Isn’t it always the way when you have an early start that you wake at least an hour before you need to, and regret it sorely at the other end of the day? And so I did on that Monday morning in August when I was headed for Sicily.
The previous days in the high Tuscan hills had been excruciatingly hot. A plethora of village festivals preceded the long-awaited Ferragosto, the 15th of August, Assumption for the religious I believe, when if you haven’t yet gone on holiday, it’s the signal that you must. So the festivals of farro, of porchetta, of vino and whatever else they come up with my in hills, cease and there is nothing but quiet.
I had done nothing for days other than languish on my sofa, take small bursts in the sun to work on my tan, eat, drink and read. It is heaven and it is a totally new kind of life for me. Unused to not having projects and goals and stuff to do, this is the time just to be. The transition I am in now is well overdue in my life. But it all comes when it is meant to and right now, I am liking doing nothing. Slothful? Yes maybe. And quite frankly I am totally OK about it.
The palest of dawn woke me at 5am and I lay there enjoying it knowing that I didn’t have to get up until 6.15 or be in my car before 7. The pink ribbon of cloud caressing my mountains stirs me as always as I make my way downstairs to the bathroom.
I am in Il Fienile…The Barn. In my part of Tuscany the barn was built under the same roof line as the house and is an extension of the house. When we bought I Cinghiali the barn was full of rubbish…. bales of hay which fell through a hole in the ground to feed the animals kept in the stables underneath, old farm equipment which I now keep as treasures of the past, and a couple of wooden saddles that would have added considerable pain to the already uncomfortable activity of horse riding. But they are still used and not long ago I saw three horses tethered nearby with these very rustic pieces strapped onto their backs. There were stacks of old timber, the chestnut of the area, and a partial mezzanine which in fact inspired the renovation of the barn a decade after the restoration of the villa.
I love the barn; I decided last week that it’s my favourite living space in the world. It is also the most simple. There are lots of windows on both levels and I leave them permanently open. Yes the odd sparrow flies in, occasionally a pipistrelli or two (tiny bats) in the depth of the night but they don’t stay and they are a reminder that I am in the country and not in suburban Melbourne. Downstairs lies the kitchen, living room, dining room, all open plan and spacious and lovely and the bathroom which is the only enclosed space. Upstairs, reached by open wooden stairs, a wrought iron balustrade contains the sleeping space which takes up half of the size of the barn and allows the vista of the beautiful mountains to be enjoyed from a prostate position in the beds.
It was this very mezzanine that almost prevented the barn being restored! Plans had been drawn up, submitted to the local Comune and work was due to start on Monday. By chance we were there, as we had not been for the restoration of the villa, and when Monday came but Giovanni didn’t we wonder why. No sightings on Tuesday either so on Wednesday we decide to take a drive, knowing we could come across his van where he would either be working on a site or drinking a glass of vino with a satisfied customer or a prospective new one!
Of course we found him and, as I had only just begun to understand his version of the local dialect, Garfagnino, I was able to ask why we hadn’t seen him and to understand his response. “They won’t let us build the mezzanine, it’s not seismic proof” was the explanation and I wondered why the architect had been on the job for two years, submitted the plans to council and accepted her payment when she must have known there was a problem!! Later I wondered about her even being an architect when I mentioned the Taj Mahal and she had never heard of it!!!
A terremoto had razed our entire village to the ground in 1921 and since then all new houses had at least metre thick stone walls in case of a recurrence. All the old houses had to be tied together, with steel rods going through them at various intervals with a rod on the outside at each end holding the tie in place.
Giovanni’s news was not welcome. Momentarily we were disappointed and furious; then I became instantly Italian and knew there must be a solution. One of the things I love about this country is the fact that the bureaucracy can be got around. A “no” is not necessarily a “no”, which it is in Australia and which I, as a consummate rule breaker, find maddening. So I said to Giovanni “What has to happen for the work to commence tomorrow?” A simple question with a very simple and immediate answer. ”Valerio at the Comune needs five million lire.” I wrote the cheque, Giovanni delivered it that afternoon and our gang was on the job at 8am the following day. No receipt of course and I would have been beyond stupid to anticipate one.
So the barn was restored in a very non-traditional way that had the builders, plumbers, electricians, and our wonderful carpenter Franco who died of lung cancer shortly after, scratching their collective heads. My region is very traditional and what was suggested to them was entirely outside their known parameters. However they got into the swing of things, came up with some wonderful suggestions and we left them to it and flew to Australia.
