The Pillars of Hercules

8 The Ferry Torres to Sicily

It would have been quicker for me to sail to Africa. It was a much shorter trip from Sardinia to Tunisia. Cagliari was only about 120 miles from Bizerte, city of Berbers; it was more like 180 to Palermo, Sicily. But it was generally bad manners, if not heresy, to mention Italy’s proximity to Africa and its melanzane—“eggplants,” as black Africans are described in Italian slang.

Under a full moon in a cloudless night sky the ferry glided out of the Gulf of Cagliari, past the lighthouses and beacons, and soon the city and its twinkling hill was far astern. We were at sea and, as another Ulysses — James Joyce’s — saw it, “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

The Sicilian crew were offhand and seemed to make a virtue of being unhelpful, so busy were they being themselves, smiling at each other with yellow faces and fangy teeth, muttering backtalk in slushy accents, and shrugging, and avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers, and all the while preserving their shabby dignity. At first there had been few passengers, but just before we left, a great number hurried on board, but few of them were cabin people. They slept in chairs, smoked on the deck, lurked in the passageways, played cards in the lounge.

The galley steward fussed when he saw me showing up for dinner.

“You’re late — I can’t help you.”

“The ship’s just leaving,” I said. “What time do you close?”

It was a buffet, there was food all over the place and not many eaters. But this was just a little spirited obstinacy on the part of the steward.

“We were going to close right now,” he said, and sighed and looked overworked, and shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I am just an ignorant American, but I’m hungry.”

“Where did you learn Italian?”

“From my mother.”

“Okay, go ahead. But all we have is menu food. No natural.”

“What’s ‘natural’?”

That set off in him a virtuoso flurry of gestures, hurried shrugging, the what-do-you-expect-me-to-do? pursing of hands, and he looked around in his impatience, as Italians do, as though pleading for a witness.

I paid my money, I got my receipt, I chose my food, as the ship’s engine made a meat-grinder noise of departure. “Natural” was a sign of the times; the theory of sensible eating had arrived in the island of spaghetti-benders: it meant health food, low-fat mozzarella and low-sodium pasta. The rest was fried and fatty.

A young man, monotonously complaining and stuffing his face with pasta, had put one foot on the arm of his girlfriend’s chair, in a sort of misplaced tenderness, as though chunking his big clumsy foot against her elbow was a romantic gesture.

I hate the noisy way you eat,

I hate your nose, I hate your feet.

Because in Italy there was such an ingrained contempt for the law, la legge, it continued to amaze me that anything as orderly as meals and departures and arrivals were timely; yet my experience of boats and trains was favorable — there were very few hitches. Mealtime, for example, was sacred. It would have been unusual if the steward had turned me away from the buffet. Traveling in Italy, I could nearly always depend on a meal at the end of the day and a cheery person to serve it. I was seldom disappointed.

The life of the mind was something else. Any honest thoughtful effort, any attempt at seriousness or intellectual ambition, was usually ridiculed. I knew that I would be made a fool of for my diligent note-taking and — though I tried to hide it — my air of scholarly industry. Only suckers tried to get ahead, bookish people were laughable, and already I could sense that once again I was among philistines, with all the responsive jollity and hearty appetite that was usual with philistinism.

As far as I could tell there were very few Sardinians on the Torres, but there were all sorts of Sicilians: city slickers (Armani suits, pointy shoes), smug Palermitanis (overcoats draped on their shoulders like a cape), sinister toughs (sunglasses at midnight), and all the rest: the students, the punks, the poor; from “men of respect” (as the mafiosi called themselves) who looked stylish and unreliable, to Gypsies with gold teeth and long skirts and scarves, squatting on the floor and breast-feeding babies.

I saw a sign, Your Muster Station is — (II Vostro Punto di Riunione è—) and it filled me with alarm.

Supine in my cabin, listening to the engine’s drone and the thumping of the screws, I could just imagine the panic and clawing and yelling and colorful language and class warfare if the ship ran into trouble. I thought: Do I want to be in a sinking boat with these people? Do I dare to share a lifeboat with them?

In a sunny Sicilian dawn, the sun blazing behind a golden haze, we entered the Bay of Palermo, mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings. The tallest man-made structures were the church steeples and cathedral domes.

Rather than stay in Palermo, where I had been before, I wanted to spend a day in Cefalù, just down the railway line; and then go to Messina and Taormina and Siracusa, places I had never seen. Still, I needed to walk in order to stretch and get the stiffness out of my legs, and I wanted just to browse in the city. So I left my bag at the station and then looked around, and decided on a hike.

Whenever I asked directions I was usually told the place I wanted was “very far” (lontanissimo) even when it was a fifteen-minute walk. I was urged to catch a bus.

