Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Cassata, and this was the start of the difficulty, was two things. For many years I’d believed Sicilian cassata was only an ice cream. It was a surprise to find in Sicily it was also a cake, and that the cake likely antedated the ice cream. Though they had things in common, the cake and the icecream were different. What they had in common was the diced candied fruit. The cake was a rich cream of ricotta and sugar with candied fruit and little pellets of chocolate in it, flavoured with vanilla and a slosh of maraschino liqueur and held together by sponge cake under a shell of hard green icing. The ice cream was rich white ice cream made with masses of egg yolks and frozen around a filling of whipped cream imbedded with diced candied fruit and chopped praline almonds. In some vague sense the ice cream was a frozen equivalent of the cake, but they weren’t the same. The cassata question had always absorbed me, and it was a disappointment to find Elizabeth David ignored this great ice cream in her work. It confirmed a sense born of reading Italian Food that she nursed a secret antipathy for Sicily and its food and maybe never went there or ate there at all. The ice cream cassata was surely eaten by houris in paradise, whereas the cake cassata for me was always claggily earthbound, so sweet it set your teeth on edge, soft, heavy, obscurely repellent, too much, baroque in all the worst ways. David might have looked at this because this contrast epitomized what made ice cream sublime, what coldness did to sweetness.

  Etymologically cassata was a dilemma. In the fourteenth century Latin of central Italy cassata was panis cum caseo commixtus, bread mixed with cheese, which might become sponge cake, pan di Spagna in Italian, and creamy ricotta cheese. There were variants going back to the twelfth century, casata and casiata as a dish of cheese and eggs. This made sense but presented morphological problems in the Mezzogiorno. It also clashed with the theory that the name was Arabic in origin, from the word qas’a or qas’at, meaning a big deep bowl, which would be the one lined with pieces of spongecake to hold the ricotta cream. After the fleeting contretemps with Pippo, I was bound to prefer the Arabic.

  * * *

  RICOTTA WAS the central element in the other great Sicilian sweet, cannoli. There was no problem with origins here. Canna was cane, as in sugar cane and also the barrel of a gun. The mafia’s lupara a canna mozzata was a sawn-off shotgun. The cannolo was a crisp pastry tube filled with a ricotta cream, looking like a larger version of the brandy snaps I remembered from children’s parties in Toorak. The shell was made by wrapping the hot soft pastry around a broomstick. It hardened into a cylinder as it cooled. The raw pastry for cannoli shells was wrapped around metal tubes and fried into cylinders. The ricotta cream allowed all sorts of variants, but it too was usually studded with tiny pieces of candied fruit and little pellets of chocolate. The cream might be vanilla or chocolate or chocolate at one end of the tube and vanilla at the other. The late Waverley Root claimed that cannoli were very ancient, not just pre-Saracen but pre-Christian too. For Waverley Root cannoli were phallic and

  thought to antedate Saracen times and even Christian times. According to this theory, the shape of cannoli reproduces that of those mysterious prehistoric stone steles of magical or religious import called menhirs, which were probably fertility symbols. In any case, cannoli seem to have been served originally at weddings; the guests who ate them were participating in a ceremony designed to insure fruitfulness to the new family. Later, cannoli became associated with Easter—a feast of rebirth—but nowadays, though the Easter association has not wholly disappeared, they are eaten all year round by persons most of whom are quite unconscious of the mystical past of this sweet.

  Not quite all the year round, it seemed. When Stefania, the longhaired sociology student who worked at the Sant’Andrea, had brought me the first cannolo of autumn a little while earlier, I’d asked her whether she ever ate them in summer. Oh yeah, she replied without reflection. They’re not so good in the summer, but you can get them. The seasonal nature of the cannolo had been at issue in a Sicilian court case I remembered from five or ten years earlier. A man was charged with raping a thirteen-year-old girl, in Palermo I seemed to recall. Maybe she’d been twelve, maybe fourteen. The man, in his early twenties, was the lover of the girl’s mother and according to the prosecutors the mother was an accessory to the crime. The young girl had shown some bravery and enterprise in going to the carabinieri on her own to denounce the man.

