At the top of the rise, beyond the two small houses of our nearest neighbors, our own house comes into view. This is the back door, the working side of Bosco: it is big and bare and graceless from this angle, the windowless walls and big iron door of the cantina where the wine is kept seem unwelcoming and uninteresting, and the flower beds are hidden behind a big ramp of earth and stones that serves for loading the tractor onto the truck. We drive past the kitchen door and beyond the house, park the car under the budding mulberry trees, and walk back toward Bosco’s frivolous side.
The last of the narcissus, withered and papery, are lost to sight in the brilliance of the freesia, the ranunculi, and the big yellow calendulas. For the first time dark purple spears thrust up from the iris I planted two years ago around three sides of the stone seat that was originally the base of the old wine press. This giant brick of gray travertine is one more instance of my fortuitous landscaping; one might think that its site, on the edge of the road, in the shade of the palm, was the result of careful if rather uninspired planning. It isn’t. That’s as far as the bulldozer managed to haul it from the about-to-be-rebuilt cantina before the steel cable broke. I feel a great affinity for that stone: surrounded by flowers, we both strive to convey the impression that we are not mere flotsam and jetsam, but that intention brought us to such unexpected shores.
The afternoon is long and warm; I putter about the garden well into the sunset, snipping off the dead heads of the grape hyacinths, discovering the first blossoms on the strawberry plants and on the white musk rose, and smelling the meager flowering of my poor stunted lilac bushes, inappropriate and ill at ease in the Mediterranean setting to which I have constrained them in tribute to the New England garden of my childhood vacations. As the light fades to lavender and dusk I realize that, unheralded and unobserved, there has been a changing of the guard. The swallows are back, chittering and swooping above the eaves in search of their evening meal, while the robins that winter in the almond trees and add their spot of red to the rosebush outside the kitchen window have gone without my noticing, having checked out only with the magpies, elegant scolds who are, together with the crows and the sparrows, our only permanent residents.
A distant mewing call comes from the olives in the valley, announcing the return of the little Athenian owls who used to live in the eaves of the Blundas’ roof, which sticks out at a right angle, eye-level to our upstairs corridor windows. We would watch them from the windows, and they would stare back, shifting from foot to foot in a worried dance and clucking angrily at this invasion of their privacy. One flew in the bathroom window one evening; I walked in to find him sitting on the radiator glaring at me, as outraged as if I had caught him with his pants down.
To our great distress the cat ate two of the owls, and now the survivors come no closer than the olive grove, but we can still hear them calling throughout the night. I wait in vain, however, for the return of the falcons who used to nest in the pits and hollows of the stable walls before we rebuilt the house. Sometimes a falcon will still circle lazily overhead on a hot summer’s day, but none has found a place to rest in the new house. This is a grave disappointment, for the house’s full name, from the contrada in which it stands, is Bosco Falconeria, the “Falconry Woods.” I fancy that Frederick II, master falconer and author of history’s first scientific treatise on hawking, hunted in these hills while he was laying siege to the last rebels who had taken refuge on the mountain behind Alcamo. But the woods have long since been cut down, and the falcons will surely never return to nest in a place as frequently, if intermittently, inhabited as Bosco is now.
The next morning Tonino and Francesco plow the vegetable garden with the big rotary tiller so that Natalia and I can plant the corn, Natalia staking the rows and sprinkling the seed in the furrows that I dig with the hoe. A Sicilian hoe, with its wide forged-iron blade and thick, stubby wooden handle, weighs at least eight pounds and must be brought up over one’s head and then down hard with a shove from the lower back muscles, if it is to make any impression at all on the heavy clay soil. In the early days roars of laughter would ring out across the fields as Turiddu Vivona watched me struggling to master the beast, but nowadays I can wield the hoe with what at least looks like ease and effectiveness.
We plant some squash too, more American imports, butternut, acorn, and pattypan, whose delicate white scalloping fascinates the Sicilians. But the soil is already very dry, and if Demeter doesn’t pull a few strings with the rain god there will be neither corn nor squash at Bosco this summer.
