Sicily. part 3: The food

When we arrived in Palermo last May, one of the first things we did was go out for cannoli. Notwithstanding the hype about these delicacies in The Godfather and The Sopranos, I wasn't a cannoli enthusiast, since the versions I'd had in the Little Italies of New York and San Francisco were usually soggy, stale-tasting fried shells filled with gummy icing whose painful sweetness wasn't alleviated by the occasional nugget of candied citrus peel. But our friend Dana, who'd been in Palermo a few months earlier and always knows what she's talking about, told us we couldn't miss the cannoli at the church of Santa Caterina, which happened to be only a few blocks from our Airbnb apartment. So thither we hied. 

In The Leopard, Lampedusa describes Palermo as "weighed down by the huge edifices of convents and monasteries. There were dozens of these, all vast, often grouped in twos or threes, for women and for men, for rich and poor, nobles and plebeians, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, Liguorians, Augustinians..." Santa Caterina was one such. A Dominican convent for high-born ladies, its church is suitably grand, in the baroque-and-beyond Sicilian style.

Santa Caterina from the ground.

Santa Caterina: A nun's-eye view.

Although the sisters were the daughters of aristocrats, their lives were circumscribed by schedules of devotions and strict rules against contact with the outside world. They watched the church services hidden behind metal grates surrounding their enclosures far above the congregation. (You can also see their hideaways in the first photo, above the tall arches.) 

Another way they spent their time was to help support the convent by producing expensive pastries for wealthy Palermans. Although there are no longer any nuns at Santa Caterina, it now has a pastry shop that offers sweets based on historic recipes from Santa Caterina and other local convents. 

Sicily's famous marzipan fruits and vegetables are on offer, along with cakes as over-decorated as the churches.

There are also lots of simpler sweets, little pastries filled with candied fruit, jam, nuts, cheese, and liqueurs. 

But that day we were there for the cannoli, which are made to order.

The young lady above, looking rather nun-like all in black, filled the freshly fried cannoli shells with sweetened ricotta, then added whatever each customer wanted--candied cherries, chocolate chips, chopped pistachios, candied orange peel.

Next to the pastry shop is the convent's beautiful garden. Reportedly rose petals grown there are used to make the rose water that flavors some of the pastries. There we sat down under a lemon tree with our cannolo (Danny and I shared one, in hopes of saving some room for dinner) and a couple of other things (because how could we not?).

The cannolo was indeed wonderful, in my opinion, and the star of the show that day. The tangy, fresh-tasting ricotta was nothing like the icing-from-a-can filling you too often encounter, and the shell had great flavor and crunch. (Danny, true to form, says he thinks cannoli are "disgusting." He really didn't have such a good time on this trip.) 

The other pastries were tasty, but a little heavier and more sedate. Being an American, I couldn't help thinking they would have benefited from being eaten alongside a glass of cold milk. (But being an American, I also can't help thinking that no dessert, anywhere, is quite as delicious as a homemade layer cake with buttercream frosting. I recognize that this is perhaps a character flaw.)

Another very popular Sicilian pastry is known as "virgin's breasts," for obvious reasons.

Now Sant'Agata is extremely popular on the island, as well as elsewhere in Italy. (She is the patron saint of my Italian family's home province of Molise, for instance.) Agata was born in Catania, Sicily's second biggest city, during the early Christian era, and was imprisoned and tortured for preferring a life devoted to Jesus rather than marriage to the local Roman governor. Her torments included, most famously, having her breasts torn off with pincers. 

Sant'Agata honored in a church in Catania.

The saint and her martyrdom are symbolized by two breasts on a platter, raising the question: which came first, the iconography or the dessert? 

Minni di vergine dissection.

We had to try one, of course. Inside was a rich cookie base, jam made with zucchini (the green layer), and pastry cream, surrounded by a sugar shell. It's delicious, if you like things that are creamy, crunchy, and very sweet, but it's also a bit overwhelming.

The same shape is used for a variety of other pastries. These two, which we had for breakfast one morning (something I don't recommend if you're planning to do anything but collapse into an insulin coma for the rest of the day), were flavored with pistachios and raspberries, respectively.  

Francesca, our guide, is a Palermo native who loves the dolce of her homeland, the sweeter and richer the better. She'd traveled to the Emilia, the part of Italy where our place is, and was unpleasantly surprised by how austere the desserts there are. To her the Emilians' simple jam crostatas and nut cookies barely qualified as desserts. "I'd lose 10 kilos if I lived there," she said dismissively. 

While Sicilian pastries are a big tourist draw, another is the island's street food, or as they say in Italian, "street food." (Apparently this culinary concept didn't exist in Italy until very recently, although food eaten elsewhere than at the table presumably has always been as common in Sicily as everywhere else.) 

