Palermo/Sicily
June 1994
The hot midday sun assaulted me as I left the air-conditioned cocoon of the cruise ship Costa Romantica. It wasn’t just hot; it was stifling. That blazing Mediterranean sun, Apollo of legend and essential ingredient of La Dolce Vita, can be so intense you feel you're being broiled alive. I almost leapt back into the ship, but I'd set my mind on having a nice lunch in Palermo, so I soldiered on.
Whizzing Vezpas and heedless Fiats normally make crossing the street in
front of the port of Palermo a matter requiring equal amounts of
courage, resignation and agility, but this afternoon they were nowhere
in sight. No psycho-drivers drove into your side of the road. It was
Saturday, and noontime at that, a time of day when throughout Italy all
work must stop, and life, in the form of a long, leisurely lunch, a
nice nap and maybe a little afternoon delight (for lovers), commenced.
My search for a suitable trattoria involved a little walking
around the old part of Palermo. Shops were closed. The heat stunned
everything into a sullen stillness. One felt that any attempt at
movement would inflame the blood of things and make the air explode in
violence. Italian words like "forno" and "omertá" rose and fell in my
brain unbidden and unremarked.
In most Mediterranean countries, the great noonday pause, the siesta, the tempo mezzogiorno,
is a time that is jealously observed. Filipinos used to have prolonged
siestas, before the go-go nature of American acculturation rendered it a
thing of the past. Filipinos still take their siestas, but Philippine
shops don't close anymore at midday. I am glad the Italians still
haven’t chucked off this practice. Italians still observe siesta as much
as a matter of centuries old habit as well as of law. There are signs
that it’s being shortened, but I don't think it's going to die out any
time soon.
Most of the buildings in Palermo were unkempt and grimy. They did not
seem to have been scrubbed for a long time. Everywhere I saw the sign
“In restauro”. This meant buildings were ostensibly being “restored”.
Later, a fellow musician from Naples who should know about these things
laughingly informed me: “ Si, they have been in restauro for 15 years and nothing has been done.” I asked why? Rubbing his thumb against his index and middle fingers, he said: “ Per i soldi (for the money). The Mafia”.
At the time, so he told me, Palermo’s famous opera house was already in restauro
for 15 years with plenty of money spent and no visible improvements in
evidence. As to why Palermo was grimy, the same fellow told me that the
Mafia prevented anything from being done. If you wanted to clean up or
do improvements to a building, you had to deal with the Mafia somehow,
which will proceed to extort money from you. Faced with this
predicament, people give up restoring anything. There were sections in
the city that hadn’t even seen any repair or rebuilding since seeing
damage in World War II.
Out of curiosity I entered a courtyard on Via Roma. Two large statues
graced recessed cornices, their features indecipherable from weathering.
Weeds grew between the flagstones and sprang from out of cracks on the
walls. Louvered windows were shuttered or broken. A square patch of
brilliant blue sky smiled above, while the sun blazed down on the
ravaged scene below. A side-door opened and a man strode out into the
courtyard. He eyed me curiously. I retreated back to the street.
I saw several funeral parlors along the Via Roma. Business must be good.
Still searching for a place for lunch, I wandered through a
medieval-looking archway, and found myself in a busy market. Here were
stalls selling mostly cheap clothing. The smell of frying fish hung in
the air. No siesta here, just plain, time-less commerce.
The space was enclosed on all four sides by tenement buildings grim
with neglect, their windows spewing out clothes hung out to dry on
stretched wires.
Not being in the mood to shop, I again retreated and walked out to the main thoroughfare.
The sight of a church with three pink cupolas drew me forward Across
from the church with the cupolas was another antique church. On the
piazza between these buildings nestled a dining place, Pizzeria Bellini.
With its large canvas awnings, pots of geraniums, and sheltered
proximity to the churches , it was the perfect place to be, if one
wanted a proper Italian atmosphere for lunch. When I was seated inside
the restaurant, I looked out not so much at a piazza as a setting for a
grand opera (say,"I Vespri Siciliani" or "Cavelleria Rusticana" both of
which were set in Sicily, if not Palermo).
