Sicilian Odyssey (3 page)

The cave spirals inward, turning in on itself; at the very back is a small hole in its ceiling that, on sunny mornings, admits a single column of light, not unlike the laserlike beam that often signals the presence of the Holy Spirit shining through the window to find Mary in a Renaissance portrayal of the Annunciation. On the quiet, overcast afternoon on which we visit the quarries, one of the gardeners working in the groves of citrus trees takes us into the cave, where he whistles a bright Sicilian tune that comes bouncing back off the walls. He shows us where the light comes through and urges us to return on a clear day, when the sun will be doing its magic trick.

When Caravaggio saw the cave, he remarked that its shape resembled that of an ear, and that it was the perfect prison for a tyrant who could take advantage its acoustical properties to eavesdrop on the conversations of the captives being held there. Word of Caravaggio’s observation spread rapidly through the city. A genius who so brilliantly depicted nature had instantly seen the true form and purpose of a natural wonder! No one seems to have noted the fact that a man who felt persecuted and in imminent danger of being sent to prison might naturally find himself thinking of incarceration, spying, etc. In any case, the cave became known—thanks to Caravaggio—as the Ear of Dionysius, a name it retains to this day, together with its reputation as a place ideally suited for the covert monitoring of its luckless inhabitants; it has also been suggested that the cave was used for less sinister purposes, to provide offstage sound effects for the nearby theater.

During his stay in Syracuse, the painter received, with Minniti’s help, a desirable commission. The festival of St. Lucy, the city’s patron saint, was approaching, and Caravaggio was hired to do a painting for the church believed to have been built on the site of her martyrdom. The result was “The Burial of St. Lucy,” one of Caravaggio’s most powerful and original works, which has been moved from its original home in the church to the city’s Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo.

Nothing can prepare you for the painting’s force, for the almost shocking originality of its vision and execution. It’s almost unrecognizable from reproductions, which never manage to convey its prodigious scale, or the fact that nearly two-thirds of the canvas is occupied by an expanse of threatening empty space, rendered in dark earthtones and including the suggestion of a sort of grotto or cave—a void, really—not unlike the latomie the painter visited on his tour of the ruins. What’s frequently reproduced is rarely the whole of the work, but rather a detail: the bottom third of the painting.

The entire action—the narrative, such as it is—transpires in that lower third, where the burial is in progress. It takes a moment to locate the figures amid all that darkness, and a moment more to find the holy martyr, who is nearly hidden from the viewer.

You have to search for the saint, the nominal subject of the painting. Because what you see first—what you can’t help seeing first—are the two gravediggers, one of whom has his broad, muscular back turned toward you. Only when you’ve looked past and around the vitality of their bodies, the luminescence of the drapery pulled diagonally across the massive buttocks of the gravedigger on the right, past the hard, brutish labor in which they are engaged—they might as well be human backhoes—only then do you see the martyred virgin, enclosed by a small circle of church officials, onlookers, and mourners, one of whom, a grief-stricken old woman, covers her face with her hands. (Like “The Crucifixion of St. Peter” in Rome, the painting reveals Caravaggio’s continuing fascination with those who did the physical work—the stoop labor—of the sacred event.)

Fragile and pale, her lips slightly parted, lying directly on the ground, the saint (whose throat was more raggedly slashed in an earlier version of the painting, which Caravaggio modified) seems already to have become another sort of being, to belong to a whole other species than the living men and women who surround her with their harsh exertions and their painful, raw emotions. Shining from some untraceable, unidentifiable source, the light catches and plays on her upturned chin and her delicate, girlish shoulder. Everything seems to have been painted in haste (as no doubt it was), with terrific urgency and intensity. The feet of the gravediggers are sketched in, roughly indicated but unfinished, as if the artist had no interest in—no time for—such irrelevant details, though it’s also possible that this section may have been the most heavily damaged during the centuries in which the work fell into disrepair.

In any case, what’s most striking and most unique—and what can most easily be appreciated if you compare the painting with the far more staid and conventional portrayal of the martyrdom of St. Lucy, by Caravaggio’s friend Minniti, which is also in the museum—is what’s missing, what Caravaggio has willfully, unconsciously, or instinctively chosen to leave out, to withhold. In Minniti’s rendering, both the virgin and her killer, whose knife is pointed menacingly at her throat, stare at us out of the picture; what it offers, as Caravaggio’s does not, is a sense of a theatrical performance being staged for the viewer, played out with the audience in mind.

