Sicily, part 2: Palermo's churches

 As a lover of excessive Catholic church decor, when I was in Sicily I was in heaven, so to speak. Take the Church of Saint Mary of the Admiral, so called because it was originally built in the 1100s under the patronage of the Syrian Christian admiral who served the Norman king, Roger II. The church's charter was in ancient Greek and Arabic and today it is part of Italo-Albanian Catholicism and its practices follow the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The mash-up of styles and the density of ornament and meaning are breathtaking. Almost horrifying.

The visual equivalent of eating too many Sicilian pastries.

The church's mosaics, statues, and ornaments pay plenty of homage to the divine, but the secular power gets its due as well. Below is King Roger II being crowned by God himself.

Our wonderful guide, Francesca (about whom more later), pointed out that whereas Roman Catholic doctrine preaches that Mary ascended to paradise in corporeal form, the Eastern rite holds that only her soul ascended. So the mosaic below shows God (who is also Jesus) at Mary's deathbed lifting her soul (represented as a baby, as Jesus once was) up to heaven. 

Mother and child reunion.

The church is also known as La Martorana, after an aristocratic 12th-century nun of that name whose convent adopted the church in the 15th century. Right next door, and at the other ornamental extreme, is the little Church of San Cataldo. In the photo below La Martorana is on the left, San Cataldo on the right, topped by three red domes.

It's an Arab-Roman church and those red domes led me to expect dazzling Moorish-style decoration. After I paid the two-euro entry fee and stepped through the curtain concealnig the interior from non-ticket-holders, I discovered that San Cataldo is both tiny and almost completely bare. 

Those red domes are disappointingly plain inside.

I didn't see San Cataldo's simplicity replicated in any other church I visited. La Martorana was much more typical. And for all its extravagance, it was outdone by the Duomo in Monreale, a town just south of Palermo. A similar mix of East and West, Byzantine and Norman, the Monreale cathedral's interior is even more stunning, being completely covered in glittering mosaics.

The panels above the arches tell the story of Noah and the ark.

Looming over all of it is a gigantic depiction of Christus Imperator, Jesus/God as ruler of the world. 

O,\

Imagine the impression this must have made on the peasants and artisans from the surrounding countryside, people who barely had roofs over their heads, when they entered the Duomo for the first time and saw God glowering down at them.  

While we were there a wedding erupted. The guests were gorgeously arrayed, but their finery was put to shame by the venue.

A side chapel erected by some bishop or other seemed to take the opulence of the Duomo as a challenge. "You think that's ornate? I see you and raise you." Ornament crammed on top of ornament, everywhere you look...it's claustrophobic. I loved it.

There's the bishop on the left, admiring Christ's genealogy. On the right, the statue of a woman suckling one infant and offering a breast to a second is a standard symbol of Charity, often seen in these symbol-crammed houses of worship. Bishops seemed to be especially keen to be honored posthumously for their charity. 

Another gorgeously ornate pile we visited was the Duomo in Cefalù, a seaside town near Palermo. 

That's the Duomo at the top of the piazza.

It too had a giant Christ looming over the altar, and plenty of gew-gaws, but it looked almost austere compared to Monreale.

One of its charms was another bishop's funerary monument depicting him dispensing clothing to a half-naked man with a crutch while two children  beg for alms. The blanket or simple shift the bishop is providing is notably minimal compared to his own luxuriant satin-and-lace outfit, and he doesn't seem to have anything for the two children, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. 

This and many other things in Sicily's churches brought to mind a passage in Lampedusa's wonderful novel, The Leopard. It's set in Sicily, still a feudal backwater in the 1860s when Garibaldi and his allies are in the process of overthrowing the old order. After the dust settles Sicily will be unified with  the rest of the newly created nation of Italy, and the country will be modernized (sort of) by empowering the mercantile and industrial North. At one point the novel's princely protagonist assures himself that "this is a country of arrangements" and that all the upstart middle class wanted was "to find ways of making more money themselves." They don't want to destroy us aristocrats, he decides, just gradually insert themselves into our places. Nothing would really change.

But when the prince tries to share this consoling insight with his confessor, the priest is outraged. "Briefly, you nobles will come to an agreement with the Liberals, and yes, even with the [anti-clerical] Masons, at the expense of the Church," he protests. "Then, of course, our property, which is the patrimony of the poor, will be seized and carved up among the most brazen of their leaders; and who will then feed all the destitute sustained and guided by the Church today?"

The priest's prediction was accurate, for much of the Church's property was seized in the wake of unification, and while the Church had done little to relieve the misery of the poor, neither did the bourgeoisie once they came to power. The result was the emigration of millions of desperately poor Southern Italians in the decades after unification and, later, the rise of fascism. 

The glory of Sicily's churches is inextricably intertwined with the notion that the vast, really obscene wealth of the Church and its leaders--flaunted in every marble sculpture, gold reliquary, and gem-studded chasuble--was justified and even sanctified because it really belonged in some ultimate sense to the poor, to the people whose misery and exploitation made all this horrible, wonderful beauty possible. 

