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

by John Keahey

  We arrive on Thursday of Easter Week and check into the B-and-B Proserpina—the Roman name for the Greek goddess Persephone—in the heart of the old city. The location places us along the route of the processions that move up and down Via Roma just a few dozen feet away. The di Miceli family warmly greets us and helps with luggage. The next morning, brother and sister Dario and Laura di Miceli offer to take us on a tour in their specially designed three-wheel motorized Ape.

  We discover one of the city’s two remaining ancient gates—La Porta di Janniscuru—high on a hillside honeycombed by caves and grottoes that once were prehistoric tombs. This gate, Dario and Laura tell us, is almost always missed by tourists. Featuring a small Roman arch and built in the seventeenth century, it is one of the “newer” gates of the seven or nine or twelve that once were arrayed around Enna’s walls.

  Different sources give different numbers. Dario and Laura believe that the number is twelve, and included four big gates, four smaller ones like the Janniscuru, and four “doors.” This one is barely noticeable from one of the modern roads into the city where traffic rumbles by perhaps one hundred feet below. The only other surviving gate is the Porta di Palermo, a narrow walkway off Via Roma near the cathedral and adjacent to one of the finest ceramic shops I have ever come across: Gaetano Mirisciotti’s Ceramiche Artistiche. During two different trips to visit Gaetano, I had missed the significance of this gate, set back on the side of his small shop. It looks northwest in the direction, of course, of Palermo.

  The brother-and-sister duo then show us the castle that dominates one end of Enna’s old city center, but what catches my attention is the high rock at the plateau’s end. Laura explains that this spot, Rocca di Cerere, is where Enna’s teenagers hang out at night to survey the lights of the massive Dittaino Valley spread out far below.

  More important, she says, it once was the site of a Greek shrine to Demeter, Persephone’s mother. It is from the top of this rock that Mary Taylor Simeti stood and imagined Demeter in this same place losing sight of her daughter along the shore of Lago di Pergusa in the valley far, far below. Where teenagers now frolic, sacrifices to appease the goddess of agriculture were carried out.

  The remains of another ancient Greek temple to Demeter have been uncovered as well. Across Enna, on a higher part of the plateau, stands the Church of Montesalvo, built on top of an ancient temple to Persephone. Next to it stands a column on the spot that is supposed to be the precise center of Sicily.

  Across from Demeter’s rock sits a massive walled Lombard-style castle where, in the fourteenth century, Frederick III, the brother of the king of Spanish Aragon, was crowned king of Trinacria, the name the French demanded as part of the Treaty of Caltabellotta to end the war of the Sicilian Vespers.

  There are those who believe that the castle rests on the remains of Arab fortifications and, perhaps, below that are foundations from a Roman-era fort. We enter the castle grounds and climb one of the remaining towers. The view after a long, circular, strenuous climb up narrow stone steps is spectacular and worth the effort.

  * * *

  The observance of Good Friday begins in the old town around two o’clock. That is when police start to ban parking along Via Roma and the other streets where the procession, which begins at the top of the hill around the cathedral, will flow. Vehicle owners have been warned: No cars allowed after two. Still, tow trucks are busy.

  Visitors have started arriving, working their way on foot along Via Roma toward the cathedral. Sometime around four o’clock—times on printed schedules are never precise; this is Sicily, where things happen on their own time—a procession from one church, San Leandro, travels to another church, the Addolorata, where various confraternities are gathered. It is here that the statue of the grieving Madonna is kept. They are met by the confraternity from the Church of Santa Santissima Salvatore, where the statue of the dead Christ is lodged.

  Confraternities are groups of laymen who do special work of piety and service for their particular churches. In Enna, the oldest of the fifteen still active, the Confraternita del S.S. Salvatore, was established in 1261. Its cape color is deep yellow and has the Maltese cross on the left side. The newest, the Confraternita del S.S. Crocifisso di Pergusa, was founded in 1973. Its members wear an old Spanish habit. The hood is pointed. Their church is San Leonardo.

