Cefalù

Sicily, part II.

Palermo: I Hear the Drums Echoing Tonight

A few months ago we finally made it to Sicily, after years of wanting to but being intimidated by the sheer size of a region larger than many countries. My prevailing observations:

Where are all the lemons? One of the culinary delicacies I had looked forward to was the Sicilian lemon, which sometimes appears in BBC travel shows as a lemon the size of a rugby ball. This citrus, which lends its name to half the yoghurts and desserts in your supermarket, is (in autumn at least) nowhere to be found on the island, at neither the famous markets nor the most Waitrosey of supermarkets, and we were reduced to using limes as salad dressing. Is it extremely seasonal, or are the Sicilians reduced to exporting the whole lot?

The clichés are quite true. Sitting in the centre of the Mediterranean, Sicily has belonged to Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French, Spanish, Bourbons and Italians, and yes, as no visitor fails to observe, all of them have left their mark and contributed to the feel and flavour of the place; the history, the buildings, the food. The long-unified south merged with the rest of Italy over a century and a half ago, and Sicily is recognisably Italian to me, but before that came several centuries as a remote outpost of the Spanish empire, and perhaps this gives Sicily its subdued character. I expected Palermo to be a loud and chaotic second Naples, but the island’s capital feels eerily quiet a lot of the time.

Everywhere is getting increasingly similar. Wherever you go these days, the unique traits of that place are getting ironed out as people merge into an international style that presumably pleases the greatest number of Easyjet punters. The decor of the apartments, the winsome easy-listening covers of the pop, rock and punk canon that get played in all the wine bars, the new custom of serving spritzes and cocktails in jam jars… not that it isn’t nice, but you wish places would stay true to themselves a bit more. With everyone criss-crossing Europe all the time, this cross-pollination is perhaps unavoidable.

It’s not that cheap. I’ve travelled through most of Italy and I had hopes that Sicily would be a mecca of fabulous, dirt-cheap food, but if it’s not as well-trodden as Venice or Rome, it is a pretty big hit with tourists, and priced accordingly. My wife wondered if the restaurants are passing on the cost of Mafia protection money to their customers, I think they probably just know how much Americans and so on have to spend on their holidays (or are passing on the costs of transporting produce from Italy to their island). We were touring all the famous artistic and historical hot spots on the northern and eastern coasts, I imagine it is a very different story inland or on the other side of Sicily.

There are a hell of a lot of stray cats. Every town and city seems to have a remarkably large population of stray cats, who will meow at any passing stranger of an evening in the hope of food. The further you delve into the backstreets, the more of them you see to the point where it feels unnerving. The cats tend to all be very skinny and very young, so one suspects that their story ends badly in almost all cases. In fact, on leaving the quite nice street we stayed on in Palermo on our last morning, there was a dead cat stretched out on the corner of the street and the main road.

Nuremberg: Almost Medieval

An aphorism I once saw in some place or other that has stayed with me is “Look at Dresden now, and look at Coventry now, and ask yourself who really won WWII”. On our way back from lovely historic Bamberg, we had a few hours in which to take a quick look at Nuremberg, a place we had opted not to stay in because we presumed the historic Altstadt to have been destroyed in WWII. Most of it is a rebuild job, but whereas anything built in the UK in recent decades is almost certain to be either ugly or be rendered ugly by subsequent decades of neglect, Nuremberg’s very substantial old town is closer in size to a modern city than your average centro storico, and it is a good quality rebuild, with the classic historic churches and houses complemented by buildings that are post-war, but somehow conform to the look and the feel of the place in their use of materials, colours and sensibilities. It is an enjoyable city, and if the British fixation on WWII means that we only associate it with the Nazi rallies and trials, this is our loss as there is far more to the rich history of this city which, unlike you-know-who, has easily managed to stand for a thousand years.

Bamberg Ascoigne

At the age of 37, having travelled a fair bit around Europe in this golden age of cheap travel for poor people, I had never been to Germany. The default city that people like me seem to go back to again and again is Berlin, so the fact of my never having been to Germany probably developed into something of a contrarian whim. I’ve very much enjoyed Austria, so I found myself thinking I would probably like Bavaria too, and I had some leave to use up before switching jobs and a Ryanair voucher that was going to expire. One of the places for which all the flights seemed to be £9.99 was Nuremberg, but I am always wowed by the fairytale aspect of well-preserved medieval cities and figured that Nuremberg, esteemed place that it plays in the history of Europe, had probably had its Altstadt flattened by Bomber Command, so I got the notion of staying in nearby Bamberg, figuring it was big enough to have been an important city in medieval times, but small enough by German standards to have been considered irrelevant by the time of mechanised warfare, and hence keep its old stuff intact. I’d heard of the ‘Bamberg Rider’ sculpture, and knew that before Bismarck turned Prussia into Germany the country was a patchwork of 300+ city states that were nominally part of a ‘Holy Roman Empire’, but otherwise I knew very little.

