Sicily VIII - Idols and Effigies

For every time I was either ignored or shouted out angrily in Sicily though – there were more times when I was honored.

Often in Palermo when people heard my name – they lit up. You see my given name is “Rosalie” and “St. Rosalia” is the patron saint of Palermo. She became a hermit and a mystic. Her body rests in a gold casket high on a mountain ledge overlooking Palermo. Unfortunately, our tour didn’t include a trip up there. But some of the respect granted to her asceticism rubbed off on me. If it’s Rosalia – it must be good!

Actually, our tour hadn’t scheduled nearly enough time in Palermo at all. I really had only one free day to walk around there, and I used most of that up going to the Marionette’s Museum. Puppetry is Sicily’s quintessential art form.

The Museum was hard to find. As in much of Europe, there are few free-standing street signs in Sicily. The Street names are usually eccentrically inscribed, like graffiti, on the stones of buildings at the various intersections. You have to look among the crevices and crumblings to make out where you are. And numbers are similarly hit-or-miss daubs of paint on doors or ledges. Add to that the fact that the Marionette Museum was off the beaten track, set in an especially bewildering labyrinth of cobblestone lanes. But I finally found it.

I first stumbled into one eerie room in the Museum that I don’t think was supposed to be open to the public. About fifty almost life-size puppets were dangling in there, hanging from two parallel ropes, like meat carcasses in a meat locker. There was almost no light on in that room, but I could make out the puppets’ dead wooden eyes, staring at me, one peering over the shoulder of the next one. Like the next victim in a horror movie, I nervously scanned the rows, searching for the psychotic killer who might be hiding, hanging there among the dead figures. I waited for that telltale blink of the eye or the ever-so-slight turn of the head to give away the living menace among the dead forms. But if there was a homicidal maniac lurking there, he didn’t give himself away. I took a few pictures (I later learned flash photos were prohibited) – and hurried on to the more obviously intended museum rooms, replete with tableaus of puppets.

One of these tableaus showed Abraham Lincoln sitting at the Ford Theater – with a dark puppet approaching from behind the curtain. Well, come to think of it, maybe I didn’t escape from the eeriest of the rooms after all.

Sicily VII - Veni! Mange!

The food in Sicily started out being a joy. However, every night we were faced with the same limited range of choices. Each dish would be soaked in its own distinctively flavored olive oil - but they were the same basic dishes nonetheless. Usually it was either pasta, pizza, or swordfish. A Chicago acquaintance of mine once stopped talking to me when I ordered swordfish at a restaurant. He was a vegetarian and worried about the plight of swordfish in particular. I thought of him every time I guiltily scarfed down yet another serving of swordfish – but usually that was the only solid “meat” offered. Other than that, there would have been just calamari or clams or squid to wrestle with.

The pasta dishes were always more than plentiful and left me full. But after a while, we began to notice that we rarely were offered any fresh vegetables or fruit. How odd in this land known for its earthy abundance! But we rarely got any crunchy broccoli or cauliflower or – anything. Oh, tiny bits of broccoli would appear sometimes in the pasta dishes. More often, it was bits of eggplant. Eggplant was ubiquitous. Even the salads we got tended to be limp leafs of head lettuce with a few shavings of this and that mixed in – just the typical sort of salads you find as a side dish in greasy spoon restaurants here.

So where had all the fresh vegetables gone? I remembered that in the Durrell book about Sicily I’d read in preparation for this trip – that author had similarly written about the repetitious meals. He had reported just pasta and rice – pasta and rice – over and over every night. When I read this, I thought it couldn’t be true. Italian cuisine is world-famous! But while each dish we were served was individually delicious – it really tended to be just pasta – and more pasta. How did all the Italians remain so svelte when their main course is always - just another heaping dish of pasta?

