Tesserae - 7 - Lucca, Tuscany

"O Soave Fanciulla......"

In Puccini's opera La Boheme, Rodolfo, a poet living in a freezing garret in the Latin Quarter of Paris, meets Mimi, an embroideress who lives in the same building.  He is struck by her pale beauty, and having held her frozen hand for a moment, sings:

O soave fanciulla, o dolce viso

Di mite circonfuso alba lunar,

In te ravviso il sogno

Ch'io vorrei sempre sognar!

(Oh! sweet young girl! Oh, sweetest vision,

With moonlight bathing your pretty face!

The dream that I see in you is the dream I'll always dream!)

  

Puccini, who was born in Lucca in 1858, lived a bohemian life himself as a student in Milan, and was something of a womaniser, so La Boheme reflects some of his own experience.  But in a different way, the city of Lucca herself is a sweet girl.

She is not a grand city.  She has a population of approximately 90,000, but not all of these live within the 16th/17th century walls which surround the old town in an undamaged tree-shaded ring of 4.2 kilometres.  These walls, pierced by seven gates of different ages, provide a circuit to walk, jog or cycle, places to sit and rest, to chat, and the views over the city and out to the mountains beyond.  Nowhere in the world has quite such a facility and perhaps this accounts in part for the seeming well-being of the inhabitants.

Within these walls crowd churches, palaces, shops and streets, all on the flat at 19 metres above sea level.  With very little traffic allowed, the bicycle is a favourite means of transport, and for visitors there are hire shops, and hotels provide bikes free for their guests.

  

The streets sing with people during the day, both on wheels and on feet, and these ravines offer respite from the Tuscan sun.  I can imagine Puccini, who only lived fifteen kilometres away at Torre del Lago at the height of his fame, puffing on a Toscano cigar, strolling about the town, dropping into a café for a glass of wine, casting an approving eye across the passing ladies, and humming O soave fanciulla! to himself.....

And not only those in the bloom of youth would have caught his attention.  Lucca is not young herself, and her people, and her visitors, all pick up a lightness as they relax in la dolce vita that imbues this place. 

Even when carrying a heavy gold bag filled with goodies from the market!

Or resting in the peace and shade of the Botanical Gardens.

This is a graceful town.  Tiny touches like these pots of basil on a window-sill (below) catch the Keatsian romance of the place.  Elegant shuttered windows embellish the buildings, and you can see how Puccini might have thought the whole town earned the adjective soave, with its meaning of gentleness, or delicacy, as well as with its connotations of the fragrant wine of the north.

The city is set amongst gentle hills, with a backdrop of rugged mountains.  The defences were planted with plane trees and chestnuts, holm oaks, beech and pine to hold the earthworks together within the red brick walls.  Even on top of the Giunigi tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, there are oak trees - lecce, or quercus ilex - planted by the family to symbolise regeneration.

Wherever you look, the red brick and marble, the green and blue shades of trees and distance, the scene is gentle.

Whether St Martin's Cathedral dominates the view (above) or you stand before the church of San Michele in Foro by day:

Or by night:

  

Or you look down on the buildings which have grown up in the shape of the Roman amphitheatre:

  

Or you stand within it:

Or you admire the raked rooftops and slender streets.....  Wherever you look, Lucca is indeed una soave fanciulla!

As an aside, Lucca has changed hands in terms of its rulers many times, from the Etruscans to Napoleon for example, and the delights of the area were particularly appreciated by the French, when Napoleon's sister, Elisa Baciocchi, found that the  nearby thermal baths, at Bagni di Lucca, some 20 kilometres from the city, suited her and her court.  However, after the 1814 Congress of Vienna, the Duchy of Lucca became the property of the Bourbon family, and for a while was favoured by the English.

 

And although the resort of Bagni di Lucca still thrives, it was in a house such as this, below, that Shelley spent some time in 1818, translating Plato's Symposium, while Byron may have gambled in the Casino. 

