Sicily; If You Like Italy
for its People, Tempo and Joy of lLving - You'll Dig Sicily.
The
ANNOTICO Report
Few
people are aware of the Rich History of Sicily.
Sicily in 750 BC- 200BC was the Center of Magna Grecia
(Sicily and Southern
Italy), that far surpassed it's Hellenic
roots, and was an important center of learning. Sicily boasted more Greeks
(and probably more Greek temples) than Greece itself. The Romans then
asserted their influence after the Punic Wars.
In 515, Sicily fell to the Byzantine general
Belisarius. By the ninth century, all of Sicily
was in Saracen
hands, Moors (Arabs) ,Palermo
and its splendor was said to rival
that of Baghdad.
The lemon and the orange were cultivated, complex irrigation systems were
developed, and sophisticated mathematics introduced.
In 1061, a Norman lord, Roger de Hauteville attacked Messina
and defeated the Saracen garrison, and later Palermo. Sicily
was again part of Europe. It became the wealthiest realm of Europe, The Golden Age of Sicily had begun.
In 1198,
Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, ascended the
throne and ruled for more than half a century. By now, the Golden Age of Sicily was in full flower.
From Palermo's splendid royal palace, the
enlightened Frederick ruled most of Italy and also parts of Germany as Holy Roman Emperor, though in truth
he spent little time in Sicily.
It was a peaceful era, and very few Sicilian knights took part in the Crusades
and the other wars of the day. "Stupor Mundi" was the Latin nickname
given to the brilliant Emperor admired across the Mediterranean
and across the world.
Frederick's heirs proved themselves
less able than he, and Sicilian independence came to an end with the defeat of
the last Hohenstaufen at the Battle of Benevento in 1266. The Angevin dynasty of France
ruled the island from Naples until 1282, when a
bloody uprising, the War of the Sicilian Vespers, expelled Angevin
troops and nobles from Sicily.
The political
reasons for this war, described at length in The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge 1958),
considered the landmark work on this historical period, were indeed rather
complex. The local aristocracy was certainly involved, but so were several
European monarchs and even the Pope. The Sicilian conflicts mirrored those
between Guelphs and Ghibellines
elsewhere in Italy.
In the wake of the Vespers, the barons offered
their nation's Crown to Peter of Aragon, who gladly accepted. This led to the
island's being ruled, except for brief periods, from Spain for the next four centuries.
Owing to various
factors, particularly a dynastic interregnum, the Chiaramonte
family seized a certain degree of feudal power for a time after 1350. Their
wealth derived from confiscated estates that had belonged to the displaced Angevin feudatories before the Vespers, but with the King
so far away, families like the Chiaramonte and d'Alagona vied for local power. The situation was only
resolved in 1392, when Martin, grandson of the King of Aragon, arrived in Sicily to ascend the
Throne and restore order among the unruly barons. Andrea Chiaramonte,
the leader of the rebels, was executed at the castle now called the Steri, in Palermo's
Piazza Marina, and a parliament was called. It wasn't the first and it would
not be the last, but it was not particularly effective, and it led to few real
reforms.
The
Renaissance and Baroque certainly influenced Sicily internally, but to the rest
of the world it was a colony, a kind of strategic province that the Great
Powers could trade as a bargaining chip at key negotiations. With the discovery
of the New World, Sicily's importance
diminished, though it was still one of the most prosperous parts of Italy,
despite an aristocracy intent on exploiting its
resources and returning nothing. In 1713, Victor Amadeus of Savoy
became King of Sicily, though he ruled the island from his family's traditional
capital, Turin.
In 1720, the Crown passed to the Emperor Charles VI of Austria, and in
1734 to Charles de Bourbon, son of the King of Spain.
Charles, who
actually ruled from Naples, brought a degree of
autonomy to Sicily and Naples, which had likewise been ruled from
afar for some time. He built splendid palaces in Palermohis capital and made it the wealthiest, most opulent city in Italy, but
spent little time there.
