Sicily in the spring

I've just returned from a week-long holiday in Sicily – four days in Syracuse (Siracusa) and three in Palermo – and thought I would record some impressions.

Studying the Blue Guide to Sicily on the plane already gave me an impression of the island as offering almost a crash course in architectural history. (The book itself, like a lot of older guidebooks, is rich in detail and judgement about art and architecture, but deals with restaurants and transport in a few throwaway sentences; very different from the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides our generation has got used to!) Sicily has examples of every style from Doric temples to Baroque, and even some good modern design (the Venetian Carlo Scarpa, an unfairly talented designer who could sketch with both hands simultaneously, left his distinguished mark on the Palazzo Abbatis in Palermo). What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the impact of these styles being layered on top of or mixed up with each other. The duomo in Syracuse is a strange architectural palimpsest: to see the columns of a Greek temple emerging from the wall of a Romanesque church is a truly uncanny experience, not at all a successfully “unified” one of course, but a sort of perceptual flicker between feeling oneself loosely surrounded by spaced rows of ancient columns and tightly bound in by thick Norman walls. The façade is Baroque, recently restored to gleaming splendour at the centre of the main piazza. Some examples of this eclecticism, on the other hand, verge on the nauseating: La Martorana in Palermo had many of its Byzantine mosaics obliterated and replaced by Baroque fresco, styles that really have nothing in common with one another, and in juxtaposition produce a sort of fairground gaudiness.

Another effect of the passage of history could be felt in the texture of the stone used for many of the buildings and sculptures – the light, friable, originally volcanic tufa. It erodes easily and becomes “sunburnt”, so that the Baroque town of Noto, which is almost all built from it, is now after a few centuries almost the colour of apricots:

Meanwhile the ornamentation on the facades – once perhaps as crisp and dazzling as some of the churches in Rome – has become soft and fuzzy, as if it had lain underwater or become overgrown with some organic substance. (This impression of calcification, of living growth and movement arrested yet preserved, is striking travelling through the landscape of central Sicily. Lampedusa in his great Sicilian novel The Leopard described it as "comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.") One bust in tufa of an old man that I saw in the archaeological museum in Syracuse had been dredged up from the bay, which can only have accentuated its boniness, the sunken cheeks and ridged brow. Of the more ancient of these sculptures scarcely anything of the form remains – the friezes from “Temple E” at Selinunte, now in the archaeological museum in Palermo, are decayed beyond recognition. The effect is haunting in conjunction with the knowledge that Selinunte itself (which I did not visit) was once one of the largest cities in the ancient world, a Greek colony with its own “acropolis” of five temples and a population of 100,000; it was (e)rased in three catastrophes, sackings by the Carthaginians and Romans and then an earthquake in the medieval period as coup de grace. The lust for utter destruction, apparently without reasoned or ideological motives, must be one of the most regrettable and incomprehensible things about the ancient world. One would love to know more about the lost cities of Tyre and Carthage (brutally sacked by Alexander and the Romans respectively), and the seafaring Phoenician civilisation that produced them, whose language was so similar to Hebrew that they were mutually intelligible and which left us the word “Bible” (the Greek root biblos is from the name of the Phoenician city Byblos, famous for its papyri).

Papyri were one of the many things on this trip that reminded me of the East, in this case of Egypt. Near the Fonte Aretusa (the subject of Greek myth and a Latin ode by Horace), with its clump of papyrus plants:

we also found what looked uncannily like a banyan tree, with its aerial roots that drop down and fix themselves in the soil to form (given time) new “trunks”. (Calcutta’s botanical gardens have one of the largest examples in the world: it gives the impression of entering a small forest, and indeed the tree is so old and the secondary trunks so numerous that the original central stem has died away.) In fact it was not a banyan, but an originally Australian member of the same genus (Ficus microcarpa): in the Piazza Garibaldi in Palermo were two century-old exemplars. Their twisted branches look disturbingly animal, like muscles or tentacles:

Then there are the fruits: the loquats (Italian nespole), indigenous to China and already ripe in April in Sicily, with an acidic but sweet flavour, not at all bitter; the oranges, which were still bitter and unripe, at least when plucked from the tree; and the chinotto, also thought to be originally Chinese (hence the name), and available everywhere as a type of Fanta, which looks like Coca-Cola but is much more herby and interesting. Almonds are common, processed into milk as well as a very tasty granita, which may well have had a dash of almond liqueur when I tried it (although the owner of the gelateria wasn’t letting on).