Wisteria blossoms drip like early grapes from the railings and balconies in Palermo, and Maria Vica and I must visit the Villa de Cordova. At the end of the seventeenth century it became fashionable among the Palermo aristocracy to build splendid villas in the luxuriant orchards and citrus groves that stretched for miles outside the walls of the city, where they could take refuge during the summer from the heat and smells of the city. According to the English historian Denis Mack Smith, more than two hundred of these villas were begun, and the pompous magnificence of their facades—behind which the villa often remained uncompleted—was a major factor in the ultimate bankruptcy of the aristocratic class.
The spreading tide of modern construction on the outskirts of the city has engulfed what remains of these villas; high-rise condominiums dwarf those lying nearer the center, while smaller houses, commercial enterprises, junkyards, and repair shops have encroached upon the more remote, flooding the surrounding parks and invading the stables and the outbuildings. Spare parts and rusting chassis prop up toppling Grecian urns, and laundry flaps on the scraggy remains of exotic shrubbery.
The later villas, the more famous and splendid examples of this fashion, are to be found in Bagheria to the east: Villa Valguarnera, Villa Trabia, Villa Palagonia, this last produced by the warped creativity of a humpbacked prince, who ringed his garden walls with grotesque stone monsters and lined his ballroom with distorting mirrors, so that all his guests appeared crooked too and wherever he looked he could keep a jealous eye on his beautiful young wife.
The villas to the west in the Piano dei Colli are smaller and somewhat simpler, although almost all of them bear the hallmark of the Sicilian baroque, the double staircase that curves up the facade to the piano nobile. The inventiveness of the Sicilian architects lay in the variation with which they were able to treat this theme: each family wanted its staircase to be similar but unique. At the Villa de Cordova the curve of the staircase is repeated in the wisteria vine below it, and Maria Vica and I have a long-standing date to see it at the height of its flowering.
It is already hot at ten o’clock when Maria Vica comes by to pick me up, and a slight haze tempers hue and texture, the perfect light for the lichened walls and lavender flowers that we are to look at. The winding country road that once led past quiet villas to the little fishing village of Sferracavallo is now a major artery for traffic heading to the autostrada for western Sicily. The stream of cars whisks us past the big Villa Boscogrande, a fashionable nightclub lodged in the Lampedusa family villa that was the setting for the opening chapter in The Leopard, and drivers honk impatiently as we brake to turn left through the Villa de Cordova gateway, the shape of the urn-topped pillars barely discernible under a swathing of tattered ivy.
The charm of the villa lies in its scale, its perfect, intimate, livable proportions. The courtyard where we find ourselves is less than a hundred feet long and half again as wide. A low row of stables encloses it on either side, their flat roofs topped by an openwork stone balustrade that flows around the courtyard from the gate, borders the terrace that runs across the second story of the villa, then sweeps down and around the curving arms of the double staircase. The simple facade above the terrace is broken by shallow pilasters whose rich golden brown stands out against the pale gold of the walls and the mossy gray of the stonework.
The courtyard itself is a tangle of unkempt and faded green: four palm trees droop gray and withered fronds over weedy
gravel and leggy thistles. In the central bed a hibiscus bush, unpruned and shapeless, is surrounded by spikes of deep-purple iris and the pale violet flowers of a rambling scented geranium, thus stating in the foreground the range of hue to be admitted within the curve of the staircase, where the thick gray trunk of the wisteria vine echoes exactly the arc of the broad stone banister, swirling up like a spiral of smoke to lose itself in the cloud of lavender flowers suspended in the stairs’ embrace, a watery cascade of purples and violets laced with the first tiny leaves of green.
Below the wisteria an arch leads underneath the house to some rear courtyard: a peasant woman with a washtub balanced on her hip peers out at us from the shadows. A pop song from a transistor radio accompanies the hammering noises that come from one of the stables, but the villa itself is closed; the upper windows are boarded up behind their broken panes, and slatted shutters losing their paint bar the lower ones. The structure itself looks sound: surely this villa is not in any danger of falling. Having withstood revolutions and earthquakes it will merely flake away, a sliver of lichened stone here, a sprinkle of plaster dust there, neglect nibbling at the marble and sanding down the stucco.