The river Lima flows past Ponte a Serraglio to join the Serchio which winds around Lucca on its way to the sea, 150 metres below.  This is beautiful Italy, and it is not surprising that poets have wanted to stay here.....

But back to Lucca herself.  The evening light strikes shadows down the streets:

And it is time to dine:

And the Trattoria da Giulio (Via delle Conce, 45) is the place to go.  A family run establishment (Giulio himself is now retired, but still drops in to see that all is well) this is gentle Italy at its very best.  I don't try the Tartara di Cavallo (Horsemeat Tartare), nor the Pulmone di Vitella in Umido (Stewed Veal Lung), nor even the Testina di Vitella Lessata (Boiled Veal Head) as a starter, but we do enjoy a caprese (mozzarella and tomato) salad, panzanella (bread and tomato salad), Tagliatella alla Contadina (home-made pasta with raw tomatoes, olives, olive oil and basil), Maccheroni Tortellati (flat pasta parcels filled with ricotta and spinach and served with a tuscan beef sauce) as well as local sausages with cannellini beans and Verdure Fritte (slices of courgettes and aubergines with courgette flowers, fried in a very light batter in the family's own olive oil).  And we try the Terre di Matraja Costa Toscano Bianco from the Fattoria Colle Verde, and finish with Vino Santo con Buccellato (Lucchese aniseed cake). 

Aaaah!

And then it is time to wander home.  The full moon bathing the city in her light, Puccini's o dolce viso/Di mite circonfuso alba lunar .

The dark streets lit subtly to highlight points of interest such as this fresco on the Porta San Gervasio:

And the façade of the Cathedral lit to guide us safely across the piazza:

With a different angle on the idea of una soave fanciulla:

Which reminds me of Ilaria del Carretto, whose marble effigy lies in the Cathedral. She was the second wife of the wealthy merchant, and ruler of Lucca, Paolo Giunigi.  She died in childbirth in 1405, and her tomb was created in marble by Jacopo della Quercia.  Some twenty five years after her death Paolo was driven from Lucca and the tomb was removed and damaged.  The effigy remains, however, and in the moonlight it is a most fitting representative of the soave fanciulla that is Lucca.

The Sicilian poet, Salvatore Quasimodo (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1959) paused before this likeness and wrote Davanti al simulacro d’Ilaria Del Carretto in his collection Ed e subito sera (Suddenly it's evening) in 1942 the title poem of which is:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

(Each one stands alone at the heart of the earth

transfixed by a ray of sunshine:

and suddenly it's evening.)

Quasimodo's musings before the likeness of the young bride are tender but his thoughts fly up, and out, to the paradoxes of love and life, and the sadness of death:

Sotto la terra luna già i tuoi colli,
lungo il Serchio fanciulle in vesti rosse
e turchine si muovono leggere.
Così al tuo dolce tempo, o cara, e Sirio
perde colore, e ogno ora s’allontana,
e il gabbiano s’infuria sulle spiagge
derelitte. Gli amanti vanno lieti
nell’aria di settembre, i loro gesti
accompagnano ombre di parole
che conosci. Non hanno pietà; e tu
tenuta dalla terra, che lamenti?
Sei qui rimasta sola. Il mio sussulto
forse è il tuo, uguale d’ira e di spavento.
Remoti i morti e più ancora i vivi,
i miei compagni vili e taciturni.

(Under the gentle moon the hills that were yours,

girls in red and turquoise dresses

move lightly along the river bank.

As in your time, dear, Sirius

pales, and drifts further away each hour,

and the seagull rages on the abandoned

beaches.  Lovers stroll happily

in the September air, their gestures

underlining echoes of words

that you know.  They have no pity.  And you

trapped here on earth, why are you sad?

You are left alone.  My tremor

is perhaps yours, equally angry and afraid.

The dead are remote, the living more so,

my companions mean and speechless.)