The most intriguing example of eastern influence is by a long way the art of medieval Sicily. Here stylistic mixing is unquestionably successful on every level: the styles reflect the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Norman kingdom that produced the great cathedral at Monreale near Palermo, as well as the many smaller churches and palazzi in Palermo itself. Many of these have a serene and dignified simplicity one would perhaps not associate with an eclectic approach:

Monreale is however a good deal less restrained. Inside a Romanesque structure, the iconic art of Byzantine mosaic, dazzling and affectingly naïve at the same time, crowns a dado striped with the elegant, aniconic, geometrical patterns of Arabic art. These are echoed in the columns of the cloister and burst out in the splendid exterior of the apse:

More subtle but also more daring was the geometrical sensibility I believed I could feel in a Sicilian painting of the later medieval era, the anonymous Triumph of Death in the Palazzo Abbatis. Across the swathe of collapsing figures down the right side of the picture the trapezoidal motif of the fountain at the top seems to be echoed in tiny details of drawing, from foreheads to eyelids to lips, all with delicately raised corners. And yet this fascination with abstract “lines of beauty” was present side-by-side with naturalistic, fully modelled and directly expressive figures of an almost Renaissance type. The composition as a whole does not “work” but this does not matter in the least: it is there, like a tapestry, entirely for the sake of the details.

Such a richness of styles and aesthetics made me curious about the culture which produced this artistic flourishing. So on my return I did a little reading, and discovered a historical personality of a cosmopolitan and enlightened cast of mind such as one simply doesn’t expect to meet with in the medieval era (if one isn’t a medievalist, I suppose). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi (the astonishment of the world) and ruling much of it himself from Palermo, was half-German and half-Sicilian, combining a rough and energetic temperament with indefatigable curiosity about the arts and sciences. His education, which was eclectic and largely self-conducted due to political circumstances and the early death of his mother, took place in and was formed by Palermo in the late twelfth century, of which his early twentieth-century German biographer Ernst Kantorowicz gives a wonderfully poetic sketch:

“unsupervised, the eight-, nine-year-old boy roamed through the alleys, markets and gardens of the half-African capital at the foot of Mt Pellegrino, where a bewildering variety of peoples, religions and customs interpenetrated: mosques with their minarets and synagogues with their domes stood there next to Norman churches and cathedrals, that in turn were decorated with golden mosaics by Byzantine masters, and whose structure incorporated Greek columns in which Saracens had engraved the name of Allah in Kufic letters. Round about the city in the exotic gardens and vivaria of the Conca d’oro lay the summer palaces and fountains of the Norman kings that once so enraptured the Arabic poets, and in the markets the people in all their colourful variety went about their business: Normans, Italians, Saracens, Germans, Jews and Greeks. The youth depended on intercourse with all of these and soon learnt their customs and languages. Perhaps there for some time a wise imam might have taken over the direction of the youth’s education…we do not know.” (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Munich 1961 [1927], pp. 30-1)

One should interpolate here that Kantorowicz, a member of the poetical circle of Stefan George, was much criticised by other historians for this sort of speculative description, however successful it was in conjuring up the “tone” of the period. What seems to be more generally accepted is that Frederick’s open-minded attitude and cultural and linguistic adaptability (he spoke half a dozen languages) had a great deal to do with his environment as an adolescent, for no other European monarch or kingdom of this era came close to it. The court he eventually established in Palermo included figures from many countries and areas of scholarship: Michael the Scot, an astronomer learned in Hebrew and Arabic, who was assisted by the Provencal Jew Jacob ben Anatoli in translating Aristotle; the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, who introduced the modern system of Arabic numerals to Europe from Algeria; or the Italo-Byzantine poet John Grasso, who produced violent tragedies on classical Greek models. Frederick himself corresponded with Arabs and Jewish scholars in Spain, wrote a Latin treatise on falconry with some unusually accurate illustrations, and sponsored and allegedly contributed to the first school of Italian poetry, the “Sicilian school”, which fixed Italian as a literary language for the first time and coincidentally gave birth to the most prestigious European lyric form, the sonnet. (Given Dante’s acknowledged debt to Sicilian sources in his efforts to establish the dignity of the Italian vernacular, it seems rather ungrateful of him to cast Frederick into the sixth circle of his Inferno as an “Epicurean heretic”.)

