Category Archives: Sicily

Sicily: the Island of Snow and Fire

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Our journey back to Palermo to return our hired car and to catch our flight to Pisa took place on one of the most beautiful days I have encountered and through marvellously Arcadian landscapes.  In January Sicily is at its greenest;

it is hard to imagine that by the torrid summer much of the island will be almost desert-like.

The first part of our journey took us past Mount Etna. It’s such a majestic volcano, crowned with perennial snows at its summit and yet almost constantly in eruption.

In fact at this very moment Etna has continued its fiery activities since August.

I remember as child staying on the top floor flat of my uncle and making out the red-hot vision of the crater. Almost as important as the weather was the topic ‘what is Monticello (the local name for Etna) doing today?’ Unlike Vesuvius, which explodes infrequently but violently (as in the destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii in 79 AD; the last major Vesuvian eruption was in 1944) Etna is more courteous to its human neighbours and lava rarely flows as far as the city of Catania although it has swallowed villages higher up. Eventually, however, the solidified lava crumbles leaving a fertile soil which produces the finest horticulture one could wish for. I remember visiting the orchards of my Uncle’s family doctor and being stunned by the lush vegetation and the abundance of fichi d’India (prickly pears).

Etna originated around two million years ago during the Quaternary era and at 10,912 feet high it is the tallest terrestrial active volcano of the Eurasian tectonic plate. My cousin was part-author of a Club Alpino Italiano book on the volcanic caves of Etna a geological feature I have yet to explore.

Europe’s most southernly glacier, in one of Mount Etna’s volcanic caves (Courtesy Catania University)

We met with more snow-capped mountains driving past the Nebrodi hills which rise to a height exceeding six thousand feet.

Our final Sicilian stop was at the coastal town of Cefalù with its magnificent cathedral-basilica dating back to 1131.

The apse is crowned by glorious mosaics in the characteristic Sicilian-byzantine style. The intention was to continue the mosaic decoration in the nave as happened at Monreale. I found however, that the mosaics were emphasised in their majesty by the approach via the almost bare nave.

As Goethe wrote in his ‘Italian Journey’: ‘Our visit to Sicily is now happily completed and will for me be an indestructible treasure for my whole life’. I could not agree more!

Newtown (Ancient Sicilian Style)

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The main part of Greek and Roman Syracuse lies north of the islet of Ortygia and extends over a wider area than that occupied even by the modern city. It was divided into four quarters with the following names: Acradina (wild pear), Neapolis (New town), Tiche (after a temple), and Epipolis (outlying town). Here we visited the Greek theatre, one of the finest outside Greece and dating from the third century BC when the city was governed by Hieron I.

What would I have given to be time-transported to the days when the lost plays of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus were acted on this stage!

Nearby are the giant quarries called latomie which were later used as prisons. The largest of these, the Latomia Del Paradiso, is also nicknamed Dionysus’ ear not only for its earlobe-like shape but also because of its remarkable echo which can pick up the slightest whisper and, therefore, proved most useful for the guards gathering up any confabulations of escape uttered by the prisoners incarcerated there.

In 212 BC Syracuse became a Roman province after a battle during which Archimedes was killed while he was engrossed on a mathematical problem completely unaware of what was about to happen to him. That’s what I call utterly, barbaric ignorance…

In the second century AD the amphitheatre, second in size only to that of Verona, was completed. So gladiatorial combat and animals fights took over in popularity from classical Greek drama….

Giovanni also took us to visit his namesake’s church, a mystic early Christian building, San Giovanni alle catacombe. The ancient Basilica was built around the 6th century in the place where, according to tradition, the first bishop of Syracuse, Marciano, that died a martyr under Gallienus and Valerian (mid-3rd century), was buried. This church was once Syracuse’s cathedral.

On the way we passed a modern monstrosity of a church dedicated to the Madonna of the Tears whose image miraculously shed tears here in 1953. Giovanni ironically said that if she saw today what was constructed to honour the memory of this event the Madonna would shed even more tears!

We paid homage to the German poet August Von Platen who died of Cholera aged thirty nine in Syracuse and whose tomb is in the city’s non-catholic cemetry next to the fine archaeological museum founded by Paolo Orsi.. Giovanni laid a wreath in his memory:

Here is part of one of my favourite poems by Platen (my translation):

I wish I could always be as free as my dreams,
away from the flashy crowd,
and wander by the banks of placid streams
cooled by shadow-drifting clouds.