“But you’ll need a ticket.”

“Of course.”

“You buy one there.”

Silly me for not knowing that bus tickets were sold in a seedy little tobacco and porno shop, Bar “T”—Cafe Stagnitta — Articoli da Fumo, Articoli da Regalo, Articoli da Gioca—smoking paraphernalia, presents and games. And bus tickets, of course. It was preposterous to think that a bus ticket would be sold in a bus or in a vending machine. A man who sold bus tickets had to have a large stock of cigarettes, and candy, and tit-and-bum magazines.

The swagger of the Sicilian men in Palermo was remarkable for its confidence, the men, swarthy as Arabs, shouting to each other. Anthony Burgess once heard a young man in Palermo telling his friends how he had devised a foolproof method for discovering whether his new bride was sexually innocent on his wedding night. “He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat.”

I was fumbling with my wallet, when a woman took me aside. She said, “You’re a stranger?”

“Oh, yes. American.”

“Watch your pockets,” she said.

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“You see, Palermo is very beautiful — eh—”

She lifted the fingers of her right hand and flicked forward, beneath her chin.

“We’re good people — eh—”

Again she grazed her chin with her fingers.

“And you’ll be all right here — eh—”

Her gesturing continued, as she looked slightly away, and then with a final caution, she walked off.

I had seen this chin-flick gesture before. I had understood it to mean a deep defiance, Up yours, so to speak. But that is another, more severe use of it, say in Naples and north. Here, the flicking fingers were meant as a contradiction. Yes, I am saying this is a nice place but notice that I am indicating with my hand that it is not true in every instance; be warned.

That was nicely candid. Standing at a bus stop, the gestures were more subtle as a priest joined the little crowd. There were some mutters but no one spoke to the priest. Italians — men especially — squint at priests’ skirts. They believe that priests who pass butcher shops turn the meat bad. Priests are neither men nor women. They have the evil eye.

I was alert to everyone around me when I saw a priest in Italy. A silence fell when this one appeared, but often there would be a series of simultaneous gestures, because of the belief that priests had the evil eye. For an Italian man, the commonest and most effective way of dealing with the clerical evil eye was to touch his own testicles and subtly prong his fingers at the priest. I never found out what Italian women did. Perhaps they prayed, but in any case they were less anxious than the men in matters that related to the supernatural.

I took a bus to Monte Pellegrino, on the recommendation of Goethe, who had written about it. The high hill was outside the northwest corner of the city and as this was a weekday in March, there was hardly anyone else on the footpath. I had been told that I could see as far as the Lipari Islands from the summit of Pellegrino; the day was too hazy to see any distance, yet the view of Palermo and its bay was splendid, enough of a reward for a two-hour walk.

But the view had stirred something in me. Walking down the slope towards the bus, I became agitated about my trip. Perhaps it was the sight of all that coast, and the thought that almost two months into it, where was I? Kicking along a dusty path in Sicily made me feel tiny, overwhelmed by everything that lay ahead of me — Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, all the rest of North Africa, not to mention the war in Croatia and Bosnia, the islands of Cyprus and Malta.

Then I remembered that I had plenty of time. I had no job, no deadlines, nothing else; and I reminded myself why I had come here. To eat spaghetti and talk to people and, first of all, to see Cefalù.

Cefalù was where the English Satanist Aleister Crowley had lived in the 1920s and 30s, studying yoga and black magic and writing dismal poetry. He was also a mountaineer, and had climbed a number of high peaks — had even worked out a method for climbing Mount Everest, “rushing the summit.” His Confessions, published only in 1970, showed him to be one of the loonier figures in recent history. He was a dabbler and a dilettante, and as a wealthy man — he had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business — he could afford to be. There was no end to his high spirits. He filed his teeth to points. He showed these fangs to women and said, “Would you like a serpent’s kiss?” A number of women doted on him. Today he would be called a New Age guru, they would be called groupies or cultists. He had named his favorite sex partner The Ape of Thoth.

So, after a late lunch, I traveled about twenty miles down the coast on the line to Messina and stopped at Cefalù to see whether anything remained of the Crowley ménage. But no one in town recognized the name of Aleister Crowley and, though I walked the streets, I could not find the house where he had worked black magic and tried to bamboozle visitors and wore a sorcerer’s funny hat.

But mine was not a wasted trip. There was something pagan and animistic in the monstrous lions carved in the facade of Cefalù’s cathedral — how appropriate that Crowley had chosen to live in a place where the supernatural still mattered. There were oranges and lemons on the trees and behind the little town, snowcapped mountains. And from the cliff at Cefalù, I could at last see to the east the Lipari cluster of islands, also known as the Aeolian Islands. The volcano Stromboli was regarded in ancient times as the home of Æolus, god of the winds.

