The Viceroys Read Free Page A

planning. The manuscript, unlike the tortured pages of Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi
, shows few erasions for a first draft. The idea of the book must have been with him ever since the time when, a youth just out of school, he had spent a period as librarian in the new civic reading-rooms, once the great library of the monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena in Catania. No-one could work there now without being affected by past splendours, for the monastery, according to De Roberto’s own later computation, was the biggest in Europe except for Mafra; it now houses not only the huge municipal library, but four day-schools, an art-school, a gymnasium, a barracks and an observatory, the whole with its orchards and outhouses covering in its day a district of the town. In this improbable building were set some of the most fascinating scenes in the book. The vast luxurious monastery becomes a twin pivot, with the palace of the Uzeda in the town below, for pride, corruption and greed. The facts may be coloured, but there is no doubt about their accuracy. At the time of the sequestration in 1862, when church property was sold off at what turned out to have been mainly rigged auctions, the monastery drew an income from fifty-two estates, for the benefit of some fifty choir-monks and their dependants, of about the modern equivalent of £100,000, or $280,000, a year (untaxed). The Sicilian Church, until 1860, had become progressively more prosperous ever since the allocation toit by the Norman Kings of a third of the island’s land and many privileges. Both at San Nicolò and at their other great house, Monreale outside Palermo, the Benedictines in Sicily had become powerful and lax. Though their Order’s ancient tradition of distinction in science and letters was still very important to island life, and their vast rentals were so extensively used for the relief of the needy that no-one has yet filled the gap (facts never mentioned by De Roberto), yet their discipline was loose; power and riches had brought pride, and there was an insistence on noble blood which is certainly not to be found anywhere in the Rule of St Benedict. * Annals show how tense their relations often were with the local archdiocese, and even with the Papacy itself, while their public contribution to the religious life of Catania was limited to one sumptuous procession on Corpus Christi Day. Like most Italian writers during the last hundred years, De Roberto was anti-clerical. The local combination of paternalism, outward splendour, squalor, insistence on the letter to the detriment of the spirit, must have driven hard such faith as he had. San Nicolò, to him, represented the worst side of religion in Sicily, and his prejudices were apt to run away with him, although he was generally scrupulous about his documentation. The weak Abbot who makes an occasional semi-imbecile appearance in
I vicerè
can only be based on a very different figure, who tried to reform both Monreale and then San Nicolò at this time: the saintly and shrewd Cardinal Dusmet, revered in Catania as ‘friend of the poor’ and now under process for sanctification. But the relations of love-hate, attraction and repulsion between modern Sicilian writers and their Church would make a fascinating, though rather macabre, study in itself.
    Identifying characters in such a local novel can be a stimulating entry into Catanian life, and so an effective if roundabout help to appreciation. Though the family of Uzeda have as much basis in reality as Proust’s Guermantes, only the Paternò Castello clan in its various branches held an analogous position at the time. Don Blasco, for instance, an improbable figure to us outside the pages of some biased account ofmonastic life before the French Revolution, turns out to be
una cosa naturalissima
in Catania, possibly based in part on a Father Paternò Castello who was famous in the town fifty years ago and is still remembered for his private life and public bluster.