Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

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  WHEN YOU leave Palermo along the waterfront, heading east toward Bagheria, you see piles of rubble on the sand beyond the road and reeking waste on fire, shacks of disparate materials pieced together. There are still people in them at the end of summer, and perhaps all year round. There are other broken-down and boarded-up restaurants and hotels, closed for the season and by the look of them maybe for ever. There are low concrete walls and stands of reeds, used car lots and stands selling watermelon and mussels, fishing boats pulled up on the beach. The road then runs between two rows of mudcoloured houses with heavy wooden shutters on their windows built directly on the narrow street, none of them more than two or three stories high. Behind them loom the big and ugly bleak new boxes. Along the road out of town shops and bars and house doors all have the same dark cavern entrances hung with strips of plastic. The odd greengrocer stands a line of boxes along the narrow footpath, the odd bar has a row of rickety wooden chairs outside, supporting immobile elderly males with cloth caps and grey moustaches, who stare into the traffic passing inches from their face. The sight is quintessentially southern coastal, and quintessentially the season, late summer, early autumn, the violent heat gone from the air, a dusty lethargic golden haze enveloping all. A number of coffin outlets, polished wares stacked like slabs of toffee in the dark, do a subsidiary trade in ugly crucifixes and other appurtenances of mourning.

  When the periphery thins out again and you glimpse the sea and a bit of grass and light industry, you start noticing the seaside architecture, the little houses that crop up illegally along the foreshore. Usually two-storied, in whitewashed reinforced concrete and breeze block, with terracotta tile roofs, aluminium window frames and those slatted modern shutters, always in beige, that pull down like venetians and seal the window completely, they often manage to work in a bit of balustrade, several metres of readymade short bulging pillars, always in blinding white. The fancier places may have a plaster nymph or cherub or a plaster David, all of them blurred and softened and melted-looking from the mould and standing, on the fanciest premises, by a little pond or fountain lined with tiles of brilliant swimming pool blue. There may or may not be pots of geraniums, almost certainly a double car port, probably some tiled patio and quite likely an elaborate spiked steel fence around it. Like the older streetscape of mud-coloured houses, these villettas are deeply familiar to anyone who has been around the coastal Mezzogiorno. Their analogues spread in thousands through the violent lawless hinterland of Naples, they spread up and down from Bari on the Adriatic coast. There’s an almost uninterrupted line of them down the Tyrrhenian coast of Campania and Calabria. These houses have always fascinated me, partly because the permitted extravagances, certain statues, certain fountains, the white paint and terracotta and the fatly pillared balusters and the concrete gardens, irresistibly stir memories of certain home improvements in Leichhardt or Carlton.

  In Italy, being illegal constructions on a single-family scale, they express with a directness unmediated by any architect the dreams and desires and fears of those who build them. You see the fragmented longing for style, the TV image of the good life that comes out in a random assemblage of sites or features that ends up very much like a TV set and whose proliferation is restrained only by the requirements of economy and speed in clandestine building on the one hand and safety on the other. Whence the shutters, the armoured doors, the spiked railings, the walls, the video cameras, the alarms, the spyholes. The coastal constructions are modest enough, being often just holiday homes, for security not to be so visibly the overriding concern. Moving inland into the hills of Sicily, where the villas are bigger, more costly and solid, the new houses look more and more like dreadful fortified bunkers. As they are. There is no grimmer or more palpable expression of the social ethos in Sicily among those who’ve lately had money to spend. The style isn’t without its historical antecedents and continuities, but never as in the late twentieth century have its expressions been so deadly. They are the ultimate expression of fear and mistrust of your neighbours. Thinking this, now and on bus trips inland to Corleone and Racalmuto, I saw the amazing appeal the Australian houses of Glenn Murcutt must have had for the student Vincenzo, sitting so airily and lightly and modestly on the earth, minimal, essential and open to the world around them. From Sicily such houses seem models or dreams of another world, another way of living, and seeing this, I realized as I hadn’t earlier the politics of Vincenzo’s enthusiasm.