Returning the following February for the huge, heavy, 5 inch bull nose piece of marble for the kitchen bench to be carried by 4 men down our steep drive on a pouring wet day and to be placed on spindly thin little stainless steel legs that was its base. One step wrong on that slippery path and our 300 kilo piece of the Carrara Mountains would have been in 1000 bits. Only when it was in situ making our barn complete did our team realise what a special and different space we had created and lent their enthusiasm to the finished project.
This is the space I crept out of on Monday at 7am in already 20 degree heat to head down to Pisa and eventually Sicily to stay with my friends who are in their own restoration process.
Down the road and around the corner I spied a curious sight: an old man in white in the middle of a field, and standing only a metre from a scarecrow, doing what looked like Tai Chi. Given the ageing population of my area and the traditional lives of the people this sight was extraordinary. Having to stop a few hundred metres down the road on the perimeter of the next town for a beautiful deer to cross safely is far more common.
An easy two hours drive to Pisa airport, car parked and there even too early for check in for my flight to Catania. So what else is a girl to do that check out the rather nice assortment of shops for the travelling public? Ah, renovations here too….a new loo and greatly modernised. A new underwear and bikini shop. Maybe time to chuck the ancient model I found in my cellar last week and woo hoo…everything is on sale…so what’s to lose by checking out the racks. If only I’d known….half in and half out of a pretty pink model the strains of that dismal pre-Dickens music came into my dressing room bringing about an immediate state change. I had to buy them quickly and get out thinking that after all these years and after all those UPW’s how it could still affect me like that.
The deep blue Mediterranean is a huge contrast against the parched brown landscape from Pisa to Rome and then to Sicily. Once over Sicily I am reminded of the hundreds of thousands of Sicilians who left their homes in the early 1900’s not just to try their luck in America but to avoid starvation in Sicily. The evidence is the dozens of abandoned stone houses with crumbling walls and caved-in roofs. They had nothing here, the land is very unforgiving save for oranges and olives and some grapes in certain areas, and these men walked down to the ports and left, probably with a piece of fabric carrying everything they owned on their backs. They changed American society I am sure, just as their absence changed life in Sicily.
I read what I wrote about Sicily a decade ago in Interlude with Wild Boars: “The poverty is depressing: the hundreds of derelict farmhouses long since deserted; the phenomenon of casa abusiva where houses, built without planning permits, are lived in but never finished; the heavily fortified prisons of Palermo and its overflowing rubbish bins which are never emptied. Almost the entire population of a block of apartments is arrested on narcotics charges and I read that over ten billion dollars of Mafia property in the capital has been seized by the magistrates over the past ten years. The 1986 trials of five hundred top Mafiosi took place in a specially-constructed bunker in Palermo, resulting in jail sentences of over two thousand years. The roads are pretty average and even the marzipan is disappointing.”
I wonder what has changed and am delighted the wonderful gelati are still wonderful. The prisons are still lenient I understand … fathers and sons languish inside with their mobile phones arranging the next deal and mums and wives pop in each day with their hot midday meal and for a chat. I’m not sure if sex is on the agenda, but this is Italy, nay, this is Sicily and I am sure everything can be arranged for a price.
The hour and a half drive to my friends’ renovation site is full of barren fields and lots of goats. It’s definitely goat territory and quite frankly I think some of them are sheep but it’s hard to tell the difference. A few forested parts offer some green respite to offset the white stone that is Sicily’s.
My Tuscany is grey. Grey stone houses with red tegole…the half pipe round roof tiles. Here huge chunks of white stone poke out of the ground as far as the eye can see and the case are built of the white stone with matching tegole for their roofs. It is such a different look and every bit as lovely.
The roads are narrow, terrible and match the Sicilian drivers. If they have a Patente, a driving licence, I reckon it was handed out in the Weetie packets. No one stays on their side of the road and most of the intersections have no logic to them. There are no rules, other than watch out for yourself and drive slowly. My friends say the locals are patient if you want to chat to someone along the way and hold up the traffic a bit and deafeningly horn blowing when you do something stupid. Good to know if you want to drive.