The sun that filters through the overcast floods the courtyard with the same warm, nostalgic glow that lights Lampedusa’s memoirs of his childhood in the villa of Santa Margherita Belice, Places of My Infancy. To see these villas in this light is to be exempted from mental acrobatics; it blocks out the gray winter of their present decay, the contempt with which Sicily treats her past; it tempers the harsh glare of a Sicilian summer sun baking the vast feudal holdings, three-quarters of the island, that were milked dry to build such mansions, each penny that could be squeezed from starving peasant labor invested in pomp and luxury rather than in roads, new crops, irrigation. I am grateful for such an exemption: it is too much of an effort to juggle all at once these other seasons together with the exquisite taste and loveliness of the flower-lit facade before me now and to keep all three aloft in some coherent construct.
Maria Vica has something else to show me, a recent discovery she is eager to share. We leave the Villa de Cordova and make our way to Acquasanta, a little fishing village hidden in the westernmost corner of the Bay of Palermo in the shadow of Villa Igea, Palermo’s most glamorous hotel. The narrow strip of land between sea and steep mountain has offered little foothold for the city’s advance, and despite considerable new construction, Acquasanta retains the character of a village.
We park the car in the piazza, a square swaying with tall, sparse palms that look out over a little port cluttered with pleasure boats, a few magnificent yachts, and dozens of brightly striped fishing dinghies. Maria Vica leads me into an alleyway, around and behind a turn-of-the-century house with two doors leading, according to the words carved over their lintels, to hot baths and cold baths. We follow the alley down into a courtyard half filled by a voluminous tangle of vines, wisteria, and bougainvillea knotted together by white rambler roses, which have escaped the pruning shears of the Villa Igea gardeners and tumbled over the hotel wall. A little two-storied house occupies one side of the courtyard, its facade proclaiming in faded letters “Establishment for Mineral Baths: Sacerdoti Pandolfo Bros.”
The upper windows of this house are shuttered, but some sort of life goes on downstairs: an old man in an undershirt is repairing a motorbike inside the front door, a young woman in slippers flaps out of the house and up the alley, then comes back shortly with a can of Coke in hand, giving only a quick, uninterested glance at my attempts to focus my camera in this narrow space. What interests me lies to the right of the house, where six feet of railing and a gate mark a passageway that tunnels under the second story of the house and opens on a little ravine, where natural rock and sunlight are visible, thick foliage and a faint tinkle testifying to a vestige of the thermal waters.
Maria Vica has brought me here to look at the tiles that cover the walls of this passageway, hand-painted majolica squares each bearing a grape leaf and a generous bunch of purple grapes, whose tendrils twist and link from tile to tile, encasing the walls in a network of curving branches and purple clusters, a naïve echo of the wisteria we have seen so much of this morning. On the wall opposite the gate a large marble plaque reads:
THIS MINERAL WATER
CONSIDERED SALUTARY BY THE ANCIENTS
WAS EMPLOYED FOR THE REBELLIOUS OBSTRUCTIONS OF THE BOWELS
AGAINST CHRONIC RHEUMATISM GOUT GALLSTONES PROSTATE ETC.
SCIENCE, HAVING THEN STUDIED ITS CHEMICAL QUALITIES,
SAID TO IT: SULPHATE, MAGNESIAC, FERRUGINOUS!
THUS CONFIRMING ITS THERAPEUTIC ACTION
IN THE AFORESAID MALADIES.
CLINICAL EXPERIENCE SANCTIONED ITS EMPLOYMENT
WITH REPEATED PROVEN SUCCESS.
PATIENTS PRAISED ITS EFFICACY
FOR THE BENEFITS THEY DERIVED.
ITS DIVULGATION FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY WAS PROMOTED
BY IMPORTANT AND ILLUSTRIOUS CITIZENS
BY MERITORIOUS AND INDUSTRIOUS DOCTORS.
IN HOMAGE
THE JURY OF THE NATIONAL EXPOSITION OF PALERMO
GAVE IT A MOST DESERVED AWARD.