Ferdinand I, then Ferdinand
II,ruled, but the
monarch and his son spent most of their time at the splendid Chinese Villa, set
at the foot of MountPellegrino, or Ficuzza, an estate in the mountains near Corleone. In 1812, Ferdinand signed the constitutional
decree abolishing feudalism, thus abrogating the last land rights of the
nobility. Though cut off from Naples,
Sicily was enjoying an
economic boom of sorts with the mining of sulfur. In 1816, he amalgamated
the Neapolitan and Sicilian realms into one state, forming the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies.
By 1848, enough disillusion had developed to spawn a revolutionary spirit.
The riot begun in Palermo quickly spread across
the island and, to a greater or lesser degree, across Europe.
(An analogy to the American protests of 1968 would not be
inappropriate.) Though King Ferdinand II suppressed this revolution by
force, he considered the situation serious enough to grant his subjects a
constitution.
The seeds of
dissent had been sown, however, and when a band of mostly Piedmontese
troops led by Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily
in 1860, young King Francis II, proved himself ill
prepared to meet a military challenge, even though he had Italy's largest
army. but many saw no reason to fight for the King.
In Garibaldi's
campaign Palermo was one of the first cities to
fall but it was months before the fortress of Messina surrendered. Cities that resisted
were sacked and burned. The eastern Sicilian city of Bronte was all but destroyed. Randazzo, Castiglione and Regalbuto
followed.
The rest of the
Kingdom had fallen by March 1861, though there were pockets of armed resistance
by partisans in the mountains of the mainland. There was never any declaration
of war, and a false referendum (with an alleged majority of almost 99%)
confirmed Francis' cousin, King Victor Emanuel II of Sardinia,
as "King of Italy."
A series of riots
followed for several years, in Sicily
and elsewhere in the South, and only the presence of thousands of Piedmontese troops could prevent the Sicilians from
re-installing Francis II on the Throne. The Piedmontese not
only confiscated the
national bank (and five million gold ducats from the Palermo
Mint),whose
assets dwarfed those of Piedmont, it executed
more than 100,000 southerners between 1860 and 1870,
civilians as well as partisans. Most were killed for little more than their
loyalty to the Royal Family of Naples, others were
incarcerated in Alpine prisons for "treason." In September
1866, an anti-Savoy revolt broke out in Palermo
but was ruthlessly put down within a week. By December of that year, tens of
thousands of Piedmontese troops had occupied Sicily to prop up the
new regime. Most of the land holdings of the Church were gradually being
confiscated by the new government, and with them numerous schools,
which were closed. Most Sicilian schools had been administered by the monastic
orders, and they were not immediately substituted by state institutions. This
meant that illiteracy became more widespread, though previously its
prevalence here had been no higher than in other parts of Italy.
For several
generations, the cause of Italian unity was enshrined as a kind of national
creed, in Sicily
and elsewhere. It would be contradicted in 1946 during the brief reign of
Victor Emmanuel's descendant, Umberto II, who signed the decree establishing
the Sicilian Region as a semi-autonomous part of Italy. More astute historians now
concede that a federalist union would have been better than a unitary,
monarchical Italy
with a shadowy democracy, and federalism is certainly advocated by many
Italians today.
The decades
following 1860 witnessed Sicily's
slow economic decline as important new industries gradually emerged not in the
South but in the North. Some of this was economic happenstance, but much was
the result of punitive taxation and other national economic policies detrimental
to the South. Until the 1860s, the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (i.e. Naples
and Sicily)
was clearly the largest, wealthiest and most industrialized of the various
Italian states. While Italian immigration prior to about
1870 had been primarily from the poorer northern regions, henceforth it was to
be from the increasingly poorer South. Between 1890 and 1930, millions of
southerners left for the Americas.