Greg I’ve known since Pontius was a Pilot…his father was my boss in my first job. We met at the Blue Posts in Rupert Street, Soho when he was pulling beers and some years later I introduced him to his first wife. Later I was a guest at his second marriage and now I am about to meet Lizzy, Numero 3 who has single handed and initially with no Italian, let alone Siciliano, bought two properties here and is almost through a huge restoration of the one we are going to. I am impressed before I meet her. When we drive up the Strada Privata and come across a beautiful long low white stone building, faced with a huge loggia, two lovely cottages for guests (one of which is mine for the duration) I am significantly beyond impressed. As I look through the huge piles of stone that landscape the front of the villa there is a sparkling blue pool and a spa and a crazy wooden day bed which I mentally reserve for myself.
Pots of fragrant green basilico line the side wall of the house, a beautiful big green tree is hemmed in with a round stone seat, outdoor barbecues and a stone oven add to their entertaining area and elsewhere there are the digging machines, scaffolding, concrete mixers, the remnants of road making equipment and other impedimenta that tell a whole other story about how this piece of magnificence was created.
I finally meet Lizzie in the kitchen where she is preparing wonderful fresh, from someone’s garden, but not theirs – yet, vegetables for dinner and Greg gets out the bubbly and the cold glasses. It is all perfect.
The house is lovely and Liz has captured all its original features in the modernisation including glassing part of the floor in the living room covering what seems like an archaeological dig below. Not what it seems, it was created as a secret grain storage area in case Mussolini came to rape, pillage and plunder. Not much else of its origins is evident save the tiny windows and the low low lintel off the kitchen that even the tiny men sitting in the streets outside bars on old wooden chairs would probably have to duck for. The big stone fireplace is another feat of Lizzie’s determination and it is stunning. But it’s hot and the pool beckons. Greg calls for George who will materialise with the drinks and now I’m very impressed wondering who will show up and thinking George is not a very Sicilian name…or Albanian, as there are a lot of them here too. George however is floated on the pool hiding a bottle of chilled white and a set of plastic glasses and I am impressed. Even more.
Liz came to this part of Sicily a bit on a whim some years ago. Born a Brit, lived in New York for 10 years, chartered her own yacht around the Caribbean for more years, and for the last about 12 lived in the Marshall Islands running the store there. The where? I hear you asking, and I had to as well. The Marshall Islands are somewhere in the Pacific, have a population of bugger all, none of whom seem to go much anywhere else or have particularly functional lives. Most houses have no running water and no sewerage. There is a huge diabetes problem because of the white rice consumed and most things have to be shipped in. Hence Lizzie’s store. She is a go-go woman with beautiful eyes and boundless energy… she can do anything, and certainly, as I discover this piece of magnificence in Sicily, has done an absolutely brilliant job creating a Sicilian casa. To her it is but half complete…to the naked eye, yes, there is landscaping to do and the odd extra touch but it is already more than stunning.
Their local “town”, St Jacobo has more stores and bars than my hamlet in Tuscany including a common feature of Sicily, or at least this part, called a circolo. These circolo’s are effectively men’s clubs where men go to chat, have a coffee, probably escape from their women and talk about sport and politics, and probably their women. The women, even if they wanted to pay the subscription, are not generally allowed. In Ragusa we saw the adjoining building to the circolo had a first floor covered-in balcony where the women sat to try and overhear the conversation without being seen, which reminded me of the carved screens in India and the screened area in the Colon, the opera house of Buenos Aires, where the widows could enjoy the opera without being condemned for not mourning their late lamented and most likely philandering husbands properly.
Going to the local town Giarratana for market day I am delighted to see a different type of housecoat hanging for the housewives and their daily chores. My son Hugo always wants to buy me one when he comes to my market day, and I make a mental note that the Tuscan numbers are just a tad more stylish!
I think the economy of Sicily is not anywhere as prosperous as that of la bella Toscana. Here the villages look poor, the landscape is hard and unforgiving and to eke out a living would be terribly hard and arduous, unless of course you are engaged in the most prosperous occupation of Sicilians – drugs and money laundering.
But the harsh landscape is tempered with the beautiful green of the olive trees, old, gnarled and capable of putting out a fabulous oil that equals any of the Tuscan greats. In Melbourne I used to alternate in my oil shopping between the big Tuscans and the small Sicilians and now, tasting the local at source, I want more of it.
There are lots of people on market day, and, as it happens, it is also the festival of horses although as much as we looked, and smelt for evidence, we could not come across them. They have just had the festival of the frozen virgin as Greg calls it – the Lady of the Snows (snows here in hot Sicily?? I dont think so!) and the festival of the onion and I marvel at the Italians for their ability to create a holiday atmosphere and a week of festivities over something as humble as the onion. When I see a truck on the roadside selling bright yellow melons and what appears to be huge white melons I am told that the latter are in fact the revered onions. Yes I think even I would create a festival to celebrate such greatness!