JUNE 7, 1892
From one courtyard to another we have jumped almost two centuries. The innocent faith in science, industry, and progress carved into this piece of marble has nothing to do with the weary sophistication of the Villa de Cordova. We are fully into the last splendid blossoming of the city, the Belle Epoque, when the huge industrial fortunes of the Florios, of the Whitakers and the Inghams, English merchants of Marsala wine, joined with the dwindling fortunes of the aristocracy to finance Palermo’s last great moment of architectural glory, the villas and the town houses designed by the Art Nouveau architect Ernesto Basile. It is the period of the Teatro Massimo, whose stage is second in size in Europe only to that of the Paris Opéra, and of the, Villa Igea next door, whose halls, frescoed with maidens wading through water lilies and carved into sinuous floral designs, welcomed the royalty of all Europe, kings and kaisers, who considered Palermo to be a watering spot of the greatest gaiety and opulence.
The First World War, which was soon to extinguish this last brief blaze, seems to have smothered taste as well. After the pretentious monumentality of the Fascist epoch, pure unadulterated ugliness has taken over, “modern” cement and stucco blocks that rapidly age and discolor into uniform dreariness, whimsical villas afflicted with wrought iron and tile on which even the most luxuriant landscaping cannot confer charm. Not that the means are lacking: if Palermo ranks seventieth among Italian cities in per capita income, it holds seventh place for per capita consumption, a mysterious discrepancy that can be explained only by heroin, graft, and tax evasion. But licit or illicit, it all flows into the status symbols of mass consumption: BMW cars, Gucci luggage, Les Must de Cartier.
Maria Vica and I still have some time to spare before we return to our respective duties, and we decide to continue our drive out past Villa Igea and along the narrow road that runs between the cliffs of Monte Pellegrino and the sea. We are leaving Palermo behind us: the city gives way to summer beach houses, the sun burns through the haze and lights up the sparkling sea, the glistening white of the stucco, the bright crimson and fuchsia of the bougainvillea, the tropic green of palms and banana plants in exotic backyards. Two-thirds of the way around the mountain we arrive at the beach of Mondello. The broad, tree-lined streets are peaceful now in the spring noon, the little houses with their gingerbread turrets and neo-Pompeian swags, Belle Epoque scaled down to a bourgeois pocketbook, mostly shuttered still; the beach itself, a wide cove between two mountains, is still free of cabins and crowds, with only a student or two skipping school to lie in the sun and a few hardy German tourists actually swimming. We drive on past the Bathing Establishment, a vast, ivory-colored wedding cake standing on piles in the water, and the little fishing port, crowded with seafood restaurants and stalls selling boiled octopus, raw mussels, or dark purple sea urchins that taste of i
odine.
The sight of the sea and the smell of the clean air tell me that I am ready to turn my back on Palermo, on its opulent history and present decay. I want landscapes bleached clean by the sea and the sun, the illusion of classical simplicity, the pungent smells and sounds of the Sicilian summer.
The first tastes of summer, like vegetables out of season, come dear. The next weekend is a long one, since Monday the twenty-fifth is a holiday commemorating the liberation of Rome from the German troops, but we cannot make use of it as I would like. The delivery of some new furniture becomes the occasion for a domestic revolution: like a dog that gets up and circles about on his bed before settling down to sleep again, every so often we move ourselves about in the hopes of accommodating ourselves more comfortably to the cramped dimensions of our Palermo apartment. Saturday and Sunday find us painting walls and shifting furniture despite the sun outside the windows.
I have convinced everyone, however, that the proper reward for all this hard work is a trip to Erice. Or at least almost everyone: Francesco, just turned fifteen, has lost interest in family outings, so it is Natalia, Tonino, and I who set off on Monday morning.
The mountains that form an almost unbroken chain from the Straits of Messina west along the northern coast of Sicily run past Palermo, swing round the gulfs of Carini and Castellammare, and then reach out to Capo San Vito, the western tip of the island, whose abrupt outline and winking lighthouse we can see from Bosco. The southern shore is much flatter, however, a long coastal plain that ranges from the Arab near Tràpani, Marsala, and Mazzara to the Greek of Selinunte, Agrigento, and Gela. This plain, which is very broad in its western tract, is broken only at the beginning, where Mount Erice rises to guard the port of Tràpani. Erice is a smallish mountain, really, only 2,454 feet high, but the improbability of its position, all alone at the edge of the sea, gives an impression of greater height. And of great mystery: this is one of the most sacred spots of the Mediterranean, sacred long before man had discovered the means of recording and transmitting the reasons for this reverence.
On Persephone's Island Page 20