By contrast, there is nothing that includes you, or invites you, into Caravaggio’s rendering; indeed, the gravediggers are doing everything possible to keep you at a distance, to conceal the tragic scene from view—just as, in life, the participants in something sorrowful, violent, and shameful might try to keep it secret, hidden. What’s even more striking is all that earth, all that brown, all that darkness taking up all that room in the painting. There are no clouds here, no starry firmament, no heaven, no promise of ascension, no vision of an afterlife surrounded by plump, pink-cheeked cherubs and choirs of angels. There is only earth, only darkness, only the fierce and brutal energies of the living. That, Caravaggio seems to be saying, is all there is.

It is perhaps the darkest and certainly among the most hopeless and least consoling of religious paintings. Yet there is something profoundly comforting about its honesty, its bravery, its conviction—and, above all, in the depth and beauty that Caravaggio has managed to wrest from this scene of mourning and almost unmediated pain.

The danger and seduction of retrospect lie in how much we try to read back into the events that preceded what would ultimately reveal itself as the future. Looking at “The Burial of St. Lucy,” we not only find ourselves assuming that its dark vision must have been influenced by the misfortune and violence that Caravaggio had already experienced, but we may also be tempted to find some ominous presentiment of how little time the painter had left and of the misery that lay before him.

Leaving Syracuse, Caravaggio continued on to Messina, and then to Palermo, all the while painting furiously, taking on local commissions and smaller paintings that he hoped to bring to his patrons in Rome, partly in the hopes that his new works would move them to intercede for him and obtain a pardon that would allow him to return safely home. When this began to seem probable, he left Sicily for a brief sojourn in Naples, where he was gravely wounded and disfigured in another fight. Then, bringing along several paintings, he set sail for Rome.

His boat stopped at Porto Ercole, and, possibly mistaken for someone else, he was detained and imprisoned. While he was being questioned by the authorities, the tides shifted, and it was necessary for the boat to leave.

Impatient, enraged to find himself stranded in the port, Caravaggio set off for the capital on foot, a dangerous hike through swamps infested with malaria, which (or so it is thought) the painter contracted, and from which he is believed to have died, en route to Rome. Like so much about his life, his death remains shrouded in uncertainty. All that we know is that his last great paintings continued on their sea journey and arrived safely in Rome, without him.

For many years, when we lived in rural upstate New York, one of our neighbors was a carpenter-contractor who had a placard in his front yard advertising his business:
BUILDING AND REBUILDING.
We used to think the sign was funny, sort of, as if it described an ongoing process, a series of events that amounted to a confession of incompetence. First he would build and later, by necessity, rebuild what he’d screwed up the first time.

Here in Sicily, I keep thinking of him and of his sign, which, oddly, has begun to seem like a terse summary of the energies, the aims, the history of the Sicilian baroque—so much of which involved a series of reconstructions and revisions, powered by disturbing memories of the destructive powers of time and nature, and by a brighter notion of a future in which the forces of devastation and ruin could be overcome, or at least temporarily subdued.

Throughout Sicily, especially in Palermo and in the southeast, the baroque seems always to be waiting just around the corner, positioned in the exact place where the sun is most likely to strike it and produce the maximum brilliance, the optimum dazzle. Travel up a narrow, dark, cobblestone medieval street in a remote hill town and, suddenly, you’re standing in a spacious, open piazza, where the scale expands to confront you with the scrollwork, the curlicues, the heroic staircase of a church, its stone facade perfectly sited to catch the golden rays and reflect them back at the few elderly worshipers arriving for morning Mass. Pause in the midst of an undistinguished alley and look up, and all at once you’re staring at the underside of a balcony, decorated with gargoyles, chimeras, coiled serpents—architectural elements with no sensible justification, no other purpose than adornment.

Yet often these optimistic, exuberant buildings and extravagant details are in advanced states of disrepair, propped up by scaffolding, awaiting the influx of money and energy necessary to restore them to their former splendor. Nowhere is this more obvious, more thought provoking—or more heartbreaking—than in the town of Noto, in the southeast corner of Sicily, an hour or so from Syracuse. If Noto is the island’s most famous baroque city, it’s because it represents a sustained and conscious experiment in the baroque, the attempt to construct a designed and planned community (think of the eighteenth-century equivalent of Celebration, Florida) that—like so many such experiments—has, over time, made the sobering discovery that God and nature had entirely different plans for it.