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  THE BUILDINGS thin for a bit and you see the vast extent along the coast of the famous citrus orchards and their dark green leaves like painted tin, and the wiry silvery olive groves among them. Gianni and I tooled along for a few minutes in the taxi and then we rose into the hills and as the road turned, on a shoulder of the hill, we saw villa Cattolica. It was a handsome, slightly odd, slightly asymmetrical building in that endearing southern way I’d met in the duke of Verdura’s villa Niscemi the hot day I lunched with Orlando. It was very high in relation to its floor area, and this combined with its position on a spur made it stick out dramatically like a wedge of pinkish late-baroque cake. The sight was complicated by a tall crane and some high chimneys that seemed to be growing out of it: they belonged to a factory jammed up behind it. The villa itself was once used as a food cannery.

  It was closed for works. We parked the taxi by the high front gate which was bolted and impenetrable. Following the perimeter wall, we came across an elderly couple with a small child who seemed to live in a large single room, a kind of cave dug into the wall. They told us the villa was closed for works. On all else they were vague. Nearby we found a small art gallery selling ceramics, whose dapper owner was more forthcoming. He told us the villa was closed for works. Was an end to the works foreseen? The works of restoration are supposed to be completed by the end of next year, said the gallery owner. Supposed, he repeated with a savage little twirl of his hand. The flow of art lovers past his shop had clearly dried up. I wasn’t too happy myself. A fortune on Gianni’s taxi for nothing. Were there any other traces of Guttuso left in Bagheria? His family home? Look, said the gallery owner.

  Renato Guttuso left Bagheria a long time ago. He stayed away most of his life. He was famous in Milan, in Rome, not here. He never did a thing for this place. Got out as soon as he could and he only started getting sentimental about the place at the end of his life. The people of Bagheria could not give a STUFF about where Guttuso was born.

  Gianni said, Let’s go and see villa Palagonia. We went up into the town. The comparison that came first to mind here was the Stalinist housing of eastern Europe. A moment later you reflected that that hideousness had been mitigated in some degree by a sense of public dignity. Destiny required monumental spaces, wide roads between the barracks, heroic scale. This is absent in modern Bagheria, though it must have once been there in the disposition of the noble villas. The lowering cement blocks of Bagheria now hem you in, threatening, greedy, without order or symmetry. From a place first chosen for its light, its vegetation, its view of the sea, all these have been eliminated for those who live in the mafia flats or walk the streets between them.

  The statues carved out of soft yellow tufa stone in the middle of the eighteenth century under the direction of the prince of Palagonia stood out once against the blue sky above the walls surrounding his villa and its garden. Those that remain now merge into blocks of flats. The villa of the monsters is choked by the building around it, lost in a modern slum. This is the place that was a must see in the eighteenth century for those on the grand tour, so freakish that its monsters had the fame among the locals of making pregnant women abort. The monsters were the big statues with big heads the prince had carved to his orders and placed on guard at the gates, at the entrance and along the walls surrounding his garden. Many have been vandalized, destroyed, or had their soft shell tufa so worn by time and weather that the figures look as if their bodies are rotten or cankered. All the depredations make it hard to imagine the strong
effects these bizarre protoromantic nightmares in stone once had on those who saw them. To a twentieth century eye what remains looks merely playful. Yet Goethe hated this place and the mind of the prince of Palagonia who created it: he gives freest rein to his passionate appetite for misshapen, tasteless forms, and to credit him with even a spark of imagination would be paying him too much honour. The man of the Aufklärung lists the elements of Prince Palagonia’s folly.

