Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean by Keahey John

Author:Keahey, John [Keahey, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Aci Trezza and the Cyclops

A grim loner, dead set in his own lawless ways.

Here was a piece of work, by god, a monster

built like no mortal who ever supped on bread,

no, like a shaggy peak, I’d say—a man-mountain

rearing head and shoulders over the world.

—Homer, The Odyssey

I HEARD a story about the folks who climbed Etna each day and carried the large blocks of ice wrapped in protective green ferns down its steep, rich slopes so they could preserve the early morning catch of fish. The ice, made from snow packed by peasants and preserved for summer use deep in lava tunnels on Etna’s slope, was stored some distance from the coastal fishing villages that stretch out north and south from cluttered, overcrowded Catania.

I thought about this daily ordeal one bright July Sunday when I dropped down along the narrow, confusing mountain roads from Trecastagni to a little village on the Ionian Sea, Aci Trezza. This is the village made famous by a Giovanni Verga novel, I Malavoglia, the name of the family in the story. The English translation carries the additional title The House by the Medlar Tree. It tells the tragic story of a fishing family that lived out their lives in that tiny village in the late 1800s.

The good folks in Aci Trezza depend on tourism these days as well as fishing, and they capitalize on the fame of this book and the 1948 Luchino Visconti film, La terra trema, based on the story, which Visconti set not in the late eighteen hundreds, but in the mid-1940s. Visconti used only local people, nonactors, who spoke only their local dialect. The result was a tribute to his abilities as a director.

I learned that only two of the townspeople appearing in the film were still alive. I met one during my usual stroll around the town’s main square overlooking the port. He is a retired fisherman, Salvatore Vicari, now seventy-two. At around age ten, he was “Alfio the boat boy,” the brother of the film’s hapless hero, ’Ntoni.

Salvatore revels as the town star; he loves meeting people who have seen the film and who remember the Visconti character despairing as he watched his family disintegrate within the grinding poverty of the fisherman’s life. The final scenes are particularly touching as he goes, hand in hand, with his brother to find work on a fleet of new boats, enduring the brutal badgering of the bosses as they ridicule the fishermen who tried to defy them.

Today, Salvatore, looking like he could be in his midfifties or early sixties, his face, nut-brown from a life at sea, has a winning smile and an easy manner as he greets visitors eager to shake his hand. Men of his generation never went to school. The host of my bed-and-breakfast tells me, “Most of the older men can’t read. A man from the north reads news and documents to them.”

Looking at the young people of Aci Trezza today and their easy interactions, they seem no different than American teenagers.

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