Free to shake off this weary weight
of human life, and rest instead
in nature’s perfect heart :
all summer singing around me.

….

And nothing would I drink or eat
save heaven’s clear sunlight and the spring
of earth’s own sweet welling waters,
that can never sting the heart.

My visit to Syracuse was also a trip down memory lane for I had been here before more years than I can to remember when I was guest of my Uncle the French literature professor at Catania University. Here are some photos from that time when I was not yet a teenager. The latomie and the amphitheatre can be recognized.

New Year’s Eve arrived and I was expecting to join the crowds of revellers in the Syracusan streets. Actually we celebrated at Giovanni’s partner’s parents’ place as we were advised that we could easily be injured by fireworks if we ventured outside at the midnight hour. It was wise advice as the noise from the ‘botte’ or bangers was deafening and they were launched in all directions. The following morning the streets were littered with the remains of this battle of the night.

It was sad for us to leave such a fascinating city as Syracuse and I have yet to keep a promise to return and visit it in more depth. I hope I can keep this promise next year for ‘if winter comes can spring be far behind?’

Sicily’s Queenly Quail Island

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If one were unfortunate enough to be given just one city to visit in Sicily it would have to be Siracusa, ‘Syracuse’. Divided between the mainland of the island of Sicily and the islet of Ortygia, its name deriving from ancient Greek for ‘quail (perhaps because of its shape? Or because it was once the home of quails which are table delectation for many Italians) the city was founded by the Greeks in 743 BC and rapidly grew flourishing especially after one of its tyrants Geione vanquished the Carthaginians at the battle of Himera.  Syracuse became the principal city of Magna Graecia under his successor Gerone and turned into a major cultural centre; for example, poet Pindar and playwright Aeschylus both lived at the tyrant’s court.

The status of Syracuse diminished under the Romans and the city entered into a long period of decline. Now, although its area is just a fraction of what the ancient city occupied I found the place happy, prosperous and quite fascinating.

We had booked a hotel in Ortygia and in the morning met up with our friend Giovanni who was to be our guide during our couple of days there. And what a guide! Already well-known for his moonlight trips around the temple of Minerva south of Florence and guardian of the Brunelleschi-designed fortress of Vicopisano Giovanni is equally knowledgeable about the distinguished history of Syracuse. He took us for a walk round Ortygia.

We strolled through the market:

We wandered to the end of the island which is defended by the eleventh century castle of Maniace elaborated into its present gothic form by Frederick II.

We saw the enchanted fountain of Arethusa so evocatively described in music by Szymanowski and also where Giovanni met his partner Andrea whose civil union we attended at Vicopisano fortress in 2018.

We entered a spacious square and stepped inside what we imagined to be the baroque cathedral of the city only to find that we were, in fact, within the cella of a Greek temple with the peristyle closed in to form a giant nave in the seventh century.  What a sensation it is to enter into a building that has been continuously dedicated to religious rites for close on three thousand years!

Giovanni also pointed out to us some of the lesser known wonders of Ortygia. One of these was an ancient ritual Jewish bath discovered under the foundations of a present-day hotel.

We also passed by the fountain of Diana, a monumental cascade dating from 1907 by Giulio Moschetti, with the collaboration of his sculptor son Mario Moschetti and located in Piazza Archimede in Syracuse.

I remember this fountain when, as a very young boy, I was taken there by my Catania university professor uncle and took this picture then.

Archimedes was another famous citizen of Syracuse and it is fitting that a square has been named after him.  Considered as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history, Archimedes’ contributions range from geometry to hydrostatics, from optics to mechanics: he was able to calculate the surface and volume of spheres and discovered the laws governing the buoyancy of bodies; in the engineering field, he discovered and exploited the operating principles of levers and his very name is associated with numerous machines and devices, such as the Archimedean screw, demonstrating his amazing inventive ability. Still surrounded by an aura of mystery, however, are the war machines that Archimedes would have prepared to defend Syracuse from the siege by the Romans. Was it all done by mirrors I wonder?