Originally located a few miles away, at a site now known as Noto Antica, Noto was destroyed completely in the cataclysmic earthquake of January 1693. Sad experience and sustained government pressure persuaded the city fathers (who at first wanted to reconstruct their home on the ruins of the old settlement) that its former location was too vulnerable, and so it was decided to rebuild the town in its current spot.

Inspired by this opportunity for renewal, and mostly financed by the Spanish government, construction was begun, directed by the Duke of Camastra, who had already demonstrated his urban planning abilities at Santo Stefano di Camastra. Sicily’s greatest architects—among them Vincenzo Sinatra, Paolo Labisi, and Rosario Gagliardi, a disciple of Borromini—were brought in to collaborate on the project that was conceived as an opportunity to apply the essential principles and to realize the aims of the baroque aesthetic: an amalgam of rationality and grotesquerie, order and dynamism, capricious wit and grand theatricality.

Local craftsmen were employed to decorate the elaborate palazzi and construct the sweeping staircase of the cathedral, as well as the Convento del Santissimo Salvatore and the Chiesa di San Francesco. Plasterers were set to work, layering decorative moldings and squadrons of winged putti on the church interiors. Altars were constructed of multicolored marble, inlaid in intricate patterns. And the city was separated into quarters according to the intended purpose—ecclesiastical, residential, commercial—of each neighborhood and the social class of its inhabitants.

San Francisco all’Immacolata, Noto

Everywhere, you can see evidence of the optimism of this project, of the belief that nature could—by employing a precisely calibrated chemistry of scientific engineering, wishful thinking, and sheer defiance—be prevented from repeating the ravages and cruelties of the past. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Palazzo Villadorata, a fanciful confectionery of stonework depicting yearning mermaids, charging horses, griffins, monsters, and clownish faces whose expressions are impossible to read. Are they knowing or foolish, ironic or half-crazed, and whom, exactly, are they mocking?

Perhaps they are laughing at their creators, whose ambitions for the city have been, more than three centuries later, mostly undone. In its excessiveness, its overrichness, its imaginativeness, and its less easily definable quality of flying in the face of good taste, practicality, and common sense, the palace may remind you of the candies and cream pastries in the
pasticcerie
found all over the island, and of which there are several famous examples in Noto. What the Palazzo Villadorata and the bargelateria Corrado Costanzo have in common is a faith in pleasure for its own sake, regardless and in spite of what we know about what’s reasonable, what’s good for our health, what will prolong our lives and protect us.

In the mid-1980s, it was discovered that even a slight tremor of the Earth could cause damage severe enough to approach the horrors of the catastrophe of 1693. Emergency repairs were begun, and over the next few years, cars—whose exhaust and vibrations had undermined the stability of the weakened structures—were banned from the town center. Even so, the great dome of the cathedral collapsed during a thunderstorm in 1996, and it is presently being restored behind a curtain hung over the scaffolding and painted to show the face of the cathedral in happier, healthier days.

Indeed, nearly everything in Noto is under construction or awaiting reconstruction, building or rebuilding. Like exoskeletons, steel braces keep the damaged facades from buckling and collapsing. There are cracks in the interior walls of the church, iron cables buttress sagging arches, metal plates cover the exteriors in an effort to stave off their disintegration. Though travel guides and art books still refer to Noto as a jewel of the baroque—a showpiece of golden sandstone eloquently testifying to its creators’ fascination with views, perspective, harmony, and symmetry—the truth is altogether different. The chasm between the optimism of the baroque, the hope and humor that you can still read in the extant glories of Noto, and the experience of being in the contemporary town is something like the contrast between the extravagantly overdecorated churches of Palermo and the reliquaries displaying fragments of bone and rotten cloth, housed under the altars of the rococo chapels.

Present-day Noto is a shadow of its former self, a scrim much like the one that covers the Duomo and beneath which you can just perceive the outlines of what it must once have been. And its citizens seem to know that their town is approaching—or, one hopes, rebounding from—a low point in the cycle of collapse and construction, of design and decay, of building and rebuilding. The population is mostly geriatric, and on a weekday morning the town’s young men stand along the sidewalks, loafing and chatting—not working. People know you’re not from here, and make no secret of their low-level curiosity and even lower-level resentment. It’s not a particularly comfortable or inviting place to be; the residents seem aware of the fact that though plenty of tourists, art lovers, and students of the baroque traipse regularly through their town, they don’t spend much money—or do much to pump up the local economy—in the handful of souvenir shops and the few simple restaurants and hotels.

