The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily
264
The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily
264eBook
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Overview
In this sparkling book, Theresa Maggio takes us on a journey in search of Sicily's most remote and least explored mountain towns. Using her grandparents' ancestral village of Santa Margherita Belice as her base camp, she pores over old maps to plot her adventure, selecting as her targets the smallest dots with the most appealing names. Her travels take her to the small towns surrounding Mt. Etna, the volcanic islands of the Aeolian Sea, and the charming villages nestled in the Madonie Mountains.Whether she's writing about the unique pleasures of Sicilian street food, the damage wrought by molten lava, the ancient traditions of Sicilian bagpipers, or the religious processions that consume entire villages for days on end, Maggio succeeds in transporting readers to a wholly unfamiliar world, where almonds grow like weeds and the water tastes of stone.
In the stark but evocative prose that is her hallmark, Maggio enters the hearts and heads of Sicilians, unlocking the secrets of a tantalizingly complex culture. Although she makes frequent forays to villages near and far, she always returns to Santa Margherita, where she researches her family tree in the municipio, goes on adventures with her cousin Nella, and traces the town's past in history and literature. A beautifully wrought meditation on time and place, The Stone Boudoir will be treasured by all who love fine travel writing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619020269 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CIOLINO
I WAS ON A MISSION: to find the smallest mountain towns in Sicily. Tiny jewels, remote and isolated, these are places tourists seldom see. But they are the island's hidden treasure and the secret spring of Sicilian endurance.
One town led to another. I'd stare at my map, now flannel-soft at the edges, and look for a small dot with an appealing name. Then I'd get on a bus and go. That's how I came to Polizzi Generosa, a town of four thousand people teetering on a peak in the Madonie Mountains in north-central Sicily, a quiet world of mist and moss on old stones.
I liked Polizzi so much that I rented an apartment there for two weeks. One day I explained my search to Signora Riccobene, the grocer. "If you're looking for a small town," she said, "you must go to Locati." Her twin daughters, both pharmacists, owned a drugstore there. I checked my map; Locati didn't rate a dot. My kind of town. If I wanted to go, all I had to do was meet Antonietta and Rosaria at six the next morning, and they would drive me there.
For several days I made their pharmacy my base camp. There I met the black-shawled women and men bent over canes who came in to have their prescriptions filled. One thousand people lived in Locati, and soon only the old would be left; the young leave for school and desk jobs in the city. No one wants to be a farmer anymore.
Rosaria and Antonietta were kind to their aged customers and always listened to their sorrows. Seventy-year-old Signora Maria, a regular, had lived most of her life alone in a thatched stone hut in a village much smaller than Locati. A stroke had forced her to move to town three years before, but she still longed for her abandoned home in the wheatfields of Ciolino.
One afternoon the sisters planned a surprise. They closed up shop, picked up Signora Maria, and drove us to her old home. The summer landscape slid by under a matte, blue sky — tawny fields of wheat, fresh furrows of earth, the rustling gray-green crowns of olive trees. Signora Maria hadn't seen her cottage since she locked its door and left it. Slight, with blue eyes and gray hair, she stared out at the land and told us her life.
She had never married. A peasant farmer's only child, she lived with her parents on a dirt road in the middle of wide wheatfields. Her family was too poor to own a car, so when they needed supplies, her father took Maria on the donkey and walked to Locati, the closest town with stores. They had to wade across the river because there was no bridge. "It was all mud," she said. "When it rained, you couldn't walk."
Her father died when she was seven, leaving only the house and the donkey. Maria was heartbroken when her mother sold the beast and they waded one last time across the river to Locati, where there might be work. For the next two years, Maria's mother had heart trouble. Then she died, and Maria was alone. She walked back to Ciolino and raised herself in the thatched stone hut.
"I worked in the wheat harvest. They used to sing," she said as we wound past orchards of almonds and pears. Maria gleaned the fields, the miller ground her grain, and she baked round loaves in the communal domed brick oven at the end of her street. To give Maria a trade, a kindly woman taught her how to give injections painlessly. People paid her with pasta, bread, and sacks of grain. "We all respected one another," she said.
There were seventy families in her village then. At Carnevale, before Lent, they would dance until dawn. But Maria spent most of her time alone, cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, and washing for one. "You were a little girl," I said. "Did you ever have time for fun?" She did; in her spare time she memorized long folk poems. Once learned, a poem was hers forever, the one thing that couldn't be taken from her.
