DISCOVERING THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF ITALY'S BIGGEST ISLAND

By Cara Mia DiMassa, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
April 18 2002

"THE STONE BOUDOIR"

Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily 
By Theresa Maggio, Perseus Publishing, 246 pages, $25.95

There is something inherently romantic in finding yourself between one tiny 
black dot and another on a well-traveled tourist map. The pilgrim's progress 
in Italy has become so worn with our footsteps that American college students 
traveling there often carry the ubiquitous "Let's Go" travel guide--not for 
choosing destinations, as the title suggests, but rather as a template for 
what, and where, to avoid.

American-born writer Theresa Maggio has spent the better part of the last two 
decades on a Sicilian quest, looking for the tiniest of towns on Italy's 
biggest island. "These are places tourists seldom see," she writes in "The 
Stone Boudoir," her chronicle of those journeys. "But they are the island's 
hidden treasure and the secret spring of Sicilian endurance."

Maggio--who last wrote about Sicily, the land of her grandparents, in the 
evocative "Mattanza," a portrait of the tuna fishermen of Favignana, an 
island off Sicily's coast--has sought out places obscured from the typical 
tourist's vision by a sentiment that some towns and villages were too small 
even to bear mention.

Using Santa Margherita, the town from which her grandfather emigrated to the 
United States, as her base of travel, Maggio travels around Sicily with 
little money to spend on luxuries but with an intense curiosity about how 
people live, and endure, on an island whose rocky composition is both an 
obstacle and a comfort.

All that is constant in a Sicilian's life, it seems, is the presence of the 
sky, the water--and stones. Houses are fashioned from caves; a woman saves 
the stone turned over in her fields to build a patio for her house; a man 
makes a living assembling semiprecious stones into a jigsaw puzzle of 
elaborate inlay that will fetch thousands of dollars. When we learn that the 
father of one of Maggio's friends died after his body grew a kidney stone too 
large to expel, we know that it is not just medicine but the island that 
failed him. Stone, after all, lasts for ages.

Maggio herself finds comfort in the cobblestones. Describing the town of 
Polizzi Generosa--"a long name for a small dot"--she writes that the streets 
"were so close and intimate that I felt I'd walked into someone's stone 
boudoir. Every time I put my foot down, it rolled over the soft convex of a 
stone.... In the rain, the stones shone like puffed satin pillows--uneven, 
imperfect, and of humans."

Maggio is a compelling writer who can render even the simplest moments into 
sheer poetry. Describing a mother feeding her 3-year-old twins, Maggio 
writes: "She twirled the spaghetti on a fork and the girls sucked in their 
supper strand by strand. The noodles whipped their cheeks with red sauce and 
made their mother laugh--love from a bowl, in the street, where there was a 
breeze and people watching."

In moments like these, when Maggio steps aside and lets the people she meets 
take over her pages, "The Stone Boudoir" is delightful...

In the end, the quest for undiscovered country at the heart of "The Stone 
Boudoir" is at odds with the conclusions it leads us to along the way: The 
people of Sicily were never really hidden from view. Perhaps we just weren't 
looking hard enough.