Our days are languid and long. I don’t do much but sloth around and in the pool, taking an afternoon siesta as one should in this heat. Lizzie spends her time rounding up bits of timber and metal strewn across her 22 acres and putting them all in piles for later use. She is not a gal who wastes a moment or a thing. Greg is engaged in his laboratorio making a shed. Workmen come and go and Lizzie speaks with and understands them perfectly. I am impressed and vow to work on my Italian which I don’t use enough even though I know it well.
One night we go to the beautiful baroque town of Ragusa for drinks and dinner, and a tour with their friend Consuelo, who points out the three big bridges and the caves in the hillside and the red light area before we even start our descent into this beautiful town built after its predecessor was razed to the ground in 1693. Dining in a small square surrounded by motor bikes, cars, kids playing, death notices pasted on anything that will take them, paying 5 Euros for a main pasta course and feeling deliciously warm even though it is about 11pm, we all comment that life here is pretty damned good and we wouldn’t be anywhere else for quids. Or Lire, or, in fact, Euros! Or whatever the currency is on the Marshall Islands or Fiji where Greg lived for more than two decades running the Cousteau resort and Turtle Island before that. Or was it Lizard, I always get the two muddled up.
Modica, another beautiful town a couple of nights later offers the best pizzeria on the planet. When Lizzie discovered I Baccanti some years ago there were 4 or 5 tables in an alleyway and one room inside beside the kitchen. Now there are more than 20 tables in the alleyway, at least 8 rooms inside leading to another alleyway the other side. At midnight they are still full and people waiting for take-aways. Liz asks La Padrona how many pizzas they make a day, and she shrugs and says non lo so.…I dont know. I do know it was one of the best pizzas I have ever had and for a few mere Euros it filled my plate and me before I was half way through. Modica is out and about even though it is only Wednesday. It seems like a festive Saturday night. So despite what I might have previously thought about the economy here, it would seem there is enough money to eat out and some places would be making a substantial living.
I notice all the men are wearing a bag. Not for them the discrete leather clutch with a wrist strap…these are big bags stretched across their chests and carrying all their bits and pieces. Greg approves. And in the shops, the remnants of summer shoes all with 5 inch heels and platform soles which are, for me, never an option on these cobblestones.
Lizzie decides to do some entertaining. No use having just a few….lets ring a bunch of Italians and invite them for a barbecue. Greg and I are despatched one very hot morning to go shopping. The local butcher offers a wonderful display of things: we leave with meat for the five thousand at a cost of 16 Euros. The same price buys us all the accoutrements at Conad, the ubiquitous supermarket chain around the corner. I’ve just read that Melbourne is again the world’s most liveable city where what we bought would have cost not E32/AUD37 but at the very least three times that. So Melbourne, you are not the world’s most liveable city: at least for these three Italophiles.
Dinner Party Sicilian Style: prepare food, lay table, pour a drink, consume a drink, maybe two, wonder who will come, and when, or if. But they did: Enzo with a magnificent head of hair just waiting to run your fingers through as countless have done before and will again, and his playful pup Rino, and Giorgio the builder and his girlfriend Stefania (No 1) on his motor bike. Between them they speak a few words of English but I determine to speak Italian all night and hope they don’t lapse into Siciliano. They don’t, and I do. All night, asking questions, making comments, answering questions and everyone totally understood me. It’s the most Italian I have spoken for ages, and it works. Greg starts the BBQ but Enzo takes over. He’s lived here more than Greg, accompanying a friend of Lizzie’s who moved in to look after the casa when she was back in the Marshall Islands.
Greg decides Enzo’s dog is like all Sicilian men: very good with emotion, and no good at discipline. There is no word of dissent from Enzo and I make a mental note. At 11.30 the phone rings to remind us of the fireworks and I learn a new term… fuoco artificiali which are to go off at midnight in our town…for another festival no doubt, or just because they had some left over from the last one. Greg says let’s not go because they won’t start them until 1am. And he was right. Just at 1 when I decide to go to my piccola casa the first shower of light is seen in the dark night sky. He may be a relative newcomer to Italy and indeed Sicily but he’s got their character in one!
