The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  When, in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, the Piedmontese representative Chevalley di Monterzuolo offers the Prince of Salina a seat as appointed member of the senate, the prince declines, replying: “The sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own … for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony.”1 In its status as “colony” the island experienced many abrupt shifts under various dominant powers. In a period of just over twenty years in the early eighteenth century it changed hands three times: in 1713 Savoy Duke Victor Amadeus II took it, then in 1720 it went to the Austrians, and in 1735 the Spaniards took it back under the Bourbon dynasty. Finally, in 1860, Garibaldi showed up with i Mille, his “thousand” supporting troops.

  Centuries before, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, Normans, and probably many others had chosen this island as their seat of power, stationing their headquarters under the shade of its palm trees, amid the scented air of its orange groves, the sound of its murmuring fountains, and the rush of waves breaking on its incomparable beaches. This prolonged servitude had its price—Palermo’s history is rife with risks and opportunities, and only rarely did the latter gain the upper hand.

  Its permeable, worn-out social fabric has reacted to the vexations of power in the only way it could, considering the circumstances and traditions shared by all oppressed populations: by cultivating the art of the vendetta—in other words, by establishing a parallel system of justice.

  Anyway, before the idea of entrusting the legitimate use of force exclusively to the government, attempts at reestablishing some kind of “justice” by one’s own hand—to spontaneously remedy all wrongs and to establish local heroes—was a common practice everywhere. Robin Hood, a character hovering somewhere between historic fact, legend, and faithful superstition, is one of the most well-known incarnations of the phenomenon: part bandit, part philanthropist, in the most popular version of the tale he lives like an elf in the woods, suddenly popping out to steal from the rich and give to the poor.

  Provence, too, has its own hero hovering between history and legend, an analogous myth based on the real-life man known as Gaspard de Besse (named after his hometown, Besse-sur-Issole) who became known by a catchy couplet: “Brigand pour la France, héros pour la Provence.”2

  After recruiting a gang of men ready for anything from the narrow alleyways of Toulon sometime around 1775, Gaspard became a bandit. Posted along the town’s main streets, his gang preyed upon the carriages of the wealthy, especially nonlocals. Gaspard continually changed his appearance and played pranks on the town’s gendarmes. Such a tumultuous life soon burned him out: Betrayed by one of his own, he ended up hanged in the main square of Aix-en-Provence alongside his assistant, Joseph Augias, an ill-fated forebear of yours truly. Both were barely twenty years old when they went to the gallows.

  And in Palermo? It, too, has its own Robin Hood, probably an ancient myth that became widespread in the eighteenth century. We’ll hear about that in a bit. But beforehand I should explain why the local version of this archetype, unlike his parallels in England and Provence, acquired such unique and enduring characteristics.

  Both Palermo and Sicily in general have their own unique religiosity, wherein displays of pain and death are paramount. Guido Piovene’s unforgettable book Viaggio in Italia (“Journey Through Italy,” 1957) describes the strange customs of this “Arab, baroque, dark, fantastic” city:

  Here [children] receive gifts from the dead instead of from Santa Claus, and kids express their wishes in letters written to their dead uncles, grandmothers, fathers, or other late relatives. The dead then give them, in addition to toys, dolls made of colorful candy. Local shops are full of these dolls—paladins, jacks, fairies, Amazonesque damsels on horseback—which the children then gnaw on, breaking them apart limb by limb.3

  Death is a constant and widespread presence, or perhaps I should say mood or climate. This death is infused with the flavors of ancient Spanish culture, highly baroque—it is the atrocious death of martyred virgins, of Madonnas pierced by swords, of people flayed, burned at the stake, hanged. It is the death of the immense religious processions parading down Sicilian streets each Good Friday leading up to Easter, frightfully lumbering forward atop the shoulders of young men crushed by tons of wood, plaster, ornaments, capes, candles, and exvotos, between a riveted and bewildered crowd of people making the sign of the cross, staring at the statue, and counting its wounds, be it a grieving Mary or an urn containing a realistic statue of Christ dripping with blood, contorted in agony, just like the faces of the flagellants whipping themselves as they march with the procession until blood gushes from their wounds.

