Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  On the left side of the gate a marker notes that this is the spot where the bandit Salvatore Giuliano was gunned down. The myth survives. Again, there is no mention of the Mafia involvement or complicity by police.

  Just seven months after our visit, on October 28, 2010, ANSA, the Italian news service, reported that Palermo prosecutors had ordered the exhumation of Giuliano’s body from the Montelepre cemetery. They wanted to check his DNA to be sure that the body was really his. A new report had showed contradictions in official reports about the death, and authorities wanted to be sure the bandit was not spirited away to live out his life elsewhere. It would take several months, they said, for the test results to be known. In April 2011, the online edition of Corriere del Mezzogiorno reported that there was a “degree of compatibility” between the body’s DNA and that of a nephew of the bandit.

  * * *

  In four trips to the island within a year’s time, I’ve experienced early spring twice, a blistering summer, and a comfortable, golden fall with the air heavy with grapes. No matter the season, something is always growing here or always ready for harvest. I watched olives tumble from the trees in the fall; saw ripening almonds clustered on dark branches in advance of their August harvest; walked by fields of tomatoes in various shades of red, hanging heavily on vines and awaiting pickers during the year’s hottest months; dodged swaying trucks with high, slatted sides delivering mounds of black and deep purple eggplant; and glided through, in a small boat on the Ciane River near Siracusa, vast lemon groves awaiting harvest. Along eastern Sicily highways in the late fall and early winter were thousands of acres of various varieties of heavily laden orange trees, including Etna’s famed blood oranges.

  Around Piazza Armerina, in the island’s south-central quadrant, I drove for miles through vast fields of cactus plants being grown as a fruit crop. In perfect rows, the plants looked to be at least fifteen feet tall. They bear fruit that Americans know as the prickly pear. This has a taste similar, I discovered, to watermelon. Served cold and with the tough outer skin removed, the fruit is refreshing. In some places in southern Sicily, Sicilians use it to make liqueur called ficodi. At a small, roadside stand, a young man made a face as he told me about it. “It tastes like medicine,” he said with a grimace. I didn’t try it.

  Obviously, Sicily’s identity is tied to the land. There are vast fields covered in plastic sheeting by giant corporate growers to push growing seasons earlier and earlier. There are small plots managed by individual families who haul their vegetables, fruits, lemons, and oranges to the daily markets in villages of all sizes.

  Even when one is locked within urban concrete and far from the fragrant land, fresh produce is available daily. I recall being lost while driving through a heavily built-up section of Mazara del Vallo, near Marsala on the southwest coast. As I sat in my rental car pondering my next move, a slow-moving truck playing loud chimes turned the corner and stopped in front of a building. Women appeared on a half dozen balconies across the length of the building two and three floors above the street. They lowered baskets on ropes to the man, who opened the back of the truck to expose rows of vegetables: eggplants, Sicilian squash, lettuce, potatoes, and several varieties of leafy crops I didn’t recognize.

  The women shouted down their orders, the man piled the baskets high, and they were then hauled up, hand over hand. He shouted something to each woman, and the baskets came back down again with euro bills and change inside. I suspect milk is delivered in the same way to these urban neighborhoods, built far from the open market areas that abound elsewhere.

  * * *

  The southwestern corner of Sicily has seen much over the centuries. Its prehistory may be hidden to us, but from the archaic era through medieval times the area has been integral in how this island developed. Mazara del Vallo is where the Arabs landed in A.D. 827 to begin their conquest of the island. And just southeast from that modern city, at a place the Greeks called Selinous (the Romans called it Selinus; today it is listed on maps as Selinunte), sits a massive archaeological site that dazzles the mind. Its acropolis is situated on a promontory between two rivers—the Modione to the west, called in ancient times the Selinous, and the Belice on the east. In those days, these rivers were much larger and offered bays that clearly defined the promontory. Now, a few houses are built on land that has filled in the bays, and the rivers trickle their way past, snaking across narrow beaches into the sea.