  Humans: beggars male and female, Spaniards male and female, Moors, Turks, hunchbacks, all kinds of deformed people, dwarfs, musicians, Pulcinellas, soldiers in ancient costumes, gods, goddesses, people in Old French costumes, soldiers with ammunition pouches and leggings, mythology with grotesque additions, eg, Achilles and Chiron with Pulcinella. Animals: only parts of them, a horse with human hands, a horse’s head on a human body, disfigured apes, many dragons and serpents, all kinds of paws on figures of every type, doublings, transposed heads …

  Renato Guttuso’s first childhood home was on corso Butera, the main axis of old Bagheria, a few yards from the villa Palagonia, and years later he remembered playing in its abandoned garden, where overgrown and distorted Indian fig plants mixed with the grotesque statues and matched them. He’d been, he later said, much influenced by this mingling of the fantastic and the real. Today, everything is lopped, trimmed, hemmed in. Goethe saw a superb view across the headlands to the sea from the villa. All he’d see now would be mafia flats. The writer Dacia Maraini, indignant at what’d happened to the enchanted place she’d known as a child after the war, traced the records of the destruction of Bagheria in the fifties and sixties through the council records. It all happened in barely a decade, starting when the council expropriated land surrounding villa Valguarnera to build a primary school. The school could have been elsewhere, but once the developers got a toehold in the parklands around the villas in the town centre, with the collusion of council and administration, roads followed and then the ten-storey blocks of flats. Villa Butera was surrounded and choked in the same way, and all the other eighteenth-century villas and their gardens.

  Maraini identified a shadowy engineer called Giammanco who appeared in the records of nearly every phase in the destruction, at once the council’s technical expert who approved projects and the owner of the land to be developed, having strategically befriended some of the aging aristocrats. There were inquiries and court cases after the damage was done, about the laws and regulations that had been broken. Giammanco was acquitted. Maraini, who has aristocratic family connections in Bagheria, is a little sentimental about what it was all like before. So was Fulco di Verdura, the child of the villa Niscemi, who came to spend summers here in his father’s villa Serradifalco, and remembered his father meeting the family on horseback, flanked by two toughs on horseback with rifles slung over the shoulders, the campieri, the estate guards who followed the family everywhere outside the property. It didn’t help protect us against the mafia, the duke remarked ingenuously, adding that the Bagheria mafia was savage and vengeful and later caused his father a lot of trouble.

  It certainly was savage and vengeful. Before the fascist repression and the war, Sicily’s still-rural mafia was either that of the large estates of the interior or that of the orchards, the mafia that exploited the citrus cultivators of the coastal strip. Bagheria was the centre of the orchard mafia who terrorized the orchardists through their control of the water supply. In 1888 they murdered the mayor of Bagheria during a religious procession. When Renato Guttuso was seven or eight years old, there were once seventy-seven mafia killings in a single month in Bagheria and one evening he saw a man shot in the back in via Butera by two men with rifles. The child Guttuso was looking down from the balcony of the family house.

  Everyone instantly knew about it. Nobody had seen a thing. As a child I often heard, as darkness fell in the evening, two rifle shots with a half-second interval between them, followed by total deathly silence.

  Times change, but the orchard mafia still exists, and so does the mafia’s control of water supplies all round an island desperately short of water. Many inland communities in Sicily are forced to buy their water from a mafia which therefore has an interest in maintaining and aggravating the shortage. Taking a closer look, I noticed this day in Bagheria that a lot of the beautiful orange and lemon orchards around the town had in fact been abandoned, and many of the trees were dying. The problem in the citrus orchards, however, was no longer water denial but excess production. Now that the Mezzogiorno is integrated into the European community along with the rest of Italy, the community pays citrus producers in Sicily a big compensation to destroy their production in excess of the community quota. The European bureaucrats in Brussels are no better able to handle the mafia than the old market gardeners of the Conca d’Oro. The mafia’s business is now destroying imaginary citrus crops, and being paid by Brussels to do so. The year before he was murdered, Giovanni Falcone remarked that even if the entire land surface of Sicily were covered with orange and lemon orchards, the island would still not produce enough to honestly earn the money received from Europe for destroying the excess crops.