A fabled, even perhaps iconic Sicilian street food is a spleen sandwich. So when we came across a vendor in Palermo's Ballaro street market selling spleen sandwiches alongside another well-known specialty, rolls stuffed with panelle (chickpea fritters) and fried balls of mashed potato, we were eager to try them both, not least because the bill for two big sandwiches totaled about three dollars.

Perhaps we should have shopped around a bit more. The potato-and-garbanzo sandwich was merely stodgy, the taste of poverty, but the spleen one was kind of icky. I later read that the classic preparation involves not just boiling the spleen into edibility but then frying it till crispy. This version either skipped that second step or the spleen had been sitting around long enough to lose any vestige of crunch. The flavor was vaguely organ-ish and the texture not so great, either. After a few bites we were happy to slide all of it into a waiting garbage can. Months later Danny is still complaining about that spleen sandwich. It was a culinary low point for all of us.

 

Valerie, who accompanied us on our Palermo adventure, and I were far happier with the fare at a busy little place in Piazza Marina. The street-food delicacies they offered included a "Sicilian salad" of tomatoes, olives, and mackerel, another of sliced oranges and onions, eggplant caponata, and an array of arrancini--fried rice balls stuffed with meat sauce (round) and cheese (tubular). 

Unfortunately, I didn't think about taking a photo until long after I'd started eating.

Emboldened by that experience, we decided to do a street-food lunch at the Capo street market a few days later. 

After admiring the beautiful arrays of fruits and vegetables, we zeroed in on a busy stall selling all kinds of good-looking snacks.

There's eggplant parm and arancini or are they meatballs?) stuffed with red onions and peppers baked with cheese, and I'm pretty sure those are panelle and arancini with cheese in the back.

There were also eggplant rollatini, tomato bruschetta, meatballs on skewers, and herb pies. We tried about a half-dozen things, squeezed around a little table amid the market hustle-bustle, but we had to admit that none of it was very exciting. Maybe we hadn't chosen well, or perhaps this place was better at attracting tourists and their cameras than making really great food. We probably should have enlisted Francesca's guidance, but this was one adventure we'd decided to have on our own. Ah well, part of the adventure of travel is being reminded that only in travel writing is every meal a life-changing experience and every snack a revelation.    

As those street food photos indicate, Sicilian cuisine uses a lot of vegetables. Indeed, it hews much closer to the American fantasy of Italian cooking as an amazingly delicious form of health food than does the food of northern Italy. Because of the island's history its classic dishes combine good things from many cultures, and because its residents were mostly poor its cuisine uses a lot of seafood and a wealth of vegetables and fruits. 

This list of the day's specials at the little Bissot Bistro gives you the flavor. The dishes include rabbit with fava beans, sweet-and-sour pumpkin, pasta with tuna, green beans, tomatoes, and basil, and plenty of other seafood dishes. We had the pumpkin, some eggplant polpette (meatballs, but made with eggplant, if you can imagine that), fish cousous, and a salad. It was a delightful dinner. 

As I've noted elsewhere, in our part of northern Italy vegetables, like desserts, aren't the focus. The pastas are terrific, and so are the various cured meats, but to my palate at least the disinterest in vegetables can make many dishes seem a little bland. Meat courses in most restaurants are often (too often) plainly grilled or roasted.The vegetable contorni offered are usually either grilled or boiled, and salad means lettuce with some tomato slices and slivered carrots (and canned corn, if you're unlucky). 

Compare the usual northern antipasto--a big plate of ham, sausage, and other salumi, with perhaps a little giardiniera for color--with the antipasto platter we were served in Piazza Armerina, the town in central Sicily we visited after Palermo.

At the aplty named Trattoria del Goloso (Glutton's Restaurant).

There's eggplant parmigiana and caponata, tomato bruschetta, fresh mozzarella, grilled zucchini, dried tomatoes, and lots more besides. The main course that followed was rabbit stewed with carrots, celery, and olives. It's not spa cuisine, but it was wonderfully tasty and the vegetable ingredients get much of the credit.

Here's another antipasto, this one from Buatta Cucina in Palermo. Not as vegetable-intense, but still a lot more varied than the antipasti I'm used to in Fidenza. Apologies for the photo; it was so enticing I once again inhaled a lot of it before I remembered to take a picture.

Clockwise from the lower left, there's the remains of sardines in mint and tomato sauce, marinated tuna, two pieces of sfincione (a Sicilian pizza variant), a panella (chickpea fritter), and caponata in the center. I followed up with a Sicilian pasta classic, annelli in ragu. 

Like Spaghetti-Os, only delicious.

Other dishes I enjoyed during our time in Sicily (but neglected to photograph) included spaghetti alla Norma (with eggplant), linguine with sardines and fennel, spaghetti with clams and bottarga (fish roe), spicy green beans, a salad of tomatoes, sweet onions, and ricotta, baked stuffed clams, and a sensational sfincione-inspired pizza with lots of onions and black olives. 

Some of these dishes were pretty average, some outstanding, but overall the food on our Sicilian trip was as exciting as their crazy churches. And that's saying something.

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.