Year In The World Part 6

I don't want to leave. When I ask the maid if Naples causes you to dream, she says, "No, signora, you must have eaten pepper."

The Sun

on Its Throne

Taormina Europe can be divided into two categories-countries with riotous balconies of geraniums and bougainvillea, and countries without. Italy falls into category one, and nowhere more so than in Taormina. Like Capri, Taormina is where the G.o.ds tumped over their baskets of blessings. The earth has not formed, nor can I imagine, a place more captivating. Taormina's wavering coast below the town, a limpid sea, the perfectly positioned Greco-Roman theatre, and craggy Monte Tauro (here's our bull again) rising above the village would be stupendous enough, but that basket of blessings also deposited Mount Etna, often disappearing in mist and suddenly reappearing like a mirage in the distance. In winter, from a sunny window, you see the cone frosted with snow. Today the volcano is clear-cut in the blue air, and I easily imagine lava beginning to ooze down the slopes.

I walk before breakfast, savoring the architectural details along Corso Umberto Primo, greet shop owners who are sprinkling the street from a bottle of acqua minerale before sweeping around their thresholds, and explore the intriguing vicoli that ascend or descend on either side of the street. A stepped street, appropriately called Vicolo Stretto, must be eighteen inches wide; someone could get stuck. I like being out early before the tour buses arrive. Taormina's magnetism has pulled travellers for centuries. Early, then again by evening, the coast clears. One of my favorite things about Taormina: very few pigeons.

There's a reason we congregate in these hot spots-to wors.h.i.+p beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream. I am here for another reason as well. I am reading and rereading the Sicilian writers, Leonardo Sciascia and Giuseppe di Lampedusa. A few months ago I came across a telling line in Sciascia's The Wine-Dark Sea. After a funny, ironic exchange on the shortcomings of Sicilians, a character "brightens up at the sight of the sea off Taormina. 'What a sea! Where else would you see anything like this?'" I suddenly thought I would like to read these native Sicilian writers in situ and try to see how the island affects their work, how their works are shaped by the place. I would like to know Sicily; what better way than through the insights of pa.s.sionate writers?

I missed Taormina on my first trip to Sicily. Then two springs ago I was on a boat that let us off here briefly for a tantalizing glimpse of town and a quick tour of the Greek theatre with a stupefying view of the coast and looming Mount Etna. Always a fool for beauty, I said to Ed, "How soon can we come back?"

Sicily, with the possible exception of Napoli, seems to me the most complex place in Italy, and yet most of us arrive burdened by so many Mafia stereotypes that we hardly see the real place. What if I would like to write a novel set here? I hope my stack of books on the bedside table will give me clues to approaching Sicily as a traveller and as a writer. I am a Californian by persuasion, a southerner by genetic stamp. But in the fifteen years since I have forsaken my native land and adopted Tuscany as a new home and way of life, my ingrained sense-of-place ideas have been forced to adapt. Because Sicily seems so profoundly itself, I am curious to know if writers reflect that.

Writing Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany made me realize the depth of my interest in the mysterious intertwining of character and place. The southerner, especially the southern writer, knows instinctively that those swirling tornadoes, the smoking vat of barbecue sauce that could scour your throat, a suffocating scent of magnolia, the snake handlers, kudzu creeping over the windowsill, the throb of cicadas-all have as much to do with their personal stories and written narratives as any character or action at play in the imagination.

From what point, I wonder, does the Sicilian who feels the desire to write begin? How would the intense sense of place I-a foreigner-feel work out if I had learned to walk on stony streets, had been given sips of wine as a one-year-old, had been doted on by an entire village, as babies are in these parts? Or what if I'd had to eke a living from the parched land where the feudal world only recently ended? Art and refinement belonged to few indeed. I a.s.sume I would seek in my writing epiphany, illumination, revelation, memory, and the joy of seeing, glimpsing a moment, satisfying a pa.s.sion for texture, form, or (more elusively) color. But that's what I do now. I need to know more about the writers' intertwinings with this big greenhouse floating in the sea.

I tended to think of the South as the landscape that formed me and informed my writing, that the influence was fixed. As I lived in Italy and began to write memoirs, I was changing, and my writing was changing as well. I don't remember which writer said that his home was his subject matter. I resist that idea but may someday accept the truth in it. My feelings bolted their arbor and started scrambling up the subject of a house in a foreign country.

The scene reenacts every morning in thousands of piazzas all over Italy. We are drinking coffee under an awning, looking at the facade of the duomo. A man in a crisp blue s.h.i.+rt is engrossed in a Nadine Gordimer paperback. Two French tourists order caffe americano. A girl tossing her strawberry-blond hair breaks the fast with Coca-Cola and a cigarette. Across from me, Ed in a yellow s.h.i.+rt, my own ray of sun, is intent on La Repubblica. The Italians, of course, rarely linger. They take their espresso as though they're having a shot at a clinic. One motion, gone. But one signora sits outside with cappuccino reading Venerdi. The waiter notices my bookmark, a metal flower on a red ribbon. "Carina," he says, adorable. Very original, he continues. His delight in something so insignificant delights me.

As I leave, I take the bookmark to him. "Un regalo piccolo," a little gift. You would think I'd given him a Rolex. His shouts of grazie, grazie follow us across the piazza, and I wonder for the thousandth time-why go anywhere, ever, other than Italy.

In most of Italy, art feels as innate as breath. Natural as this is for the Italians, a frontal confrontation with art causes major shock to the traveller, especially the one who comes here to work on books, paintings, music, or photographs. Suddenly one's pa.s.sion for making a creative work becomes a natural act. This is profoundly stirring. An unknown sense for most Americans over the age of ten.