  In some cases, the groups were formed out of those practicing a specific trade and who went to a specific church for such practitioners. For example, the Confraternita del Sacro Cuore di Gesù, established in 1839, was primarily comprised of sulfur miners. The Confraternita dello Spirito Santo, organized in 1800, was made up of farmers from a district of Enna known as the Funnurò.

  The confraternities, each with members distinguished by various colorful robes, walk in the procession in a specific order that, for centuries, has never varied. They are made up of Catholic men of all ages and boys from about age five upward. Each group has a specific function. Within the clusters of male-dominated confraternities, young girls ranging in age from six or seven to early teens are dressed in nuns’ habits or white silk robes, and they walk with the men and boys.

  Two confraternities carry the simulacri, or statues, of the crucified Christ and the grieving Madonna. This Madonna has a sword through her breast, representing her pain at the death of her son. The adult men, perhaps as many as seventy-five to a statue, who carry the monstrously heavy loads do not wear hoods over their faces as others in the procession do. The cloth is pulled back over their heads to keep their vision clear.

  These are huge statues: The Madonna is standing upright, towering over the city street; the bloody Christ is prone and is laid out in a glass-walled casket. Both are larger than life. Like soldiers and sailors, the adult robed men carrying the statues on their shoulders walk jammed tightly together, swaying slightly in unison. They don’t stride, they shuffle. A small group of men walk backward at the front, guiding the ends of the heavy beams supporting the simulacro, their eyes fixed on the statues to detect any problem. As I did in Racalmuto during the feast of Saint Giuseppe, I wonder if any of the giant figures ever topple. No one I ask can, or will tell. “No, no, no. Unthinkable!” one says.

  At the rear, other men guide the beams’ ends using ropes that aid in guiding the carriers as they swing the whole contraption around corners. It all runs with precision. The guides keep the men shouldering the heavy statues in unison and on track with quiet commands.

  Other members of confraternities—wearing hoods with tiny holes cut out for the eyes—carry other symbols that relate to the story of the Passion. One group carries items on red satin pillows, such as Christ’s crown of thorns, or the nails that held Christ’s hands and feet to the cross, or the hammer that drove those nails. Others carry candles, some real, some powered by batteries. Other groups carry torches. Small boys, dressed identically to their elders and with hoods in place, walk in the procession with adults in their midst to keep them in proper order.

  The route is long, perhaps two miles. It begins at the cathedral amid pealing bells and firecrackers, and then the procession and spectators plunge into near silence. The route winds down through the ancient city streets to the cemetery. There the marchers pause and rest up for the journey back. It begins around six o’clock and ends close to midnight.

  I am amazed at the endurance represented here, especially the children, whether bedecked in robes of the confraternities, or nuns’ habits, or white silk dresses. They carry candles shrouded in brown paper. The girls walk with solemn expressions, their hands clasped in prayer. For five or six hours this goes on. No one drops out; no one quits. Back at the cathedral, they are finally joined by their families.

  In times past, I was told, some members of the crowd would follow the procession barefoot as a sign of their devotion. I did not see any of that this Easter, but the crowd of observers, thousands of them, seemed nearly as big at the end of the night as it was at the beginning.

  The old town is jammed for th
is spectacle. With automobiles out of sight and, except for the murmuring of the crowds and the flash of light from hundreds of cameras and the modern dress of the observers, it could be Enna of a hundred years ago.

  Good Friday’s procession is somber. The Banda Cittadina de Enna, its members interspersed throughout the procession, plays the same dirgelike music over and over and over. There is no joy here. Christ has been crucified, his mother is grieving. Despite the presence of thousands of humans, the silence is almost deafening.