The idea of una soave fanciulla is not such a simple one.  The tinge of regret here beautifully captures the tranquillity of the effigy, and the stillness of Lucca under the moon.

  

Lucca is very much una dolce fanciulla.

[But there are also other metaphors within this..... 

Dammi il braccio, o mia piccina... ]



O soave fanciulla, o dolce viso

Di mite circonfuso alba lunar,

In te ravviso il sogno

Ch'io vorrei sempre sognar!

Amor, amor, amor!

For an interesting take on the effigy of Ilaria del Carretto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8ywrIvPbVM

And Mirella Freni as Mini and Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0-1sQ0XOGE

Sicily 2

Land of Hawks and Sparrows

Il Tempio di Giunone, Agrigento

We drive away from Etna, though cannot shed her looming shape from our mirrors.  The landscape rolls open and floral, as if we are wandering across wallpaper. A passage from the essential Sicilian novel, Il Gattopardo comes to mind:  L'aspetto di un'aridita ondulante all'infinito, in groppe sopra groppe, sconfortate e irrazionali delle quali la mente non poteva afferare le linee principali, concepite in una fase delirante della creazione; un mare che si fosse pietrificato in un attimo in cui un cambiamento di vento avesse reso dementi le onde. Or, as Archibald Colquhoun translated the last phrase: a sea suddenly petrified when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy. Ancient uninhibited fertility abounds at this time of year, so different from the scorched fields of summer or the wet cold of winter.

  

It is strangely quiet.  There are occasional vehicles but most are parked in impossible corners of towns, as if the possession of a parking space is more precious than any need for transport.  Our modest machine, incidentally the only Golf 1.6TD Cabriolet on the island, is perfect at curving and shifting and breezing and making the most of the extraordinary curls of stilted motorways and the steep narrow lanes of baroque town centres.  Everywhere we go we are waved and tooted at as being eccentric foreign visitors.  We are like exotic birds that have been blown off course.

And then we reach the coast, the southern face of the island, and there is no one there.  We are screamed at by swifts and croaked at by jackdaws nesting on the cliffs but no one else is around.  I park the car and draw my name in the sand with a stick.  The waters sparkle turquoise and azure, the rocks lie tanning themselves, like beached seals, the struts of incomplete buildings stand like bleached skeletons, pecked clean by vultures. A memorial to the 1943 landings reminds me that others have been here before, but no one else appears.

But it wasn't the 1943 landings that created Sicily, even though it may have legitimised the mafia.  There is another line from Il Gattopardo which refers to the waves of invaders in the past:  The macchia which clings to the hillsides maintains the same tangle of aromas which the Phoenicians,  the Dorians and the Ionians found when they landed in Sicily, that America of the past.

Il Tempio della Concordia, Agrigento

The Greeks came here about five hundred years before Christ was born.  That 'America of the past,' such a telling phrase, was fertile, wooded, available, and uncluttered.  Greece, pestered by Middle Eastern forces, was more populous and less arable.  No wonder that the New World became popular, and the colonies became powerful.   And no wonder that the potentates, such as tyrant Terone (488 - 473 BC), raised such impressive monuments as these temples at Akragas.

A Booted Eagle surveys the world about Agrigento

Nothing lasts forever, however, and in 406 BC the city was sacked and burnt by the Carthaginians.  Two hundred years later it became Agrigentum, under the Romans, and then, after the decline of the empire, it came under Bizantine rule, and then Arab, then Norman, then Spanish, and then Italian. Nothing here is Sicilian (if you avert your eyes from the crude and suspect concrete erections of the twentieth century).  Or, paradoxically, everything here is Sicilian, as in a certain sense all who land here are ensnared by the sirens or by the cyclops or simply by the climate and food and wine, and so become a part of the culture and the world of Sicily. But that world has always been divided, between Lords and serfs, or Hawks and Sparrows.  The rulers had left their mark in the great buildings, the extravagance and permanence of the powerful.  The serfs have left their mark, as they still do, in the stone walls and olive trees, the carobs and the sheep that are so characteristic of the island.

