Bella Tuscany (4 page)

Following Spring:
The Palms of Sicily

I
'
M NOT OFF THE PLANE IN PALERMO FIVE
minutes before I have an
arancino
in my hand, ready to taste
the
signature dish of Sicily. Ed has gone to find the rental car office and I head to the bar right in the center of the airport. There they are, a line of the deep-fried
risotto
balls formed into the size and shape of oranges. “What's inside?” I ask.

A man with those amazing black, Sicilian deep-as-wells eyes points to the round ones.
“Ragù, signora
. And the oval ones—
besciamella e prosciutto.”
His eyes fascinate me as much as the
arancini
. All through the airport I've seen the same Byzantine, hidden, historical eyes. At the bar, savoring the crisp creamy texture of the rice, I'm watching a parade of these intensely Italian-looking Italians. Women with gobs of dark curls cascading and flowing, slender men who seem to glide instead of walk. Tiny girls with miniature gobs of the same dark curls, and old men formed by stoop labor, carrying their hats in their hands. Crowds surge to meet planes coming in from Rome, which is
only an hour away. They're all waving and shouting greetings to deplaning Sicilians who probably have been gone a few days, judging from their carry-on bags. Ed comes back, bearing keys. He, too, polishes off an
arancino
and orders an espresso. He looks startled when he sees how small it is, barely a spoonful, with rich
crema
. One taste and he's transported.

The waiter sees his surprise. He's about 5'3". He looks up at Ed, almost a foot taller. “The farther south you go,
signore,
the smaller and the stronger.”

Ed laughs,
“È fantastico
.
”
He wheels our bag to the green Fiat and zooms out of the garage.

Along the coastal road to Palermo, we glimpse the sea and cubical North African–style houses in a rocky landscape. The instant we enter Palermo, we're in wild traffic, careening traffic, traffic moving too fast for us to locate where we are going. Lanes disappear, avenue names keep changing, we turn and turn in mazes of one-way streets. “That
barista
should have said ‘smaller, stronger, and
faster,'”
Ed shouts. At a light, he rolls down the window and calls desperately to a man revving his motorcycle in anticipation of the green, “
Per favore,
which way to Hotel Villa Igiea?”

“Follow me,” he shouts back and he's off, spiraling among cars and glancing back now and then to see if we're behind him. Somehow we are. Ed seems to be in his wake, just going. At highway speeds on city streets, cars are neck-and-neck. On all four sides, we are two inches from other bite-sized cars. If someone braked, we'd be in a hundred-car pile-up. But no one brakes. At an intersection, the motorcyclist points to the left then waves. He swerves right so hard his ear almost touches the ground. We're tossed into a roundabout, spun, and emptied suddenly onto a quiet street. And there's the hotel. We creep into the parking lot and stop.

“Let's don't get in this car again until we leave. That was absolutely the worst.”

“Suits me,” Ed agrees. He's still gripping the wheel. “Let's take taxis. Everywhere. This is more like the running of the bulls than driving.” We grab our bag, lock the Fiat, and don't look at the car again until we check out.

 

Because we have ended up with “the most beautiful room in Palermo,” according to the manager, I am ready to fill the tub with bubbles, open the minibar for cold water, and recuperate. When the weather turned on us in Tuscany, we decided to follow spring south. The delicious days of early March turned stormy and freezing rain hit the windows. Primo managed to stabilize our sliding hillside wall, and now has moved his men to an indoor job in town until the ground dries. We were toasting in front of the fire when Ed said, “I bet it's already warm in Sicily. Wouldn't it be fun just to take off—go tomorrow?”

I looked up from my book. “Tomorrow?”

“It's close, really. Drive to Florence, quick flight—we'll be there in three hours total, door-to-door. It's no more than going to Seattle from San Francisco.”

“I've never been to Seattle.”

“That's beside the point. We'll go to Seattle. But the forecast here is for rain all week. Look at the sun all over Sicily.” He showed me the weather report in the newspaper, with gray slants covering central Italy and yellow smiley faces dotting Sicily.

“But I have Fear of Palermo. What if we get caught in Mafia crossfire at a funeral and end up on the evening news?”

“We won't be going to any funerals. We don't even know anyone in Sicily. The Mafia is not interested in us.”