From the friendly waiter, I ordered the mixed antipasti, the spaghetti a la sardine, and a chicken cacciatore.
The antipasti featured a tasty stuffed sardine and roasted vegetables
(eggplant, peppers, broccoli). The spaghetti had a topping of ground
sardine and fennel and hit the spot.The chicken cacciatore was a curious
dish. It was smothered in olives, tomatoes, basil and olive oil, but
turned out to be sour, as if it had been pickled before being cooked.
Was this an authentic Sicilian dish, sour taste and all, or a culinary
miss? I did not finish it. This puzzling repast was saved by the light
and crusty sesame-seeded bread. The accompaniment of a half-carafe of
dry white wine, and dessert of standard tiramisu washed with strong espresso erased whatever misgivings I had about the meal.
More interesting to me was the lunchtime Italian opera buffa that
was unfolding before my eyes. There is always an element of melodrama
in scenes of everyday Italian life. From the florid gesticulations
accompanying their conversations to effusive hugs and kisses and dire
arguments, Italians seem always to be on the verge of either killing
each other or performing an aria. An exaggerated sense of drama is so
ingrained in their character they had to invent opera in order to give
vent to their tempestuous emotions. I’m sure Michelangelo and Leonardo
da Vinci were no shrinking violets.
Take, for example the scene inside the pizzeria Bellini. Two young women
and a portly gentleman occupied the table in front of me. One woman
wore dark Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and spoke rapidly, her long,
manicured fingers dancing to the cadence of her words. Sitting beside
her was a dark-haired, Moorish-looking woman who remained silent, save
for interjecting a word here and there The man sat with his back to me,
but every now and then I’d catch his profile. He wore prescription
glasses and looked like a professor. An ordinary enough scene, but
something in the air and the setting suggested to me that they could
have come straight out of a Pirandello play. Label it: "Characters in
Search of a Voyeuristic Tourist".
A tour bus rolled into the piazzetta. A flock of tourists—perhaps from
our cruise ship—clambered out of the vehicle and were herded into a
side alley and into the large church. They did not stay long there, and
soon filed out again and into the bus and were gone.
An Oriental-looking couple, Japanese most likely, appeared on the scene,
took photographs of each other in front of the church, and then
vanished.
A man in a blue suit yelled at somebody across the piazza. Soon he was
engaged in a loud, long-distance shouting match with this invisible
somebody, their voices reverberating in the enclosed space as of two
tenors performing a little heavy-duty duetto. Soon the other’s
voice took the form of a slim young man of about twenty who opened the
door to a little Fiat that had been blocking the other man’s white
pickup. Two elderly ladies in summer dress cheerfully piled into the
young man’s car and they were off.
I heard somebody wailing "Aheu! Aheu!" several times.
The man in the blue suit parked his mini truck in front of the potted
geraniums adorning the picket fence of the trattoria. He then opened the
back door of the truck and brought out a quantity of printed T-shirts.
He handled them carefully, as if showing to everyone and no one in
particular how lovely his shirts were.
The bell-like voice of a child singing rang out in the square. It had a
startling sweetness, like that of the shepherd boy at the beginning of
the third act of “Tosca”. I've encountered several kids like him in the
course of the afternoon, children singing confidently, without
self-consciousness. A Sicilian trait? Bellini the composer was Sicilian,
and most Italians have music in their blood. This came as no surprise
to me.
After paying my lunch bill at the Pizzeria Bellini, I resumed my excursion.
I followed the route the bus tourists took. The church was closed (most
historic buildings here in Italy don't re-open till 4 PM), so I entered
an alley and came out to another piazza featuring a large, many-statued
fountain--the Piazza Pretoria. The multi-level fountain ran amok with
nudes whose attitudes were not necessarily heroic, more like soft-porn.
A veritable zoo supported the marble basin: heads of lion, sheep, goat,
what looked like a llama, and of gargoyles peered out from beneath.
