Reader’s Digest
102 february 2020
the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, where
the embalmed corpses of monks
and city prelates hang from hooks.
One such tour, through the shabby
grandeur of the streets radiating from
the Quattro Canti—a grand, rounded
intersection of elaborate balconies
and cornices—which should have
lasted 30 minutes, becomes an hour
(roadworks, the milling of pedes-
trians). A furious argument rages
between driver and tourist, and the
police get involved, making flambo-
yant gestures in everyone’s direction.
You feel sure it will end with a swipe
on someone’s temple. But as usual
it dissipates to nothing, overlooked,
as everything in this city is, by stone
saints and shrines to the Virgin, who
is to be found even in the knife shop
off the Piazza Caracciolo with her
eyes raised in a peasant’s ecstasy,
surrounded by a halo of candles and
meat cleavers.M
y friends Luca and Do-
menico tell me that whenever
they pass a derelict building
in the city, they feel a mounting rage.
To the English, such a thing is an ab-
surdly romantic prop of the past, but
to a Sicilian it is an expression of the
foulest moral decay. The mafia, for so
long in control of the construction in-
dustry here, cares only for quick-buck
new buildings, not old. They would
raze the entire city to the ground if
they could, rages Domenico, and stick
up a forest of brutalist high-rises, likethey already have in what remains
of the olive and lemon groves that
enclosed the old city walls. Mafia,
mafia, mafia. It is the secret litany of
every exchange.
In the afternoon, off the Piazza
della Kalsa, I watch the evening begin.
At 4 p.m. come the swallows in a
rapid, swooping carnival. At 5 p.m.
a man starts frying cockles in a caul-
dron. At 6 p.m. another man makes
his chickpea pancakes for a few cents
each, and people queue to trans-
port bags of them away on Vespas.
At 7 p.m. fresh swordfish is put on ice,
and braziers are lit outside restaurants
in readiness for early diners.
From the open doors of a nearby
church comes the sound of choir
practice. A waiter tells me that this is
the choir of a priest once cherished for
his ability to heal, for the laying on of
hands. Apparently, some years ago he
had gone to prison in connection with
celebrating Mass with a mafia fugitive.
“He has changed,” says the waiter
solemnly. “Now he is sad.”
Struck by their seriousness in con-
trast to the wacky Neapolitans, I once
asked Luca if he thought Sicilians
were pessimistic. “Oh no,” he said,
carefully shaking his head, “not pessi-
mistic. But our wisdom lies in expect-
ing the worst.” You can feel this grief in
the churches. The statue of a spindly
Christ with deep welts in his knees in
La Gancia on the Via Alloro. The fake
head in a glass case a couple of cha-
pels along, made to look like Christ