I wonder sometimes if the strongest drive throughout the history of the Italian peninsula has been the impulse toward art. Around Cortona archaeologists still are discovering thousand-year-old Etruscan tombs, digging out of the muck a gold necklace fas.h.i.+oned so delicately that it stops your heart, a bronze animal votive so cunningly wrought that you want to grab the tiny bull and run. The reach of the artist is long, long, long as time. Across Italian history this has been so, and who knows why. "Cortona is a spiritual center; there's a magnetism in the earth you can feel," the owner of the bookstore tells me. "Go stand on the steps of San Francesco-it is especially strong there."

Although I am not inclined toward the mystical, I never doubted her for a minute because when I went to Italy, I began to write spontaneously, with pleasure, with focus, with ease. My form changed. The fatalistic, elegiac, and dark motion of my poetry turned toward the Italian light as easily as the local giant sunflowers swivel toward the sun. The people I have come to know in Cortona are genuine, direct, courteous, expansive, with a few rotten characters thrown in the mix. I get so accustomed to the constant kissing that when I return to the United States I find myself kissing people who do not expect that. The more I heard the laughter in the piazza, the more laughter I found inside my daily life. Could these qualities shape a writing style?

A place never can be neutral; wherever you put yourself, the filings are magnetized and begin their alignments. That lover of the Mediterranean world Lawrence Durrell believed that "you could exterminate the French at a blow and resettle the country with Tartars, and within two generations discover, to your astonishment, that the national characteristics were back at norm." All landscapes, he says, pose the same question to the traveller: "I am watching you-are you watching yourself in me?"

Both Lampedusa and Sciascia are skilled liberators of the revealing image, what T. S. Eliot called the objective correlative. What they "set free," as Michelangelo freed his images from marble, is what may enable me to grasp a Sicily that is probably otherwise unavailable. Images, when they arise from the place, turn emblematic, transcending mere sensory detail. Through the giusto, just, image, we are time travellers.

Proust wrote in "On Art and Literature": "What intellect restores to us under the name of the past is not the past. In reality as soon as each hour of one's life has died, it embodies itself in some material object . . . and hides there. There it remains captive, captive forever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free." There-Proust recognizes the liberation of the image, as Michelangelo recognized his figures wanting to be freed from the blocks of marble he carved, just as Lampedusa and Sciascia chose images so truly that they s.h.i.+ne as icons.

In my "walking notebook": tile rooftops, a handmade ladder propped in a fig tree, olive trees beside a stone wall, a man outlined in a doorway-these images are contemporary or medieval or Roman and so partake of the timeless. A stone wall glinting in the wet light-what stone does to light speaks emblematically to a sense of time that floats from one era to the next. In a nimbus of gold, a little dirt-colored donkey stands against a whitewashed wall, a stony path winds into a smoky aura of light; a man with a birthmark covering half his face tips his chair against the wall under the arbor and laughs; a distant tower seems to exist through a long telescope into time.

I travel for images. I read for images, too, because the choice c.u.mulatively creates the style of an author. Why does Lampedusa lavish words over what food was served at a ball? Because he is showing us what the people expect and how they perceive. The powerful imagistic language of Lampedusa and Sciascia conveys more in a few pages than chapters and chapters of history. I must admit to a grat.i.tude because histories of Sicily are hopelessly dense. This island has been tossed and criss-crossed and stomped on and razed beyond counting. That these two writers take on Sicily's daunting history and subsume it within the lives of their characters gives you, finally, a grasp of the sequence of takeovers and makeovers. And more.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the older of the two, was born in 1896 into one of the oldest aristocratic Sicilian families. He was Duke of Palma and, eventually, Prince of Lampedusa. The tiny boy was named Giuseppe Maria Fabrizio Salvatore Stefano Vittorio Tomasi di Lampedusa. He was very attached to his mother, had a playboy youth, studied law, and then was folded into World War I, where he fought and was captured in Hungary. He walked back to Italy and suffered a breakdown. During the fascist years he travelled, lived abroad a great deal, and married a Latvian baroness.

During his life he published nothing except three articles on French literature in a small periodical. His grand family palazzo on via Lampedusa, 17, in Palermo was bombed in 1943. Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, which he labored over for years, was rejected for publication, but in one of those cruel twists of fate, the year after his death in 1957 from lung cancer the book was published and became an international megasuccess. E. M. Forster called it "one of the great lonely books." Visconti made an ambitious, sensuous movie version starring Burt Lancaster in 1963. Posthumously, a book of stories and two volumes of essays were published.

The Leopard rose from his intimate knowledge of the Sicilian aristocracy. Family members inspired some of the characters, and we can be sure they were not pleased. The book begins in 1860 and ends in 1910, the formative years when the Italian nation went from a squabbling group of duchies, papal states, and foreign possessions to a unified (more or less) country. The book starts during the years of Garibaldi's foray into Sicily-a torch to the Sicilian time warp. Lampedusa shows the rings of effects on the family of the Prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio.

First and last, we have the influence of the brutal, munificent Mediterranean sun. The narrator says, early in the book: "The sun, which was still far from its blazing zenith on that morning of the thirteenth of May, showed itself to be the true ruler of Sicily; the crude, brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence as arbitrary as dreams."

Lampedusa a.s.sociates the sun with the annulling of the will, with immobility, and random violence. These characteristics also flow relentlessly through the lives of his characters. The sun over Sicily never is pa.s.sive in The Leopard. Here the family is about to have lunch outside: "All around quivered the funereal countryside, yellow with stubble, black with burned patches, the lament of cicadas filled the sky. It was like a death rattle of parched Sicily at the end of August vainly awaiting rain."

Even in October, the sun reigns: "The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch . . . The heat braced without burning, the light domineered but let colors live; from the soil cautiously sprouted clover and mint, and on faces appeared diffident hopes."