Another day, my last, and before I am awake Angelo is out there beavering away with the noisy digger moving the rocks that are Sicily. I love this place. It has a great spirit. It has a heart that I hadn’t felt on my previous visit which was all ruins and trying to find decent hotels and avoiding the Mafiosi. This time I have been for some days almost a local in a tiny locale of this large island which has been raped, pillaged and plundered by many over the centuries and I love it.
We are expected for lunch with a friend of Lizzie’s. She is making her signature bread …sought after by all the locals and we are running late. She calls our hostess…no worries says Stefania No 2, an hour in ritardo is fine. We are in their summer house, only a couple of kilometres from their usual house, and tiny but with a beautiful garden and a large pool in which there are dozens of Sicilians. Lunch, for 30 people mostly in bathers, is wonderful: easy, casual, delicious flavours that keep coming served by good looking men and women with darkened skins. My neighbour, a female architect tells me that if Sicilians are not eating they are talking about food. She is not just talking about women; men talk endlessly about how zucchinis are prepared with oil and garlic and fresh oregano and just a hint of balsamico. You have got to love these people.
Later we drive out to meet up with Francesco, a very good looking (and mysterious and I think available) Venetian lawyer who divides his time between his studio legale in Venice and restoring an old stone house that is surrounded by what he loves: olive trees, and his next business. Sitting under a rough matting logia on a quasi terrace made from scaffolding boards, Francesco has laid out a huge delicious-smelling Pecorino cheese, some purple plums from his tree, sweet dried tomatoes, semi dried tomatoes in olive oil and herbs and garlic and some amazing bread made from old grain called orzo. He pours the local tipple: white wine, Campari and aqua frizzante, complete with lemon and ice. It is a setting fit for royalty, surrounded by his 1300 old olive trees, and 1500 freshly planted ones.
We talk to Francesco in Italian and learn about olive production here in Sicily…or at least his part: what it takes to be designated DOC or its equivalent, why he doesn’t get his olives crushed locally by a friend but instead takes the entire harvest an hour away, and how he is setting up his own facility on this magnificent property. All his olives are expensively hand-picked rather than using a machine or a man with a bastone…a bit stick: 4 men to a tree and the best, the first pressed, rich and low yield, comes in October. The yield from his 100 year old trees is 10 litres. Later in December and January he gets more yield but lesser quality. Nonetheless Francesco’s oil must be hideously expensive as it comes in as small as 100 mil bottles and is exported to Germany. Purchasing is on demand. No oil of his will sit on a supermarket shelf going rancid for months, or, like cheap commercial oils be filled with cleansing products to mask the already rancid flavour evident before it even hits the shelves. When you order one of Francesco’s oils it is made for you, or at least bottled from the huge temperature controlled and gassed vats so that you get it fresh and lovely. When he gets his facility up and running he plans to get some geese to shoo away the ladri who might have in mind a bit of theft: he thinks they are more effective and louder than any guard dog.
Later we leave this heaven and find a tiny restaurant down a narrow cobblestoned alleyway in Buccheri and I recall how when I was in Sicily 11 years ago we could never find restaurants. Now I know why. This particular alley, opposite another magnificent baroque locked and fenced church which Sicily is littered with, and is totally inconspicuous to the non-local. Run by two brothers, one who cooks and one who is front of house, we are greeted by Chico in jeans and a striped t-shirt and looking like Billy Crystal, who brings a small plate over to our table with four types of pasta on it. Thick white strips, tiny white conch shells, green ribbons and chunky pink worm like pasta: all made in their kitchen and, I am told, all wonderful. I go for the pink which is full of chilli and comes with a bit of oil and some ruccola. It is delicious. We are learning words from Francesco and to Greg’s and my amazement Liz learns the word kitsch: and then we realise it describes the restaurant perfectly. But olde worlde kitsch…pictures on every wall alongside certificates and an old photograph of some boys pushing a cart up one of the towns hills. One boy has the bottom totally out of his woollen dungarees showing his bare backside to all who follow; a reminder of the poverty that was Sicily’s. Local produce: net bags of snails, the huge and revered onions in rush baskets behind my chair and a disused German prosciutto cutter on a shelf high on the wall. The litre of local red was magnificent and cost only a few Euros. Francesco silently paid for us all and we crept out under the midnight sky to our own haven in San Jacobo where the stars shone and the moon was half way between invisible and full.
My last night in Sicily, for now. I have a new love and respect for the place and vow to return sooner than the 11 years since I was last here. Thank you Lizzie and Greg for your amazing generosity and hospitality for allowing me into your Sicilian world for a moment.
Until next time, with heart
Buzz