The only enforcement I came across in Sicily though involved eating. Usually anything goes there in the arenas of love, traffic, or law. But I had glanced through one of Rick Steve’s travel books on Italy before launching off, and I’d read how many Italian cafes have a strict dual price list. One price is for counter service; the other price allows you to sit at a table. But I forgot about this little duplicity one day when I ventured into a café myself. I unthinkingly ordered a cheaper-looking offering and headed towards the outdoor café with it in hand. A waiter screamed, “No! Is no permitted!” - and rushed over and blocked my way. Then I remembered! My cheaper price had just bought me the right to stand inside at the café’s counter and munch there.

Some members of my tour group drifted into the café a few minutes later, bought some brioches and sat down. Then they espied me and called out for me to join them. But I was in the embarrassing position of having to decline. I called out to them, “I can’t. I just paid for counter service. I have to stay standing up here.” I felt like a naughty child relegated to the dunce’s corner in third grade.

Sicily VI - A Walk on the Wild Side - Traffic in Sicily

Moving along to some quick random impressions of Sicily – I think the most startling sight I came across was in Palermo. I was walking along one of the main streets, on my way to the big plant conservatory there, when I saw two men changing a light hanging high over the middle of the thoroughfare. The men were doing things the old-fashioned way. They didn’t have a cherry-picker crane, as our road maintenance crews would have here. Instead they just had a rickety tall, tall, tall, two-sided wooden ladder. I have never seen such a tall ladder anywhere else. It might even have been homemade, and it was 25-feet high if it was an inch. One man stayed below, supporting it – while his partner clambered up. What made the scene a really white-knuckle spectacle though was the traffic. Cars and motorbikes were whizzing by, within a hair’s breath of the ladder on either side. If just one of those notoriously harum-scarum drivers had deviated by the smallest fraction – the topside man would surely have been plummeted to his death.

You’ve no doubt heard about Italian traffic. I’d heard about it too, but I still wasn’t prepared for the free-for-all in Palermo’s streets. The Italians apparently have even more of a love affair with cars than Americans do. Our guide said there were about three cars to every adult Sicilian. And that isn’t the half of it. There seem to be more motorbikes around than cars. The cars dart here and there and the Vespas dart in and out between the cars. Most of the streets are choked with vehicles. Our Palermo Hotel was on the fringes of the downtown area and the intersection outside of it was often jammed. I saw one typically Italian exchange of gestures. A man double-parked near the intersection, causing traffic to come to a complete standstill for almost a block in all directions. The stymied motorists first started honking and shouting. Then some of the men among them got out of their cars.

I thought the gathering mob might start to pummel the offending driver into the ground. He didn’t flinch though, maintaining his right to park wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Finally, after several minutes of this operatic exchange, the fellow got back in his van and moved it – about fifteen feet. And so the shouting and gesticulation started all over again.

But that’s traffic in Sicily. Other members of my tour group who had traveled more extensively said that traffic was actually a hundred times worse in Rome. A hundred times worse! How could that be?

But it was the sheer numbers of vehicles, jockeying and jostling, that made street life such a spectacle. From 9-to-9 every day, the streets were like one big, clotted PacMan game. There were very few traffic lights to regulate traffic flow. And there was a general every-man-for-himself nature to navigating in the cities. Cars drove up on sidewalks and parked there with impunity. (Where else was there left to park?) My toes were constantly in danger of being flattened by some vehicle riding up the curb.

Then traffic was further stymied by the almost daily demonstrations that took place throughout Sicily. I saw the main street of Palermo being cordoned off almost every time I walked along it – to accommodate one group or another demonstrating against some government policy. One time it was a group demonstrating against housing restrictions; another time it was a demonstration against immigration policy. Each time a group announced its intentions to bring their protests to the streets, the local carbonieri would have to come out in force, complete with gas masks and truncheons. But I gather that generally these demonstrations don’t escalate above the grand operatic gesture. Rarely do the carbonieri have to use force.

