away from the internet for days and days...

We have been through so many sensations over recent days, in Modica and Palermo. Requiring essays rather than blog bits.

The journey from Siracusa to Modica was a display of extraordinary productive countryside. A film of that below.

We planned three days in Modica choosing to be in a place out of town, surrounded by space, distinct from our experiences elsewhere of living in ancient city centres. A spectacular place, though I draw attention to any who might follow our example that there were a thousand and more steps from our place to the main street of Modica. Went down twice on foot, came back once on foot, once in taxi. Very beautiful place. 

See little film of the Modica passeggiata.

Killer chocolate. We had looked forward to the Modica chocolate, close to Aztec in tradition. Two (or four, or so) pieces and we neither needed more chocolate for days nor could we eat dinner that day.

Thursday in Modica was a deliciously warm day. See small movie of that.

Friday the weather was vicious but we were collected by wonderful friend Silvia Corsini (whose apartment we had rented in Siracusa) and swept away to very generous lunch at the country home of Claudine and Gio Barone, Gio a sculptor, with lovely group of people including architect, art historian and photographer... but leave aside the professions — it was a lovely group of thinking and somewhat radical-minded people with imaginations, meeting whom gave our travels new dimension. Silvia had wanted me to meet in particular Aldo Palazzolo, who kindly brought along a great portfolio of his work for us to see and discuss especially his experiments with 'liquid light'. 

Saturday was clearer and we enjoyed the run through central Sicily by 'Pullman' as buses are known here.  A film of that below.

Sunday in Palermo we found weather much as Sydney winter and a little film of our walk shows that. We are dealing with the world through unpleasant viruses but that does not entirely account for the sense of treacly-ness about doing things here. Great beauty. Extraordinary history. Vivacity and diversity. But it seems, more than anywhere else, a reminder of how young the state of Italy is. Many we deal with in simple transactions and attempted conversations are themselves wrestling with Italian as a second language, which means that while we have been doing well in Italian it can be a more irritated exchange with people who do not understand clear Italian and speak something impenetrably else. Monday when we went out we went past people who still come to our Piazza Porta Carini in mid-town to carry water home from a tap in big plastic containers. A few steps down the street through the Mercato del Capo where we had bought fresh things for breakfast earlier. Turn left again and enter the precinct of the Ministry of Justice; stop to pay respect to the impressive long wall of monument to Magistrates assassinated while pursuing the Mafia in recent decades. Along streets increasingly rough (and interesting) of restorers and sellers of antiques real and imagined (much as Rome centre and Trastevere in the 1960s. To the Cathedral with its remaining fragments of the Norman Cathedral noting on the door who from Roger II was crowned there. Roger on Christmas Day 1130. The Norman boys who went to England did OK and got to stay; these boys sent off south, to ease land inheritance issues for these Viking families come ashore in the lower Sienne valley did exceptionally well. But a hell of a lot harder to hang onto Sicily than England, Sicily at the centre of the world, England the strategic door to the Faeroes. Walk back home through more narrow streets, as a pedestrian, living and moving safely and swiftly, after the manner of and between the graces of Palermo car drivers. Sicily is a place that fails to make it, to get out of poverty, to get good politics, to offer work to the young. So many of those with whatever have left here, over and over again for centuries; successions of outside powers have invaded. It remains, the people remain, the centre of the world. Religion is deeply ingrained, Catholic imagery seems more serious (more real than imagery) and central to life than elsewhere except say in central America or rural Philippines. 

The flatness of Palermo has an effect, intensifying the enclosure, mercifully in late winter; it must be so much greater in summer. We may get to see the end of a street, the spire of a church, but intense life is in small places.

So here are films:

TRAIN FROM SIRACUSA TO MODICA



THE PASSEGGIATA AT MODICA



MODICA MORNING



PULLMAN TO PALERMO



PALERMO SUNDAY

today to Modica/reflections

We leave Siracusa today for Modica. We head southwest into the Iblean mountains to the Val di Noto, which runs down towards Catania. The Val di Noto was hit by an enormous earthquake in 1693, utterly destroying some towns. Reconstruction was well funded by church and state and with something of a fresh start, some of the finest baroque buildings anywhere were built. So the valley, including Modica, today has World Heritage status.

Modica is also a place of traditional (including Aztec traditional) chocolate making, so we will investigate and report.

We reflect on walking around the battlements of the Castello Maniace yesterday. At the entrance to one of the finest harbours of the Mediterranean. But not industrialised inside the harbour. After defeating Athens in this harbour in 419BC, Siracusa found itself in the beginning of what would be a hundred year war with Carthage - Carthage on the site of the modern Tunis. "Out there is Tunisia and Carthage," said one of the custodians of the Castello to me. When you look at the map below, you see that Carthage is in fact to the west, its Phoenicians having come from what is now Lebanon. Look east from here and you could sail straight past the Peloponnese - the southern water washed portions of Greece - and up to Athens. The 100 year war ended when a Siracusan army of 14000 went to Carthage and won on land. Then in the 200s BC it was Rome's time, and the command of the Mediterranean and the achievement of colonies in Africa meant war with Siracusa and Sicily. It began the usual way: Roman settlers in Sicily appealed to both Rome and Carthage for protection against bullying from all these Greeks here. Schoolyards were ever such.

Here is a nice quote from Robert Kaplan's wonderful Mediterranean Winter Vintage Books 2004, pp 40-41

Phoenicians carving out a great sovereign state on Berber soil while fending off desert tribesmen: all so that Phoenician Carthage could be culturally infiltrated by the Greeks, and then obliterated by the Romans, whose own imperial longevity would lead to decline and conquest by Vandals... The beach at Carthage taught a lesson [to Kaplan, visiting in the 1970s] in the impermanence of empires at a time when the Cold War, and the hegemonic struggle it represented, seemed likely to go on forever.... [snip]


Later that afternoon I visited the American War Cemetery in Carthage which holds the remains of 2,841 American soldiers killed in the Allied campaigns in North Africa. In November 1942, American troops landed in Morocco to begin the rollback of the Axis powers in the Mediterranean. The allies retraced the path of the Vandals across north Africa with similar lightning speed...


A long historical perspective and avoidance of chauvinist blindness are relevant. I do not recall to which visitor he was replying, but Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, asked in the early 1970s what he thought of the outcome of the French revolution, reportedly replied: "It's too soon to tell."

Three nights now in Modica and then to Palermo. Click the map to enlarge.