Watercolor by Hallie Cohen
Jasmine and dung—these are the smells of Sicily. The
spider’s web of wash lines hanging across the windows of Caltagirone, the
vaults hiding the Terme baths under Catania’s Duomo, Scicli’s ancient caves dwellings or Chiafura,
the Greco-Roman ruins of Siracusa. Everything in Sicily is layered; all the
scents, sounds and sights have their own archeology. Driving into Siracusa or
Ragusa’s rush hour traffic, you are rudely awakened from the past. The
perfectly appointed landscapes, the picuresque farms with their bales of wheat give way to urbanity, though cows and goats still interrupt traffic on major
thoroughfares, leaving their dung behind. This is the land of Etna
whose volcano meted out huge destruction in 1693 and is always waiting to
unleash its fury in the backyards of Pirandello and Verga. There is nothing as pure
as a Proustian Madeleine and no brioche to let them eat. The bread is as hard
as the people. You have to be tough to survive in Sicily and there is no
escaping its pull as Alberto Lattuada’s l962 film, Mafioso so trenchantly demonstrated. Sicily helped to usher in the
Risorgimento. Scholars speak of a Sicilian Risorigimento which paved the way
for unification, but Sicilian towns and cities don’t partake of the modernity of
Milan, Bologna, Modena or Rome. There’s something archaic and unconscious at
work in the Sicilian sensibility. Even as you inhale the perfume in the air,
you feel you’re being drugged. Think about it, what really is a Godfather? Isn’t
there something almost sacrosanct about the word?
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Sicily Journal VII: Jasmine and Dung
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