Here and There Read Free Page A

ever since. Taxi drivers and hotel concierges fend off the inquisitive questions from tourists with a wearied thin politeness, like men being asked about their prostates.
    From the moment you land in Palermo, you’re aware that one of the defining characteristics of Sicily is that it isn’t like the rest of Italy. A secretive, watchful, hard and self-contained place, there is none of the light-hearted bantering and flirtation you associate with the mainland. Indeed, there are few women around, and it’s outwardly as overtly masculine as the countries across the straits in North Africa. I was always aware of being watched in the hugger-mugger collapsing streets of the old capital. Whenever I looked over my shoulder there was somebody looking back. Not threatening or intimidating, just noticing, marking your movements through the teeming streets. The balconies of the old baroque houses have blankets hung over their metal balustrades to protect the modesty of daughters leaning over to whisper secrets and dart dark, meaningful glances. Or just hang out the washing.
    There are hundreds of huge and vainglorious palaces here, ancient and decrepit, dropping their decoration and pediment like stone lepers. They’re blackened and crippled, strung with utility cables like life-support, and inside the warren of rooms is a mass of illegal immigrants from Tunisia and points south from Africa. The poignancy and beauty of extreme penury and desperation set against crumbling, reduced grandeur is one of the endearing pleasures of sightseeing. Picturesque slums were ever the background of The Grand Tour, which took in Sicily for the poorest and most aesthetically pleasing peasants in Europe. Its ruins of half-a-dozen defunct civilisations and Mount Etna continue to be the living symbols of hubris and nemesis: compared to the power of ancient gods, human vanity and aesthetics are merely laughable graffiti.
    There are few places that have quite so much naked, molten history as Sicily. Dozens of invasions, uncountable massacres and clearances, relentless vendettas. The past infects the present and the future, it glows in the brooding, and seeps from one generation to the next. Blood, as they say around here, calls for blood. Everything about Sicily seems to be a cautionary tale. Everything is itself and a symbol and part of a code. It’s not an easy place to grasp, or necessarily one that you’re drawn to. There are a lot of people here, a lot of poor people and a lot of corruption. Modern buildings of the most dispiriting type seen outside the dreams of Stalinism crust every hillside and elbow every small town. There was a time in the ’70s when they said Sicily was the second-biggest importer of concrete in the world after Nigeria. It was a society adept at milking the guilt and hush-money of European grants for the least lasting good.
    But it still manages a striking and harsh beauty, an unpolished or unfenced sense of the ages made palpable and accessible. A people whose hardship and secrets have also given surprising moments of sweetness and sympathy. I was particularly drawn to the confectionery. Traditionally cakes and pastries are made by nuns in closed and silent orders, who make delicate and intricate moments of almond and honey with infusions of soft fruit and citrus and chestnut, sugared and shaped into devout little braille prayers. There are hundreds of these sweet things offered to martyrs or on religious holidays. The intensity and the hardness of the belief and the life made them give each a flavour that transcends the marzipan and ricotta. They have a memory of the crypt, a veiled reminder of incense and death. And behind the childish pleasure of sweetness is mortality and pain and guilt and mortification. The island is heavy with mandarin oranges. The air is full of the smell of their blossom, heady and morbid.
    I went up to the small hill village of Savoca in the south-west. Not many people make it up