Palermo
Monreale
Agrigento
I went to Agrigento today [February 13]. But I didn't plan it well (really, I didn't plan it at all) and didn't have enough time to venture down to the Valley of the Temples and back, so I went into town instead, where everything closes at one and doesn't reopen. But it gave me a chance to see a different side of Sicily.
I ducked into the Museo Diocesano, remarkable mostly for its ivory crucifixes and daring English translations, which often verge on poetic. Consider: "It conveys in this room a cute little angel, escaped to two sacrilegious thefts, that in the past centuries, disfigured his harmony."
Then there is the "precious plastic testimony" of "the little elephant" (not that little: a hunk of marble that probably weighs more than a refrigerator) and the "coronary women" and the "catalytic center of pilgrimage" and "the dreamy sweetness of the ad infinitum landscape."
Naturally, that museum also closed at one.
Agrigento in February is quiet to the point of catatonia. Stray cats outnumbered passers-by, lean, distrustful things, despite the plates of cat food and pasta (penne and conchiglie, by the looks of it) tucked into every alcove.
At the ticket office for Santo Spirito, three little old women shared what is far less than a part-time job manning the ticket booth. They had the quality of relics, of women stuck in time. They either seamlessly replaced women just like them or they alone have uncovered the secret to eternal life. The catch is that you live forever as an elderly cashier with arthritic fingers who must tell the few visitors that drift your way that, no, the bakery, advertised all over town, is not open today. One rather suspects all the baking nuns—shunning the peculiar immortality of the cashiers so that they might be joined in death with their Creator—have long since passed away and that no more nipples of the virgin will ever be sold here.
The city is still heavily scarred from WWII. It reminds me of the port city of Ermoupoli. You can still see where the bombs fell because what was destroyed was never rebuilt. You can see, too, how arbitrary a war is, because these bombed-out homes look like private disasters, sparing the neighbors. On the train, which cuts across the rocky heart of the island, you get some ideas about why people emigrated in droves. Life looks hard. The sun—even in winter—is obliterating: bleaching and flattening everything. Olive trees grow in straggling rows. The mountains look like bundles of exposed nerves. The river beds—carved out by violent floods—are parched.
Sicilian art—so far*—strikes me as bipolar: either gentle or ghastly. There are tender Madonnas so sweet as to be somehow inhuman (or at least unconvincing) and there are gory crucifixions, contorted faces, gnarled hands. The latter show a keen knowledge of suffering.
I'm curious about the love of dioramas. But I might understand it better now that I've seen a bit more of Sicily. A diorama is a tidily contained world where the vegetation is always lush, populated by clean, cheerful peasants of all shapes and sizes, some towering like benevolent Goliaths, others dainty as pygmies. These scenes depict festival days or moments of untroubled rest. The shepherd boy is always dozing next to a basket full of bread, cheese, and wine, with no wolves in sight. To my eyes, the dioramas are painfully tacky, the mismatched dolls insipid as Renoir's femmes with their blazing cheeks and dull eyes. But these are pleasant moments, encased in glass so as to be undisturbed forever. There is no shadow of whatever the next moment will bring—only the bright, even light of midday, when morning and evening are equally out of mind.
It is an act of great faith to believe in gentleness in a landscape scarred by volcanoes and shaken by earthquakes and flattened by bombs, where everything that grows wears an armor of brambles or thorns, in a dry place tormented by a glittering, undrinkable sea.
*This was pre-me running into the works of Antonello da Messina
Nice to see a creative, visual substack for a change. Love your photos. I used to do travel photography and like yours, they were mostly architectural with very few people in them. These resonate with me and looking forward to seeing more.
I absolutely love your photographic eye Eliza! Wonderful work. I'm glad you did this and I'll look forward to more.