She was quiet a moment, then the words bubbled up from sixty years before, and Signora Maria began to recite a folk epic in rhymed, rhythmic quatrains. It told of heroes and villains and women in love, a story about courage and poverty, true friends and betrayal. She recited for ten minutes, as if in a trance, using stage whispers and shouts that once would have lured her neighbors to gather and listen.
The sign at the turn for Ciolino said: "Beyond this point the streets have no names." And as far as we could see, no trees and no houses, only the sinewy ripple of wheat stalks, plush as puma fur, in fields vast and golden. Now only twenty families remained, Signora Maria said.
Her old neighbors, who knew we were coming, met us at the door of the square stone house they had built and roofed with red tiles. They had abandoned their traditional straw-thatched hut years before for the conveniences of modern living. Signora Maria stepped out of the car and looked worriedly at her old house next door. It seemed to have sprouted from the ground and now was going back to it. The straw roof, once stiff as a broom, was bowed and rotting. When it buckled, the world it once sheltered, her girlhood, would be gone forever. Our hostess put her arm around Maria and led us into her own house to a trestle table laden with crusty bread, homemade cheese, plates of sliced mortadella, and bowls of black olives. Her husband, a farmer, opened a door off the dining room, flung his arm wide, and showed us his treasure: a storeroom stacked to the ceiling with plump burlap sacks of hard Sicilian durum.
Signora Maria ate little but waited politely until the table was cleared. Then she fished a skeleton key from her purse, walked to her cottage, pushed open the door, and stepped in.
The only light came through the cracks in the thatching. It was a single large room whose beamed ceiling came to a point high above its center. The beams rose from limestone-block walls built to chest level. The floor was smoothed cement. The rest of the house was of straw.
The neighbors, their son, the twins, and I traipsed about in this relic of another time. I lay on the floor and took pictures of the roof beams, then walked around taking notes. No one thought to leave Maria alone with her memories.
The house was as she had left it. Her bed was against the wall opposite the door, a quilt still folded at its foot. A broom leaned against the wall. Wooden vegetable crates had been her chest of drawers, a bedside table her only real furniture. A curtain on a clothesline divided the room. Her eyes followed a sunbeam up to the roof.
"When it rained, it never leaked," she said.
She led us to the outdoor kitchen she had built with her own hands — two stone walls with a tiled roof and an iron pot hung over a fire pit. Signora Maria had lived here without electricity or plumbing. There was the galvanized bucket she had used to haul water from the well; the tall terra-cotta amphora she had filled with oil, its pointed bottom snugged in a sand bed, as it would have been on a Phoenician trading ship; the white enameled bowl where she had bathed; the shard of mirror before which she had combed her hair; the fingernail brush on a hook. Niches carved in the wall were her dish drainers. A caned wooden chair, covered with cobwebs, was set in a corner.
Signora Maria was on her knees, searching with a broom handle for something under the bed.
With the broomstick she pulled out a brown leather book bag. She stood up, wiped the dust from it with her sleeve, and hugged it. She would not say what she thought was in it, and she would not open it before us.
A few days later I called the twins from a phone booth in Sperlinga, where some people still live in cave homes in a cliff. Rosaria answered the phone.
"What was in the book bag?" I asked.
"The poems," she said.
CHAPTER 2NANA AND PAPA
WHENEVER I FLY INTO PALERMO, the plane circles and dips over the powder-blue sea and I see the two-man fishing boats with their nets streaming like lace ribbons behind them. Low clouds cling like cherubim to the sides of Monte Pellegrino. The passengers always applaud when we touch ground. After they have been away for a while, Sicilians are as happy to be back on their island as I am.
Maybe I am so drawn to Sicily because I am half Sicilian and the island is hard-wired into my genes. Or maybe Sicily is a vortex that pulls some people in — a center of the universe, like the Omphalos at Delphi, a navel stone that connected some inner world to the outer. Here the bedrock hums with hidden energy. Sicilians use it to build their houses, churches, and streets. Their lives saturate the rock, carving niches, and pooling in the voids. Like water, the people taste of the stone that contains them. Sicily is a hard place to leave.
My father's parents emigrated from Santa Margherita Belice, in the mountains south of Palermo, at the beginning of the twentieth century. When she was twelve years old, Alfonsa Adamo said goodbye to her mother and younger sisters and left the island to live with relatives in Brooklyn. There, Giuseppe Maggio, her future husband, had rooms in the same building.
