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!