Late in the day, I caught an express train to Messina. It was called “The Archimedes” (the mathematician was born in Siracusa, on the other side of Sicily) and it was due in Messina in a couple of hours.

More interesting than the fruit trees and the sight of the sea and the snowy peaks was the man next to me in the compartment, scribbling notations on sheets of paper lined for musical scores. He was murmuring, but he was not humming. He was thoroughly absorbed in his scribbling. Occasionally he tapped his foot. He was writing music?

I would not have believed such a thing was possible except that various people had claimed they had done it, the most famous example being Beethoven in his deafness.

The man was small and bald, about fifty, with a pleasant face. He quickly filled three sheets of paper with music. Then I interrupted him with a grunt.

He stopped tapping his feet. He smiled. “Yes?”

“Are you writing music?”

“Yes,” and showed me the sheet with beads and squiggles on it. “I usually write music on this train. It’s not hard.”

“But you have no instrument. There’s no music.”

“This is music. And I don’t need an instrument. I write from memory.”

“Amazing.”

“The music is already in my mind before I write it. When I get home I will continue.”

“In silence?”

“I use a piano at home for composing, but my favorite instrument is an accordion.”

This odd word fisarmonica I had learned in high school as a joke, and this was the first time in my life I had ever heard it spoken. And this man was a fisarmonicista.

“It’s a typical Sicilian instrument. But I am the only composer of accordion music that I know. I think I might be the only one in Sicily. I love modern music, and mine has folkloric melodies in it.”

His name was Basilio. He had just been in Palermo playing in a piano bar, both piano and electric keyboard. Not only his own music but Frank Sinatra hits.

“‘Staranger Een Danah,’ ‘Conflowah Me,’ ‘Myweh’—they are the most beautiful,” he said, mingling English and Italian.

“You spend a lot of time traveling back and forth to Palermo.”

“I don’t have a problem. I’m not married,” he said, and laughed. “I have a girlfriend, though. My family is always asking me when I’m getting married, but I say to them, ‘Eh, what about my music?’ ”

We were passing more orchards and a stretch of coast where there were empty beaches.

“Look, all empty,” he said, seeing that I had glanced out the window. “It’s so lovely. Sicily is warm from March until October, but no one comes here — why?”

“Maybe something to do with the Mafia?”

“The newspapers! The newspapers! It’s all lies,” Basilio said. “All the news is about Mafia and danger. Eh, where’s the Mafia? Do you see them?”

“I haven’t looked,” I said, startled by his sudden energy.

“Forget it — it’s lies. As for beauty, listen to me — three-fourths of Sicily is untouched. Absolutely untouched! No one comes here — they’re afraid. Of what?”

“Yes, it is very pretty,” I said, wishing I had not roused his fury.

He was now talking to the other person in the compartment, a man in a heavy sweater and purple socks, holding on his lap a damp and stained parcel that stank of cheese.

“We have — what — a million people or so?” Basilio said.

“About a million,” the man agreed.

Surely more? I thought. In fact, there are more than five million people in Sicily.

“A little island. Not many people. And so that makes it all the more friendly,” Basilio said. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer, Basilio.”

“That’s great. Please, when you write”—he put his hands together in a little prayer gesture, then he held them apart, cupping them in a Do-me-a-favor mode—“tell people it’s nice here.”

It’s nice here. Lemons, oranges. Composers on trains. Staranger Een Danah!

“I travel a little myself,” he said. “We find Sicilians everywhere. You don’t have to speak French or English. There’s always a Sicilian taxi driver!”

“You’ve been in Sardinia?”

“To my shame, no, not to Sardinia. The purest dialect is Sardinian — the worst is Bergamo. As for Corsica — what’s wrong with them? Why don’t the Corsicans admit they’re Italians?” He was laughing. “I love to travel, of course. Although I haven’t been to other places in Italy, I have been everywhere in Sicily.”

He sounded a bit like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, I have traveled much in Concord.

“Sicily fascinates me, the way the dialects here reflect Spanish, French, and Arabic.”

“I am headed for Siracusa.”

“One of the best places,” Basilio said. “Ancient. And natural too. Up north, the beaches are filthy. But here they are clean.”

We happened to be passing one that was brown with muddy water from runoff.

“Some of the beaches are a little muddy from the recent rains.”

“Very muddy, I’d say.” And they were strewn with such rubbish and rocks, and bounded by trash-filled streams and open sewers. Italians were such litterers.

“It will pass! Listen, Germans come here in November and go swimming. For them the water is warm!”

