John Keahey - Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

To the memory of my teacher Bessie Mae Savage Baker.

Long ago, when I was sixteen, she encouraged me to take her journalism class, opening the door to the rest of my life.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

M OST SUMMER afternoons when I was six or seven, and for many years beyond, I would walk two miles from my southwest Idaho home to the Carnegie Library in downtown Nampa. I would grasp the large door handle with its beautifully rubbed patina, pull open the heavy leaded-glass portal surrounded by wonderfully smooth and polished-oak frames, turn to my left, and head downstairs along a narrow stairway, its creaking treads worn into shallow depressions.

There, in a long, narrow room that served as the librarys childrens section, I would sit for hours at a large table poring through stacks of stereo cards imprinted with mysterious, sepia-toned double images, slipping one at a time into the frame of a stereoscopic holder. Through the eyepiece, I could seemagically I thoughtthe double photograph now as one startling, sharply focused 3-D image.

I absorbed thousands of these images of Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Rome or Paris, and vivid scenes of the European countryside. I discovered the Empire State Building, the Roman Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower. But what I luxuriated in were the foreign scenes of peasant farmersmen, women, and childrenthreshing wheat or picking grapes that were piled high in baskets strapped tight onto sturdy backs, or images showing large milk cans being hauled in the back of donkey-drawn carts.

These photographs, which I viewed in the days long before my family got its first television and for years afterward, were my introduction to the world far beyond my neighborhood of neat two-bedroom, postwar houses. The scenes, probably dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are how I visualized Europe, and in particular Italy, well into adulthood.

When I eventually got to Rome, Florence, and then Sicily in 1986 at age forty, I saw nothing like those pictures. There were no donkey-pulled carts with drivers chewing on the stems of stubby pipes, no families gathering and bundling wheat by hand. Instead, there were tractors like the ones farmers used in the countryside around my hometown, and long, straight rows of corn and potato fields, and flowing acres of golden wheat punctuated here and there by mechanized combines. There were a few elderly women wearing black, but that was about it. During those first two weeks in Sicily, I found myself driving down well-paved roads, surrounded not by donkey carts but by Fiats.

It didnt take long to realize that the images I had absorbed in that quiet library basement of my boyhood were gone forever.

Now, thankfully, this much-abused peasant class is gone. Tourists flock to Sicilian farms in agritouristic droves to help pick grapes or harvest lemons, oranges, or olives, and to eat hearty food prepared by Sicilian families who supplement their incomes off the land by hosting visitors from Germany or Great Britain or the United Statesall willing to pay significant money to try to reconnect to the earth of their ancestors. But most of these visitors, who stay for only a few days or perhaps a week, dont take the time to understand what it was like in these once malaria-ridden plains and valleys just a few generations earlier.

I discovered that there was a better way to find out what it was really like way back then, at a time before or during the taking of those stereoscopic images. It happened one day when, absently thumbing through books on a bookstore shelf, I came across a Penguin Classic edition of Giovanni Vergas Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories . Like a hand leaping out of the pages, the stories grabbed me, reminding me of those sepia images discovered in childhood. Once again I could visualize reapers heading to or from their fields on foot, sometimes traveling so far that, during the harvest, they had to sleep out in the open in the fields or in tiny huts, eating like soldiers in an army: biscuit in the morning and bread and bitter oranges at nine oclock and midday, and homemade pasta in the evening served from kneading troughs as big as washtubs.

I began to live vicariously in another time. Nineteenth-century Verga led me to Luigi Pirandello, whose writings spanned both centuries, then on to twentieth-century Leonardo Sciascia, perhaps the greatest Sicilian writer of them all. They taught me about a world unlike anything on the peninsula of nearby Italy that I had experienced during all my years of traveling there. Through the pages of story after story, novel after novel, essay after essay, they whispered to me that Sicily, in the entire Mediterranean world, is truly unique, that in many ways it is like a puzzle made up of thousands of tiny pieces and is almost impossible to put together completely. But each piece, standing alone, is complicated, complex, and rich.

* * *

I have gone to Sicily several times since 1986. Most recently, for this project, I made four trips in one year: March and July 2009 alone, November 2009 with my son Brad, and early March 2010 with photographer and documentary filmmaker Steve McCurdy. My idea was to see the island in various seasons, and the final visit in late March was to witness Easter, a major event for most Sicilians.

The goal in writing this book is to develop a better understanding of Sicilians and their unique culture, which is demonstrably separate from Italy itself, through conversations with these Mediterranean islanders and by studying their writers, their myths, and a history that spans more than three thousand years. This history is a key to everything else. One foreign power after another has trampled over this landnorthern Italians were the final conquerorsadding to and co-opting unique aspects of the islands character. This is a people who never had control of their own destiny.

I dont know if I can do this strange, magnificent, brooding island justice. But if I can look at it through these various eyes and compare that to what I have personally witnessed, maybe I can beginjust barelyto understand a land that has been scourged by so many and lovingly embraced by a few.

CHRONOLOGY

B.C.

80007000 Evidence has been uncovered of the earliest occupation in Sicily by humans, particularly in caves around present-day Scopello and Palermo.

20001100 Three major groups of people settle on the island, coming from areas around the Mediterranean. They are the Sicani, who first went to the western part. Different sources give different guesses about who came next, but the Sicels and the Elymians arrived in due course. The Elymians settled in the west, forcing the Sicani to the islands center, and the Sicels settled in the east.

1000 Phoenician merchants begin landing along the islands coastal areas, ending up primarily in the west after the Greeks arrived. Legend has it that in 814 the Phoenicians had established a colony at Carthage in North Africa from which the Carthaginian Empire developed.

Ca. 800 Greek merchants begin arriving in Sicily, establishing outposts. Carthage also creates way stations, particularly in the west.

The Greeks start colonizing the island. The first is Naxos, near Taormina, between Catania and Messina. Eventually numerous colonies are established as far west as Selinous (established in 630), now referred to as Selinunte.

Ca. 500280 Syracusae, todays Siracusa, grows into the most powerful Greek city on Sicily. The Greeks are firmly entrenched on the islands eastern half. Carthaginians dominate the western half. Earlier peoples are absorbed into the newer cultures.

264212 Rome and Carthage fight the first of three Punic wars. Rome wins, eventually taking over the island from the Greeks as well and turning it, in 227, into its first province, primarily to serve as a wheat-growing area. Siracusani resist Rome but are finally defeated in 212; Archimedes, a resident of Syracusae, is killed by a Roman soldier.