  In the girl’s story, it had been a hot August evening and her mother had been sitting round eating and drinking with her lover and several other young men, also, perhaps, her lovers. I imagined one of those interiors that figured in Letizia’s photographs of domestic violence and ruin. Eyes, at some point in the evening, began to be cast covetously at the barely pubescent daughter asleep or half-asleep or feigning sleep in the room. The mother then, according to her daughter, offered her child as a prize to that one of the men who could eat the most cannoli. The mother’s own lover had won. Maybe the contest had been rigged. The girl was had on the spot. Various circumstances confirmed the girl’s story and the mother’s lover was jailed. He appealed the sentence, though, and the crux of the appeal when it was heard was that the girl’s story couldn’t be true. It didn’t hold up. She’d said cannoli and the rape was supposed to have happened on a hot August night and everyone knew, the defence lawyer said triumphantly, that in Sicily cannoli were a winter sweet. The ricotta went off in the heat and anyway they were much too heavy. The judges agreed. They didn’t disbelieve the girl, they said kindly, but she’d clearly been far too upset and confused to give reliable evidence. The mother’s lover was acquitted.

  If cannoli tenuously represented life and fertility in Sicily, the other sweets, of the Day of the Dead, were unmistakeable. It was a festive time in Palermo, a time of presents for the children, and the city streets were crowded till late with families milling around the stalls that were set up so that in places you couldn’t move. Anna Maria had put little marzipan fruits that evening on each of the Sant’Andrea’s tables. Sciascia had described the scene in Open Doors, one of his last stories.

  mannikins of sugar and marzipan brightened the pastry shop windows … the things of the dead, the mannikins and the marzipan fruit that the children hunt for round the house on the morning of the second of November …

  And Giovanni Falcone underlined what they meant.

  The culture of death doesn’t belong only to the mafia. All of Sicily is impregnated with it. The day of the dead is a great holiday with us. We offer sweets called heads of the dead, made of sugar hard as stone. Solitude, pessimism, death are the themes of our literature from Pirandello to Sciascia …

  * * *

  ACROSS THE table Angelo was talking about his olive harvest. He talked about costs and labour and quantities and qualities and sales. He sounded like a man who wasn’t used to employing workers and paying wages and keeping accounts and was rather enjoying it for that reason. He dwelt on the unexpected ways of his seasonal labourers. They all wanted to be paid in kind instead of money. They wanted oil from the press. It was so good that after supplying their own families they could sell it at a handsome profit. So did the German wholesaler he was selling his entire production to. Angelo’s oil was so fine the German could mix it with a great deal of inferior oil and still market the blend as first grade cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. The oil we produce has an acidity of point one per cent, said Angelo. Anything up to one per cent acidity still counts as extra virgin. Ten times the acidity. The criteria weren’t subtle. It seemed a pity to drown his production in a wash of lesser stuff.

  A boutique oil, I yelled. The place was going to my head. Get a fancy bottle and a distributor and you’re in business. Angelo glanced across for an instant. Business was not something he really wanted to be in. Playing farmers was altogether different. He’d inherited the farm a few years earlier. Before that, and before he met Clara and started the restaurant with her, a new start for each of them after a major breakup, his life had described a very Italian trajectory, for someone his age. Ang
elo talked about growing up in Salemi. Salemi was a hilltop town, inland from Trapani but closely linked to it, in the strategic middle of western Sicily. It had a castle and was another of those very ancient settlements that was given its character and importance by the Arabs, as well as its name, Salem, health and safety. Later it was a refuge for the Jews driven out of Spain, and the site of a great Jesuit college. Salemi was strategically placed for the mafia too. It was the home town of the two cousins who became the most powerful men in postwar Sicily and two of the richest in Italy. I mentioned the Salvos.

  God yes, Angelo said. Town like that everyone knew everyone else. Played with their children when we were kids, went to their houses. Matter of fact, he added indifferently, Angela was my girlfriend. We had a little thing going there for a while when we were kids. Nothing really serious. We were hardly in our teens.