Of course that's not the only story these churches tell. However corrupt the institution, it is also a vessel for the spiritual seeking that so often animates our species. Out for a walk I randomly stepped into another church, not a famous one, San Giuseppe dei Patri Teatini. It was yet another flamboyant monument to worldly wealth and power.

But the church organist was practicing a requiem, while nearby a nun knelt at a confessional. I was reminded that faith, hope, and some of the other virtues also had a place here.

Then a man in work clothes, presumably the sextant, hurried over and interrupted the sister's confession to talk to the priest about some urgent matter. It was an Italian genre painting come to life. 

The earthier side of Italian Catholicism was also in evidence at the little Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a few blocks from where we were staying. It was built in the late 16th century by a merchants' guild--the gravediggers' guild, according to our guide, Francesca--and exuberantly decorated around 1700. Francesca said that the guild couldn't afford the expense of marble sculptures so hired sculptor Giacomo Serpotta to deck the place in stucco reliefs. The stucco was mixed with marble dust to give it some sparkle. It's small but stunning.

It is most famous for what's not there. Until 1969 a Caravaggio masterpiece, Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence (that is, San Lorenzo), hung over the altar, but that year the painting was stolen, allegedly by the Sicilian Mafia.  It has never been recovered, but in 2015 a "high-tech" replica of the painting was installed where the original once hung.

San Lorenzo was a deacon of the early Roman church and ran afoul of the Emperor Valerian when he demanded that Lorenzo turn over all the church's riches to the imperial treasury. Lorenzo instead gave away as much of the church's wealth as he could gather to widows, orphans, and other indigents, and when Valerian's emissary demanded the goods Lorenzo reportedly presented him with a crowd of the poor and sick, saying that the suffering masses were the true wealth of the church. Once again, "the patrimony of the poor."

In retaliation the emperor ordered that Lorenzo be roasted to death. (The grill depicted by Serpotta, shown below, looks exactly like the one we saw in an old-fashioned restaurant a few years ago, where we enjoyed some excellent grilled veal chops.) Today San Lorenzo is the patron saint of cooks, because of the grill, and of comedians, because before he expired he is supposed to have said, "I'm done on this side, turn me over!"

San Lorenzo and his grill.

Perhaps that's why, despite the saint's suffering, the mood in the oratory is rather light-hearted. There are putti everywhere, and they are not particularly angelic, tussling and taunting each other all over the walls. 

The pair below seem to be illustrating a popular Italian saying that translates as "Quit busting my balls."

Speaking of... I spent an enjoyable couple of hours in the Modern Art Gallery of Palermo, housed in a former convent that was taken over by the civil authorities in the 1860s, in the wake of unification. Despite its name, its collection is made up of very traditional work from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including this large painting from 1898 by Pietro Pajetta. 

It's titled Le gioie della famiglia, which at first I assumed must mean "the family jewels," because gioeilleria is the Italian for jewelry and what else explains the juxtaposition of the pantsless bambino and that carrot? But in fact it's "the joys of the family" that are being celebrated here, apparently including the joys of a good carrot harvest. 

In that spirit, the next post will be about the food we enjoyed during our Sicilian sojourn. They eat a lot more vegetables down there than the folks in Emilia-Romagna do, so maybe that painting really is a celebration of carrots.  

 

Sicily, part 1: Palermo

I'm only now getting around to the almost two weeks Danny and I and our friend Valerie spent in Sicily last May, not because it isn't blog-worthy, but because there is so much to say and so much that I don't know about Sicily and wish I did. 

We spent the first week of our trip in Palermo. Our Airbnb apartment was in the Kalsa district, near the port and also, it turned out, near pretty much everything we wanted to be near to. Lots of interesting bars, lots of important churches and museums, lots of places to eat, and the warm weather made being outside a pleasure day and night. 

Via Maqueda, a nightlife hot spot.

The word that keeps coming to mind in Palermo is "gritty." It's not dirty or scary, at least not where we were. But it has a down-at-heels quality that keeps it from feeling like a theme park, even though most everyone seems to be having a great time. Many of the buildings look derelict, but like they've been derelict for the past several centuries. 

This juxtaposition of an elegant palazzo and a place that looks like a squat is pretty typical.

A lot of it could be a backdrop for a neorealist film noir, except that--at least in the neighborhood we were in--it didn't feel at all threatening.

Here's a ruin that dates back to the Phoenicians, who founded settlements in what's now Palermo and in other parts of Sicily more than a thousand years ago.

I enjoyed wandering around the city and gawking at everything. The place is so terrifically Italian, it seemed to me, perhaps because in the U.S. Sicilians are our idea of the prototypical Italians. There seemed to be something picturesque around every corner, like this flower seller downtown.

It wasn't unpleasantly hot, but much of the time the sky was hazy with dust blown over from Africa by the scirocco. You can see it hanging over this park alongside the port.