Papa, my grandfather, had red hair and china-blue eyes set in a pear-shaped face, but I knew him when his hair was white and he walked with crutches. He was a short, solid, stocky contadino, which means both peasant and farmer. Every fall he would weave a reed blanket for the fig tree so it wouldn't freeze in the northeastern winter. He made paper corn stalks and funny hats for my sisters and me from the comics section of the Daily News and always kept quarters for grandchildren under the kitchen tablecloth. He never learned to read or write his own language and I don't remember him speaking English, and he taught me to play checkers by never letting me win.
Nana was dark and strong and she was the real head of the family. In Santa Margherita she had attended a convent school where the nuns taught her sewing and how to speak and write proper Italian. Her mother ran a store where she sold bridal trousseaux, the cutwork sheets and fancy linens that a Margheritese bride brings to her marriage — sheets and blankets for six winter beds and six sets for summer. Nana's father was an overseer, a sovrastante, for a baron; his job was to weigh the grain and cheese with which peasants paid their taxes.
In New York, Papa got a job as a garbage collector for the city. One day at the dump he kicked a brown paper bag and a dead baby rolled out. He was horrified, but said nothing, fearing he would be blamed, and he quit that day. Later he worked for the railroad and in restaurant kitchens. Alfonsa and Giuseppe's first child was born in Brooklyn; then Nana and Papa moved to the country, to the New Jersey Meadowlands, so they could have a garden and a grapevine. That's where my father was born. Papa worked nights in New Jersey, and Nana commuted to New York City's garment district all week and in the evenings and on weekends sewed sequins on gowns at home. She bought tickets to matinée performances of the Metropolitan Opera and taught herself English by reading the New York Times aloud. By day, Papa tended their five children, their chickens, the kitchen garden, and the grapevine.
When I was growing up in Carlstadt, my family spent every Sunday after church at Nana's house. In summer our Sicilian relatives would come from Brooklyn to sit in the shade and smell the frosty blue grapes under Papa's arbor. The Jersey sun filtered through the broad green leaves and we tuned out the hum of the traffic whizzing behind us on Route 17. The men sat on Depression-green benches at a picnic table and played checkers while they waited for the women to bring food: plates of artichokes and dried tomatoes in oil, crunchy green fennel, and cold cuts. Then pasta with meat sauce in a broad hand-painted bowl, then barbecued chicken and sausages my grandmother made with meat she required the butcher to grind before her eyes. Then came the walnuts, plums, and cherries, and cookies from the Italian pastry shop. Papa sat up straight and gripped his fly swatter like a scepter. He'd whack the table, then hold up a flattened fly by the wing. He never missed.
The aunts and uncles brought our innumerable cousins. We, the children, mainstreamed Americans, spoke no Italian, but the grown-ups used Sundays to be Sicilian together. They spoke in the deep dialect peculiar to Santa Margherita for the pleasure of it — it affirmed their common bond — and to keep secrets from the kids. Years later, when I asked my Aunt Freda what they would talk about, she said, "It was always Santa Margherita," that hill town they had escaped yet still longed for.
As I got older, I realized that Sundays weren't like this for everybody. My friends called their grandmothers Grandma. Their grandparents didn't speak in broken English, didn't make such a ritual of a meal. By the time I was eight, I understood that this was a Sicilian thing, but I didn't know what Sicily was. Nana showed me a map of a three-cornered island being booted toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She said it was once part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. "When I was a girl, a princess used to wave to me from her balcony when I walked my donkey through town," she said. To tell you the truth, I didn't believe her, even though Nana was not the type to tell fairy tales.
When I was fifteen and Nana was in her seventies, I sat on a stool in her basement kitchen and watched her stir a vat of sauce. Papa had parboiled the tomatoes and pushed them through a hand-cranked crusher clamped to the edge of the table. Now she added a few basil leaves to the pot. Her back was to me.
She could have bought a plane ticket to Sicily if she had wanted to. She and Papa had bought three houses in northern New Jersey and helped four sons start businesses, marry, and build homes. "Nana," I asked, "why, in all these years, have you never gone back?" She wheeled around and spat the words at me.
"There's nothing there," was all she said.
To her, Sicily meant Santa Margherita, and an earthquake had destroyed it while she was living in New Jersey. She'd never seen the rest of the island, except when she was twelve and was on her farewell trip from the mountains to Palermo, where she boarded a ship that took her to Naples, and then to New York. On the night from the fourteenth to the fifteenth of January 1968, an earthquake crumbled most of Santa Margherita and all or part of nine other hill towns. In a sense, there really was nothing left there. Nana spoke no more to me about Sicily. The subject was taboo; I came to think of Sicily as the family's skeleton in the closet.