“Well,” I paused for about fifteen seconds, “let's pack.”

 

A day later, this corner room has four sets of immense doors opening onto a balcony. Balmy air, palms, and blue, blue, blue water. The twenty-foot ceilings match the grand scale of the Napoleonic furniture. Tile floors, a big sleigh bed—a fabulous room, totally unlike the first one we were shown in another wing of the building. That one was depressingly dark with a carpet I did not want my feet to touch. The bellman opened the shutters to a view of a wall. “No palms,” I said.

“Here there is no palm,” he agreed.

I loathe complaining and Ed hates it more than I, but after an hour we went downstairs and I asked for the manager. “The room we have is not beautiful. In such a lovely hotel, I expected something more. . . . Is there another available? We'd like to see the palm trees.”

He looked up our room number and grimaced. “Come with me,” he said. Then he took us miles down marble corridors and came to this one. He flung back the draperies, pushed open the doors, and light off the water bounced into the room.
“Ecco, signori, Palermo!”
He showed us an octagonal sitting room with gilt ballroom chairs, as if we should have a chamber music quartet playing while we slept.

“Now I'm happy,” I told him.

 

The taxi arrives quickly and we launch into the bumper-car traffic. Yes, it's always like this, the driver tells us. No, there aren't many accidents. Why? He shrugs, everybody is used to it. We sit back, and he's right, we begin to feel the double-time rhythm of driving here. Drivers look alert, as though engaging in a contact sport. He drops us in the center near an esplanade closed to traffic. Out of the street's chaos, we're greeted by the scent of flowers. Vendors are selling freesias in all the Easter colors, purple, yellow, and white. Instead of the puny bouquets I buy at home, these are sold in armfuls, wrapped in a ruff of brazen pink foil and trailing ribbons.

Not wanting to take time for lunch, we sample
sfincione,
pizza with big bread crumbs on top, then keep going—palms, outdoor tables filled with people, small shops of luxurious bags and shoes, waiters with trays aloft carrying pastries and espresso.

Pastries! Every
pasticceria
displays an astonishing variety. We're used to drier Tuscan pastries; these are mounded with cream. A woman arranges her shop window with realistic marzipan pineapples, bananas, prickly pears, lemons, cherries, and, for the Easter season, lambs complete with curls. Inside, her cases display almond cakes, wild strawberry tarts,
biscotti,
and, of course,
cannoli
, but in all sizes, from thumb-sized to a giant as large as a leg of lamb. Two bakers pause in the kitchen doorway and all the customers step back as they gingerly balance and step. They bring out a three-foot tree made from small
cannoli,
a stiff pyramid like a French
croquembouche
at Christmas. S
fince,
rice fritters filled with ricotta, cinnamon, candied oranges or strawberries, honor San Giuseppe, whose
onomastico,
name day, is March 19, when Italians also celebrate Father's Day.

The freezers glow with
sorbetti
—pistachio, lemon, watermelon, cinnamon, jasmine, almond, as well as the usual fruits. Most children seem to prefer
gelato,
not in a cup or cone, but stuffed inside a brioche. Just looking at the almond cake is almost enough satisfaction, but instead we split one of the crisp
cannoli
lined with chocolate and heavenly, creamy ricotta. No harm done; we're planning to walk for the rest of the afternoon.

On the first day in a new place, it's good to wander, absorb colors, textures, and scents, see who lives here, and find the rhythm of the day. We'll crank into tourist mode later, making sure we don't miss the great sights. Dazed by actually coming to Palermo, by the flight, the espresso, and the day, we just take the appealing street, turning back if it begins to look dicey. Palms are everywhere. I wish I could take one back to Bramasole to replace the one December's freeze probably killed. Not only do I love palms because they mean tropical air, I love the image Wallace Stevens made: “the palm at the end of the mind.” To imagine the end of the mind and to see not a blank wall or a roadblock or an abyss but a tall swaying palm seems felicitous to me.

We come upon a botanical park, dusty and empty except for cacti, carob, mulberry, agave, and shrubs with primitive, broad leaves. The palm looks native but was brought by Arabs in the ninth century, along with their fountains, spices, arabesques, ice cream, mosaics, and domes. Palms and domes—gold, pomegranate, aqua, verdigris—characterize Palermo. How bold to color the five domes of San Giovanni degli Eremiti a burnt red. Inside, aromatic citrus blossoms and jasmine suffuse a cloister garden, a secretive respite from the tortured road outside.

