Tripping the world, slowly
Moments of racial absurdity: “What are you, black or white?” As if I had a choice.
Namwali Serpell, in an article on Toni Morrison
The church of Saint John the Hermit in Palermo is said to be a refurbished mosque. When you see the use of light and air in the spaces within it seems hard to argue with this assessment. Light like this calls for a monochrome treatment.
The Benedictine Cloister of Monreale is a card left over on the table from a political game played in the 12th century CE. William II of Sicily was based in Palermo and had differences with the bishop of the city. His plan was to reduce the power of the bishop by building a new cathedral nearby. Since he did not have the power to do this, he built a cloister for a hundred Benedictine monks and a grand church for them next to the monastery. These were completed in 1174. If you visit the church you can see a mosaic of the pope of the day among the saints who are depicted. The successor declared this to be a cathedral. It became the main cathedral of Sicily and remained under the control of the king.
Knowing this does not directly help in appreciating the artwork of the two buildings. What it does is to help you understand why the work is so lavish, and why these two buildings stand cheek to jowl. When I saw these two photos of the cloister taken by The Family, I had the same feeling. She had taken the two more or less from the same spot above the ground, at different heights. I find the closer one more beautiful, but the one from higher up gives a better understanding of the terrain, and how difficult the construction would have been.
A small church with a long name, Chiesa Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani, lay on our route from our B&B to the cathedral in Messina. I’d taken a brief look at the listing, which said that it was built over the remains of an old temple to Neptune. As we walked towards it, this seemed to be only a small part of the story. The structure that was visible from the road looked like the mixture of Byzantine and Islamic architecture that is commonplace in Turkey. What was it doing here?
The apse of the church lies well below street level, and we had to climb down some stairs to reach it. The facade visible from the courtyard looked entirely Islamic. The pillars and arches of one door could have been transplanted anywhere in the Maghrib and would have fitted in. Another door, adjacent to a broken wall, bore some resemblance to the Norman details that we’d begun to see in Sicily.
Inside, the church had the look of a Byzantine building restored by Islamic architects, exactly as I’d thought. If this was built over an older Greek temple to Poseidon, as is claimed, then I did not notice the remnants of that older structure. The church was about to be closed, and I had to hurry out. The Family said, “It was quiet inside, and full of light.” Yes, except for the man who was trying to end his working day on time.
A story for Esther: The chimney was the first part of the house to cave in. He enjoyed watching old houses sparkle and blaze. No point in being naughty unless you loved what you did.
Before Rembrandt and Velazquez, before Bernini and Rubens, there was Caravaggio. He established himself as a major artist in Rome, but murdered someone in a street brawl and had to flee to Naples, and from there to Malta. On his way back to the Italian mainland, where he died, he passed through Sicily. He had his first commission on the island in Siracuse. We walked to the little church, Santuario di Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, which is now famous because of his giant canvas depicting the Death of St Lucy.
I haven’t seen many of the late paintings by Caravaggio, and this was a good place to sit and concentrate on one. The painting seems bottom heavy. About half of the canvas, the top half, is taken up by an empty wall with half of an arch. It has been interpreted in many ways. While it definitely has the merit of focussing attention on the action in the bottom half, which is closer to the viewer, Caravaggio’s focus on getting back to Rome quickly should not be forgotten. He painted this canvas quickly and left town before it was unveiled. I looked through the camera lens at the details, and was surprised by the artist’s simple observation that in moments of grief, people are more focused on themselves than on the person they are mourning. Only the gravediggers are in the moment, looking at each other, as their work demands.
One day The Family woke up and told me “We are walking enough all day to burn off any calories that we may take in these Sicilian sweets.” Our evenings changed after that. We continued to eat all the sweets and coffee that we had before, but now without the sense of guilt and impending catastrophe.
From this period of our trip through Sicily I remember three wonderful pasticeria. One was inside the monastery of Santa Caterina in Palermo. This was a rather traditional sweet shop which said it made very traditional recipes. We got a traditional cassata from them, topped with fruits, a biscuit filled with traditional ricotta cream, and a new-fangled pistachio and almond cassata along with the coffee. The Family asked “Why did you order a third thing?” “We’ve walked more than usual today,” I told her.
The previous day we’d taken the bus to Monreale, walked up the steep hill, walked through a monastery and a church, and climbed many steps. We deserved a sweet immediately after lunch. Right outside the cathedral was a busy gelateria. One display had what you see in the photo above. A cannoli right after lunch? Why not? And a lage bread with ricotta cream piped into it. Nothing that a ristretto can’t put right.
