Sicilian Odyssey Read Free

landscape, and from each part grew one of the nine towns whose names begin with Aci: Acireale, Aci Trezza, Aci Castello…
    Late on the afternoon of our arrival, we decide to go for a walk from our beachfront hotel (named, charmingly and improbably, Aloha d’Oro and built in accordance with someone’s equally charming and improbable Polynesian/North African/Mexican fantasy) and to head up into town toward the Piazza del Duomo. It’s misty, chilly, getting dark. But as we turn up Via Vittorio Emanuele, we begin to notice dabs of color—a baby dressed in a bright yellow bumblebee costume, a teenage boy sporting an oversize, striped-velvet, Cat-in-the-Hat stovepipe hat, a middle-aged woman in a jester’s cap ringing with tiny bells. And before we know it, someone has showered us with confetti.
    Shrove Tuesday is almost two weeks away, but the citizens of Acireale (home of “il più bel Carnevale di Sicilia —the most beautiful Carnival in Sicily”) are getting a head start on their pre-Lenten celebrations. Strings of glistening lights form an arching canopy above the main streets, dance music blares out of invisible loudspeakers. In the Piazza del Duomo, the soaring, extravagantly elaborate facade of the cathedral is brilliantly illuminated, as are the stalls selling masks, roasted pumpkin seeds and chestnuts, fried sausage, panini, noisemakers, plastic bags of confetti. Half the local population—and nearly everyone under twelve—is in costume, dressed as pirates and knights, skeletons and witches; lions and lambs, angels and devils stroll hand in hand.
    Some of the masks are familiar; in fact the plastic monster heads are the very same ones I saw in October, at Halloween, in New York City. And yet there’s something about the spirit of the event that’s entirely different from Halloween in Greenwich Village, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or St. Patrick’s Day on Fifth Avenue. At home, public holidays have mostly become excuses for teenagers and young adults to dress up or paint their faces green and get as hammered as they’ll get the following weekend, as they got the weekend before. But this pre-Carnival celebration in Acireale feels like an entirely unique moment in the yearly calendar, a time for people (many of whom clearly know one another) to step out of character, to leave their normal selves behind, and to unleash something that—precisely because of familiarity, proximity, and the need to coexist harmoniously and amicably—stays in check for the rest of the year.
    To walk through Acireale in the days preceding Carnival is to understand what it means for the Lord of Misrule—that great equalizer, leveler, and liberator—to be in command. Children giddily bop their elders over the head with colorful plastic mallets that make a hollow sound somewhere between the noise of a baby rattle and the pop of a firecracker. It hurts just enough so I can feel (or think I feel) the fillings rattling lightly in my teeth, but after the first half-dozen bops, I’m no longer tempted to wheel around and show the little bopper how New Yorkers act when someone’s invaded their personal space. Groups of high school students spray each other—and total strangers—with shaving cream and strings of colored foam propelled by aerosol. Shy girls clutch bags of confetti, waiting to get the nerve to fling a handful at some cute boy—for much of the revelry is energized by the explosive charge of courtship, romance, and sex.
    But finally what makes the merriment seem so Sicilian is the ease with which it combines the mournful with the festive (the tunes played by the fresh-faced, earnest high school marching band are almost comically dirgelike and funereal) and the present with the past. The designs of the elaborate princess costumes (the outfit of choice for little girls) seem modeled on the gowns worn by Bourbon royalty and make their wearers look like the pretty, uncomfortable, and slightly stunned children in