  Two days later, in the late afternoon of Easter Sunday, everything changes. The confraternities are back; more thousands of observers start gathering around the cathedral. Something new and remarkable is about to happen. I stand near the cathedral’s top steps. For about two hours, the crowd builds. Then, suddenly, a cheer breaks out. At the top of Via Roma, a confraternity turns a corner from a side street bearing a new statue. This is the risen Christ standing tall; a hand, its palm spotted with red, is raised in peace. He becomes like a living organism: His movements are subtle and under control by the dozens of men shouldering the beams that hold him in place. He moves a bit, swaying slightly, as if he is impatiently waiting for someone.

  He is. There is a rumbling of the crowd lining the street a hundred or so feet downhill on Via Roma. Just as suddenly as the statue of Christ appears, a statue of the Madonna turns a corner at the bottom of the street, looking up.

  What happens next, to my uninitiated eyes, is remarkable. This is not the statue of the grieving Madonna of two nights earlier. This one is without the sword through the breast. On her face is a full smile. This is a joyful Madonna.

  The men carrying her make movements in unison that seem to bring her to life. She looks up the hill; it dawns on her that what she is seeing is her son, raised from the dead. She is in shock, she takes a step backward and then she moves forward a few feet. As it sinks in on her what has happened, she sways from side to side, her disbelief dissolving into belief that her son is alive. Then, suddenly, she sprints toward her son; the sweating men carrying this massive statue are actually running up the hill in strict choppy-step unison.

  Christ, by now, is moving down the hill toward his mother. She reaches him next to the cathedral, and the confraternity members carrying her execute an amazing 180-degree maneuver. They turn her around completely and, in seconds, she is standing next to her son, moving down Via Roma. The pair then turns into the piazza in front of the cathedral, where more than 150 men jockey their way up the steep steps and inside.

  The crowd is cheering; the municipal band is playing bright, happy tunes. We push our way inside the great church and look up at the two statues side by side. Weary robed men, their hoods pulled back to show smiling, sweat-glistened faces, are leaning against pillars or straddling chairs, exhausted.

  AFTERWORD

  IT WAS early one evening in either 1998 or 1999—my memory is faulty here—when I boarded a train in Siracusa after a five-day visit to that most wonderful, most walkable, and friendly Sicilian city. I was ensconced in a semiprivate cabin on a sleeper car heading to Bologna in northern Italy. Later, I discovered that I had not only the cabin but the entire car to myself. No one boarded this sleeper during the night as the train passed through Catania, Taormina, Messina, crossed the strait by ferry, and dropped onto the toe of Italy’s boot before heading north to Naples, Rome, and then, by midmorning the next day, into Bologna, the end of the line.

  That first evening, as we were slowly leaving Siracusa, I briefly had as a companion the train’s first-class porter who made up my tiny room, explaining that he had to make up the second bed in case someone boarded during the night with a similar reservation. After all, I had not paid for complete privacy.

  His job, without other passengers, was going to be easy during that trip, and we stood out in the passageway with train windows lowered halfway, feeling the warm, lemon-scented breeze of early spring, and speaking a basic mixture of English and Italian. He was telling me about his job and how often he saw his family. I told him where I was from and about my family. His interest seemed genuine and warm.

  As we talked, the train slowed a bit and stopped on what appeared to be a siding. We hadn’t quite reached Augusta, the highly industrialized area twelve miles north of Siracusa. “Another train is coming,” he said. “Aspettiamo.” (We wait.) It was a long wait. As I looked out toward the Ionian Sea across the southern edge of the Golfo di Augusta and to our right, I realized that within my line of sight was the archaeological site of Thapsos on a small island tied to the coast by a narrow causeway. I had just read about it, perhaps in a tourist guidebook, and knew only that this settlement of indigenous Sicilians greatly predated by several hundred years the arrival of the Greeks.

  Thapsos was only a short distance to the south, and just out of our line of sight from the train, from the ancient Greek-Sicilian city of Megara Hyblaia, colonized by a group from Megara in Greece, perhaps fifteen years before a group of Corinthian Greeks ever set foot on what became Siracusa.