Tempio della Concordia, seen from that of Giunone

The small town of Naro, thirty-five kilometres from Agrigento, shows this well.  Surmounting the top of the hill, dominating the settlement and the valleys around, is the tightly sealed and impregnable nest of the hawkish landlords, the thirteenth century Castello del Chiaramonte, with cylindrical towers and square keep.  But then in the narrow lanes around there are the dilapidated and in some cases abandoned dwellings of the sparrows. 

Naro - Castello del Chiaramonte

Naro - medieval house

Naro - abandoned housing

I was asked the other day if I met any Mafiosi in Sicily. The answer is probably, yes, though it is not that they wear a badge. Like many fraternities, like the masons, they may have their secret signs and handshakes, but they do not necessarily advertise their allegiance. According to authorities, such as Norman Lewis, Cosa Nostra is a relatively new feature of Sicilian life (the word "mafia" was first recorded in 1668, but "mafiosi" did not appear until after Garibaldi coined it in 1861), but is also one that has changed radically in the last half century since the US deal with powerful Sicilian bosses in 1943 which helped liberate the island from German occupation, but which indirectly led to the world of drug trafficking.

The tradition of a mafia, however, was described by Tomasso Buscetta, the first and most famous of the Pentiti, [Repentents] in November 1992. Ognuno, ogni mafioso, ha una Famiglia numerosissima, e questa Famiglia ha altre Famiglie.....  Each individual, each mafioso, has a very large family, and that family has other family..... It is connection.....

I am not defending anything here; the many murders associated with the mafia, the drug dealing, the appallingly wasteful and disfiguring construction contracts, the political intrigue - the mafia is a criminal organisation and its leaders' talons are deeply stained with the blood of others.  The hawks bite the heads off sparrows.

It is difficult to read about Sicily without reading about the Mafia.  Mary Taylor Simeti's book, On Persephone's Island, essentially a journal of family life with much about the seasons and agriculture, refers to threatening phone calls, exploding gas cylinders, a residual fear that nothing is absolutely secure which imbues existence with a particular paranoia.  Shortly before his death, at the hands of the Mafia, Giovanni Falcone, Director of Penal Division in the Ministry of Justice, said this in an interview:  Solitude, pessimism, death are the themes of our literature from Pirandello to Sciascia. It is as if we were people who have lived too long and all of a sudden feel tired, drained, emptied, like Don Fabrizio in Tomasi di Lampedusa [The Leopard]. Affinities between Sicily and the Mafia are many.  His point was that the Mafia was the "culture of death," and that this was  applicable to all things Sicilian.

More abandoned housing in Naro.  Empty nests.  
The population has halved in the last sixty years.

In The Mafia in Sicilian Literature, (New Academia Publishing, 2008) Corinna del Greco Lobner refers to Leonardo Sciascia's choice of, writers who have unveiled the secrets of the Sicilian people. There are several but Verga, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa dominate his choice. What Sciascia is suggesting is that in order to find out what the Mafia is really like readers must go to Sicilian literature. It is here that they will discover the importance of Mafioso behaviour that animates characters and situations as presented by Sicilian writers.

In a further paragraph, del Greco Lobner explains how complex and insidious the Mafia really is: the 1987 Palermo maxi-trial of 465 indicted Mafiosi delivered 342 convictions with sentences adding to a total of 2655 years in prison, not including the nineteen life terms adjudged to members of the cupola. It was not long, however, before business as usual resumed.  As recently as August 2003 the Italian government admitted the impossibility of eliminating the Mafia from the national scene and suggested some form of convivenza [cohabitation] to ease the tension and stabilize the situation which notes the ability of the Mafia’s adjustments to changing social and economic conditions (a factor constantly present in Sicilian literature), mix with ordinary people without creating specific problems for the Mafiosi, rely on intimidation and violence, and be faithful to oneself regardless of the circumstances. In short, to be and to remain la stessa cosa [the same thing] at all times. Even if frustrated, Italians have kept their sense of humor. They call Cosa Nostra – Casa Nostra (Our House).