Today, however, Archimedes’ life is remembered through numerous anecdotes, especially the one about his exclaiming eureka!  when, naked, he ran excitedly through the streets after jumping from his bath having discovered the theory of the displacement of water in the calculation of volumes. Actually, although not quite in such a direct manner, scientists continue to get equally excited about their discoveries especially the recent ones involving vaccines which may finally rid us of this pestilential Covid-19! The spirit of Archimedes thankfully lives on!

We had, however, yet to discover the wonders of an ancient Greek colony that lay on the mainland half of Syracuse…

The Valley of the Temples

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Sicily was once part of Magna Graecia’ – greater Greece – and its Greek remains are as fine as anything one can find in present-day Greece. The temple of Segesta, the acropolis and temples at Selinunte, the theatre at Syracuse are just the tip of the iceberg of what Sicily can offer in terms of classical Greek monuments. And then when one gets on to the Roman period…

What could we select in this cornucopia of marvels? Agrigento was on the way to our destination of Syracuse for the New Year and it was well-chosen.  Imagine a two-hours walk through a valley of temples each one more fascinating than the other: a stroll through an open-air museum of some of the finest buildings from ancient times.

Agrigento was founded as a Greek colony with the name of Akragas in 581 BC. Under its tyrant Terone its power extended to Sicily’s northern coasts. In 480 BC it won a memorable victory over the Carthaginians. It was in the fifth century BC that Akragas obtained its maximum splendour and it was during this time that the temples were built  These included the  temple of Olympian Zeus, one of the major achievements of Grecian architecture, unfortunately now just a mass of stones collapsed as a result  of several earthquakes. In the rubble I noted a Telamone, or stone giant, which had supported the temple roof but was now laying a rest for many centuries after his labours.

The best preserved temple is that of Concord thanks to its being reused as a Christian church. I wish the Christians had done that to more temples instead of using them as a quarry..

The temple of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri is perhaps the most familiar thanks to its souvenir cork models one of which I had as a child. It’s slightly disappointing to realise that the temple is a mid-nineteenth hypothetical reconstruction and, in fact, mixes up Ionic and Doric elements!

There’s also the temple of Hera and that of Heracles not to be missed.

There’s so much more to see. For example, the sanctuary of Ctnoie, the tomb of Terone and the temple of Aesculapius. We could have spent days there but were just happy to soak in the afternoon atmosphere of a late December sunshine just at the time the almond trees were coming into bloom in the valley of the gods.

Half-way through the vale another wonder, this time natural, captured us. It was the garden of Kolymbethra which has been ranked as one of the most beautiful in Italy.

We are lucky to have the history of this magical place well-documented since classical times.

Diodorus Siculus writes about the renovation works of the city promoted by the tyrant Terone immediately after the Battle of Himera (480 BC) and mentions a

“… A large pool … with a perimeter of seven stages … twenty fathoms deep … where the aqueduct irrigate nursery of refined flora and abundant wildlife …”

In the same period the Kolymbethra was built, thanks to the help of many slaves captured in battle, it was possible to construct the superlative temples and the hypogea, or artificial tunnels with the function of collecting the waters that oozed from calcarenite porous rock, to convey them, through a system of tunnels, from the hill towards the Kolymbethra basin, constantly feeding the pool. The garden, in addition to being a holiday resort for the aristocracy, was also a meeting place for all the inhabitants of the classical city: here, in fact, women gathered to wash clothes and anyone who wanted to cool off in the clear waters of the swimming pool.

A century after the Battle of Himera, the basin was buried and transformed into a vegetable garden, thus becoming a rich arable area. The presence of the hypogea, whose original function was adapted to agricultural use, was fundamental; the water conveyed by these aqueducts fed a small basin, located next to the mouth of an underground, which was used to irrigate the garden. This system still works today, keeping the land arable.

Subsequently, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the cultivation of fruit trees spread in Sicily, it became a citrus garden.

In 1999 the Sicilian Region entrusted Kolymbethra to FAI, the Italian equivalent and associate of the National Trust FAI. And so it was that we showed our National Trust life membership cards and entered perhaps the most ancient continuously cultivated gardens we have ever trod.

What one sees today is a group of isolated temples. It must be remembered, however, that these temples were integrated into a populous city most of which remains to be excavated. What a wonderful ancient city Agrigento must have been!