  I turned to my new traveling companion and started to tell him what I knew was on the tiny island just a few hundred feet offshore. Immediately I could see he understood what I was referring to, and when I asked him what he knew about it, he shrugged slightly and said, “Oh, solo un po.’” ( Just a little). Then he proceeded to tell me, in a unique combination of simple Italian and basic English so that I could follow, about when it was first inhabited, perhaps around 1400 B.C. He described how pots and other items recovered showed that the people of the Thapsos culture had traded with the people of what became Greece and perhaps the people of what is today Malta. He talked about the Greeks and how they came to Sicily to find homes in a New World. “Like America was at one time,” he said with a smile.

  This man clearly knew the history of his island and was pleased that I wanted to learn more about it.

  The evening was now in twilight. My friend had things to do, and I returned to my small room and read until quite late, enjoying the rocking of the train and the soft, muffled clacking sound of wheels against tracks. In the morning, I thanked the porter for our conversation, we shook hands, and I stepped off the train in Bologna for a twenty-four-hour visit before heading back to Rome and my airplane home.

  This encounter on the train and subsequent conversations I have had with dozens of Sicilians of various ages have shown that these Mediterranean islanders are attuned to their three-thousand-year history.

  These visits and the reading of Sicilian literature have given me a better understanding about the impact on a people of one conqueror after another sweeping across their island. An identity cannot be formed. Self-determination cannot occur in the wake of all-powerful foreign invaders. No wonder their society was closed for so long; no wonder they could really trust only those within their own families. Silence with strangers and authority figures was commonplace.

  While the Normans, French, and Spanish certainly exerted their influence on this island—its buildings, street names, churches, dominant religion—it is the Greeks and the Arabs from whom most Sicilians descend and identify with. Sicilian surnames and the names of their towns and villages come from those languages. While a small part of their cuisine has French and Spanish touches, it is made up of ingredients the Greeks and Arabs brought there, such as olives, lemons, almonds, and certain spices.

  As outsiders, we will never comprehend the Sicilian psyche; perhaps many Sicilians don’t fully understand it, either. So again, I turn to the Sicilian poet Ignazio Buttitta (1899–1997), to help explain Sicily to me. These are the last five stanzas from a poem entitled “Lingua e dialettu” (“Language and Dialect”). It was written in 1970 and translated by Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero, a onetime student and friend of Buttitta.

  Lingua e dialettu

  Un poviru,

  c’addatta nte minni strippi

  da matri putativa,

  chi u chiama ‘figghiu’

  pi nciuria.

  Nuàtri l’avevamu a ma
tri,

  nni l’arrubbaru;

  aveva i minni a

  funtani di latti

  e ci vìppiru tutti,

  ora ci sputanu.

  Nni ristò a vuci d’idda,

  a cadenza,

  a nota vascia

  du sonu e du

  lamentu:

  chissi non nni

  ponnu rubari.

  Nni ristò a

  sumigghianza,

  l’annatura,

  i gesti, i lampi nta

  l’occhi: chissi non nni

  ponnu rubari.

  Non nni ponnu

  rubari,

  ma ristamu poviri

  e orfani u stissu.

  Language and Dialect

  I’m a poor man,

  who suckles the barren breast

  of a so-called mother

  who calls him ‘son’

  as an insult.

  Once we had a mother,

  they stole her from us;

  her breasts were fountains of milk,

  and everyone drank from them,

  now they spit on them.

  For us her voice remains,

  the cadence

  the low note

  of its music and the sorrow:

  they couldn’t rob us of these.

  They couldn’t rob us of these,

  but we’re poor

  and orphaned just the same.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO BE able to do what I do and to see the things I get to see is, I think, remarkable. Better still is the opportunity to meet fascinating people willing to share their lives, stories, and, in the case of this book, their views of this world just “north of Africa” that I am struggling to understand.