  Angela? I said. Not the one who got married and –

  Right, said Angelo. He’d been looking at me obliquely, wondering whether I’d pick it up. Nino’s daughter. The wedding present. The silver tray. I’d heard a few things about the Salvos. Now Angelo told me their story.

  * * *

  JUST AFTER the war, when the cousins Nino and Ignazio Salvo were young men, two members of a well-known local family, they were mentioned in a carabinieri report on the 1946 election campaign as mafiosi. Another report by the commander of carabinieri at Salemi in 1965 described each of the cousins as a member of the mafia and son of a mafioso. They were in fact the sons of mafia bosses. In 1971 colonel Dalla Chiesa, when he commanded the Palermo carabinieri, was asking questions about them. Others defended them and it was a number of years before anyone outside Salemi remembered the Salvos’ origins and connections. To do so would’ve been dangerous, useless and rather tasteless. By the late seventies the Salvos had become, fairly discreetly, the most powerful people in Sicily and among the richest in Italy. For thirty years or so, the Salvos were on a roll.

  When Rome had created the largely autonomous region of Sicily to dampen the separatist fires of the forties, the new regional assembly had to decide the question of tax collection. They discussed the matter for two years and in 1952 finally decided by a one-vote majority to perpetuate a curious tradition that went back to the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. They handed the job over to private tax collectors. The young Nino Salvo had married the daughter of a local tax collector and got into the new business. He formed a company called Satris with his cousin and in ten years it had tied up the tax collection agencies for almost all of Sicily. Instead of the normal three and a half per cent fee on money collected, the Satris monopoly got ten per cent. It also got permission to hand over the money collected after a delay of several months. The Salvos used these months, and the tax revenue of Sicily, the liquidity of a small state, to build their empire. By the age of thirty they were operating out of Palermo and hugely rich.

  The Salvos became, on a huge scale, landowners, developers, hoteliers, winemakers. Angelo reproached me once for liking Torre Vecchia because it was a Salvo wine. At the same time the Salvos moved from controlling the Salemi town council to controlling the Trapani province DC. Challenges to their tax monopoly were regularly defeated in the regional assembly. The Salvos’ power was inseparable from the DC’s. The cousins were one of the gravest factors of mafia interference in Trapani province, where they control the local DC, reported the parliamentary antimafia commission in 1976. Not that this stopped them, or anything else. They kept a twenty-six metre yacht in Palermo harbour, mainly for having parties on. A frequent guest, I’d read in The True History, was Claudio Vitalone, the former minister now on trial with Andreotti for the Pecorelli murder. The Alicia was hung with paintings by Van Gogh and Matisse. Alicia had been the Roman name for Salemi.

  Things started going wrong for the Salvos in the early eighties. They had the misfortune to come to the attention of Giovanni Falcone, who was just then being drawn into a concern with the mafia because that was where all the cases he was assigned led him. In May of 1982 they were stunned by the arrival of fifty inspectors from the financial police who searched their Palermo homes and their offices. Thirty cartons of documents were taken away. The Salvos thought the orders had come from Rome, and at the beginning of July Nino Salvo emerged from the shadows to issue a warning to the DC in Rome. He gave an interview to L’Espresso, Italy’s influential weekly. Can [the DC] allow the systematic persecution of those members of the business community that have always been closest to it? In the first week of August the Italian government fell: it was a rapid and mysterious crisis, a kind of warning, and five days later an identical government was set back up. The Salvos and their empire remained intact, although Falcone had meanwhile made some interesting discoveries about business and politics in Sicily.

