The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

This was typical. Italians seldom spoke ill of each other. Compliments warded off aggression, and while Italians could be seriously quarrelsome when they were cross, they got no satisfaction in carping, and were not interested in nit-picking, which was why chatting to them was nearly always a pleasure. Of the Calabrese they said, “They’re like us!” Of Neapolitans, they said, “Musical people!” Of Romans, “Clever! Cultured!” They knew that putting it mildly Sicily had its problems of underdevelopment and poverty and organized crime, and so they were not quick to judge other parts of Italy. The worst they would venture was something like, “Up north? It is very hard sometimes to understand the way they speak.”

The exaggerated attention in Siracusa as in much of Italy was this guff about Greeks and Romans, all glory and harmony, and then silence, as though nothing else had happened in the last two thousand years. Nothing about the years of lecherous and satanic popes settling into big feather beds with their mistresses and fondling them under gilt crucifixes, or plotting murder, stranglings and poisonings in the Vatican cellars. Never a word about Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who commercialized the papacy and sold pardons, and who had a hooligan son by one of his mistresses whom he set up in style; nothing about Pope Alexander VI and his seven children, one of whom was Lucrezia Borgia, another Cesare Borgia, who was made a cardinal, along with his uncle. Apart from the poisonings and murders, one of the highlights of Alexander VI’s papacy was a bullfight that was held in the piazza of St. Peter’s to celebrate a victory over the Moors. Nor anything about Leo X, who handed out cardinals’ hats to his cousins, or Sixtus IV, another murderer. Not relevant? But surely these were the ancestors and inspiration for Padre Carmelo and his Mafia monks at the Franciscan monastery in Mazzarino.
The Middle Ages had not occurred. There was never anything about the centuries of rape and pillaging, cities destroyed by hairy Vandals or Ostrogoths in furry pelts; nothing about bubonic plague or cholera, nothing about the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufens, who goose-stepped all over Sicily, nothing about those religious fanatics and show-offs, the Crusaders, who went clanking around the island in their rusty suits of armor building castles and sniffing out Muslims to murder for Christ, nothing about Muslims and their weird depredations (though the occasional mutter about “Saracens”), nothing about the Jewish expulsions, the cruelty and intrigues, little villagers ratting on the local rabbi and then seeing the old bearded Jew carted off or tortured; and never anything about the war that ended just the other day, how they had changed sides; and nothing about their cowardly little dictator—just the mentioning of his name in polite company was immeasurably worse than farting.
“Never mind Mussolini, look at the exquisite statue of Archimedes,” was the exhortation of people who couldn’t put two and two together. Or it was classical trivia: “Archimedes said ‘Eureka!’ in Siracusa,” or, “The philosopher Plato was made a slave in Siracusa!” the Siracusans said, which was just about all they knew of Plato.

The most Sicilian of Sicilian words, known and used throughout the world, is mafia. It is identical to the obsolete Arabic word mafyá, meaning “place of shade,” shade in this sense indicating refuge, and is almost certainly derived from it. Norman Lewis describes in his 1964 book about the Mafia, The Honored Society, how, after the orderliness of Saracen rule in Sicily was obliterated by the Normans in the eleventh century, Sicily became feudalistic. “Most of the Arab small-holders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia.’ ” It became an alternative—and secret—system of justice, society and protection; a refuge.

All areas of Italian life, even the Church, had been penetrated by the Mafia. In 1962, the Franciscan monks of the monastery of Mazzarino in central Sicily were put on trial, charged with extortion, embezzlement, theft, and murder. The prior, Padre Carmelo, was the capo of this band of Mafia monks. He was a sinister, sprightly man—greedy and libidinous, with Mazzarino in his foxy jaws. The monks were eventually found guilty of most of the charges at their trial in Messina. And it emerged that what was perhaps the most surprising aspect of their criminality was that it had not interfered with their religious routines. The fact that they entertained prostitutes, and ordered killings, and amassed large sums of money in their extortionate activities never prevented their hearing confessions, saying masses, or preaching at funerals—in at least one case, the monk in question saying a funeral high mass and preaching piously over the body of a man he had ordered killed.

In travel, as in most exertions, timing is everything. There is the question of weather; of seasons. In the winter Corsica was stark and dramatic, the mountains were snowier, the valleys rainier; at the coast the tourist tide was out. Traveling to places at unfashionable times, I always think of the Graham Greene short story “Cheap in August,” or Mann’s Death in Venice. All I had to do was show up. I never had to make a reservation. I liked Corsica’s cold days of dazzling sunshine, its cliffs of glittering granite, the blue sky after a day of drizzle, its lonely roads. It was an island absent of any sense of urgency. I could somehow claim it and make it my own.

I liked being out on the blue Mediterranean, among the sailboats, again that feeling of being at the edge of the sea that obliterated any clear idea of nationhood—the ports having mixed populations and a common destiny, living by the sea.
“The Mediterranean is beautiful in a different way from the ocean, but it is as beautiful,” Victor Hugo wrote on a visit to Marseilles. He made some pleasing distinctions. “The ocean has its clouds, its fogs, its glaucous glassy billows, its sand dunes in Flanders, its immense vaults, its magnificent tides. The Mediterranean lies wholly under the sun; you feel it by the inexpressible unity that lies at the foundation of its beauty. It has a tawny stern coast, the hills and rocks of which seem rounded or sculptured by Phidias, so harmoniously is the shore wedded to gracefulness.”