  This Greek city was established the farthest west of any other Greek cities on the island. It was founded in the seventh century B.C. during a migration involving colonists from Sicily’s east coast who found themselves too close to Siracusa, then called Syracusae, to the south and other colonists to the west and north. Because the Greeks were never politically unified as a nation and despite their common language and shared culture, Greek city-states fought one another throughout ancient times. The same held true for the Greek-Sicilian colonists.

  In Selinous, at the bow of the promontory jutting into the narrow Strait of Sicily that separates the island from Tunisia, they built the acropolis. Massive temples dedicated to various gods were arrayed across the landscape. One, a temple dedicated to Zeus’s wife, Hera, and known as Temple E, is the only one that has been partially reconstructed. Today the foundations of hundreds, if not thousands, of ancient homes, built in neighborhood grids, are spread out across the landscape.

  An aerial photograph shows much more open land yet to be uncovered and explored. Clearly marked streets, some narrow, some wide boulevards leading to city gates, remain.

  Its residents fought many skirmishes with Segesta to the northeast, only one of Selinous’s enemies. By the second century B.C., the once magnificent city was fairly well abandoned. Built on land composed primarily of sand and sandy clay, Selinous was devastated by earthquakes, not to mention the wars its citizens fought and lost.

  The death blow came during the First Punic War at the hands of the Carthaginians. Most of its twenty-five thousand citizens were moved to Lilybaion, today’s Marsala, on the far southwest coast. Rome left then empty Selinous alone when Romans defeated Carthage and took over the island, and the place crumbled into piles of golden stones, probably wracked over the centuries by earthquakes and now overgrown by low-lying brush and wild celery plants that still flourish on the plain and gave the city its name.

  I drove to Selinous/Selinunte one glorious March 2009 morning, just an hour or so after leaving the lone temple at Segesta. The archaeological park is huge, covering nearly 667 acres. Guy de Maupassant, the French writer who traveled here during his Sicilian odyssey in the late 1880s, gave this place a four-sentence description in his book Sicily. In it, he raved about Segesta and its solitary unfinished temple and amphitheater. But he mocked Selinous, this once magnificent Greek city, as “a heap of collapsed columns” and a “shapeless heap of stones” that could appeal only to “archaeologists or poetic souls.”

  It took a long time for those archaeologists to make sense of the rubble. They waited until the 1950s, I am told, to begin restoring the temple to Hera, Temple E. Ironically, the single temple at the more famous Segesta, which likely draws more tourists, is much smaller than any of the individual temple sites at Selinous.

  Today, Temple E and the acropolis are the only places in the vast Selinous plain with columns resurrected. But brush has been cleared from some of the areas where houses once stood three thousand years ago. As far as the eye can see, it is obvious that many of these now leveled dwelling sites remain hidden by nearly impenetrable thorny brush.

  For a few extra euros beyond the admission price, a visitor can get a ride in a golf cart from one edge of the park, say from the visitor’s center to the area around Temple E, and then to the acropolis. On the day I was there, and then again in the following July, many hikers eschewed the carts, and with backpacks full of their picnic lunches, set off on foot.

  That seemed to me the right way to do it—if you have time to spend a day. But just walking across the
tumbled stones of the acropolis, with its gate to the north and its scaffold-covered columns lined up in a west-east layout, got me in touch with the place.

  On the western edge of the acropolis, overlooking the Modione River and a beach community far in the distance, I discovered I was standing in the midst of ruins that either once were houses or, given their proximity to the acropolis, perhaps a cemetery. It was here that I realized what a paradise this island was to the Greeks and all the successive conquerors that made their way here. But it was a paradise wracked by brutal times.

  On this stunning promontory, surrounded by golden columns and a city full of life, its citizens could be defeated, forcibly transported to strange locations, and these temples and hundreds of homes abandoned. We, of course, know parallels in our modern era.

  It was a rare moment that March; I felt the emotion, sat down on a stone chiseled millennia ago for the wall of someone’s house, and rode it out.

