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.