The third of the trio of wonderful pasticeria was Maria Grammatico’s in Erice. It’s so famous that several Sicilians told us to go there when they heard we were going to Erice. We sat with a plate of biscuits (see the featured photo) and coffee in the afternoon, resting our feet. The queue at the counter was long, but fortunately we’d been through it already. Later, at a less busy moment, I took a photo of the sweets on display. As a friend summarized later, “Sicily is famous for wonderful but somewhat heavy sweets.”
As a peripatetic paparazzo my life is hard. When I saw a post-church wedding celebration on the crowded roads of Palermo I had to clamber on to a jutting piece of wall to look over the heads of the people gathered to bear witness. I had to guess where the wedding guests, friends and family, shaded into gawkers, tourists, and paparazzi like me.
Once I’d got this all sorted out, I could concentrate on the proceedings. I got a clear line of sight to the happy couple at the center of the day, and at the genuine photographers. That made this a proper ambush photo. I got the photographers as well as their subject.
In this other case I started off being a proper ambush photographer. I saw a post-wedding shoot at the hotspot called Quattro Canti in Palermo and got in a first photo of the family and the photographer. It was only after that did I find the drama begin to unfold, as a drunk guest photobombed the shoot. I think it took the family a little longer than me to realize that they were being photo bombed. As we walked off, The Family and I disagreed about what had happened. I thought the drunk lady was a wedding guest, but The Family thought she was a tourist. What do you think?
When you are at a loose end, you could do worse than wend your way to Sicily and then to Monreale, where you will find the Benedictine cloister. It is a peaceful place, apart from the pigeons and influencers. There you can spend an afternoon admiring the arches with their pillars, and the superb capitals that the slender pillars are surmounted with.
Every visitor to the cloister comes away with a collection of photos of their favourite sculptures from these capitals. I don’t know most of the stories from the Bible, so I could ignore the narratives that the pillars provide and concentrate on the figures and forms. In the slide above, the featured photo, and the one below, I hope you will find pieces which are not mentioned by other bloggers, or even guidebooks.
There were quite a few capitals with sculptures of birds. Unfortunately the vandalism of the past thousand years has resulted in some of them being hacked away. I could almost recognize the birds that you see in this photo, but I wish there was more of the sculpture left for a definite identification.
No photos of granita yet, you say? Here’s one, the top layer of mango, and hidden under it, a layer of lemon. I love the flavour of lemon and always try to get a bite of it in every ice cream or granita I find. The lightness of a granita, essentially shaved ice sweetened and flavoured, made it my favourite dessert in Sicily. In India we would call it baraf gola. Most of the time I found the usual fruit flavoured granitas. The mango flavour was unexpectedly nice; mangos are grown on the slopes of Etna.
I kept asking for coffee flavoured granita, something that Montalbano has been known to eat with brioche. I didn’t find it anywhere Catania or Siracusa, probably because I hung around the more touristy parts of these towns. Finally in Messina, as non-touristy as you can get, I found a shop selling coffee flavoured granita. So we shared one, and had a cannoli on the side. I skipped the brioche. You can see the bunch from which our cannoli was taken in the photo above.
These decorations looked very good on a sunny wall in a back street of Palermo. I stopped to take a photo. The Family eyed the set up and said “It must be symbolic of something.” She has a better nose for such things than me. But if it is symbolic its meaning is not something I know. I can still look at it from an aesthetic point of view. After all we tourists are adept at going to a new place, and stopping in front of beautiful things, knowing fully well that someone has spent time in making it beautiful only because it has a symbolic meaning to them.
Erice is a lovely medieval town perched on a hilltop above the port of Trapani in Sicily. The town is charming, and the medieval festival that took place during our days there was a nice bonus. The Family loved going through the narrow streets and suddenly coming to a square bustling with activity.
I decided to put these two photos together. The first looks like a photo of a Capulet passing by a Montague house, or the other way around. The cold shoulders are palpable. The other is clearly an ill-matched couple, perhaps only during the festival, deeply in love.
One of the things that Erice is famous for is hand painted pottery. We saw many examples. Our favourite shop was this, where you could watch the young lady painting. I liked the way she caught the sunlight here. In the narrow streets of the town it is not easy to get sunlight at the street level.
Some more photos from the festival. The dance with the flags was The Family’s favourite surprise. The second surprise came when we were walking back after dinner one night and a priest went by with sentries in armour, followed by drummers and others dressed in medieval finery. What was that? Just a piece of street drama, I suppose.
Don't hold your breath 