Prose - Sicilian Odyssey

On the north coast of Sicily, which Homer called the Island of the Sun, the shipwrecked Odysseus washed up on shore and was saved by Nausicaa, the kings daughter. Farther inland, on the flowery banks of Lake Pergusa, Hades seized Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, and carried her clear across the island to a spring just south of Syracuse, where they descended into the underworld and remained there until Demeters pleas persuaded the gods to let Persephone rejoin the living for two-thirds of every year. Pursued through Arcadia by the river god Alpheus, the nymph Arethusa prayed to Artemis for help; changed into a fountain, she reappeared across the ocean, in Syracuse, joined with her pursuer in a pool that today is overgrown with papyrus, occupied by placid white ducks, and surrounded by stylish bars. So even in pre-Homeric times it must have been apparent that this island was so magical that the gods and heroes would naturally have come here to act out their dramas of danger and survival, of grief, mourning, and reunion.

Amphitheater, Segesta

Sicily is where Daedalus landed. After the failure of his ingenious plan to free himself and his son from King Minoss prison on the wings that he fashioned from wax, after the tragic accident he must have witnessed, watching his son soar higher and higher, closer to the sun until the wax wings melted and sent Icarus plummeting into the sea, after gathering up his sons body and burying it on the island of Icariaonly then did the architect of the Labyrinth, the inventor, and the master technician come to rest in Sicily, of all the places he could have chosen. hat did he see as he flew in andaccording to the mythtouched ground somewhere along the west coast? Whatever sights greeted him would have only distantly resembled what the traveler finds today. Erice, near where Daedalus is said to have arrived, was not yet the austere and lovely medieval town swathed in mists and set high on the mountaintop like a diamond solitaire in an antique ring. The salt pans on the coast between Trapani and Marsala, the cathedral at Cefal, the giddy baroque excesses of Noto and Palermo, the petrochemical plants at Gelanone of it would exist for centuries. Lake Pergusawhere Persephone was seized by the enamored Lord of the Underworldhad not yet been encircled by a dusty racecar track.

And the islands colorful, brutal history had not yet had a chance to cover the landscape with the rubble and dust of battle, invasion, foreign occupation, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, warfare, tyranny, crime, and death. Inhabited by prehistoric tribes, the island had still to repel and then embrace the long succession of invadersGreeks and Carthaginians, Romans, Goths and Vandals, Byzantines and Saracens, Normans, Swabians, the Spanish and Frenchall of whom would inflict great losses and bestow even greater gifts on the conquered country. In fact, the whole history of Italyand of much of Europeseems to have been distilled, concentrated, and acted out on this singular island. To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, wrote Goethe, who landed in Palermo in April 1787. For Sicily is the clue to everything.

Its easy to understand what drew the invaders here, why they bothered, what they wanted. Some part of the attraction must have been the sheer beauty, whichas Homer reminded usmen will go to extreme lengths to possess, to claim as their own. But there was also the fertility, the generosity of the soil. From earliest times, the goddess of fertilityCybele, Demeter, Cereshas been worshiped here. In the archaeological museum at Syracuse is a collection of votive figurines of the goddess holding sheaves of grain. Down the hill from the Greek theater at Palazzolo Acreide are the Santoni, a dozen or so statues of Cybele roughly hewn from the rock face. The fact that the sculptures have been put behind barsfor their own protectionmakes them seem all the more mysterious, otherworldly, and imposing. Every August, the hill town of Gangi decorates its streets with ears of corn tied with red ribbonsa festival that derives from the sacred rites in honor of Demeter. And in Enna, the highest major city on the island and the nearest to its geographical center, you can climb out on a rock believed to have been the most important altar in the cult of Ceres and, on rare clear days, you can see all the way to Mount Etna.

So perhaps Daedalus saw only the goddesss gifts: the golden hills, the turquoise coast, the warm sun, the stands of wild fennel and orange, and, across the island, the smoking cone of Etna with its threat or promise that something dramatic was about to happen. Perhaps he intuited or understood that he had come to a land in which the most extreme natural and man-made splendor insisted on its right to coexist with the most extreme horror, the most sustained and terrible bloodsheda conjunction that must have seemed refreshingly truthful and even comforting in its honesty in light of the pain and loss that he had just endured. Possibly, Daedalus recognized that he had reached a place in which the most lush magnificence, the most sybaritic pleasures console us forwithout ever lying aboutthe harshness of existence.