Sicilian Odyssey (11 page)
A warm, vibrant woman in her forties, with an electric energy so intense that even her thick blond hair seems independently animated, Shobha—who has written about the connection between the church and the Mafia and who has reported for European magazines and newspapers from as far afield as Cuba, Eastern Europe, Central America, and the United States—lives with her boyfriend, Paolo Falcone, in a light-filled, rambling apartment not far from the Piazza San Domenico. Their place is crammed with art books (Paolo is the founder and curator of the Micromuseum, an alternative exhibition space for artists), plants, computer equipment, African drums (at university, Shobha studied to be a musician), statues of the Buddha, small shrines, votive candles, bright shawls, and curios brought back from Shobha’s many visits to India, where she converted to Hinduism more than twenty years ago.
“I never tell the people I photograph what to do,” she tells me, “where to stand, how to act. It took a while for the people you see in the book to trust me. But after awhile they did. And as soon as I’d arrive, they’d say, ‘Oh, let’s do this, let’s do that.’ The most dramatic shots were always their idea. They were always performing, acting, but that’s what they do. So much of their lives is theater.” She laughs. “It’s almost like their
jobs.”
One of the more flattering photos in the book is of a handsome young couple; the man sits at a table, holding a glass of red wine, while his barefoot wife, tanned and sinewy in a perfect little black dress, walks confidently across a tile floor with a wine glass of her own. They are, Paolo and Shobha explain, Alessio and Francesca Planeta, who have turned their ancestral estate near Sciacca into a thriving vineyard that produces some of Sicily’s best wine.
Later, at lunch at a restaurant not far from their apartment, Paolo orders a bottle of Planeta’s La Segreta; it’s not even Planeta’s best or costliest vintage, he tells us, it’s their middle-level white. Even so, it’s terrific—dry, complicated, delicious. And with every mouthful it becomes clearer that the history of the Sicilian aristocracy is not merely one of steady decline, of defensiveness, boredom, decadence, and conservatism. If the desire, the talent, and the inspiration are there, they can write a great novel, found a great restaurant, acquire a great painting—and even make a fabulous bottle of white wine.
Walking through the streets of Palermo with Letizia Battaglia, I’ve temporarily stopped worrying that I’m missing something important, that I’m only seeing the surface, the deceptively obvious. And in fact the city she’s showing me is more layered and complicated than what we’ve seen during our last few days here—that is, before we arranged to meet and walk around with Letizia, whose photographs I have long admired, and whose show I saw last fall at a gallery in Manhattan.
In the days since we’ve arrived, we’ve visited all the art sites and tourist spots, seen the mosaics at the Palatine Chapel and La Martorana, the tombs of the Norman kings at the monumental cathedral, admired the baroque exuberance of the Chiesa del Gesù, made a sort of Serpotta pilgrimage to the churches and oratories that the sculptor encrusted with plump naked cherubs and dense depictions of biblical and historical scenes. We’ve heard the hubbub of the city (Palermo is very noisy, even by Italian-city standards) muted the minute we entered the cloister of San Giovanni degli Eremiti, a garden that makes you feel as if you’ve been magically transported across the Mediterranean to North Africa, or westward to southern Spain.
Church facade, Palermo
We’ve been to the archaeological museum with its huge collection of artifacts from western Sicily; in fact it’s my favorite sort of museum: old-fashioned, musty, nothing user-friendly or interactive, the exhibits labeled and identified by little cards lettered in spidery, faded handwriting. We’ve walked through the markets and up the avenues, strolled the fashionable shopping district to the north of town, and gotten lost in the twisted lanes and cul-de-sacs of the medieval quarters.
Most enjoyably, we’ve spent a morning in the Orto Botanico, strolling along the wide avenues lined with palms, peering into the elaborate greenhouses, circling the pond, examining the exotic species of cactus that have been lovingly tended and preserved, marveling over the gargantuan, serpentine banyan trees and the dense groves of bamboo. Goethe called the Botanic Garden “the most wonderful spot on earth,” and it was there that he was inspired to begin rereading
The Odyssey
and to write the first draft of a play about Nausicaa. In the centuries since Goethe’s visit, the gardens became increasingly neglected and desolate. And it’s partly Letizia Battaglia’s work as a community activist that helped revive the Botanic Garden after its decline, during the 1970s, into a squalid, refuse-strewn, overgrown haven for neighborhood drunks and junkies.