The stories you hear about rural Sicily, about the country villages in which, as in certain vintage Westerns, a stranger’s arrival is greeted by the shuttering of windows, the slamming of doors, and the ominous, sudden disappearance of the entire population, all of that comes back to you as you walk through Noto. But whatever fears and suspicions those stories represent don’t seem to apply here, exactly. What you mostly fear, in Noto, is that a chunk of elegant baroque masonry will finally dislodge itself, fall, and land on your head.

And yet, and yet…to truly appreciate the beauty and brilliance of Noto, its originality and inventiveness and optimism, to see it anew as if each gargoyle and fillip of scrollwork were still bright, pristine, and freshly minted, you need only spend an hour (or as much as you can bear) in Noto’s modern equivalent: Gibellina Nuova.

In January 1968 a violent earthquake destroyed a major section of south-central Sicily. The farming town of Gibellina—not far from Salemi and Castelvetrano—was leveled; the only thing that survived, more or less intact, was its cemetery. Inspired perhaps by the example of Noto, the town decided to rebuild a few kilometers away, in a less perilous spot. And that’s where the resemblance to Noto ends.

Gibellina Nuova is one of the creepier and more disturbing places in Sicily, and (at least in terms of architecture and urban planning) possibly anywhere I know. Artists from all over the island were enlisted to help with the project, but you can’t help wondering how much control or influence they actually had. Throughout the modern town, examples of dated and sadly misdirected 1970s public sculpture pop up from the lunar landscape in varying states of neglect and disrepair. Yet their condition is shipshape compared to that of the city itself.

The marble sidewalks of the deserted main square are chipped and broken, metal reinforcement rods poke through the surface of half-poured concrete, everywhere are unfinished building projects, though often it’s hard to tell what’s still being constructed and what’s already falling apart; much of Gibellina Nuova seems to have met—and got stuck—somewhere in the middle. The streets are depopulated and bare, like those of certain California suburbs; you can drive through them easily enough, but you wouldn’t want to walk.

Perhaps what makes Gibellina so alarming—and so notably un-Sicilian—is that the past seems to have been wholly obliterated, swallowed and erased along with the original town. For though Sicily is thoroughly modern, in some ways more so than the mainland—tiny country inns and rural
agroturismo
farms all seem to have their own Web sites, a surprising number of restaurants and public spaces practice a strict no-smoking policy, you actually see people jogging—the past is always imminent, and the centuries have, by necessity, learned to coexist.

It’s more than just a matter of architecture, of the church built on top of the Greek temple, the baroque palazzo standing beside the Bauhaus-inspired office complex. The interaction of past and present affects, for better and worse, the way people live their lives, from the large institutions (the church and the family still exert enormous influence over the culture) to the minutiae of daily existence, so that it’s not uncommon, in the countryside, to see drivers chatting on their cell phones as they wait for herds of sheep to cross the road. Especially in rural Sicily, the average citizen’s ability to get a job, to find housing, to arrange for the simplest necessities, depends on history, on connections—on who your family is and was, on what transpired generations ago between your ancestors and the ancestors of the boss you are asking for employment.

But in Gibellina, there is no visible sign of the past, or perhaps the problem is that there
is
no progress, no viable present, no future, and so everything has remained locked in the past—frozen in some deranged version of the 1970s. Judged by the standards of a more typical Sicilian town, everything seems severely dysfunctional; no one gathers to chat in the piazza, and the market suggests those bleak, transient Gypsy encampments on the edges of housing blocks in northern Italian industrial cities.

To be fair, few towns are recognizable from their descriptions in tourist brochures, but the language of the pamphlet I get from the helpful but understandably suspicious fellow (what, he obviously wonders, are we
doing
here, taking pictures?) in the underfurnished information office seems particularly inapplicable: “The New Gibellina…shows an urban structure characterized by the alternation of pedestrian precincts and carriageways, each with a small garden. Sculptures of great contemporary artists have been located, little by little, in the wide spaces of urban territory.”

If Noto Antica is a romantic spot containing a few stones and relics mostly covered over by greenery, moss and creeping vines, nature has been effectively prevented from reclaiming the site of the original Gibellina by Alberto Burri, a well-known and otherwise gifted artist, who has been covering the remains (the
ruderi
) of the medieval town with a layer of poured concrete—120,000 square meters scored with crevasses to mark where the streets used to be. Up close and from a distance, the piece, entitled “Il Cretto,” suggests a giant concrete bandage applied to a wound that will never be allowed to heal, or at least not until the earthwork/memorial follows the road to ruin that Gibellina Nuova seems to be taking.