Papa died of a heart attack a year after the earthquake. Twenty years later, Nana died too. Among her papers I found a letter her cousin Betta had written to her five weeks after the earthquake. "We are living in tents because the house is uninhabitable. Nothing to eat until today. We still feel tremors from time to time, no one knows when they are supposed to end. We live as God wills."
Nobody told me what my grandparents escaped when they left Sicily near the turn of the twentieth century — the poverty and corruption, wheat failures and famine, drought, the latrines in the stone stables, the rule of the Mafia, the roaming bands of dogs who would take over the village after dark. The Sicily Nana and Papa left was a place where ordinary people could work hard and never get ahead. Bribes, threats, protection money, and high taxes sapped their savings and their souls. So they came to America and did not discuss Sicily with the children. The day Nana told me there was nothing there I decided that I would see Sicily for myself.
When I was a college junior majoring in French and spending a semester in Paris, I kept that promise. It was 1973. I had ten days between the end of spring term and a summer job as an au pair. I bought a train ticket through to Palermo, and a textbook, L'Italien sans peine, from a Seine bookstall, and set out for Sicily. By the time we reached Rome, I had memorized how to ask, "From which track does the train leave?" and "Where is the bathroom?" I got by on that, my French, my Catholic-school Latin, and sign language. South of Rome, I saw no other women on the train.
The crowded cars clacked south all night. I was in a second-class compartment with five men, all with stubble beards, all sleeping sitting up. Pasquale boarded in Naples, and the compartment woke up as he settled in. Then Pasquale opened his wallet and showed us all the beauty of Rosalia, his fidanzata, who lived on the outskirts of Palermo. At three in the morning the train reached the Strait of Messina, at the tip of the Italian boot. At land's end, where the train breaks up into sections to drive onto a ferry, the oldest man in the compartment woke me up. He led me up on deck and pointed to the moon, nearly full, reflected on the glassy black sea. The last lights of land twinkled behind us as we crossed between Scylla and Charybdis. The statue of the Madonna blessed the mainland harbor as she had blessed the Sicilian diaspora a hundred years before, when millions of southern Italians were leaving, maybe forever, the little towns that had spawned them, the only place they had ever known. The inscription on her pedestal reads BENEDICIMUS VOS ET CIVITAS VOSTRA — "We bless you and your town."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Stone Boudoir"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Theresa Maggio.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Praise,
Praise,
ALSO BY THERESA MAGGIO,
Title Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Preface,
Chapter 1 - CIOLINO,
Chapter 2 - NANA AND PAPA,
Chapter 3 - ROCCELLA VALDÈMONE,
Chapter 4 - PRICKLY PEARS,
Chapter 5 - HOME SWEET STONE,
Chapter 6 - SATURDAY MARKET,
Chapter 7 - WASH ON THE LINE,
Chapter 8 - THE SHEEP SLEEP IN PALACES,
Chapter 9 - THE EARTHQUAKE,
Chapter 10 - POLIZZI GENEROSA,
Chapter 11 - FAVA BEANS,
Chapter 12 - CONTINUING EDUCATION,
Chapter 13 - ZAFFERANA ETNEA,
Chapter 14 - BORGO CATENA,
Chapter 15 - THE CYCLE OF BREAD,
Chapter 16 - SICILIAN BAGPIPES,
Chapter 17 - THE ETNA LINE,
Chapter 18 - LINGUAGLOSSA,
Chapter 19 - CHRISTMAS AT MALETTO,
Chapter 20 - LA PIOVRA,
Chapter 21 - CASTIGLIONE DI SICILIA,
Chapter 22 - "MY FLOWERS WERE OF STONE",
Chapter 23 - CASTELLO ROMEO,
Chapter 24 - GRIM REAPER,
Chapter 25 - FOOD IS THE FONT OF LOVE,
Chapter 26 - LOVE ON A PLATE,
Chapter 27 - THE FEAST OF SAINT AGATHA,
Chapter 28 - KEEP IT LIKE THIS,
Chapter 29 - WATER IN THE STONE,
Chapter 30 - GERACI SICULO,
Chapter 31 - FREEDOM,
Chapter 32 - WITHOUT A MAN,
Chapter 33 - THE SECRET SPRING,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY,
Copyright Page,