Goethe, in his Italian travel book, bemoans the fact that his visit to ancient Agrigento was delayed by his guide wanting to show him modern Agrigento.  We in retrospect were disappointed that we found that by not visiting mediaeval and modern Agrigento we missed out on a city filled with a lovely cathedral and some fine mediaeval streets. But with our time limit how could we avoid the wonders of ancient Greek temples?  In this we were totally in agreement with the then head of Bagni di Lucca Villa post office who we met quite by chance as were exiting the bewitching valley.

Alchemy, Guttuso and Cart-wheels in Palermo’s Bagheria

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Every Italian city of cultural importance is encircled by superb aristocratic villas. Lucca’s own are spread among the foothills of the Pizzorne and include such wonders as the Villa Reale (see my post on its new owners at https://longoio3.com/2020/08/12/elisas-villa-resurrected/) and the Villa Torrigiani. Vicenza is famous for its Palladian villas along the Brenta. (There’s my post on these at https://longoio3.com/2018/11/04/vicenzas-palladian-splendour/). Florence is distinguished for its UNESCO world-heritage Medicean villas (see my post on them at https://longoio3.com/2020/02/28/a-place-in-the-country/

It is no wonder that, with its magnificent location between mountain and sea, Palermo would have a cornucopia of villas. The town of Bagheria is the focus for these villas. Indeed, the name derives from the Arabic baḥriyya, meaning ‘by the sea’.

The majority of these villas were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are baroque in style. Sadly, many are now abandoned, waiting for a shining knight to rescue them from the dragons devouring their dilapidated splendours.  We wanted to indulge in some urban exploration of them but the risks were too high what with crumbling roof beams and a major mafia centre nearby at Corleone.

Interestingly, there is a theory that alchemical philosophy was at the basis of the construction of some of these villas, in particular Villa Valguarnera and Villa Palagonia with their strange sculptures.

This philosophy probably derived from the desire to create an Arcadian society where acolytes could devote themselves to the liberal arts and alchemical philosophy, far from Palermo’s menacing Court of the Inquisition of Palermo. This theory links up with Florence’s Neo-Platonism associated with villas like Careggi where philosopher Marsilio Ficino was based. (No wonder I felt enlightened when I woke up in that villa’s grounds now incorporated in Florence’s Careggi hospital after my eight-hour operation earlier this year…)

In Bagheria there are some villas available to view and one that I came across by chance houses the Renato Guttuso museum. The villa was built in 1736 by the prince of Cattolica Eraclea, Francesco Bonanno. From 1830 the Bonanno family lost the property and the villa took different uses: lazaretto, barracks, and finally at the end of the 1800’s it was bought by Gioacchino Scaduto who used it as a home and a factory for canned food!

Luckily the villa was saved for more exalted purposes and reopened in 1973 housing works by Renato Guttuso which the maestro donated his hometown before his death in 1987.

In addition to Guttuso’s creations, representing over forty years of activity,  the villa hosts works by twentieth century artists like, among others, Cagli, Mario Schifano, Onofrio Tomaselli, Silvestre Cuffaro, Domenico Quattrociocchi, Pina Calí, Vincenzo Gennaro and Giuseppe Pellitteri, Mimmo Pintacuda andGand Tornatore. Over the years, other works have been donated to the museum.  Here is a small selection of what we saw:

Guttuso’s works range from paintings to sculptures, from drawings to engravings and range from works from the 1930’s to the artist’s last years.

Guttuso, who we had the privilege of meeting in the 1980’s when he opened an exhibition of his works in London, is one of the most significant Italian painters of the modern age.  I particularly admire the socialist imprint of his artistic production. Without indulging in the crasser aspects of soviet realism Guttuso manages to produce works which stand for their moral force together with those such as ‘Guernica’ – Guttuso and Picasso were good friends.

(Guttuso’masterpiece: ‘Crucifixion’.)

The museum also includes a lovely collection of the two-wheeled painted Sicilian donkey cart. The panels illustrate stories from the great knightly epics of the past like ‘Orlando Furioso’ and his paladins.

The tradition of painting transport vehicles in this colourful way continues to this day in Sicily: for example with this Fiat 500.

In India we noted a similar tradition with regard to heavy goods vehicles vivaciously decorated with epic stories, this time from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

For me these are wonderful examples of how great traditions can survive and continue across technological progress. Ever thought of customizing your car with stories from Malory’s ‘King Arthur’, for example?