  Palermo is also the place where the Inquisition’s tribunals organized the most successful autos-da-fé.4 Pietro Zullino—whose guide to the city’s mysteries and pleasures has never been translated into English, and has become hard to find even in Italian—reminds us that the Palermitan version of the auto-da-fé swiftly became a colossally popular form of spectacle, a veritable street fair of sorts. Bleachers were set up to seat prominent spectators, who festively ate and drank as they awaited the executions: “For months afterward the chit-chat in noble Palermitans’ mansions focused on the physical and moral strength displayed by the condemned, much as Spaniards spoke of the brave bulls of the corrida.”5 On August 15, 1573, a Muslim, a presumed Muslim, and an old man “who maintained that the soul dies along with the body” were all burned at the stake together. The crowd’s jubilation was enormous. The magnificence of such shows often struck even the Spaniards with a sense of admiration.

  The bureaucratic machinery of the Santo Uffizio (“Holy Office,” as the Inquisition’s main institution was referred to in Italy) was merciless, relentless, and remarkably far-reaching. According to Zullino’s accounts, in 1577 Viceroy Don Marcantonio Colonna calculated that no fewer than twenty-four thousand inhabitants of Sicily were officially working for the Inquisition, including fifteen thousand in Palermo alone. Altogether they were the so-called Famiglia dell’Inquisizione, the “Family of the Inquisition”; as Dominican spies, they enjoyed the privilege of full tax exemption. Comparisons with equally extravagant present-day regional institutions would appear to be warranted.

  In the winter of 2012 Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga hosted an exhibition titled “Cuerpos de Dolor” (“Bodies of Sorrow”), featuring religious imagery in sixteenth-century Iberian culture, produced at the height of the Counterreformation and shaped by its religious tribunals and executions. It showcased statues tormented by pain, symbols of boundless affliction, a dark spirituality embodied in vivid visions of shaking virgin saints, in the severity of religious orders where obedience was to be observed perinde ac cadaver, “in the manner of a corpse,” a term used to describe disciples’ submission to their spiritual masters. This was the height of suffering, and the great seventeenth-century painter Francisco de Zurbarán captured it in his crucifixion scenes, where the body of Christ loses all sacred stylizations to become the mere cadaver of the executed, contorted in pain, nailed to his cross.

  This was precisely the period when—in Spain and the many territories controlled by the Spanish crown, as well as Rome—the custom of religious processions became common. Such processions invariably included the display of a martyred body or the ecstatic rapture of a hermit staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull, spectacles that quickly became tools for putting the crowd on guard and, ultimately, for mass conversions.

  From then on, year after year, these spectacular processions have continued to fill the streets of many southern Italian towns, with Palermo providing one of the best backdrops for such festivities.

  The suffering of saints and martyrs contrasted with the fleeting pleasures of worldly life, the admonit
ion of death and at the same time its alluring draw, to the point where it pops up even in colorful sweetmeats made for children. Such depictions offer the image of a severe god, ready to punish even the slightest transgression. But these weren’t unique to Sicily. The American historian and mathematician Morris Kline wrote that in the seventeenth century, “Priests and ministers affirmed that nearly everyone went to hell after death, and described in greatest detail the hideous, unbearable tortures that awaited the eternally damned … God was presented not as the savior but as the scourge of mankind … Christians were urged to spend their time meditating upon eternal damnation in order to prepare themselves for life after death.”6 Such beliefs perpetuated the ancient role of religious faith as a force for restraining human passions. In one of his satirical dramas the ancient (fifth-century B.C.E.) Greek Sophist Critias outlined his famous theory that the gods were invented precisely to keep human behavior in check. Polybius, a second-century B.C.E. Greek historian who admired the rise of the Romans, wrote that the ancients had inculcated their populace with the idea of gods and an afterlife for precise reasons. Such ideas, he claimed, help to hold back the passions of the masses. He concluded by observing that modern thinkers trying to dispel such illusions were utterly ignored. Such ideas gradually fell into decline elsewhere, but held on tight in certain places, including Palermo and Sicily. It is as if such places needed an extra injection of admonishment in order to contain people’s comportment, holding them back within the bounds of reciprocal tolerance.