Protesting that I was a wonderful person, and urging me to tell people how delightful Sicily was at all times of the year, he called out, “See you again!” and got off at Santa Agata di Militello. Then it was just small hot stations and embankments and so many tunnels it was as though we had traveled to Messina in the dark.

The most God-fearing places in Italy were those that had experienced a natural disaster; such an event was inevitably a goad to Italian piety, and nothing provoked prayer like a flood or an earthquake or a tidal wave. Messina had all three just after Christmas in 1908, when almost the entire city, in fact this whole corner of the island, was destroyed. Part of Calabria was also leveled. Almost a hundred thousand people died in the one-day disaster (earthquake at 5 A.M., tidal wave just after that, then flooding; cholera came later) — it was equivalent to the entire population of the city.

That is why there are no ancient buildings in Messina, though quite a lot of talk about how the Virgin Mary engaged in vigorous correspondence with Messina’s city fathers and reassured them, “We bless you and your city.” There is a large pillar in the harbor of Messina, too, with a statue of Mary, making a gesture of blessing that also looks as though she is dropping a yo-yo, and under it, for every ship to see, the same message in Latin, Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus.

A melancholy plaque at Messina railway station records the fact that 348 railway workers died in the earthquake (A pietoso ricordo dei 348 funzionari ed agenti periti nel terremoto del 28 dic MCMVIII).

It was easy enough to find a place to stay in Messina, and no problem eating, but apart from strolling along the harbor, and admiring the Calabrian coast across the straits — lumpy gray mountains streaked with snow — there was not much to do in this rebuilt city. It had obviously been brought back to life, but it was not quite the same afterwards. Or perhaps it was something else.

I fell into conversation with a man in Messina who told me that, without any hesitation, Catania was an absolute haunt of crime.

Catania is a port about halfway between Messina and Siracusa on the southeast-facing side of the Sicilian triangle.

“The Mafia control the whole city,” he said.

Now and then you got one of these Sicilians who admitted flat-out that the Mafia was pervasive and dangerous; and they could be specific, too, about certain towns or cities.

“How do you explain it?”

“Business is good there. They get a share of it. And the drugs.”

“Because it’s a port?”

“That’s probably the main reason.”

“Palermo and Messina are also ports. So perhaps the Mafia is strong in these places as well.”

His reply was the Italian lip-droop and finger signal, a combination of affirmative gestures that meant Indubitably.

I could well believe that Messina was one of the Mafia strongholds. Such a place seemed shut and unwelcoming and buzzing with suspicion. There was plenty of money to be made by getting a stranglehold on the port; it was so easy to be disruptive if you controlled the wharves. Organized crime was seldom entrepreneurial; it was mainly a lazy business of bullying and intimidation. The idea was to find someone with a cash flow and strongarm that person or business.

All areas of Italian life, even the Church, had been penetrated by the Mafia. In 1962, the Franciscan monks of the monastery of Mazzarino in central Sicily were put on trial, charged with extortion, embezzlement, theft, and murder. The prior, Padre Carmelo, was the capo of this band of Mafia monks. He was a sinister, sprightly man — greedy and libidinous, with Mazzarino in his foxy jaws. The monks were eventually found guilty of most of the charges at their trial in Messina. And it emerged that what was perhaps the most surprising aspect of their criminality was that it had not interfered with their religious routines. The fact that they entertained prostitutes, and ordered killings, and amassed large sums of money in their extortionate activities never prevented their hearing confessions, saying masses, or preaching at funerals — in at least one case, the monk in question saying a funeral high mass and preaching piously over the body of a man he had ordered killed.

Italians use obscure gestures and elaborate euphemisms whenever they talk about criminal organizations — the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Naples. Even the most specific word in Italian for the fees the gangsters charge to businessmen they threaten is somewhat vague—tangenti. It is a simple word, meaning “extras.” But anyone in the know defines it as “extortion.”

Bored with Messina — and anyway I would be back here next week to take the ferry to Calabria — I caught a train to Taormina, twenty-five miles down the coast.

Lovely beaches! Basilio had said to me, but the beaches outside Messina were littered with old fridges and rusty stoves, junked cars, hovels, plastic trash and rusty tomato cans. Then it was just driftwood, and finally stony beaches. At Nizza di Sicilia station I saw my first tourists in Italy. They were of course Germans, two young women wearing army boots and heaving forty-pound rucksacks and studying their handbook Sizilien; they were sturdy, short-haired, sapphic.

They got off with me at Taormina, the elegant shoreline station. The town itself is high on a cliff, glittering and vertical.

At the station a man approached a conductor of a train going in the opposite direction and said, “Where are we?”

“Taormina Giardini,” the conductor said.

“And where are you going?”