  * * *

  I first visited Siracusa in 1986. I was there for a few hours as a reservist, traveling with a group of U.S. Navy people based at Sigonella Naval Air Station near Catania. We were visiting the grave in that city of an American sailor who had died in 1803 while aboard the USS Constitution, Old Ironsides, anchored in the harbor. This was during the First Barbary War against the pirates based in Tripoli.

  I remember little of that visit. Our van passed the catacombs where someone mentioned Archimedes had been entombed. In a subsequent trip many years later, I tried to find the place where the sailor’s grave was located but failed. Then, in the late 1990s, I returned for five days and had ample opportunity to explore the city, particularly the original city on the island where the Greeks first settled and built their temples, and that became a magnificent center rivaling Athens.

  I made a handful of other trips over the years to Siracusa. On one, I went for a middle-of-the-night walk from my pensione across the short bridge connecting the mainland to the ancient island of Ortygia, where the 2,700-year-old city began.

  It was near midnight. Only a thin scattering of electric lights highlighted small patches of the medieval buildings packed onto the tiny island that once held, centuries before Christ, the Greeks of Syracusae. A full moon overwhelmed the sky above, its light subduing the stars that on a darker night would set the heavens ablaze above the Ionian Sea.

  Sitting on a low stone wall, I watched the natural light filter down, kissing the honey-colored buildings. There was no suggestion of motors this late at night, only the hint of air moving through the canopies of trees lining the water’s edge, the sound of water gently slapping against stones, and the bump of wooden boat hulls against their restraints and the stone wall of the tiny harbor.

  This scene out of the late twentieth century could have been unchanged from one viewed from this spot on a similarly dark, almost silent night hundreds of years earlier. It was a comfortable few hours away from the clamor of the city.

  * * *

  Siracusa is a walkable city, particularly on the island and even in the congestion of daytime traffic. The most stunning sight is the duomo, built in the first half of the eighteenth century on top of a Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. The Greek pillars are still there, blended into the walls and supporting the massive roof. It is quiet in that church; as soon as the door closed behind me, the sounds from the busy square in front disappeared. I had the same sensation in Milan when I strolled into the duomo there: absolute silence within a vastness incomprehensible to the American psyche. The world, in all its noise and grime, is completely shut out. Such a setting is a wonderful place to sit, observe the commingling of ancient and medieval, and take stock after a long and tiring day.

  But on my last trip, in March 2010, the best part was out of the city on the mainland side of the bay directly across from the island’s docking areas. Here flow small spring-fed rivers: the famous Ciane and the nondescript Saline.

  My photographer friend and fellow traveler on this particular trip, Steve McCurdy, and I drive to where I have been told we can get a boat ride on the Ciane. I am eager to do this for two reasons: The river is steeped in myth—it got its name from the nymph who tried to stop Hades from carrying Persephone into the underworld—and it is the only place in Europe where papyrus grows. Years before, I had watched an artist paint a Siracusian landscape showing ruined Greek or Roman columns, a cactus with two ripe prickly pears, and a pond with a pair of ducks on a sheet of papyrus, likely ordered from Egypt; it now hangs in my office and, along with my replica bust of the goddess Hera, each takes me back to long-ago times.

  The myth that is part of this short river’s heritage is only some of what it is known for. It is the site where Greeks harvested papyrus, also known as byblos, for writing. Sicilian historians believe it most likely was brought to Sicily from Alexandria when ties between that Egyptian city and Siracusa were very close.

  Today, the tall, rangy plants, some reaching as high as nineteen feet, are clustered around a small area along Ciane’s banks, today protected as a nature reserve. The river is accessible only by boat, and only operators with special permits can navigate the waters. The plants, with the billowy, balls-of-fluff tops, cannot be harvested.

  We pay our fee and hop into Vella Corrado’s brightly painted, well-maintained boat. It is docked in a canal that runs adjacent to the Ciane. Vella takes us downstream where we grab a quick view of Siracusa’s boat harbor across the bay.