I do hope that the time will come when the whole area of Bagheria will be elevated to a world heritage site. Its wonderful villas need this help and they could be used for so many social and cultural purposes. We at least are glad to have visited something of what can be achieved in the Villa Cattolica.

Where to now in Sicilia? Just one day left before our appointment with Giovanni in Syracuse….

A Christian Mosque or a Moslem Church?

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We just spent too little time in Palermo, indeed in Sicily. It’s truly a place one must return to for as the great Goethe wrote “Without Sicily, Italy Creates No Image in the Soul: Here Is the Key to Everything”.

Indeed it is! What little time we had left in Palermo (for we had an New Year’s appointment at Syracuse to keep) we spent visiting one of its most characteristic churches: San Giovanni degli Eremiti.

The Normans, who established their reign in Sicily in 1072, destroyed the monuments, but not the tradition of the preceding Byzantine and Arab architecture.  San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo, which dates from 1132, is Arab in the clear relationship between cubic spaces and hemispherical domes. Is it a Romanesque church with an oriental feel or is it an oriental mosque with a western feel?  The church is, in fact, built according to the canons of Sicilian-Norman architecture; it is a Romanesque church which externally resembles oriental buildings. If in Istanbul the Moslems took the Byzantine Santa Sofia as their model for their Blue Mosque then in Palermo the Normans took Arabic architecture as the model for their church. If only religions could collaborate as closely in their theology as in their architecture! May art always defeat war!

San Giovanni, characterized on the outside by red domes, leaning with one side against a front square body, is in the shape of a cross divided into square spans on each of which rests a hemisphere. The presbytery, ending in a niche, is surmounted by a dome, like that of the two quadrangular bodies that flank it and of which the one on the left raises to a bell tower.

The unroofed cloister, embellished by a luxuriant garden, is the best preserved part of the primitive monastery; the paired columns with acanthus leaf capitals supporting ogival arches stand out for their beauty and lightness.

Where are we I wondered as I walked through this enchanted corner?  The earthly paradise, the faith we hold inwardly, may perhaps be created when two great religions like those of Christianity and Muslim faith unite in celebration of the transcendence of God. They certainly can do this in architecture. May we hope that they do this in the horribly divided world of today?

Mummy, mummy!

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This December 13th  it will be exactly one hundred years ago that Rosalia Lombardo died of the terrible Spanish flu pandemic that followed the end of the First World War. She was just a few days short of her second birthday yet, at her final resting place in the crypt of Palermo’s Capuchin cemetery, I saw a child as uncorrupted and as lovely as the day she died, thanks to master embalmer Alfredo Salafia who used a mixture of one part glycerine, one part formalin, saturated with zinc sulphate and zinc chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid.

Little Rosalia has been thus preserved for all those who descend into the cemetery’s crypt to admire her. She is surrounded by almost two thousand other mummified beings who can never hope to aspire to her charms having had less artful embalmers work upon them.  Some have their skins eaten by insects revealing their naked skull beneath. Others have their formerly fine funeral garments rotting in ghostly tatters on their dessicated flesh.  Those dead who received no remuneration for their upkeep from the family’s descendants have been stacked on shelves, removed from their original positions. Even in the afterlife one can still suffer bankruptcy…

Some people may say what a horrible sight it is to step through the cold damp corridors of an underground catacomb and gaze upon petrifying and putrefying corpses. Yet a previous age did not see things quite like this. Originally it was only capuchin monks who were privileged to be mummified in this way and placed in the weird crypt.  However, among the Palermitani it became a status symbol to be embalmed and remain in the company of the religious fraternity and so, at the end of the sixteenth century, the practice began. It was only in 1881, after sanitary warnings, that it began to die out and it was little Rosalia Lombardo who was the last embalmed in this fashion. Looking at her sweet self I could hardly envisage Rosalia to be now buried in the damp soil and to see her rosy cheeks eaten by worms and her body to be turned into dust.