“Venice.” And the conductor turned his back and reboarded the Venice Express, Siracusa to Venice, a long haul of more than seven hundred miles.

I began walking up the hill, thinking that it was not far, but a shrewd taxi driver followed me, guessing that I would get sick of the climb. He laughed when I got in.

“Gardens, lovely view,” he narrated, then glanced at the people by the road. “Germans.”

Farther along, he said, “English church. Beautiful, eh?” and paused. “Germans.”

They were the inevitable low season people wherever I went.

The main attraction at Taormina was said to be its ancient theater, built by the Greeks and completely remodeled by the Romans. But that was simply a backdrop, the classical excuse. Taormina had been taken up by the Edwardians as a place to droop and be decadent. It was a lovely town, but it was now entirely given over to tourists. There was nothing else generating income for the local people. It was one of the more anglicized seaside resorts of Italy, and though it was now simply a tourist trap, retailing ceramics, and postcards, and letter openers, and clothes of various kinds, it had once known true scandals, mainly imported ones, perpetrated by the northern Europeans escaping the cold winter. It was strictly seasonal. In the early part of this century all the hotels in Taormina were closed in the summer.

Taormina had been mainly for wealthy foreigners, though a title helped. Any number of sponging aristocrats idled away their time among Taormina’s flower gardens, and a German baron who was an unrepentant pederast became something of a local celebrity for taking photographs of young Italian boys holding what certainly looked like lengths of salami. These pictures were sold with views of Mount Etna in Taormina’s shops.

D. H. Lawrence had spent time in Taormina, writing poetry. His well-known poem “Snake” he had written in Taormina, describing how he had been standing in his pajamas and seen a thirsty snake and bashed it over the head; and how he had to expiate his pettiness. But snakes were not Lawrence’s problem in Taormina. His daily chore was finding ways to control his wife, Frieda, in her adulteries.

Night in Taormina was silence and skulking cats. These tourist towns shrank in the off-season, and yet at this time of year eighty years ago the place would have been thronged with visitors. Taormina’s season was the winter. Now it was busy mainly in the summer.

The next day, I found Lawrence’s house on the Via Fontana Vecchia, and walked up and down the main street, looking at the shops. I looked at the old amphitheater. The only other people there were the two German women from yesterday’s train.

But the spectacle here was not the amphitheater — it was the volcano, Mount Etna. I had not expected to get such a dramatic view. With lantana and palms and bougainvillea and marigolds, sunny and serene, it was hard to imagine a prettier place or a more dramatic setting. The ancient Greeks praised Taormina in similar terms. But these days it exists only to be patronized and gawked at. It was not a place to live, only to be visited, one of the many sites in the Mediterranean that are almost indistinguishable from theme parks.

Looking down the coast, I was startled by the sight of it, an old bulgy mountain covered in snow, with a plume of smoke rising from its cone. The morning light took away its shadows and its grandeur and made it clumsy and pretty, with a splendor all its own, because its potbellied shape was unique for a mountain on this coast — and the sea so near emphasized its height.

In a fit of self-aggrandizement, Empedocles jumped into the crater of Mount Etna. In doing so, the Greek philosopher, who believed in reincarnation, hoped to inspire the sense in others that he was godlike.

In a different fit of self-aggrandizement, the writer Evelyn Waugh, passing through here on a cruise ship, refusing to go ashore to visit Taormina, peers from the deck and gets a glimpse of the volcano beyond.

“I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset,” he writes in his first travel book, Labels (1930), “the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel gray, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of gray smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a gray pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.”

Sudden and strange, the description is marvelous for its utter perversity. You have to read it twice to make sure you haven’t missed a word. Labels is full of such snap judgments and hilarious generalizations. It recalls Cyril Connolly writing “a chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west”—Waugh and Connolly were friends and in mocking a sunset they believed they were against nature. Theirs was the ultimate rebellion — so they thought; defying every notion of harmony, by refusing to be impressed or admit that such loveliness could be moving. It was a self-conscious and envious way of needling other writers, but most of all it was diabolical blasphemy, for isn’t criticizing a brilliant sunset an English way of blaming God?

Waugh’s work is always a salutary reminder that satire is usually more purposeful than veneration, and that one of the virtues of a good travel book is the chance to see a traveler’s mind, however childish, ticking away.

Nothing held me in Taormina. I took a taxi down the hill and caught the train to Siracusa. Traveling towards Catania, we crossed the lava flow from the volcano. At Carruba there were blackish cedars by the shore, and lemon groves sagging with fruit. Then, Cannizaro, Lentini, Paterno: almost every town in Sicily reminded me of the names of my high school friends, and a Sicilian railway timetable looked like a list of the Medford High Class of ’59.