  It is early afternoon; the light is perfect, and the view stunning. Vella, hand on the tiller of a nearly silent motor, maneuvers us around and into the mouth of the Ciane. It is narrow. Tree limbs overhang the water, giving it almost a feel of gliding along a bayou in the southern United States. The river is three to four miles long; we will go only halfway in a journey of less than an hour.

  We move slowly, exulting in the calm, clear, fragrant air. To our right is a lemon orchard. Vella gives us the etymology of lemons. The trees produce a very sweet, barely tart variety known as Femminello that produces four times a year, compared to orange trees that only produce once a year. A Web site administered by the University of California–Riverside, quoting The Citrus Industry, reveals: “The autumn [lemon] crop is called Primofiore, the winter-to-spring crop is called Limoni, the spring crop is called Bianchetti, and the summer crop is called Verdelli.”

  I had discovered this lack of tartness in Sicilian lemons on an earlier trip. A bowl of fruit had been placed for us at a house I was staying in near Noto, a thirty-five-minute drive west of Siracusa. I was advised to eat the lemons in that bowl as I would eat an orange. I cut it into quarters and slurped each slice from the rind. The taste was remarkable. There was only a hint of tartness; otherwise it was just pure lemony sweetness, like an orange in its mild assault on the taste buds, but different from the orange in flavor.

  Vella is the third-generation boatman in his family and has been taking people along the Ciane for thirty years. “It is the only work I have ever done,” he says. He is a lucky man, I think, in this land of chronic double-digit unemployment. He and his brother, Rossario, who also travels the Ciane with tourists, make their own boats. Vella discounts buying one readymade. “Progress is good,” he says, “except when it comes to making a boat.”

  We reach an area where the river borders a large tree-shaded pond fueled by groundwater. I wonder, in a brief flight of fantasy, if this is where Hades turned the nymph into the spring.

  Vella points to a narrow trail along the riverbank and says that a few dozen feet beyond are the papyrus plants. We find the giant clusters. The stems are woody but pliable. Turn the green outer stem inside out and you find a white interior. I can see how the ancients gathered these reedlike stems together, split them open, and pounded them into a material strong and permanent enough to write on.

  Vella, the man with the perfect job, is in no hurry. We linger, listen to the birds and the trees trembling in the light breeze. It’s a paradise here; there are so many paradises in Sicily. Reluctantl
y, we make our way back to the boat.

  “Are you sure you want to go now?” Vella asks, offering to linger with us. Unfortunately, we have to be miles up the coast by late afternoon, past more lemon and orange groves in this wonderfully sweet-smelling land. Even the oil refineries and chemical-plant complexes a few miles up the road in Augusta can’t spoil that.

  * * *

  The goal of our late-March 2010 trip is, finally, to experience Easter in Sicily. A year earlier, I had left too soon for the annual weeklong holiday. Many years before that, when I was touring southern Italy along the Ionian Sea, I had left before the holiday as well. Easter is a major event, especially in southern Italy and Sicily; it needs to be experienced.

  My sense is that this time of the year, a time that is deeply embedded in the Sicilian soul, outpaces Christmas. The July festival in Palermo honoring that city’s patron saint is massive, to be sure. Tens of thousands turn out for the spectacle and then get the next day off. The March 19 altar-bread festival on San Giuseppe’s feast day in Racalmuto brings out the villagers en masse, and the July festival there with men on horseback charging up steep stone steps into a church ends three days of good, raucous fun drawing thousands.

  But Easter is sacred, it’s emotional, and the festivities in many towns and villages last the whole of Easter Week, from Good Monday through Good Friday and then the climax, Easter Sunday.

  For this experience, Steve McCurdy and I are drawn to the central Sicily city of Enna because its celebration of the sacred week is known worldwide. There are nearly one hundred churches, all Catholic, of course, in this city of thirty thousand souls. When Easter is talked about on international news programs, it seems each broadcast features a clip of the solemn processions that define this city. The Good Friday procession here, perhaps the best-known outside of Sicily, is done in a Spanish style that goes back a few hundred years to the time of Spanish domination. It is done in near silence; after all, the faithful here are marking the most tragic day in Christendom: Christ’s crucifixion.