In fact, the city seems in every way less sinister and menacing than it did in 1992, when we first visited—though perhaps what we’re feeling has something to do with our own relief at not having to spend every waking minute rescuing our kids from the lethal onrush of traffic. But it’s not just us. Palermo itself seems changed. It’s claimed that the narcotics trade has declined since its peak in the early ’90s, though, while we’re here, the local paper carries a story about a drug stash discovered inside a statue of the Madonna.
In any case, Palermo seems to be doing its best to make us feel that we have somehow managed to be in the right place at the right moment. We arrive at La Martorana just in time to see the women getting their grocery bags blessed by the priest. As we walk into the twelfth-century chapel of San Cataldo, a group of young French seminary students touring Sicily are so moved by the church’s austere beauty that they burst into song, a Renaissance liturgical hymn they chant in perfect four-part harmony. As we enter the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, in the Kalsa district, a young man has just begun to practice, on the harpsichord, a transcribed version of Bach’s double violin concerto. Most of the time, these days, the Oratorio di San Domenico is kept closed, but as we approach, a young art restorer is unlocking the door in order to show the place to a young woman he is clearly hoping to impress—and he cheerfully lets us in.
It’s also possible that the difference we feel this time has something to do with the fact that we’re not exactly going out of our way to seek out the city’s dark side. We’ve decided not to return to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, where the dead of Palermo, some of whom have been in these underground passages since the end of the sixteenth century, are arranged by age and profession; many of them still sport the military uniforms, the ruffled caps, the fancy coats and dresses they wore to their graves. One especially ghoulish corpse is nicknamed the “Sleeping Beauty,” a small girl so perfectly preserved by some forgotten, occult embalming technique that, it’s said, she doesn’t look as if she’s dead, but merely sleeping. Or so they say. Frankly, it seemed to me she looked quite dead.
Artist, Palermo
Last time, we went early in the morning. No one was around. As soon as we descended the first few steps that led down into the catacombs, the heavy door slammed shut behind us, plunging us into near total darkness. I was designated to find the light or get help, and as I groped my way back toward the door, I saw, in a small cell off the corridor, a dour, forbidding monk, sitting motionless and silent, his hand outstretched for the offering that persuaded him to switch on the lights. Eventually, the spookiness was ameliorated by the gang of giggly high school kids who used the catacombs as a hangout in which to flirt and grab a last minute smoke before school started.
All in all, the experience had been formidably creepy. Once was definitely enough, and besides…maybe it’s the fact that I’m older, or maybe it has something to do with the horrors of recent history, but death no longer seems like an abstraction that we can admire from a distance—to be precise, the distance between the dead and the living—as we contemplate what death has done to the citizens of Palermo, men and women and children who had once lived and breathed, just like us.
A compact, energetic, smoky-voiced woman who, in her youth, must have been even more of a beauty than she is now, Letizia Battaglia meets us in our hotel lobby, plunks herself down on a couch…
allora.
Lighting a cigarette, she tells us that we should be talking to other people—that is, to other people besides herself, people who could give us a more positive, hopeful view of what’s happening in Sicily and, for that matter, throughout the rest of Italy. Surely, there must be someone who could put a more optimistic spin on the current right-wing government, on what Letizia sees and laments as the new culture of greed, corruption, and rampant speculation that has essentially replaced the old culture of Mafia violence that she has devoted much of her life to fighting.
“I have no longer much hope,” she says. “People are tired of fighting, we’ve lost the hope that we can win. In a way, it was easier to fight against the old violence—the murders, the assassinations—than the new violence, which is all about money and banking. The Mafia’s smart, they know they don’t have to kill people…well, not much…anymore. Now it’s all about money. If a new road or a school is being built, it’s not because we really need that road or that school, but because the construction is lining the pockets of the Mafia. The Mafia used to think they had to kill us, but now they know they can just
buy
us, little by little. The government is still infiltrated by the Mafia, but it’s all become so civilized that it’s much harder to identify and to fight. The biggest Mafioso in the government right now is an extremely cultivated man, a collector of antiquarian books….