Rick Steves' Europe: Italy
In Mount Etna's shadow, Sicily stays down to earth
SanFranciscoChronicle,
Rick Steves
Sunday, December 9,
2007
Jabbinghis pole like a one-pronged pitchfork into the slow
red river of rock, the ashtray salesman pulled out a wad of hot lava. I
scrambled back as he swung it by me and plopped it into a mold. His partner
snipped it off with big iron clippers and rammed it into shape. As he dropped
the now shapely mass into a bucket, the water did a wild jig. Cooling on a
crispy black ledge were a dozen more lava ashtrays, each with the words "Mount Etna, Sicily"
molded into it.
As the red lava poured out of its horribly
hot trap door, I unzipped the ski parka I'd rented for $2 at the lift. At
11,000 feet, even on a sunny day, it's cold on top of Mount
Etna - unless you're spitting distance from a lava flow.
At the edge of the volcano, I surveyed the
island. Old lava flows rumbled like buffalo toward teeming Catania. The island's sprawling second city
butted up against a crescent beach, which stretched all the way to Taormina - Sicily's
romantic cliff-side haunt of aristocrats at play. And to my right was the hazy,
high and harsh interior.
Sicily sights are hard to grasp; its historic and artistic
big shots just don't ring a bell.The
folkloric traditions such as marionette theaters promoted by tourist
brochures seem to play out only for tour groups. And the place must lead Europe in litter. But there's a workaday charm here.
If you like Italy for its
people, tempo and joy of living - rather than for its Botticellis,
Guccis and touristic icons
- you'll dig Sicily.
Sicily, standing
midway between Africa and Europe, really is
a world to itself. On this spirited island, in spite of Italian
government and European Union pressure, the siesta persists and motorbikers' hair continues to fly in the Sicilian wind.
Palermo is the Rome of
Sicily, with lavish art, boisterous markets and holy cannoli. In Palermo's markets, animals
hang like anatomy lessons, sliced perfectly in half. For less than a euro, fichi di India,
the fist-sized cactus fruit that tastes like a cross between a kiwi and an
orange, can be peeled and yours.
Palermo offers a great bone experience - skull and shoulders
above anything else you'll find in Europe. Palermo's Capuchin Crypt
is a subterranean gallery filled with 8,000 "bodies without souls"
howling silently at their mortality. For centuries, people would choose their
niche in death and even stand there getting to know their macabre neighborhood.
Then, when they died, dressed in their Sunday best, they'd be hung up to dry.
Cefalu was my favorite stop. Steeped in history and bustling
with color, it's dramatically set with a fine beach on a craggy coast under a
pagan mountain. I dutifully toured Cefalu's museum
and cathedral. But the real attraction is on the streets. As the sun grew red
and heavy, the old women - still in bathrobes it seemed - filled their
balconies as the young people clogged the pedestrian (and Vespas)-only
main drag. Tsk-tsking at the age-old flirting scene,
the women gossiped about the girls below.
My friend - ignoring the girls - tells me of
the motorbike he lusts after: "It's a classic Vespa
from the '70s ... with a body that's round like a woman's."
Just then a guy gallops up on his very round
and very blue classic Vespa and declares, "It's
the only Vespa I've ever owned. I got it when I was
14. That was in 1969. The year man first walked on the moon,
that was the year I first rode this Vespa."
My friend and a few other guys gather almost
worshipfully around. The old women in the balconies and the mini-skirted flirts
no longer exist as that very round and very blue Vespa
dripped in Sicilian testosterone.
Nearby, a cafe overlooks the beach. I sip my latte
di mandola(almond milk) with the locals who
seem to be posted there on duty, making sure that big red sun goes down. Little
wooden boats, painted brightly, sit plump on the beach. Above them, the
fisherman's clubhouse fills what was a medieval entry through the town wall. I
wander in.
The senior member, "Il Presidente,"
greets me warmly - the men go by nicknames and often don't even know their
friends' real names. Since the 1950s, Il Presidente has spent his nights
fishing, gathering anchovies under the seductive beam of his gas-powered lampara. As he takes the pre-Coleman, vintage lamp off its
rusty wall hook, I see tales of a lifetime at sea in his face. As he shows me
the ropes he wove from local straw and complains that the new ropes just aren't
the same, I lash him to the rack of memories I'll take home from Sicily.