  The story of Saint Rosalia, Palermo’s patron saint and protectress, is deeply significant. Rosalia was born in Palermo in 1128, daughter of the Norman count Sinibaldo della Quisquina, who claimed he was a descendant of Charlemagne. Rosalia’s mother, Maria Guiscardi, also boasted of connections to the Norman court. Young Rosalia took the cloth at a young age, and then became a hermit on Mount Pellegrino, where she remained in solitary meditation until her death. She might easily have been forgotten in the seventeenth century, a period of harsh pestilence, famine, and poverty, were it not for the fact that the plague ravaged Palermo as well. Someone, apparently a plague-stricken woman named Girolama Gatto, claimed that in a dream (or perhaps in a feverish delirium) she had seen a young woman pointing her toward a cave on Mount Pellegrino. The cave was somehow found and, after a series of excavations, the bones of the pious young woman were also discovered. The Jesuits took up the task of verifying their authenticity. Since genetic analysis was not yet available, the research was entrusted to the goodwill and proven faith of a few doctors. On February 22, 1625, Rosalia’s bones were turned over to the city council and, the following June, the virgin who had died five centuries before was proclaimed a saint. According to Zullino, the cult of Saint Rosalia’s worshipers can be traced back to her connections to the imperial family of Frederick II, the Swabian, Norman, man, and king who for thirty years, from 1220 to 1250, had made Palermo the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the political center of the world.

  Even today it is commonly believed that Rosalia’s remains, carried in a solemn procession through the city streets, are what stopped the terrible plague. Her cult became popular enough to eclipse her four predecessors (Saints Christina, Agatha, Oliva, and Nympha), and the veneration she enjoys elevated her to a level that is elsewhere reserved solely for Mary, Mother of Jesus.

  The story of Saint Rosalia is just one more instance reinforcing the importance Palermo grants its dead and their remains. The city also happens to be home to one of the largest and most macabre collections of mummies in Europe, and perhaps in the whole world. Somewhere between eight and ten thousand corpses lie at rest—in open coffins or swaying from the ceilings and walls in the dramatic, grotesque, obscene poses imposed by death and the passage of time—their jaws agape in one last mute cry, skulls half covered by strips of old skin, limbs contorted. Some are dressed in penitential sackcloth, some in evening gowns or gala uniforms. They include ladies in bonnets and hoop skirts, friars, merchants, baronesses, petty-bourgeois officials, virgins who died on the eve of their wedding in the gowns they never had a chance to wear while alive, now reduced to shreds, small children, and even babies. This army of the dead reminds the living of the fate that awaits us all.

  The convent whose basement boasts this terrifying theater belongs to the Capuchin monks, one of the minor Franciscan orders, named for the hood (cappuccio) they added to the simple tunic worn by Saint Francis of Assisi, the order’s founder. It is an annex of the church of Santa Maria della Pace in the Cuba neighborhood, and dates back to the seventeenth century. The first person to be buried there, at the very end of the sixteenth century, was a friar known as Silvestro da Gubbio. Many other friars followed, and then secular folk who wanted to leave a visible trace of their existence, including the possibility of family visits, were also included. The structure’s microclimate favored the processes of embalming and mummification, but they were nevertheless rather costly, which explains why almost all the remains you see there are of aristocrats or well-heeled, upper-middle-class gentry. The deceased were eviscerated and then laid out in a dehydrating mummification chamber for up to a year; after that the remains were washed with vinegar or arsenic, filled with straw, sewn back up, dressed in their Sunday best, and set up along the walls, right next to or below whoever had preceded them on their final voyage.