Near the end of the book, the sun is described again: "It was midday on a Monday at the end of July, and away in front of him spread the sea of Palermo, compact, oily, inert, improbably motionless, crouching like a dog trying to make itself invisible at its master's threats; but up there the static perpendicular sun was straddling it and las.h.i.+ng at it pitilessly. The silence was absolute."

The sun is G.o.d and mirror. And still is. I'm reading outside on a chaise longue beside the hotel pool. The sun has driven me to the shade of the hedge, and every half hour I have to move because it has invaded again. A small, finely made Sicilian man near me is reading, I'm shocked to see, Sciascia's The Wine-Dark Sea. Three screaming and crying French children with a nanny should be taken to their naps. Waiters dressed in dinner jackets circulate with pitchers of lemonade. And there's the pride of the EU, a bronzed couple with impeccable bodies; he toned and slender, his wavy black hair slicked back, his sensual molded lips almost pouting, and she a nymph in pink thong, b.r.e.a.s.t.s the shape of oranges popping from the inadequate-to-the-task triangles that almost cover her nipples. I cover my face with The Leopard and doze.

The prince is a fabulous, unforgettable character. He's very tall. The leopard insignia, appearing on pillows and in crumbling stone above doorways, symbolizes his n.o.ble family-and it becomes him. His big hand is often called a paw. He's like a lethargic leopard, who may turn predator at any moment. He has rapacious appet.i.tes toward women and goes out stalking at night, but toward morning, back in the marriage bed, he can still make his wife cry out to Mary and the saints. He rules his properties with bored attention. We see him as the last of his type. The feudal expanse of his properties will be lost in a generation. But something larger is at stake; the whole way of life, decadent and beautiful (and of course, hideously unfair), is disappearing. His own numerous children are too much under his influence to remark on this, but his favorite nephew, the impudent and fun Tancredi, has joined the forces of Garibaldi. The nephew throws his energy into the life of the prince, who is smart enough to see the changes coming but too long enervated by the centuries of other victors to join in or to try to stop them.

The prince's daughter, Concetta, loves Tancredi, but he falls hard for Angelica, a juicy daughter of the new-money, crude, Snopes-type character, Don Calogero, who is a rising force in the new order. Already Don Calogero owns more land than the prince. Now, through this marriage of Angelica to Tancredi, he is about to be absorbed into the family. He's a boor but a smart one. The prince is humiliated when, wearing afternoon dress himself, he has to greet Don Calogero in evening clothes at dinner. He is consoled somewhat to observe that the tailoring on Don Calogero's tails is a disastrous failure, the tails pointing up, the cut appalling, the b.u.t.toned shoes. Each of these characters comes to represent an historical quality at work in the fabric of society.

Lampedusa reveals the accommodations of the prince to inevitable change through his own thoughts and actions, rarely through the over-voice of the narrator. As he meets Don Calogero frequently over the marriage contract of Angelica and Tancredi, he finds an admiration growing on him: He became used to the ill-shaven cheeks, the plebeian accent, the odd clothes, and the persistent odor of stale sweat, and he began to realize the man's rare intelligence. Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero; free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans of the crushed.

Like other big cats, the prince toys with his prey.

Fortunately, Lampedusa is such a powerful writer that I never feel I am reading a historical novel; by the end of the book not only have I read a magnificent piece of imaginative writing but I understand the scaffolding holding up contemporary Sicily. When the prince is approached about becoming a senator in the new Italy, I get the impression that he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. In his long no, the Prince gives Chevalley, the representative of the Turin government, an earful. And the reader absorbs the deep background of the Sicilian character.

In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of "doing" at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's our fault. But even so we're worn out and exhausted.

For the prince, Garibaldi's changes come way too late. He sees Sicily in its new role as: a centenarian being dragged in a Bath chair around the Great Exhibition in London, understanding nothing and caring about nothing . . . Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; and I must say, between ourselves, I have strong doubts whether the new Kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage.

Then he downs.h.i.+fts to first gear: All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana . . . novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.

Chevalley does not understand all this but rises to the occasion and speaks idealistically of Sicily's future. But the prince continues in his voice-of-the-ages mode: Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders . . . upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.

Lampedusa's knife-twist comes at the end of the meeting, when the prince recommends, instead of himself, the badly dressed upstart Calogero as just the man for the new order. This bell-tolling is not only the witty and deeply exhausted voice of the many-times-conquered aristocrat, who has made accommodations all along the b.u.mpy road of history; it's a breathtaking, dark cultural a.n.a.lysis of Sicily at the historical juncture of unification. The indictment and the finesse of Lampedusa's prose sends me out into the streets-perhaps for one of those spiced sherbets he mentioned, or his favorite rum jelly.

Pasticceria Minotauro displays no rum jellies, but the prince might indulge in a finger-size cannolo filled with chocolate cream and dipped in chopped pistachios. Or one of the pastry boats mounded with cream and strawberries. Ed and I split a cannolo, then make our way down the street for cups of hazelnut and melon gelato.

What is that fragrance? A white datura, most decadent of flowers, seems to drip its narcotizing perfume over a stone wall. To walk through Taormina is to traverse layers of scents-oleander and roses, the nutmeg spiciness of creamy stock, weedy nasturtiums, all these mixed with the wafting aromas of good sauces cooking. A blue Cinque Cento filled with flats of red geraniums parks beside a stand selling blood orange juice. Moonvine and morning glories sprawl over hibiscus hedges and twine around satellite dishes and electrical wires. A delivery truck has run over a flowerpot. People emerge from shops and houses. Much discussion ensues. A loudspeaker announces another truck laden with tomatoes and onions. He runs over the remains of the pot, and the crowd's interest s.h.i.+fts to the gorgeous ripe tomatoes grown on the fertile slopes of Etna.