“It’s so much harder to have hope, to find that
possibility
of being free….” She sighs. “I can’t find anything to photograph anymore. I used to go out and take pictures wherever I found poetry, wherever I saw that combination of something old and something new. When I took pictures of young girls, I’d see their dreams…. I was taking pictures of that dream. But now I can’t find that dream. Or the dream’s all about money.”
It’s painful to consider the possibility that Letizia Battaglia might have stopped taking photographs. Because she’s an important artist—no one else has her eye, her vision; no one else is doing what she’s doing. To call her Sicily’s greatest photographer seems inaccurate only in that it seems too limited, too provincial. Her lyrical, unflinching, and hugely sympathetic pictures are universal in their resonance and their significance, and have been published and exhibited all over the world. Wholly original, they nonetheless bring together a number of traditions. Like the pictures of Eastern European Gypsies taken by Josef Koudelka (a friend of Letizia’s and a formative influence on her work) they capture moments that suggest complex narratives and provide glimpses of the histories that their subjects share, of whole worlds of experience and of subtle nuances that fascinate and elude us; like Helen Levitt’s street photographs, they catch city people—and especially the poor—in the act of expressing their tough, irrepressibly human selves; like Weegee’s crime-scene shots, they portray the weirdly frozen tableaux arranged by death and violence, though Letizia’s pictures—unlike Weegee’s—have a gritty, grainy quality suggestive of early Italian neorealist films and of the way that time scratches and pits the walls and buildings of Palermo.
Married young, partly to satisfy her family’s expectations and to escape their restrictive control, Letizia had three daughters, and in her thirties left her husband (“I took nothing from him,” she says proudly) and became a journalist for a Palermo newspaper; later she moved to the mainland to work there as a photographer. On her return to Sicily, she began taking the astute and impassioned shots of her Palermo neighbors that compose her early work, and which (together with her later photos) can been seen in her book,
Passion, Justice, Freedom.
The grisly realities of daily life in the 1960s and ’70s were such that (Letizia could hardly help noticing) more and more of her street photos were turning out to be images of bloodied corpses, of men and women assassinated by the mob, and of their grieving families. Perhaps the most remarkable—the most unusual—thing about these pictures is how eloquently they convey great ness for the helplessness and the terrible awkwardness of the dead, profound compassion for the agony of the living, combined with a frank curiosity and an almost incandescent outrage about the waste, the cycle of violence, the pointless loss of human life—the reasons why the dead got that way. Eventually, she acquired a police radio, which enabled her to race to the crime scenes before the bodies had been removed and the dark puddles of blood sponged from the streets.
Looking at Letizia Battaglia’s photography is, in certain ways, like reading the novels of Leonardo Sciascia. It’s not merely that both artists have concerned themselves with the extent to which the open and covert operations of the Mafia have influenced the daily lives and the character of the Sicilian people. It’s also the intelligence and care with which both Sciascia and Battaglia render the Byzantine complication and subtlety of that influence—pervasive, omnipresent in the community, unmentionable, oppressive—unsurprisingly different from the way in which Mafia violence has been portrayed by Hollywood: a bunch of wise guys (goofy or courtly, psycho or coolly business-savvy) whacking each other and going to the mattresses.
Letizia’s art both fueled and was fueled by the anti-Mafia struggle in which she was involved—a campaign with its own saints, heroes, and martyrs, most notably the courageous government prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, both of whom were killed by the mob. Falcone was murdered, together with his wife and three of his bodyguards, in the spring of 1992, when his car was blown up as he drove on the freeway from the Palermo airport toward the city. That same summer, Borsellino was blown up by a car bomb as he made his weekly visit to his mother; the explosion blew off the entire front of the building and shattered nearly all of its windows.
During this grim period in Palermo’s history, Letizia became an increasingly vocal and visible presence. She was elected to the Palermo City Council and later the regional parliament, started a shelter for battered women and a woman’s publishing collective, and sparked campaigns to clean up (figuratively and literally; her activities included organizing teams to collect garbage) some of Palermo’s poorest, most despised and neglected neighborhoods. In 1979, she photographed the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, on a visit to Palermo, greeting Nino Salvo, a well-known Mafioso—tangible proof of the mob connection that was common knowledge but which the minister denied. Letizia’s photo became an important piece of evidence in Andreotti’s 1993 trial on charges of corruption—charges of which he was eventually acquitted; she received death threats, her life was often at risk—and yet she kept taking pictures.