The ’memento mori’ awakened by the Capuchin cemetery is indeed pulsatingly vivid. All too often we fail to remember that, as Prospero says in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”. Let us be reminded, however, that the only truly dead are those who have been forgotten. Even those upon whose sunken sockets one may still gaze today in Palermo’s cemetery are now mostly unremembered…

Stepping from the crepuscular gloom into the bright Palermo morning I visited the more conventional part of the cemetery with its marble tombs packed closely together. Among these I found the memorial of someone who will never be forgotten as long as humanity survives; one who encapsulates the Sicilian ethos better than most:  the enigmatic Conte di Lampedusa. Giuseppe Tomasi, the author of ‘Il Gattopardo’ – the Leopard (or more accurately, the Ocelot). With him lies his beloved wife Alexandra Wolff Stomersee of German Baltic descent, psychoanalyst by profession, whom he married in Riga and who survived the Count by twenty five years.

As Lampedusa said:

“Finché c’è morte c’è speranza”.

(As long as there’s death, there’s hope.)

Palermo’s Royal Mountain

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The supreme example of that Sicilian artistic style which combines Byzantine, Norman and Arabic influences is the cathedral of Monreale. Even if I’d seen pictures of its wonders before I was utterly and wondrously stunned when I entered into the womb of this majestic building.  Its somewhat unprepossessing exterior does not prepare one for what lies within it for the façade is flanked by two towers, one of which is ruinous and the neo classical portico is nothing special.

But step inside and hold your breath. The interior breathes radiance; it’s literally ablaze with golden light reflected in the thirteenth century mosaics which cover its nave.

The Old Testament is illustrated above the cathedral’s left aisle and the New Testament is exemplified on its right side.

These mosaics lead the eye to what must be one of the most powerful representations of Christ as Pantocrator or Creator of the Universe. It is so noble, so powerful I think that gazing upon it would convert momentarily even the most stubborn atheist…

For this was the aim of the building of Monreale: to demonstrate the great earthly power of the Norman dynasty married to the heavenly power of God: to impress and to inspire at the same time.  Almost a thousand years later it has not ceased to do this.

As my old English master at school recently commented to me “Monreale is one of the most impressive places I have ever seen” and this is  coming from a true world traveller…

If the cathedral is probably one of my top five cathedrals (could you choose your top five?  I leave you to guess what my other four are – one of them in England) then Monreale’s cloister has absolutely no paragon. Uniquely extraordinary and intimate in its effloresce of columns with each one crowned by own distinct capital and with that amiable fountain within its own mini cloister in one corner the cloister breathes angelic love of  beauty and truth.

Palermo’s Royal Chapel

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Sicily is not just the crossroads of western world civilization; it is its very roundabout and Palermo is at the centre. Founded by the Phoenicians, it became part of the Carthaginian Empire until Rome’s conquest. After the fall of  Rome Palermo  became part of the Byzantine Empire. It then joined the Arab world until conquered by the Normans who raised the city to its greatest heights of magnificence as capital of Sicily under King Ruggiero II. Spain subsequently ruled the city until it became part of the kingdom of the two Sicilies under the Bourbon dynasty.  Even the British had a hand in the island’s history: Nelson was proclaimed Duke of Bronte, a town on the slopes of Mount Etna. and Woodhouse established Marsala as a centre for fine wine equalling (if not surpassing) port and sherry. Eventually in 1860 Garibaldi appeared on the scene with his ‘thousand’ expedition conquering the island for the Savoy king Victor Emmanuel II who, in 1861, became the first king of the newly unified kingdom of Italy..

Sicily, however, never quite saw itself truly as part of a new Italian nation, a major theme in  that masterpiece of a novel, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard’ . The independence movement was transmuted by government propaganda into brigandage. Unscrupulous groups took advantage of the unrest and by the 1920’s the notorious mafia had established itself as an international criminal organization controlled in large part from the USA.

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The Second World War did not help; operation Husky signalled the onset of the retaking of Italy from Axis forces and Palermo suffered greatly from Allied bombardments.  Unrest followed in the post-war years and the mafia was central in the further demolition of beautiful villas and the cementification of orchards and parks with their replacement by abusive concrete monstrosities right up until the 1980’s in the interests of land speculation. Meanwhile, the historic centre of Palermo was left to rack and ruin and its panoply of supreme examples of ancient architecture neglected.

The assassination of the highly respected judge Falcone in 1992 by the mafia helped to concentrate the mind of the authorities upon endemic corruption and extortion  and I have every hope that Palermo will once again regain its position as one of the most beautiful cities in the world with its equable climate, its stupendous setting and its marvellous churches and villas.