  He’d discovered that the Hotel Zagarella the Salvos had built in the seventies on the outskirts of Palermo, which was invariably described in Italy as pharaonic and was that same hotel where Giulio Andreotti would arrive for the DC’s friendship festival five years later, had cost fifteen million dollars to build, fifty or more in nineties money. Of the fifteen million, the Salvos had ponied up six hundred thousand, just over a thirtieth. The rest had been paid by the Italian government through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Italian government’s southern development fund. Remembering a little wedding bash for eighteen hundred guests that a Sicilian parliamentarian had thrown at the Zagarella the year before, the colonel leading the police inspection checked the accounts. The prominent parliamentarian hadn’t paid a lira. The Zagarella was popular not only with demochristian politicians. It was also a place for mafia weddings and mafia meetings. The Salvos’ reprieve lasted only a couple of years. In July 1983 Rocco Chinnici and Giovanni Falcone signed an arrest warrent for Riina and the Cosa Nostra Cupola for the murder of general Dalla Chiesa. Three weeks later a car bomb blew Chinnici to pieces, and his driver and two bodyguards and the doorman of his apartment building. His wife saw the killing through the window. Falcone however continued to be interested in the Salvo cousins.

  Tommaso Buscetta began to tell Falcone about the workings of Cosa Nostra in 1984. He remained carefully silent for nearly another decade about the politicians, but he said enough about the Salvos in 1984 for the cousins to be arrested finally and tried in the Palermo maxitrial. A big part of the indictment was a reconstruction of the Salvos’ career. The Salvos and Vito Ciancimino were the only political figures among the four hundred and seventy-five mafiosi on trial, but the question of the third level of the mafia was raised openly and formally for the first time. The third level was the political level. Nino Salvo died of lung cancer just before the trial opened. Ignazio was convicted, and was under house arrest, still a very rich man, when Riina’s killers shot him in September 1992.

  * * *

  WHEN ANGELA Salvo, Nino’s daughter, got married in September 1976, she was twenty years old and she’d left the likes of her pubescent crush Angelo far, far behind. The formal reception was of a legendary magnificence even for the Salvos, and the guests were the richest and most powerful people in Sicily. The display of huge and costly wedding gifts filled four rooms. Salvo Lima gave the couple a big silver tureen. The most valued gift of all, whether or not it was the most costly, had a table to itself in the central room, and the wedding guests filed up with a certain reverence to admire a huge silver tray and the card expressing the best wishes of the prime minister Giulio Andreotti. A Palermo photographer who was hired to film and photograph the marriage and the reception filmed the wedding presents meticulously, but the bride’s father when he later received the pictures also bought up all the negatives of everything filmed that day.

  It was hardly surprizing then that the officer, later murdered, who arrested Nino Salvo in 1984 should have found under the letter G of the little address book in Salvo’s pocket the name Giulio followed by the now foreign minister’s most private and secret personal telephone number. The only surprise was the stubbornness with which Giulio A
ndreotti denied ever giving his secret number to Salvo and denied making Salvo’s daughter a wedding present of a huge silver tray. These denials came in the context of a larger denial, that he’d ever met Nino Salvo or his cousin Ignazio Salvo. I have never seen or known the cousins Ignazio and Antonino Salvo or anyone belonging to that family. It was the same as when he’d been shown Letizia’s photograph, the one showing himself with Nino Salvo and the DC potentates at the Salvos’ Hotel Zagarella, when Andreotti identified everyone except the person on the left, who your honours tell me is Nino Salvo; I do not recognize him and have never seen him … He certainly wasn’t sitting at my table. He denied even having seen Salvo’s photos in the papers at the time of his arrest in 1984. Maybe these photographs were published only in the Sicilian papers. At this point the prosecuting magistrates described Andreotti with some exasperation as appearing to be one of the worst informed citizens in the history of Italy. Neither had Andreotti seen, you supposed, Forattini’s cruel cartoon in La Repubblica which showed him crucified on Golgotha between the two Salvo cousins.

  One last time, Andreotti was asked how it was possible, when so many in his close political entourage had said they knew the Salvos, that only he hadn’t known them at all. It is not only possible, Andreotti had replied. It is so. Andreotti’s denials, concluded the investigating magistrates in The True History, were incomprehensible and absurd, disproved not only by the most elementary logic, political and other, but by concrete evidence. The only way of making sense of the stonewalling, they decided, was