Still more surprising was Frederick’s attitude to religion. He seems to have been more or less atheist according to many sources (one of which, quoted by Thomas Curtis van Cleve, lists his many talents and virtues, and concludes that he would have been a great Christian emperor – if he had only been Christian!), merely jovially sceptical according to others, and at all events tolerant and respectful of Judaic and Islamic tradition (the robe he wore at his coronation was embroidered in Kufic script). This emerged most strongly when he was called upon to do the duty of a medieval emperor and lead a crusade. The venture scarcely got off the ground before Frederick was excommunicated by the pope (twice!), thus nullifying the sacred purpose of the entire expedition. When he arrived at Jerusalem, accompanied by his Arab tutor and a small army containing Saracens alongside Christians, he spent five months in friendly negotiations and feasting with the Egyptian sultan in control of the city, Al-Kamil, reportedly enjoying hearing the call of the muezzin in the morning, and finally signed a truce by which he crowned himself “King of Jerusalem”. He then left and the city returned to Muslim control a few years afterwards. It was apparently the only “successful” crusade since the first – and considerably less bloody than any.

This cosmopolitanism went hand-in-hand with a rational and highly inquisitive attitude to knowledge: van Cleve notes that “it was [his] quality of cosmopolitanism, together with his intellectual honesty – his insistent search for truth as opposed to tradition – that was so clearly expressed in Frederick’s alleged remark: ‘One should accept as truth only that which is proved by the force of reason and by nature.’” (p. 305) Although many texts by Aristotle were translated (with their Arabic commentaries) at his court, he did not treat them as the quasi-infallible word of “The Philosopher” that they became for later Christian thinkers, but felt quite free to disagree with the Greek sage when he felt his own observations were superior, especially on his favourite topic of falconry.

One wonders why this episode in history has not received more attention, given the current debate about Islamic-Christian relations. (I could find hardly any literature devoted to it on the shelves of the major London bookshops, and David Abulafia’s soberly critical effort at debunking the Frederick “myth” is the only biography available via Amazon.) It seems to provide another strong example of how close contact between cultures and religions, even on an unequal and authoritarian basis (which Frederick’s rule was, after all), is not only socially viable but can foster many virtues: tolerance, intellectual curiosity and independence, and artistic inventiveness. Other examples would be the court of the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar in India, or late-twentieth-century New York: Norman Sicily would I think bear comparison with these.

I suppose I shouldn’t end an entry on Sicily without some mention of the Mafia, but to be honest, it didn’t really inform my experience of the trip to any great degree (in contrast to my brother, who’s at the age where it exercises enormous fascination, and imagined mafiosi around every corner). There were a few reminders of its continuing grip in Palermo: fly-posted stickers urging resistance to the pizzo (the “tax” or protection money shopkeepers pay), and a large iron monument near the harbour dedicated to “those fallen in the struggle against the Mafia” ( – one wondered how much bravery even the erection of the monument itself must have demanded). All that really came across was a certain aspect of the Sicilian temperament that I imagined as belonging to that way of life – an occasional tight-lipped, unforthcoming, almost owlish air to people (maybe here I’m merely recollecting the title of Leonardo Sciascia’s, the Sicilian crime novelist’s, most famous book, The Day of the Owl – but another story of his, Equal Danger, had some of this quality in its oblique style). On the other side, an almost childishly direct and naïve quality was equally evident, in the faces and animated conversations of pensioners on the bus to Monreale, in some of the art, or the ceramics with their bright colours and smiling suns – as if Sicily was after all a beamingly happy country, unafflicted by poverty, corruption and social ills. Perhaps that very contrast of temperaments is what is characteristically Sicilian. I would have to spend longer there to find out.