  Renato Guttuso got out young from Bagheria. The town he left in the thirties was still largely agricultural and not at all the mafia-built slum it became a generation later. But the Bagheria of the orchard mafia was incipiently the Bagheria that was later famous for the Bagheria massacre that was one of the events of Riina’s rise to power, and as one of the apices of the area known as the triangle of death for its terrible homicide rate. He kept his distance to the end, despite brief visits and the donation to villa Cattolica, even when he’d bought himself a handsome house in the centre of Palermo. He only came back dead, to be buried among the weeds in the grounds of villa Cattolica, in a hideously kitsch blue marble sarcophagus by the sculptor Manzù, decorated with four gilt doves. Giulio Andreotti was present that day in 1989, at the inauguration of the tomb.

  The old communist at the mill, Pasquale, had reminded me how when the PCI put Guttuso up for the Italian senate, as a reward for his loyalty and his financial generosity to the party, they had to find an electorate in another part of Sicily, because Guttuso wasn’t well looked-on in Bagheria. After his election, his old comrade said, there was a dinner in Palermo, attended by the leading politicians. During the evening Guttuso got fired up and rose to propose a toast. Down with the mafia!, he cried, lifting his wine glass. The president of the regional parliament stormed out of the dinner. Guttuso was shattered at his blunder, and ran out after the president, pleading with him to return. He was losing touch. I wondered about this. As the immensely wealthy painter lay dying a few years later, his lung cancer metastasizing in his brain, a prisoner in his palatial Roman apartments, isolated from old friends and his lover by the high prelates and politicians and the adopted son and the adopted son’s family from Palermo who perched around his bed like crows, did he, in his moments of lucidity, ever feel he hadn’t got so far away after all?

  Gianni and I had a pizza down by the villa Cattolica. Downhill from the pizzeria out the back was a gully full of dying lemon trees. Might as well let them die, said the proprietor, when I asked about them. I hope you’re going to write something good about Bagheria. All this bad stuff about the mafia. Nobody comes here any more. There’s no work in Sicily. Nobody cares. He launched into the long rhythmically cadenced complaint of the Mezzogiorno. To cut him off I mentioned Guttuso and he brightened. He was an artist himself, having lately taken up sculpture. He showed me some of his pieces. The major work was a portrait bust of the maestro Guttuso himself, larger than life and carved in the same buttery tufa as the prince of Palagonia’s monsters. The shape of the head wasn’t bad, and the ridgy lines of Guttuso’s wavy hair were striking, almost Greek. But something awful had happened to the bridge of his nose. The brow and the nose had been so sculpted away that they’d become concave and for the second time that day I had thoughts of a hideous growth or a flesheating cancer and shuddered. That’s a remarkable likeness
, I said.

  Gianni took the motorway back, and ten minutes later put me down in the middle of Palermo. He looked at me hard as we parted. Gianni was sure my parents were Sicilian. In Naples, and later in Sicily, I was often taken for an oriundo. The word, like orient, comes from the Latin verb meaning rise, and all it means is that you were born in the place of which you are oriundo. In the south of Italy it takes on the particular sense of a person born in that place and returning home after a long emigration. In the days before football came to be a branch of the media industry, it also meant a footballer from overseas of Italian origin, one who came home to play in an Italian team. As far as I know I have no Italian blood, but I was always deeply pleased and touched by the attribution.

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  THE TRIUMPH of Death is a great fifteenth-century fresco from the wall of a Palermo poorhouse hospital, now restored and on display in the palazzo Abatellis. It shows Death on his charger striking down a group of young and beautiful people. A group of kings and prelates are already dead, their corpses heaped in the centre foreground of the painting. The survivors are the poor and the crippled who stare out of the left hand side, behind Death’s gaze. The bounding horse Death rides is reductively geometrical, allegorical, skeletal and abstract. Yet it’s also full of nostril-flaring energy, a kind of recall to a cruder reality than the rich, the beautiful and the powerful show. Death in this painting is not merely an allegorical skeleton, but a real body in the final stages of fleshly dissolution, with flaps of rotting skin still hanging from his bones. Death has himself died, and the grey horse seems like Picasso’s in Guernica—more a figure of suffering than danger.