Agriturismo Baglio San Nicola

And our house for a day or two is a restored masseria [farm] where the charming Santo Schembri and his wife look after us with meticulous care.  It may be something of a contradiction in the light of the above, but there is more to Sicily than the Mafia.  There is Nero d'avola, for example, a smooth red wine which goes perfectly with spicy sausages and fresh vegetables.  There is the scent of crushed fennel from the roadside verges; the sight of peach blossom in ranked orchards; wild flowers abound everywhere; bee eaters, swallows, swifts, peregrine falcons, booted eagles score the sky; magpies and hooded crows scour the fields.  

Borage amongst the hawkweeds and marigolds

And everywhere there are churches, often ornately baroque, with their revered saints and images within. Padre Pio is popular, but the Virgin Mary is omnipresent, receiving gifts and granting peace of mind to the faithful from innumerable shrines and chapels.

A Martyress in the Santuario di San Calogero, Naro

It is curious that this statue (above) is blonde, as this is not the natural Sicilian tint. Coincidentally certain other young women in Sicilian art are blonde as well.  In the magnificent Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina (constructed in the 3rd to 4th centuries AD) the mosaic floors tell of hunting, shooting and fishing, in grandiose style.  Pass-times as popular then as they were for Il Gattopardo, Don Fabrizio, in 1861.  There are beautiful geometric designs, pictures of beasts, gods, heroes and daily life and amongst the most delightful are those of a series of bikini clad ladies in the gym, toning themselves up and counteracting the effects of grand feasts.  They have golden hair, but I wonder if they were natural blondes?  Perhaps they were Greeks?

There is more to Sicily than the Mafia.  I may have met some Mafiosi, but we did not meet men with bloody hands, or witness the Lupara Bianca.  Yes we saw sparrows, and we saw hawks, but that is the way of the world, and to a certain extent we can co-exist.  

Sicily has produced a fair share of art, in several forms, and for a relatively small island two Nobel Prize Winners for Literature is not bad going. In 1934 it was the turn of Luigi Pirandello, author of The Late Mathias Pascal, Six Characters in search of an Author, and Henry IV, among other works. He was born and lived near Agrigento and was one of the twentieth century's greatest dramatists.

In 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo, another native Sicilian, was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation said that it was, for his poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time.

Street in Agrigentum

The wind is still there that I remember

kindling the manes of horses coursing

oblique among the plains; a wind

that stains and gnaws the sandstone and the heart

of the doleful telamons lying

felled on the grass.

Ancient soul grey with bitterness

you return with the wind, sniff

the delicate moss that clothes

the giants thrust down from the sky.....

Evening near Agrigento

There is more to Sicily than the mafia.  Even sparrows can be beautiful.....

A Reading List

Tomasi di Lampedusa: "Il Gattopardo"

Quasimodo: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Poets)

Luigi Pirandello:  "Six characters in search of an author."

Luigi Pirandello:  "Il fu Mattia Pascal"

Leonardo Sciascia:  "Una Storia Semplice"

Leonardo Sciascia: "Il giorno della civetta."

I Libri dell'Unita:  "Mafia e Potere"

I Libri dell'Unita:  "I Corleonesi: Mafia e sistema eversivo."

Mary Taylor Simeti:  "On Persephone's Island."

Norman Lewis:  "In Sicily"

Vincent Cronin:  "The Golden Honeycomb."

Lawrence Durrell: "Sicilian Carousel."

Norman Lewis:  "The Honoured Society."

Giovanni Verga (translated by D H Lawrence):  Short Sicilian Novels

"Sicily through writers' eyes" - Horatio Clare

Where we stayed:

http://www.agriturismo.it/en/farmhouse/sicily/agrigento/BaglioSanNicola-3960340/index.html