Catania was big and grim, the sort of place only a mafioso would tolerate, and that for its opportunities to whack it for money. The coast here was miles of great ugliness, oil storage depots, refineries, cracking plants, and cement factories. Offshore, a man was rowing backwards in the sea, pushing the oars instead of pulling them. By the side of the track, the scrawl Cazzo—Italian slang for the male member, when spoken sounding like gatz.

The end of the line was Siracusa.

“But what could I do at Syracuse? Why did I come there? Why did I buy a ticket just to Syracuse and not to any other place? Choice of destination had certainly been a matter of indifference. And certainly being at Syracuse or elsewhere was a matter of indifference. It was all the same to me. I was in Sicily. I was visiting Sicily. And I could just as well get on the train and return home.”

This paragraph from Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversation in Sicily had a definite resonance for me. Vittorini was born in Siracusa the year of the earthquake, 1908, and was a young man in the fascist era, the period described in this novel and some of his stories. All this I discovered in Siracusa.

I had stopped inside a bookstore on the long walk from the station to the old city, which was across a bridge, on a small island, Ortygia. The bookstore owner told me about Vittorini and recommended his writing.

“This was a great city once — capital of Sicily,” he said.

He named for me the famous Siracusans — Theocritus, the Greek playwright Epicarmo, Saint Lucy, Vittorini.

“So many people have come and gone. We’ve been Phoenician, Greek of course, from long ago. But also more recently Arab, Spanish, French. You can hear it in the names. Vasqueza is a Siracusa name — Spanish. We have French ones too. Take my name, Giarratana — what do you think it is?”

“Can’t imagine.” But the truth was that I did not want to guess wrong and risk offending him.

“Pure Arab,” said Mr. Giarratana. “That Giarrat is an Arab word.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an Arab!”

Later I checked with my Arabic-speaking brother Peter and discovered that Giarrat was probably a cognate of Djarad, meaning locust.

“Our dialect is amazing,” Mr. Giarratana said. “It would be hard for someone like you to understand. Even other Sicilians have trouble with it.”

He had a growly Sicilian voice, deepened with dust and smoke. I asked him for some examples of the incomprehensible dialect.

“Wango,” he said. “Asegia. Stradon. What do those words mean?”

“No idea.”

“Bank. Chair. Street,” he said, smiling because he had stumped me. “We don’t say orange [arancia], we call them portuale.”

That was also from an Arab word for orange, which was burtugal, probably from one of the countries which grew them, Portugal.

The most Sicilian of Sicilian words, known and used throughout the world, is mafia. It is identical to the obsolete Arabic word mafyá, meaning “place of shade,” shade in this sense indicating refuge, and is almost certainly derived from it. Norman Lewis describes in his 1964 book about the Mafia, The Honored Society, how, after the orderliness of Saracen rule in Sicily was obliterated by the Normans in the eleventh century, Sicily became feudalistic. “Most of the Arab small-holders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia.’ ” It became an alternative — and secret — system of justice, society and protection; a refuge.

I bought the Vittorini novel he had spoken about and also a copy of Frankenstein, which I had been meaning to reread. Then I continued down the street and across the bridge to find a hotel. It was not much of a decision. Nearly all the hotels in Siracusa were closed, or being renovated, but not the nameless one run by Dr. Calogero Pulvino, poet and philosopher. One star, twenty-three dollars with breakfast and the occasional impromptu seminar by Dr. Pulvino.

He sat, surrounded by books, looking harassed, as though inspiration had just deserted him, or he had momentarily mislaid his lyric gift. He kept his hat on, as though it was his badge of authorship if not part of his uniform, and he amazed me with his pedantry.

I said, “So many books, doctor.”

“This is not many,” he said, dismissing my question. “I own lots more than these.”

“What sort of books are they?”

“They are not books.” He smiled at my ignorance.

“What are they?”

“They are my friends.”

To him this sort of excruciating exchange was sheer poetry.

“Are you writing one yourself?”

“Yes.” He showed me some closely typed pages. He wanted me to admire them, but when he had an inkling that I was reading them he snatched them away, saying, “These are unfinished chapters.”

“A novel?”

He laughed a big hollow theatrical laugh. He then said, “I am not interested in fantasy, my friend!”

“Are novels fantasy?”

“Completely.”

“A waste of time?”

“You have no idea.”

“What are these chapters, then?”

“Philosophy,” he said, in a reverential way, savoring the word.

“What books have you published?”

His arm snaked to the shelf and he withdrew a hardcover book, which he handed to me.

I read the title, Il Riparo delle Rosse Colline D’Argilla (The Shelter of the Red Hills of Clay).

“A volume of my poems,” said Dr. Pulvino.