Above the basin rose the statue of a youth taking a pee. A sign on the
railing said “Acqua Non Potabile”—Water Not Drinkable. This was repeated
in English, German, Spanish and French. The faded, rusting façade of
the Church of Santa Caterina occupied one side of the piazza, the
municipio ( town hall) another, as well as a palazzo all covered up for
restoration. I spent a few minutes in this square, silent now and
almost devoid of people save for a few children romping about.
Grimy, dirty, Mafia-ridden or not, Palermo is grand.
Not having the time to visit these storied buildings, most of which were
closed anyway, I continued walking and presently came upon a botanical
park whose main feature was a banyan tree with roots grown so large
they were already tree-trunks themselves. My surprise at seeing this
tree was not so much brought on by the realization that banyan trees
grew in Sicily as that they grew to the same size as in tropical
countries!
Following the sign that said Via Monumentale, I slipped into the
courtyard of the Palazzo Abatellis--a museum. Funny how these buildings
are located in Italy. The grand palazzi of Genoa are located in the
confusing, slum-like old quarter of the city. Pompeii, the excavated
Roman town, is buried by the massive outer ring of the new modern
Pompeii. Everywhere In Italy, the modern and the ancient co-exist
beside, below, above, before, beyond, because of and despite, each
other. Here in Palermo, auto-repair shops stand cheek-by-jowl with the
museum.This would be something like having Al's Auto Repair Shop right
beside MOMA. You learn to accept the physical intermingling of past and
present in Italy as both inescapable and inevitable.
The admission ticket to the museum was 2000 lire, the cheapest by
far that I’ve had to pay,
The museum was virtually deserted.
Here were fragments of ornately carved wood beams
from Saracen houses, Byzantine icons, religious paintings and
sculptures. There was a grisly fresco, a brilliantly colored,"Il Triumfo
di Morte", (The Triumph of Death). Death in the form of a horse-riding
skeleton armed with a scythe occupied the center of the composition. On
the ground, impaled by arrows. writhed bishops, nobility and common
people . Here, too, were musicians disconsolately tuning or playing
their instruments . Other characters in the painting, disporting
themselves with falcons, didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
I came upon a thoroughly appealing sculpture, that of the Virgin Mary suckling the Baby Jesus—the Madonna Del Latte,
the Madonna of the Milk. Until now I'd never seen a bare-breasted Mary
feeding her Bambino. It's a representation of her that made sense and
was more common in Italy than I realized.
There were so many treasures to see in this museum that I was loathe to leave. I promised myself to return here another time.
I went out into the street of auto-repair shops and Agip gasoline pumps, and walked along the highway beside the sea.
Traffic was becoming busy. A ferris-wheel announced the presence of an
amusement park at the seaside. It boasted a giant rocket ride
emblazoned with white and blue stars and stripes and the legend:
America/USA. Across the autostrada, wicker sofas and sun umbrellas
waited on the sidewalk for buyers. Another church materialized before
me. As the door was open,I went inside. I saw men in dark suits, women
in summery dresses and flowered hats, children with posies. Masses of
white and yellow flowers and potted palms filled the church. A wedding
looked set to take place. I left before the bride came. I didn't want to
get caught in a "Godfather" moment, if it came.
I followed the highway and once more saw ruined buildings and once grand
houses and porticoes. A giant staircase that rose up to what I
presumed was a walk had access denied by a locked steel gate. I could
see the Costa Romantica's yellow funnels a short distance away. It was
time to call it a day.
My last sight in Palermo that afternoon before I reboarded the ship was
that of an old man pulling a cart. This was no ordinary cart: it was
richly painted and decorated, like a Philippine jeepney. I saw carts
like this everywhere in Palermo, some drawn by donkeys, others by men.
In fact similarly painted panels, hooks still attached to them, were on
sale for millions of lire in an antique shop near the port. The
cultural richness of Sicily in a cart: now, that’s a thought. I think
the Sicilians and Filipinos are not that far removed from each other.
They both have colorful conveyances, corrupt politicians, long siestas,
Catholicism, mayhem and giant banyan trees.