I noticed this gigantic banyan tree dominating a city park. Apparently it's a variety of fig that's native to Australia, but it seems to be thriving in Sicily.

I also spent an enjoyable couple of hours in the Modern Art Gallery of Palermo, which is housed in a former convent that was taken over by the civil authorities in the 1860s, in the wake of Italian unification. Despite its name, its collection is made up of very traditional work from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including this large painting from 1898 by Pietro Pajetta. 

It's titled Le gioie della famiglia, which at first I assumed must mean "the family jewels," because gioeilleria is the Italian for jewelry and what else explains the juxtaposition of the pantsless bambino and that carrot? But in fact it's "the joys of the family" that are being celebrated here, apparently including the thrill of a good carrot harvest. 

Danny was considerably less enthralled with Palermo than I was, however. Where I saw the picturesque, he saw another noisy, crowded city. Where I saw neorealist romance, he saw piles of garbage.

I swear it was picked up by the next day.

He also found the streets' large paving stones, uneven but polished to slippery slickness by centuries of use, more than a little alarming. 

This was particularly challenging when cars, motos, and scooters came zipping along, forcing pedestrians to scramble onto the narrow sidewalks.

I also suspect some of his distaste was due to the omnipresence of churches, big, gaudy, overweening churches, all over the city. Much as I disapprove of the Catholic Church as an institution, I can't get enough of it as a living museum, the gaudier and gorier the better. And cheek by jowl with Palermo's battered buildings that look like unreconstructed casualties of World War II are churches, convents, and other expressions of the power that the Church wielded in Sicily over the centuries. Churches are everywhere in Italy, but in Palermo they seem even more ubiquitous and much more over-the-top. 

This is Sant'Anna, a not particularly fancy church in our neighborhood. I never saw it open, so I'm not sure it's even still in business.

That's the Kalsa corner on the right.

The architecture is less about glorifying God than asserting the dual power of the Church and whichever Great Power happened to be ruling Sicily at the time. Above is the Four Corners, the historic center of Palermo, a square with grandiose facades on all four sides of the intersection. On each corner is a statue of one of the four seasons on the bottom and of a patron saint of one of Palermo's four ancient districts on the top. Sandwiched in between them are statues of four Spanish kings who'd ruled over the island in the 1600s, when this Baroque fantasy was constructed. 

But Spain was only the latest in a long line of external powers that controlled Sicily at one time or another, including Romans, Visigoths, Byzantine Greeks, the North African Fatimid Caliphate (at one point the island was majority Muslim), and the Normans. Traces of all those who came, conquered, and then lost out to some new conqueror are everywhere in Sicily.

Here, for example, is Palermo's cathedral, which is immense, like a shopping mall devoted to selling religion. The site was originally a Byzantine basilica, which Saracen invaders reportedly turned into a mosque. In the 1100s the Normans built a new church on the site, which was expanded and elaborated over the centuries. While the cathedral's layout is Norman, some of its early decorative stonework recalls North African designs.

Inside, a highlight is the overwrought silver urn containing the relics of Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the city. Her remains are credited with miraculously saving Palermo from the plague in the 1600s, more than four centuries after the holy hermit died in a cave on nearby Mount Pellegrino.

Some hope Saint Rosalia can also save Sicily from Covid. 

But the cathedral's decor is pretty tame compared to that of some of the island's other churches. More about that in the next post. 

Scusateme

This blog's more dedicated readers may have noticed that once my long genealogy saga was completed, the blog itself seemed to abruptly follow my ancestors into the vale of nonexistence. 

I'm sorry for dropping the ball like that. In fact we came back to California in July and will be returning to Italy in a couple of months, and so far, knock wood, we have survived summer air travel and all the other horrors of our modern age. I hope Quanto? Tanto! will survive, too.

This summer I'm afraid it collapsed under the pressure of the relatively hectic travel schedule of my three months in Italy, which included not only the trip through di-Carlo-connected towns in the South that I've already documented, but also a week and a half in Sicily with Danny and our friend Valerie and then an eight-day trip to New York and Maine to see family.  Even more than usual, I felt like I was always in the midst of coming or going, with no time to write all the things I wanted to. I managed to finish the story of our genealogy tour, but somehow that one-week trip took up all my Italy writing time.

I have to admit that I also shirked my blogging responsibilities because our daughter and her entourage were around a lot, which was delightful and meant there was often something much more entertaining than sitting in front of keyboard to attend to. Probably the fading stamina of old age has something to do with it, too. 

One California enticement: an artisanal pastrami place just opened up the street.

Despite all that, and all the enticements of the California half of my life, I am determined to play catch-up and get at least some of this past summer's Italian adventures into the blog before we return to Fidenza and I have even more things I want to record for posterity. At the very least I will post about our trip to Sicily, at my usual tiresome length, just so that there's a record of it for my own delectation, although anyone else who's interested is welcome to follow along. And maybe I'll get to a few other odds and ends, if I can manage it. Thanks for bearing with me.