On the map, we see that the Palazzo dei Normanni is nearby and decide to go in its famous Cappella Palatina today. The subjects of the mosaics, the guidebook says, seem to have been chosen with reference to the Holy Spirit and the theology of light. I'm intrigued, since these two concepts seem identical in my mind.

Originally built by those busy Arabs in the ninth century, the palace was expanded by the Normans in the twelfth century and established as the residence for their kings. Later residents and royalty left their bits and pieces, and today the styles have so long overlapped that the architecture simply looks like itself. Byzantine Greeks began the mosaic decoration in the twelfth century. Tessera by tessera, it must have taken them forever; every Bible story I ever heard glitters around this room. The floors, too, are mosaic or inlaid marble in designs like Oriental rugs.

The Holy Spirit and the theology of light are only a layer. A lot is going on. It's like Palermo—each square inch occupied with life. I love the word “tesserae.” It seems to shower silver and gold on its own. There's the whole Adam and Eve saga, the flood, there's Jacob wrestling with the angel, and in the dome and apse, Christ. In the dome he's surrounded by foreshortened angels, each in intricate clothes. Christ offers a blessing in the apse. In both mosaics, he has long, long fingers. Looking through my opera glasses, I focus for a long time on his right hand, just this one small moment in the entire chapel—the hand held up, the thumb holding down the next-to-last finger, the other three straight, all formed with delicacy and subtle coloration. Late afternoon sun has a weak hold on the walls but still the gold around him sings with burnished amber light.

The rest of the Palazzo is closed. Walking back toward the center of Palermo, we pass rubble-filled lots still unrestored since World War II bombings. We look in open storefronts, where hideous junk is sold, and step off crowded sidewalks with fry-stations selling chickpea fritters. People are out gathering last-minute food for dinner. About their business, the people look contained, silent, often weary, but when they meet an acquaintance their faces break into vibrant expression. In the taxi back to the hotel, we hardly notice the near-death encounters.

 

The first two restaurants Ed selects for dinner are nixed by the hotel desk clerk. Dangerous areas, he tells us, making the motion of someone slicing a throat. He takes a ballpoint and scribbles out whole areas of our map. “What about this one?” Ed asks, pointing in our Italian restaurant guide to the highly regarded, unpronounceable
N'grasciata.
“And what does that mean?”

“In local dialect that means ‘dirty' but don't be alarmed, just a way of speaking.”

Speaking of what? I think. Dirty means dirty. “Your highest recommendation?”

“Sì
. Authentic. They have their own fishing boat. You won't see tourists there. I will call and they will expect you.”

We're dropped off at a plain place which is even plainer inside. No tablecloths, a TV somewhere, no decor, no menu, harsh lighting, and the buzz of bugs hitting the zapper. The waiter starts bringing out the food. I'm crazy about the
panelli,
chickpea fritters, and the platter of fried artichokes. Then comes pasta with
pomarola,
that intense, decocted tomato sauce, and baby octopus. I'm not so sure about this dish. I chew for a long time. The platter comes round again and Ed has more. We're offered another pasta, this one
bucatini
with sardines, currants, and fennel. The next dish is a grilled
orata,
which my dictionary translates as “gilthead,” surrounded by fried
frutti di mare
—just various fish. I'm slowing down. I like a little bit of fish, not a lot. Ed loves anything that comes from the sea and is so obviously relishing the food that the waiter starts to hover, commenting on each morsel. He's pouring wine to the brim of the glass. His dolorous eyes look like Jesus' in the mosaic dome. His long fingers have tufts of black curly hair on each digit, and a mat of hair escapes the collar of his shirt. He has the long, four-inch-wide face I associate with newspaper photos of hijackers.

I revive briefly for the spicy
melanzane
—here's a touch of the Arabic, eggplant with cinnamon and pine nuts—but balk at the appearance of the stuffed squid (all those suction cups on the arms) and the sea bream sausage. Is he bringing us everything in the kitchen? Next comes a plate of fried potatoes.
“Signora,”
our waiter says.
“Signora.”
He can't believe that I have stopped eating. He pulls up a chair and sits down. “You must.”