  In many cultures the horrible spectacle of the body’s postmortem decay is hidden from view. The baroque tastes of the seventeenth century, however, dwelled on it, and put it on display with the pretense of using it as an admonishment. At the entrance to another cemetery run by the Capuchins—the catacombs on Via Veneto in Rome—a brutal cautionary greeting reads: “Ciò che fummo tu sei, ciò che siamo sarai” (“We were what you are, and we are what you will be”).

  In Ecclesiastes, one of the bible’s wisdom books, the phrase “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas” is repeated twice over—“vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The sentence can be read in multiple ways, and one radical reinterpretation of it can be found at the end of Giacomo Leopardi’s canto “A se stesso” (“To Himself”), in the famous and inconsolable conclusion: “l’infinita vanità del tutto” (“the infinite vanity of it all”).7

  In art history the term vanitas refers to a still-life featuring the symbols of life’s fleeting nature as portrayed through many objects, although a human skull remains one of the most eloquent and immediate. It is with skull in hand that Hamlet, in Shakespeare’s tragedy, reflects on the brevity of life. The Clown turns to the prince and says: “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester.” The revelation triggers Hamlet’s memory: “Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now, get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.”8

  The vanitas Hamlet performs—if we can call it that—is also interesting because of how it juxtaposes death and Yorick’s folly, albeit a folly that was at least partially put on for the king’s amusement, or in order to voice inconvenient truths by passing them off as buffoonery. Pirandello uses this same expedient in Henry IV, arguably the best play he ever wrote.

  Set in the early twentieth century, it centers on a nobleman who takes part in a masquerade held as a group horseback ride. He dresses up as Henry IV, and is knocked off his horse by a rival as they both vie for the same woman. He hits his head and faints, and when he comes to he actually believes he’s Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, not least because a few friends and family members play along. After many years he finally returns to his senses, but he keeps pretending he’s crazy in order to get back at his rival with impunity, since the man had both struck him from his horse and stolen his beloved. The relationships between insanity and normality, as well as fiction and truth, play a central role in Pirandello’s theatri
cal works. For example, we witness another feigned insanity in Cap and Bells, where the act of pretending serves to keep up appearances, thereby saving the reputation of the bourgeois protagonist. And Leonardo Sciascia, who was as Sicilian a writer as Pirandello, takes up the same theme in his aforementioned short essay “The Crazy Cord,” where he quotes quips from both Cap and Bells and Henry IV:

  “You see, Signora, there is in all of us, something like a musical instrument—an instrument which has three strings or cords: the cords of intellect, civility, and madness.”9

  “All right, then, I’m a loony! Well, by God, on your knees, then! Kneel! I command you to get down on your knees and touch the ground with your foreheads, three times. Get down! That’s what you do when you’re confronted by a maniac!”10

  That essay was later collected in a book of the same title in which Sciascia outlines and explores his thoughts about sicilitudine, “Sicilianness,” or rather that special mixture of contradictions, falsities, and exasperated, belted-out truths he considers hallmarks of the Palermitan personality, and the Sicilian character in general. Underneath it all, he notes, lies a geographic factor: “Sicily is an island in the center of the Mediterranean, but its strategic importance, so to speak, as the keystone that assured its conquerors’ power and dominion was, paradoxically, mirrored by vulnerabilities in its own defenses, and a sense of insecurity … that exposed it to all kinds of military and political attacks.” Later on, returning to the eternal subject of this small island set smack in the middle of the trade routes crisscrossing the world’s oldest sea, he adds: “That sea washed all sorts of people onto Sicily’s shores: Berbers, Norman knights, Lombard soldiers, Charles of Anjou’s greedy Neapolitan barons, adventurers fleeing the ‘miserly poverty of Catalonia,’ the armadas of Charles V and Louis XIV, the Austro-Hungarians, Garibaldi’s troops, the Piedmontese, the troops of Patton and Montgomery; and over many centuries it suffered the ongoing scourge of Algerian pirates, who swooped in to steal its goods and its inhabitants. In the process, the island’s ‘historic’ fear has become an ‘existential’ fear.”11