“About Sicily?”

He sniggered slightly at my ignorance of geography. He said, “Tunisia. I went there for inspiration. You want to buy a copy?”

I had just bought two books that morning. Books are heavy, especially hardcovers. My method was to buy paperbacks, and read and discard them. I only bought new ones when I had nothing more to read. It was pointless to explain this to Dr. Pulvino.

“Not now.”

“The price is twenty thousand.” That was thirteen dollars. No way.

“I’ll pick it up in a bookstore.”

“Impossible.”

“I’ll bet Mr. Giarratana has it in his store.”

“Mr. Giarratana does not have it. You see, my friend, this book is out of print. This is one of very few copies left.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find it.”

“Only I can supply you with one.”

After that, whenever I saw him, he said, “Have you decided about the book?”

Dr. Pulvino was one of a number of people in Siracusa who warned me to be careful of thieves. Mr. Giarratana had mentioned “clippers”—bag snatchers, known as scippatori. They were notorious in Sicily for their merciless efficiency, and I heard many stories of people who had lost passports, wallets, handbags, watches, jewelry. But perhaps because this was not the tourist season the thieves were on holiday.

There was “A Very Important Notice” displayed in each of Dr. Pulvino’s tiny rooms. “The hotel’s esteemed guests, especially our lady guests, because of unpleasant incidents which have already happened, are advised, when going out of the hotel, to avoid taking any bags, or handbags, for the possible risk of becoming victims of bag snatchers and even of being hurt. The manager Dr Calogero Pulvino, together with the entire City of Syracuse, apologizes for this situation.”

The next time I saw him I said, “You speak English.”

“Without any doubt,” said Dr. Pulvino.

• • •

Another amphitheater, more broken columns, assorted marble slabs. Just by three pizzerias was the Fountain of Arethusa, with ducks bobbing in it. It is not really a Greek ruin. It is a place Siracusans take their kids to say “Look at the duckies!” and throw pizza crusts at them. Probably the Greeks did the same thing. The Temple of Apollo was just down the street from Emporio Armani. The Catholic cathedral had been built into and around a Doric temple, probably Athena, and so you could see Grecian columns inside and out, and crucifixes, and bleeding hearts and gilded halos, and more old columns that even Cicero had praised (“in his oration against Verres”).

The exaggerated attention in Siracusa as in much of Italy was this guff about Greeks and Romans, all glory and harmony, and then silence, as though nothing else had happened in the last two thousand years. Nothing about the years of lecherous and satanic popes settling into big feather beds with their mistresses and fondling them under gilt crucifixes, or plotting murder, stranglings and poisonings in the Vatican cellars. Never a word about Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who commercialized the papacy and sold pardons, and who had a hooligan son by one of his mistresses whom he set up in style; nothing about Pope Alexander VI and his seven children, one of whom was Lucrezia Borgia, another Cesare Borgia, who was made a cardinal, along with his uncle. Apart from the poisonings and murders, one of the highlights of Alexander VI’s papacy was a bullfight that was held in the piazza of St. Peter’s to celebrate a victory over the Moors. Nor anything about Leo X, who handed out cardinals’ hats to his cousins, or Sixtus IV, another murderer. Not relevant? But surely these were the ancestors and inspiration for Padre Carmelo and his Mafia monks at the Franciscan monastery in Mazzarino.

The Middle Ages had not occurred. There was never anything about the centuries of rape and pillaging, cities destroyed by hairy Vandals or Ostrogoths in furry pelts; nothing about bubonic plague or cholera, nothing about the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufens, who goose-stepped all over Sicily, nothing about those religious fanatics and show-offs, the Crusaders, who went clanking around the island in their rusty suits of armor building castles and sniffing out Muslims to murder for Christ, nothing about Muslims and their weird depredations (though the occasional mutter about “Saracens”), nothing about the Jewish expulsions, the cruelty and intrigues, little villagers ratting on the local rabbi and then seeing the old bearded Jew carted off or tortured; and never anything about the war that ended just the other day, how they had changed sides; and nothing about their cowardly little dictator — just the mentioning of his name in polite company was immeasurably worse than farting.

“Never mind Mussolini, look at the exquisite statue of Archimedes,” was the exhortation of people who couldn’t put two and two together. Or it was classical trivia: “Archimedes said ‘Eureka!’ in Siracusa,” or, “The philosopher Plato was made a slave in Siracusa!” the Siracusans said, which was just about all they knew of Plato.

Looking at glorious ruins always put me in a bad mood. I walked around instead. I saw a cake sale in a piazza. Cakes and pies were stacked on a number of tables, and there were about thirty people hawking them.

“Buy a cake,” a woman said, as I slowed down to look at them. “They are really delicious.”