Napoli II: Malacqua

My birthday this year was spent in Naples; I really must stop going away on my birthday because in March, Italy invariably rains every day. Just before leaving I mentioned to an Italian the poor forecasts; not believing me, he checked an Italian weather website and found six rainy stormclouds (‘Wow, you’re an unlucky guy, we call Napoli the città del sole’). Perhaps I had tempted fate by bringing along Nicola Pugliese’s Malacqua as my holiday read. This cult 70s novel was a hit on its release, but quickly withdrawn from publication by request of the author and only reprinted after his recent death. It describes six days of hard rain, floods, damage and very strange occurrences in Naples with a hypnotic prose style that flits from character to character, zooming into their innermost, no-filter thoughts with the intensity of David Peace. By the last day, all the pavements of Naples were under a centimetre of water and I felt like a character in the book, or at least some drowned murder victim from an Inspector Montalbano. Still, when the weather is lousy, Naples is still a great city for food and for sightseeing.

Trieste: Any Port in a Storm

When you were born and raised in a city whose ownership is certain to change hands within your lifetime, you find yourself thinking a lot about identity, and what nationality means. Jan Morris identified Trieste as the ‘capital of nowhere’ and, with its unique historical circumstances, it has become something of a symbol for the flux, uncertainty and strangeness experienced by anyone from a disputed borderland. Being sensitively positioned at the foot of the iron curtain, until 1954 Trieste was run as a separate city-state by America and Britain, no-one knowing to whom it really belonged. This becomes heightened if you go there, and discover what an uncanny, ethereal feeling the town has. Although a busy city of over 200,000, with its giant purposeless edifices from a vanished empire, it feels deserted and eerie even when there are people about. A famous wind called the bora blasts through Trieste on its way from the Alps to the Adriatic, and at its strongest (as it is when we visit) it delivers gusts of up to 90mph. Its strength and its effect on the body are absurd, like living inside a permanent hurricane. It is as if the contents of your head were a carefully segmented filing system, which has been chucked into an industrial-sized tumble dryer turned on to full power. Maybe its habit of mixing everything up has contributed to the fluid feel of this hybrid city, on the border of the Austrian, Italian and Slavic worlds.

Rome Pt. 4

“This mark of apostasy, over all others, applies to the Roman Pontiff. Nor is the required burden of proof difficult to establish. For the Pope, as the head and founder of this catholic apostasy, has verily defected from the faith of Christ: partly through errors and innumerable heresies introduced in dogma; partly through superstitions ordained in rites; partly through idolatry firmly established in cult worship.”

-Francis Turretin, Whether it can be proven that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist

Rome Pt. 3

“I fairly egged him on, as far as my powers in Italian permitted, so keen was I to see with my novelist’s curiosity how far he would go. The tenant had to be an American, he said. I was a Scot, I informed him, and I doubted that he would find an American to pour capital into his property with a tenure of only one year. He replied that the apartment was in a famous 15th-century building in which many famous lords had lived, which was true enough. So he went on, while I looked out the window, watching the baroque fountain playing in the fine October light of Rome. The theatrical figure representing the Nile, his great hand held up as if to ward off some falling masonry, seemed apt to my situation. ”Speak to me,” Michelangelo is said to have challenged his Roman statue of Moses; and indeed, the sculptures of Rome do speak.”

-Muriel Spark, The New York Times

Rome Pt. 2

“In Rome I’m quite different, I said. There I don’t get so excited, so out of control, and I’m more predictable. Rome calms me down- Wolfsegg works me up. Rome has a soothing effect on the nerves, even though it’s the most exciting city in the world, but at Wolfsegg I’m always agitated, even though it’s so peaceful here. I’m a victim of this paradox, I said. In Rome I express myself quite differently, I talk to everyone quite differently. Gambetti once told me, I said, that whenever I returned from Wolfsegg I talked in a very agitated manner, but only when I’d been to Wolfsegg. On that occasion I had told Gambetti that my family was to blame, He said my thinking had got out of phase with its normal rhythm, what might be called its Roman rhythm.”

-Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

Rome Pt. 1

“He looked at Ervin, full of expectation; then, when he said nothing, asked:
‘Have you thought about what I should do?’
‘Yes, Mihály,’ Ervin said quietly. ‘I think you should go to Rome.’
‘To Rome?’ he blurted out in astonishment. ‘Why? How did you arrive at that?’
‘Last night in the choir… I can’t really explain this to you, you’re not familiar with this type of meditation… I do know that you must go to Rome.’
‘But why, Ervin, why?’
‘So many pilgrims, exiles, refugees have gone to Rome, over the course of centuries, and so much has happened there… really, everything has always happened in Rome. That’s why they say, “All roads lead to Rome”. Go to Rome, Mihály, and you’ll see. I can’t say anything more at present.’
‘But what shall I do in Rome?’
‘What you do doesn’t matter. Perhaps visit the four great basilicas of Christendom. Go to the catacombs. Whatever you feel like. It’s impossible to be bored in Rome. And above all, do nothing. Trust yourself to chance. Surrender yourself completely, don’t plan things… can you do that?’
‘Yes, Ervin, if you say so.’
‘Then go immediately. Today you don’t have that hunted look on your face that you had yesterday. Use this auspicious day for setting forth. Go. God be with you.’
Without waiting for a reply he embraced Mihály, offered the priestly left cheek and right cheek, and hurried away. Mihály stood for a while in astonishment, then gathered up his pilgrim’s bundle and set off down the mountain.”

-Antal Szerb, Journey in Moonlight