Driving from the airport on our hired car we spotted this monument marking the place where the great judge Falcone and his agents were blown up by the mafia in the ‘strage di Capaci’ of 1992.

Palermo needs more than just the two days we had to enjoy it. However, it’s still possible to get the feel of this amazing city. After we’d booked into our hotel near the centre we decided to take a sortie around the Sicily and walked to Ballarò, Palermo’s historic market.

As in much of Sicily we were constantly stunned by the juxtaposition of magnificence and squalor. I was reminded of a similar feeling when in India. Yet walking in the multi-ethnicity of these quarters by night I was entranced by the friendliness we met and felt rather safer than we have done in, say, London’s New Cross.

The following day we visited the Norman palace, the seat of the Sicilian Regional Assembly. The palace is the oldest royal residence in Europe, home to the kings of the Kingdom of Sicily, the imperial seat with Frederick II and Conrad IV and the historic Sicilian Parliament. We were cordially shown round the assembly chamber and the inner courtyard.

The palace’s highlight, however, is its royal chapel – a stunning piece of Arab-byzantine-Norman architecture, the likes of which I had never quite seen anywhere else before. This breathtakingly beautiful building was started in 1129 at the command of King Roger II of Sicily, and 1140 became the private chapel of the royal family.

The Cappella Palatina combines three main strands of architecture. Byzantine in the mosaics:

Norman in the arches:

And Arabic in the ceiling niches known as Muqarnas:

and which I had ever only come across when I visited the ladies’ mosque in Isfahan, Iran.

Palermo’s Royal Chapel is truly one of the most ecstatic places I have ever seen in my life. No wonder it is a UNESCO world heritage site!

The elaborate cosmatesque work of the floor is yet another extraordinary feature:

And we still had to see two other similar sites of equally dazzling magnificence….

After just one morning I was already beginning to suffer from ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ which is defined as “a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty”. Would I make it to see the wonder of Monreale?

Saint Rosalia and the Plague

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“He who has not visited Sicily does not know Italy” said the great German, poet, naturalist, novelist, dramatist and general universal man, Goethe.

Following his advice, just after Christmas of 2011 we took a flight from Pisa to Palermo on the three-cornered Island. We’d previously visited Sicily on separate occasions but never together. Sandra had been to Erice as interpreter for a professional visit. I had first seen Sicily in the early sixties when my Uncle was university lecturer in French literature at the University of Catania. It was an invitation from the guardian of Vicopisano fortress, Giovanni Ranieri Fascetti, to visit his friends’ family in Syracuse for the New Year that prompted us to revisit the island .

We hired a car from Palermo airport and had a breakfast by the beautiful seacoast known as the ‘Conca Doro’ (the golden bay) before deciding to follow the road up Monte Pellegrino to the sanctuary of the city’s patroness, Santa Rosalia.

She was a twelfth century woman, born in an aristocratic family who, forsaking marriage and a courtly life, decided to become a hermit and spent the rest of her life as an anchorite in a cave on the hill which dominates Palermo to the west.

In the seventeenth century Rosalia’s remains were rediscovered and paraded through the city’s streets during a pandemic. Miraculously her presence wiped away the plague that was decimating the population. From that moment on Saint Rosalia’s shrine has become a popular place of pilgrimage attracting people from all over the world.

Among these was the great Goethe himself who, on setting eyes on the sweet effigy of the Saint in the grotto over which the sanctuary has been built, wrote in a letter home:

By the light of some dull lamps I caught sight of a lovely female form. She lay seemingly in a state of ecstasy—the eyes half-closed, the head leaning carelessly on her right hand, which was adorned with many rings. I could not sufficiently discern her face, but it seemed to be peculiarly charming. Her robe was made of gilded metal, which imitated excellently a texture wrought with gold. The head and hands were of white marble. I cannot say that the whole was in the lofty style, still it was executed so naturally and so pleasingly that one almost fancied it must breathe and move. A little angel stands near her, and with a bunch of lilies in his hand appears to be fanning her.

I don’t think I could have put this description any better – especially as it came from Goethe!

We left the shrine and began our descent down Monte Pellegrino. The wondrous city of Palermo lay spread out before us, its treasures waiting for our discovery of them.