Actually, there was a sort of friendliness, a comfort in all this unregulated activity. Our guide said that in Sicily, most laws are regarded as being merely “suggestions.” That was obviously true of traffic laws, if they existed at all. But other facets of life in Sicily also seemed to be appealingly unfettered. I know hardly anyone will agree with me on this point, but I appreciated coming across the occasional pile of dog dung on the sidewalks. A lot of people could be seen walking their dogs, and some dogs roamed free. And laundry waved merrily from balconies everywhere. And I saw only one garden in all of Sicily that had what could be called a “lawn.” All the other yards and gardens were free-range, with all the varieties of palm trees and cacti that had been imported to Sicily ages ago and all the native vegetation growing according to their own inclinations. My “Wild Ones” group here in Chicago (the group that advocates using only native plants in gardens) would have approved. Everywhere there was the sort of do-as-you-please atmosphere that would have been immediately quashed by any condo association or homeowners association in the U.S.

And as I say, I rather liked the free-for-all spirit – dog dung and all. It’s when the trains start to run strictly on time that I get worried.

Sicily V - Souvenir Hunting

Many of the narrow lanes of the towns in Sicily were lined with individual little shops that opened and closed with pull-down shutters. Oh, I wished I had my digital camera with me to capture a scene in one of those little cubbyholes in particular. I saw a very old and picturesque man in his storage space shop, working over a shoe last. He was the kind of shoe repairman you don’t see in the U.S. anymore – the kind who has toiled life-long, without any great ambition for other things, amid his clutter of antique tools and waiting pairs of scuffed shoes. I thought of trying to photograph him with my disposable camera, but I felt embarrassed about approaching him. I thought I might be able to work up my courage later, when I came back that way. But I’d missed my chance. When I walked back down that lane in the afternoon, the little shop had its shutter down, closed for the riposa time (siesta hours).
Our guide said the afternoon riposa close-down had been decreed by an early Roman ruler. And now it was such an entrenched tradition in much of Italy, it was still almost law. Shopkeepers feel virtually required to close for several hours every afternoon, even on cooler days, even when there are lots of eager-to-buy tourists around. This down-time often irritates and inconveniences shopkeepers who have to idle away those hours in their closed shops - betwixt and between – with not enough time to go home for lunch, but too much time to consider it anything but a big waste.
This riposa also made it difficult for shoppers. Get there quick before 1:00 when it closes! Generally, this didn’t affect me much because I’m not a shopper. But I did want to bring back a souvenir for one acquaintance. Oh, the difficulty of finding something typically Italian that you can’t find in the U.S! Well, there were a lot of puppets of various sizes. Sicily is a major center of the puppeteer’s art. All the souvenir shops had puppet versions of the Patron Knights of Sicily for sale. I considered these. Not something available in Chicago. But what about the difficulties of getting a bulky puppet with all its dangling cords on a plane? And did my friend really want a puppet?
No, I kept searching. There were all sorts of souvenir knick-knacks featuring the mermaid/naiad symbol of Sicily, the three-armed floating figure that presumably resembles the contours of the Island. There were ashtrays and plates with this figure. But no, all that seemed uninspired.
Then at last – just the thing! I saw shimmering in the window of an art glass shop – a little clown figure playing a violin – just about four inches high. It was the perennial buffo character of Italian operas in hand-blown Murano glass. I went in and bought three of these joyous figurines. They were so delicate, and caught the light from all angles. I thought there would be no problem packing these small men for the trip home. How clever of me to have by-passed all the gangly marionettes. But then the shop owner started to wrap the glass figurines. And he wrapped and he wrapped and he wrapped. He put each figurine carefully in its own form-fitted block of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam block was wrapped in crushed tissue paper. That mummification went into a box. That box went into a larger box. That outer box was wrapped in paper. By the time the man was through, I was sent trundling out of his shop with a billowing that would have rivaled the largest of Macy’s Parade balloons. I spent the whole rest of my trip worrying how I was ever going to get this bulk onto the plane. The boxes were too big to pack in any remaining space in the one suitcase I’d brought. I would have to carry them on the plane by hand. Would I be allowed aboard with this much baggage? I tossed and turned.
As it turned out, I made it aboard without being challenged or searched, and I made it home. The figurines were of course in tact when I unwrapped them in my kitchen. Well, the way they were padded, an atomic bomb could have been detonated under them without their sustaining the slightest damage. Oh, the perils of souvenir hunting!