We stop to gaze at a window arranged with trays of candied fruits, gleaming like jewels. The prince perhaps partook of cedro candito, those huge gnarly lemons, almost all peel, as well as the whole candied oranges and lemons, and the array of marzipan fruits, and piles of torrone bianco con fighi secchi, white candy with nuts and dried figs.

Even inside the duomo, lilies drench the gray air with their sweet deathly scent. They're enlivened by gla.s.s jars of pagan birds of paradise on several altars, and arrangements of white and yellow roses and lemons. Those praying inhale these sanctious odors of flowers, along with the final whiffs of incense left behind by the priests.

It is enlightening to read, right after The Leopard, the works of Leonardo Sciascia.

He was born in 1921 in the small town of Racalmuto, a quarter of a century after Lampedusa and at the opposite end of the cla.s.s spectrum. His father worked in the sulfur mines. He was a bookish boy and rose above his beginnings to become a schoolteacher. In the prince's time he probably would have been a priest. Also a late starter, he did not publish his first book until the age of forty. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, The Leopard, which seems from another century, had been published only three years previously.

These two writers, so disparate in birth circ.u.mstances, are nevertheless brothers. Sciascia, like Lampedusa, is funny and deeply fatalistic-two intrinsically Sicilian qualities that emerge from both writers' characters. Sciascia sometimes reminds me of Pirandello, the writer from Agrigento, but then I remember that they both wrote out of a similar apt.i.tude for taking core samples from the layers of reality. The literature of the South, my American South too, always verges on the absurd. Sciascia, who grew up under fascism, was the first to write directly about the Cosa Nostra. He later became a member of the European Parliament, abandoning fiction for pamphlets, essays, and speeches. Lampedusa and Sciascia both wrote about the mindset of Sicilians. Although Sciascia's subject is often the Mafia, his fiction delves more into the perspective of the national character that makes the Mafia possible rather than into the surface reality of the mob. As one reviewer noted, the Mafia was "both the cancer eating away at his society and a spark of rebellion kept alive in the hearts of a conquered people."

Conquered. That word again. A key. "I don't have a great creative imagination," Sciascia remarked to an interviewer. "All my books are the story of a series of historical delusions seen in the light of the present." Sicilian Uncles, four long short stories, shows a different uncle-type character at four points of hope: in and after World War II, during the rise of Communism, during the Garibaldi years, and during the Spanish Civil War. Always there's that sun, "scorching down enough to flay you alive."

At each crux, the hope turns to disillusionment. "This is a country," a character says, "where the left hand doesn't trust the right hand, even if they both belong to the same man." The soldier fighting in Spain gradually realizes he's fighting against the poor, his own kind. The feudal empires of the Spanish rich are as frightening as those in Sicily. The wors.h.i.+per of Stalin begins to hear that he's not the idealist he thought but instead is a horrid lout. The so-called "little man" will always be duped by the powerful. On a train a man meets a man who works in oil. He doesn't even believe there is oil in Sicily, but the man a.s.sures him that there is. "Oil?" the character Micciche says: "They'll soon grab it . . . One long pipe-line from Gela to Milan and they can just drain it off. The devotees, those who have the interests of Sicily at heart, will be left wringing their hands . . . I'd rather not talk about it."

"But if this happens . . . won't Sicilians, too, be to blame?"

"Certainly: it's a Sicilian failing to stand around and wait for the ripe fruit to fall off the tree straight into our mouths."

"We're not like that," chimed in the girl. "The fact is, that we like to make others believe the worst about us, like people who imagine that they are suffering from every illness under the sun."

That's where Micciche agrees, brightens up at the sight of the sea off Taormina, and says, "What a sea! Where else would you see anything like this?"

Sicily and the sea, two in one, impossible to separate. In "The Long Crossing" a boatload of Sicilians sets off from a deserted beach. They are immigrating to America. They listen to the sea, which to them sounds like "the wild-animal breath of the world itself," gasping and dying. They are the typical "huddled ma.s.ses." After eleven days of squalid living, they're dumped on the sh.o.r.e, they think near Trenton, New Jersey. They disperse and soon hear singing. Must be Italians living nearby. Then a Fiat pa.s.ses, then another. They have landed in Sicily. Duped again.

And thus the mindset that secretly approves of those bold ones who take the law into their own hands. Before the Mafia, many admired the bandits who demanded protection fees from towns and robbed and pillaged Sicily for generations. What have the little people ever gotten from the law? The South is only changing now, slowly, slowly. Any benefit that's ever come their way has been taken by someone.

Sciascia is wildly but subtly comic at every turn in these stories, especially in The Wine-Dark Sea. You have to love the characters in these stories.

Fatalism this deep is often comic-the absurd is only the other side of the mirror. In Lampedusa, the prince suffers from existential loneliness. Sciascia's characters have more heat. They're involved in love and honor and idealism and craftiness and cynicism. They're closer to the complex Sicilians of today. Both writers force the reader to unravel the stereotypes forever.

When I first went to Sicily, I wrote innocently, "It is easy to see why all those conquering hordes wanted this island. The landscape is everywhere various or dramatic. Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window, the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being." Already the spirit of the place was beginning to imbue my mind. The sun can break stones, Pirandello wrote. Place will have its way with us. I'm fascinated to the core to learn how fundamentally different Sicily is, to learn that the world is not small, is not reduced to phrases such as global economy or global village or one world. These ancient people are not like us. I am so thankful for that.

My favorite place to read is the public garden. When I leave the hotel, I tell Ed, "I'm going out to drink a cup of beauty." He's on the terrace with his notebook.