“I’m traveling. I don’t have room.”

“Where have you just come from?”

“Sardinia.”

“Lovely place. Rocky. Natural. Unspoiled. Not like here at all,” the woman said. And then, “Buy a small cake,” she said. She showed me two or three.

Some other women gathered around, boosting their baked goods, all seeming very earnest.

“Are you trying to raise money for a particular purpose?” I asked.

“Not for us. It is for the families in Bosnia.”

That touched me. So the larger world and its disorder intruded on this small settled place. But in fact Bosnia was not very far away. And when I gave them five dollars in Italian lire and wished them well, a woman chased me through the piazza with a bag of cookies.

The town was dedicated to one of its native daughters, Santa Lucia. But it was the Madonna of Tears who had produced the most miracles — people cured of blindness, deafness, gammy legs, blights, poxes, and diseases, and an enormous sanctuary was being built in her honor outside Siracusa in the shape of a vast cement wigwam.

• • •

The low season might have meant poor business and hotel and restaurant closures and grumbling entrepreneurs, but it also meant that people had their towns to themselves. In Siracusa this took the form of the passegiatta—the streets dense and chattering with promenading citizens. The streets and squares of the Ortygia were thronged on weekend nights, Siracusans of all ages walking, families with small children, groups of girls flirting with groups of boys; punks, lovers, scolding crones in widow’s black bombazine, old shysters wearing sunglasses. Some walked dogs, or carried cats, or pushed infants in carriages. They swarmed among the ruins and shops and the pizza joints, buying ice creams or candy but not much else. It was all friendly — no suggestion of pickpockets, no aggression, just good humor.

It was a nighttime turnout, and I had never seen such a thing anywhere. Frenchmen played boules under the trees, while their womenfolk walked the family dog. Spanish men met outside cafes, and yakked. Men in Corsica and Sardinia gathered on street corners and whispered. Some Arabs did the same in Marseilles. But never the whole family, never little children and old people and lovers and animals; and never at night. This was extraordinary and carnivallike, beginning just after dark and going on until eleven or so, the tramping up and down the cobbled streets, swarming around the fountains and the squares, everyone well-dressed and cheery.

They talked among themselves. They greeted and kissed and shook hands. They whispered and laughed. It was an old ritual of sharing — sharing the street, the air, the gossip; it was a respectable way for women to be allowed out, after the meal was cooked and the dishes were done. It was something the telephone or urban crime or traffic had done away with elsewhere. It probably had medieval origins. It was the way old friends and neighbors caught up in news, the way people met and wooed each other; the way they courted; the way people showed off a new hat or coat. The air was full of greetings and compliments. “Nice to see you! Beautiful hat! Sweet little child! God bless him!”

The next day they were all back at work. I was tempted to take a ferry from here to Malta, but there was only one a week and I had just missed it. I went to the fish market and noted the prices of the clams and oysters and octopus. There was not much fishing here, the fishmongers told me. These had come from Venice and Marseilles. The only local product was mussels, sold bearded in black clumps, the sort that are left to the seagulls on Cape Cod.

“You’re traveling, eh?” the fishmonger said. “Sardinians — cordial people!”

This was typical. Italians seldom spoke ill of each other. Compliments warded off aggression, and while Italians could be seriously quarrelsome when they were cross, they got no satisfaction in carping, and were not interested in nit-picking, which was why chatting to them was nearly always a pleasure. Of the Calabrese they said, “They’re like us!” Of Neapolitans, they said, “Musical people!” Of Romans, “Clever! Cultured!” They knew that putting it mildly Sicily had its problems of underdevelopment and poverty and organized crime, and so they were not quick to judge other parts of Italy. The worst they would venture was something like, “Up north? It is very hard sometimes to understand the way they speak.”

That day I hiked out of town to the hill called Belvedere. Along the way there were tumbled villages thick with orange groves, laundry hanging from every balcony, prickly pear cactus growing wild, schoolchildren shrieking or else holding hands, or an old mustached woman in black howling her hello to another passing crone, and in her garden a crucified Michelin man — fatso as a scarecrow — and the village street sweeper going about his job using a seven-foot palm frond, more effective than a push-broom. I thought with a retrospective shudder of the chilly streets of Nice, and the south of France generally, all the skinny widows and their lapdogs, and their way of studiously refusing to see that this otherwise impeccable Riviera was awash in dogshit. Sicily had its sanitation problems, but dogshit was not one of them.

On my walk back I took a different route, by way of the Anapo River, and reaching the shore saw ahead of me twelve nuns in black habits waving their arms and strolling by the blue sea. It was a Sicilian combination of the bizarre, the religious, the humorous, the tender, and the surreal.