A bench above the sea, that endless vista, and a good book. An olive tree was planted for each soldier killed in World War I; the names are still nailed onto the trees, and I notice that four of them commemorate boys from the Cacopardos family. Such a sacrifice from one family. The garden with many eccentric follies was built by Florence Trevelyan Cacciola, a Scottish woman who escaped to Taormina in 1889 after a scandalous affair with Edward VII. She settled down to the calmer pastimes of bird-watching and gardening and married a local professor. The family donated the garden to the city in the 1920s. Someone should write a book about the Mediterranean gardens designed and preserved by expatriates. This one steps down in long terraces, offering many places to read or embrace your true love. Behind my bench, a circle of orange trees. Beyond where the eye can see lies Gela, where Aeschylus died when a tortoise carried by an eagle dropped on his head-a fate both my writers would understand. The sun seems to pa.s.s through my body. I angle the brim of my hat, find my place, and fall into the world of the book.

Tasting the South Italy Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South . . .

-JOHN KEATS Dear Steven, Yes, we are still travelling in the South. Put Sperlonga on your list. A white village with houses like sugar cubes above the sea, arm-wide cobbled streets running under Moorish arches, and outrageous flowers swagging off balconies like bright skirts of ballgowns. To Ravello tomorrow, one of my favorite perches. When I go to Ravello, I'm always on a honeymoon.

You asked what's great to eat when you and your friend venture south of Rome next month. You know my philosophy-ask well-fed, happy-looking people on the street for a restaurant suggestion. At hotels, the staff sometimes directs you to touristy places, but if you ask specifically, "Where would you eat on your anniversary?" you get a different answer. You are going to love the food.

I lived in Italy for years before I understood pasta. The first sentence uttered by Italian bambini must be Pasta, mama, per favore, pasta. Not only a food, pasta symbolizes home, friends, family, all the good things, and down South this holds even more strongly than other areas that may have their moments with polenta and rice.

When our friend Roberto from Cortona drove to Scandinavia for a vacation, he took a dozen large pelati, cans of tomatoes, in his trunk, along with boxes of dried pasta. Only we, the foreigners, were surprised. Italians fear finding themselves without pasta. I have friends who have eaten pasta at least once a day their entire lives. Do we have an equivalent in our culture? I don't think so. The Mexicans have the tortilla.

Pasta seems eternal but isn't. Only since the eleventh century have Italian housewives wielded the rolling pin, turning out fettuccine, tagliatelle, spaghetti, and hundreds of other shapes-sh.e.l.ls, ears, wheels, b.u.t.terflies, even little radiators. Remember the big pasta seash.e.l.ls stuffed with cheeses and shrimp that I made for you? Down here those sh.e.l.ls come in several sizes. In the South-pasta, pasta, pasta, big portions, served more al dente than in the North. The texture is toothsome, even chewy. Along with olive oil, it's the keystone of home cooking.

You've heard, I'm sure, that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China. He didn't. He brought back some breadfruit concoction, decidedly inferior to a mound of steaming macaroni. Maybe the Etruscans invented it, maybe the Romans, or Arabs. No one recorded the moment when the first plate of lasagne plonked down on the table. I like to think the creator was a Neapolitan nonna, with a house full of grandchildren, who said to herself, Let's just see what happens if I pinch this dough into pieces and throw them in boiling water instead of baking the same old griddlecake in the ashes.

From visiting us, you know pasta in Tuscany. The pasta down South ups the ante. We use red pepper flakes decorously in Tuscany. Here, they tip the jar. Almost everything is served all'arrabbiata, angry. A famous dish in Puglia, spaghetti alla zappatora, ditch digger's pasta, has a tomato sauce with red-hot peppers and lots of garlic. In Sicily there's a rigatoni alla carrettiere, cart driver's rigatoni, a basic but spicy tomato sauce, this time on chewy rigatoni. The origins are not aristocratic, but the aristocrats eat these dishes, too. Italian cooking crosses cla.s.ses smoothly-there is no codified, developed haut bourgeois cuisine. In the grandest palazzos they're serving pasta with chopped tomatoes and basil. Nothing beats an old-fas.h.i.+oned maccheroni al forno, macaroni cooked in the oven with mozzarella di bufala, spicy sausage, and tomato and meat sauce. Macaroni with ricotta equals soul food. You meet many oven pastas here; they're not common in Tuscany. Hard ricotta salata, similar in taste to feta, often is tossed with cinnamon, sugar, and milk, certainly a throwback to the Arabs. Often the ricotta is combined with ground almonds and pistachios, also a bow to the Arabs, but a good use of what lies at hand.

Around Naples a favorite spaghetti is alla puttanesca, in the style of the wh.o.r.e. Maybe they'd worked up an appet.i.te! The lively sauce combines anchovies, tomatoes, capers, olives, chile peppers, and lots of olive oil. How basic can it get? Mary Taylor Simeti, in her Sicilian memoir On Persephone's Island, describes lasagne cacate, so delicious sounding with its layers of meat sauce, sausage, onion, ricotta, and pecorino. Delicious until you learn the translation for lasagne cacate-s.h.i.+tty lasagna. Sicilian humor-don't be deterred from trying this l.u.s.ty pasta.

Bring along Clifford Wright's A Mediterranean Feast. A copy lives on the backseat of our car when we travel. His detailed history of pasta, plus his grasp of the interrelations.h.i.+ps of the various Mediterranean cuisines, makes for exciting reading aloud as Ed swerves along the coastal roads. My other read-aloud companion is the cla.s.sic The Food of Italy by Waverley Root. Some information seems dated, but still fresh is his fine grasp of the food within its culture.

Delicate nuanced food, as in the French cuisine you love so, with its ephemeral sauces, its airy souffles, does exist, but 99.9 percent of what appears on the plate is of the hearty plow-the-fields and fish-the-sea persuasion. La cucina casalinga, home cooking. As you hop about in Italy, the variety from place to place is absolutely astonis.h.i.+ng, especially given that most food springs from la cucina povera-the poor kitchen, the make-do kitchen. Wild greens, nuts, fish, game, fruit-all the things free for the gathering-appear in every area but in different guises. The South, I've read, is always different, no matter what country, no matter what topic.

Sicily was my introduction to the food of the southern Mediterranean. Everything we tasted seemed revelatory. Street vendors sold tasty panelli, chickpea fritters. We stopped in tiny shops for a slice of sfincione, pizza topped with large breadcrumbs. Because we were in Palermo on San Giuseppe's day, all the pastry shops offered sfince, rice fritters made with ricotta, cinnamon, and candied fruit. All of Palermo seemed like a picnic.

In Bella Tuscany, I described the first dinner on that trip. N'grasciata, which means "dirty," was suggested by the concierge after we prodded him for an authentic restaurant. The name did not inspire confidence, but we took his word that "the name is just a way of speaking. They have their own fis.h.i.+ng boat. I will tell them to expect you." The place was clean and bare, filled with Sicilian families and groups bent over their plates. Most had napkins tucked into their dresses or s.h.i.+rts. There we first met pomorola, the South's intense, reduced tomato sauce that makes all others seem sissy. They served a tris of pastas: bucatini with sardines, currants, and fennel, orecchiette with bitter greens, and plain spaghetti revved up with the pomorola. Then the carts began to roll out of the kitchen-baby octopus, fried frutti di mare, whole grilled fish, every little swimmer arrived at our table, along with grilled eggplant, roasted potatoes, and salad. When I could eat no more, the waiter grew concerned. "Signora, you must." He took a bite of squid to show me there was no cause for alarm. When I smiled and shook my head, he gently grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled back my head, and held the fork to my lips. I ate.

We were used to Italian markets, but the Sicilian ones were the most vibrant we'd seen. I wrote in my notebook: "Lines of lambs, gutted and dripping, eyeb.a.l.l.s bulging, hang by their feet. Their little hooves and tails look so sad. Their little guts so horrifying. The rainbows of s.h.i.+ning fish on ice, the mounds of shrimp still wiggling their antennae, painted carts of lemons, jewel-colored candied fruits, bins of olives, nuts, seeds-everything is presided over by dealers who shout, sing, cajole, joke, curse, barter, badger . . . A vendor holds out a basket of eels that squirm like live sterling silver. He gyrates his hips to emphasize their movement . . . I wish for a kitchen so I could gather some of the l.u.s.trous eggplants and clumps of field greens. My stomach is growling so loud it sounds like a tiny horse neighing. Cooks here are in paradise. I'll never eat lamb again."

So, my friend, get ready. That one day in Palermo rocked my culinary world.

Since then, we've returned to Sicily twice and have taken several trips to Basilicata, Puglia, Naples, Amalfi area, Capri, and Ischia. Like you, Ed enjoys an adventurous palate. He will taste anything and likes some of the most impossible things. When I'm curious but disinclined to order something, he launches right in. Fried newborn fish. Various kidneys. Head cheese. For Easter, Giuseppina served a platter of braised hearts, livers, and lungs-the thought makes my knees weak. Our neighbor stewed a porcupine who had been bothering his chickens. He roasts tiny songbirds. Ed holds out his plate for more while I'm still staring at mine. In the South, anything pulled out of the sea, he's ready to meet with fork aloft.

The cooking traditions along the southern outline of the Italian coast, and on the islands, go back so far in time that they blur. Ovid mentions the "sweet mullet and tender eel" of Taormina's waters. Pliny the Elder was sipping Sicilian wines with pleasure in the first century. The Mediterranean coasts have been won and lost, won again, occupied and fought over. Greeks, Romans, Normans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Angevins-who were they-Carthaginians, Spanish, and on and on-don't make me take the history exam! (American history is so much easier! One course, and you have a good grasp of it.) How all these invasions blend on the table makes the cuisine of the South so spectacular. The Arabs and Greeks left their fingerprints on every platter-but oddly enough, a main heritage comes from the Americas, the potato, corn, peanut, chocolate, turkey, string bean, pumpkin, and many other exotics those marauding explorers brought home. Once there was no tomato! Italy without the tomato! Imagine. No lemon either, until the Arabs brought them, along with lime, coconut, watermelon, artichoke, cinnamon, eggplant, bitter orange, and mango. What were they eating before? Legumes and fish? The Arabs even brought basic crops-sorghum, sugarcane, and hard wheat. While most of Europe dreamed through the Dark Ages, wherever the Arabs settled there was plenty of light. Waverley Root says, "You could draw a map of the limits of the Moslem invasion by plotting the places where . . . their flaky pastry became established." They loved water and channeled it in quadrants through their gardens to symbolize the cardinal directions in the Garden of Paradise, so frequently mentioned in the Koran. They taught the locals advanced agricultural techniques such as irrigation, from waterwheels and buckets on pulleys to sophisticated connections of wells that linked to underground aquifers. By breaking up the immense holdings of landowners, they initiated a small farm system. Agricultural production burgeoned.

Indigenous people are hardly mentioned in culinary histories. We learn what the invaders brought but not what the locals already were eating. Surely those living in the South had discovered their own big fish stews, though the Greeks get the credit for introducing, via Ma.r.s.eilles, the bouillabaisse equivalent. Today the fish soups of Lecce are famous. I hope you go there-one of those towns you can imagine you could have been born in-and feast your eyes on the fanciful baroque architecture. You can visit the workshops where craftspeople make exquisite papier-mache creche figures. I hand-carried an angel with billowing sea-green skirts home to California for the top of my Christmas tree.

Back to food-who knows who first threw a mess of fish into a cauldron? I know you like to trace origins, but separating influences way back before the Arabs becomes dicey. Certainly the Romans, as well as the Greeks, introduced many things to eat. Certainly the locals were stomping on their grapes all on their own and making some form of bread/pizza. But it is interesting to realize how many of the defining ingredients were either brought or popularized by the Arabs. All over the South, you find sublime gelato. The Arab touch is in the flavors, the pistachio of Lecce, the jasmine, myrtle, almond, watermelon, lemon, and orange. Sometimes in Sicily you can find rosewater gelato. What a gift.

I can see you out early, walking and gazing, then pausing in a bar for espresso and some glorious little pastry. Ed swears that coffee in the South of Italy is the eighth wonder of the world. I'll never forget his expression when we first landed in the airport in Sicily. I was already eating an arancino, a fried rice ball with creamy melted cheese or ragu hidden inside. He stared into the cup-I thought he'd seen a bug inside-then lifted his eyes, and I saw that it was, instead, a religious experience he was having.

As far back as Homer, I've found mention of a strong black drink with mysterious properties. Again, the Arabs' trade routes were influential in bringing coffee to Italy from Africa, but navigators from all over were plying the Mediterranean. The sea must have been like Los Angeles freeways. Coffee first arrived in Venice around 1570, where it soon became available in chemists' shops. A coffee bar opened in Venice in 1640; by 1763 there were 218 in the city. Today there must be a thousand. Not everyone was pleased. Some fanatics considered coffee the drink of the devil and asked the pope to ban it. After one sip the pope is said to have exclaimed, "This drink is so delicious that it would be a sin to let only misbelievers drink it! Let's defeat Satan by blessing the drink, which contains nothing objectionable to a Christian." Little did he know he was sanctioning a sacred rite. The Caffe Florian in the Piazza San Marco, where we spent a late afternoon together and you snapped the picture of the couple kissing, still pours forth.

But the coffee of Venice ranks only as semidivine. In Sicily and Naples, through the barista's rituals of preparing the grounds, tamping them just so, and favoring true pump espresso makers (not automatic), coffee achieves an unparalleled concentration and complexity of flavor.

I know you love artichokes. Wait till you try them here. Freshness makes a difference, as does knowing when to pick. They grow mainly around Bari and Brindisi and beautifully on Sardinia. Artichoke's first cousin, cardoon, is a native, probably from Sicily. We plant these at Bramasole and struggle in the kitchen to release them from their stringy exterior. Poached in broth then treated to a few dabs of bechamel and parmigiano, they're not just artichoke's poor relation. Possibly the Arabs or North Africans evolved these thistles into their present states. Southern farmers drive trucks up to our markets in Tuscany with bundles of cardoons and five or six varieties of artichoke, still attached to the stalk. We are lucky enough to buy sackfuls of those prized, small purple-tinged ones. Ed makes a tomato sauce, adding garlic and onions, then stirs in a couple of dozen of these well-trimmed, barely steamed little princes-such a simple process, such a taste. Carciofi fritti, fried artichokes, taste better than French fries. A sprinking of coa.r.s.e salt renders them addictive. I like to fry them in sunflower oil. Often a trattoria will have them, even if the menu does not say so. Ask!

In Puglia, cooks like layers. In high-sided pie plates, called tielle, they stack seafood, potatoes, and vegetables, or they use rice, leading some to connect the tiella with paella. In method, it's a kind of lasagna without the pasta. One fabulous recipe I found in Nancy Harmon Jenkins's Flavors of Puglia is Artichoke Parmesan. Sliced hearts of artichoke are dipped in a batter and fried in olive oil. You then layer the crisp slices with mozzarella and a little parmigiano. Fresh tomato sauce is spooned sparingly over the top; then the dish runs into the oven for half an hour.

The fact and fate of the South remains the sea. There are so many tiny places on the water where the fish is delicately fried-fritto di pesce-and the ambiance is enlivened by musicians who stroll in and out. At the Trattoria Dora in Naples, I ate a mound of cicale, plump crustaceans that resemble their namesake, cicadas. One of the waitresses burst out singing as she served the next table. The restaurant fell silent, and she held forth for fifteen minutes, then scooped up the pasta plates and swept, like the diva she is, into the kitchen while we applauded. Dining in the South goes like that. Fun. You must eat at Dora. Be sure to make a reservation.

At the crowded pizza places, you sit at a table with other people and try to absorb the noise level. Pizza, which was "bread with a relish" in Roman times, is now so simple-I saw most Neapolitans ordering the basic Margherita over and over. The quality of the mozzarella, made from the milk of water buffalo-imported into Italy from India for some reason around A.D. 600-makes all the difference. They would croak to see how we pile twelve ingredients on pizza in America. Other than mozzarella, the main cheese of the South is pecorino, sheep's milk cheese. Pecorino fresco is new and soft; semistagionato, somewhat aged, hardens and sharpens in taste; and stagionata, aged, is harder even than Parmesan. The canestrati, artisan pecorini, bear the mark of the basket (canestro) where they were formed. At home in Tuscany the cheeses often are coated with ashes or wrapped in oil-soaked grape or hazelnut leaves. Old baskets for forming ricotta are collectibles, long since replaced by plastic. Pecorino marries well to figs, to sliced pears and apples, and also to dense quince paste. The sacred spring rite requires you to eat pecorino with new fava beans. If you don't like this combination, don't tell anyone. Try also the adorable bulbous scamorza from the Abruzzi. This yellow cow's milk cheese is usually roasted in the fireplace-just like marshmallows on a stick-and eaten with bread. The hardened outside gets toasty and the interior turns creamy. We met this on a mountain road in early June. Ten minutes earlier we'd been enjoying the red swaths of poppies across the meadows; then a freakish storm sent flying slush at the winds.h.i.+eld. We couldn't see the edge of the road. We pulled over at a trattoria where people were gathered around a bonfire feasting on great hunks of rough bread with melted scamorza.

Bread-oh, so good. In Pompeii on the day of the eruption, a bakery had turned out eighty-one round loaves of bread made from wheat and barley flours. There are so many touching details at Pompeii. It's almost as though someone from that era lays a hand on your shoulder when you learn that the loaves were gashed in eight sections so that they could be broken apart easily.

Bread in Naples is cakier than the rough Tuscan bread we're used to. They usually use semolina flour in the South, giving the bread a golden tint and a more briochelike consistency. In English, this is durum wheat flour. I know you don't like the unsalted Tuscan bread, so you'll be happy here. Before the oceans became polluted, bakers often used seawater in making bread. I guess you'd gag if someone did that now. When we're driving, we start out the day at the best forno and buy a loaf to take in the car, along with whatever else looks good. I like the ring-shaped, small, herb-scented twists of bread with coa.r.s.e salt called taralli. They're the Pugliese equivalent to pretzels. If they're not fresh, they can crack a tooth. The famous big old pugliese loaves are simply the bread of Puglia. They can weigh twenty pounds in some areas. Naturally, as with all bread, you can buy a quarter of a loaf or a half. And buy it, of course, every morning.

A day proceeds like this.

Breakfast: always pastry. Sfogliatella, a fan-shaped flaky pastry stuffed with some delectable creamy ricotta filling, with a cappuccino, fuels you for endless sightseeing days. Pastries in Tuscany tend toward dryness. I always know when I'm truly acclimated there because the pastries start to taste good to me. Then I come South and taste heavenly cannoli, that impossibly divine combination of tastes and textures-fried tubular pastry filled with sugared ricotta delicately scented with orange flower water. Often their ends are dipped in chopped nuts. Oh, Lord. I'm not a fool for desserts, but thank you for allowing me back into the pastry shops twice a day. Pastry in Sicily is an art form. I saw a whole Noah's ark made from marzipan.

Lunch: pasta, fish. Maybe I am given to excesses. In Sardinia every day I ate lobster for lunch-then sometimes for dinner. All over that area you meet various types of lobster that don't even look kin to the Maine lobster. Waverley Root says that in Sardinia they eat like Stone Age men. Staring into the eyes of one of these lobsters, you have to agree. It doesn't look like something you'd put in your mouth. Once you do, you want to weep! So tender and sweet. Besides all the get-up-and-plow pastas of the South, one I took to immediately in Sardinia was new to me: fregola. It looks like breadcrumbs, slightly colored by saffron, and is served with salty ricotta. One difference from the usual pastas is that it's cooked in stock. The whiff of lost Araby comes from the saffron and from the mysterious town of Alghero itself, where we stayed in a former villa, turned small hotel, with two friends. We wandered the medinalike streets for a few days, hardly getting in the car at all, pointing to brightly colored tiled cupolas, stopping for strawberry gelato, drinking in the warm May air. Isn't the experience of food too intricately woven into your surroundings for you to know exactly what a taste is? The clear waters, with the sun spangling the floor of the sea, the young man bicycling with his baby on his shoulders, the slow slosh of the tide, the smell of fish scales, salt, iodine, and roses, the sun cutting down a narrow street-all these mix with the memory of the taste of lobster, the taste of a crisp cuc.u.mber salad, the taste of an icy amber beer. Maybe that's why when we go home and try a recipe, following all the instructions, it never quite tastes the same as we remembered it from the high terrace over the sea when the water was striated from lavender to gray and a little piece of music hit you right in the breastbone. The food seemed, then, so alive, so perfect and clean there, when the waiter lifted out the whole spine of the fish in one swift movement.

Dinner: a mussel soup with crostini, rounds of bread soaked in the broth. Next, a hare with pappardelle, rabbit with fennel, something hearty, or a simple grilled fish. They know to leave a fish alone. Elaborate preparations mask the elemental taste. No nut crusts, no breading, no thick sauces. Just a squeeze of lemon, a sprinkling of parsley and mint. Sardines are loved all over the Mediterranean. Quickly grilled or dipped in vinegar and fried-they convey the essence of the sea.

To extend a summer night down south, end your dinner with a tiny gla.s.s of strega, which translates as "witch" but seems instead closer to the angels with its airy floral perfume, or a bracing limoncello, the very tart breath of the citrus groves. By the way, limoncello is very easy to make at home. In a cool place, you steep peels from eight organic lemons in a covered quart of ninety percent proof alcohol for four days, shaking it now and then. On the fifth day, prepare a syrup of fourteen ounces of sugar and a quart of bottled still water. Don't let it boil, just simmer five minutes or so. Strain the lemon mixture and mix it into the syrup. Throw away the peels. Pour into bottles, and cork.

A friend uses the same method to make a laurel elixir, which he serves icy cold. I've had basilicocello, too. Even in Tuscany we seek out Moscato Pa.s.sito di Pantelleria, the dessert wine from the windy Italian island of Pantelleria, way down close to Tunisia. Will you go there? I haven't been but would love to. The wine is lush and smooth and fragrant. You almost want it for a body spray. Stromboli, too, I've missed, maybe because of that dreary movie with Ingrid Bergman.

The southerners are fond of their amari, like all Italians. These bitters aid digestion. I don't feel the need for such an aid and don't respond to their cough-syrupy flavors. The South's walnut liqueur makes my tongue raspy, and I fear it will cause my brain to curdle. Ed, however, likes them all, even the artichoke-flavored one, but especially Averna, made from thirty-something herbs. Maybe you and Ed have shared a few late-night nips of this.

The wonder of Italy-it's hard to find a bad meal. Hard also to have a bad time. Buon viaggio, amico mio.

Con affetto,