Sicilian Odyssey (7 page)

When I was very young my great-aunt gave me a set of the
Book of Knowledge
that had been published, I think, in the late 1920s. I used to read the encyclopedia—one volume for each letter, bound in embossed dark red with blue lettering—from cover to cover, like a novel. It was a deeply strange reading experience, since by the time I got the books a good deal of the information they contained (certainly much of the science and history) was outdated, and besides, I was too young to understand much of what I was reading. The result was that I never much knew or cared what was supposed to be factual, and what wasn’t. Were the constellations really formed when Greek mythological figures were pasted up in the heavens? As far as I was concerned, they were.

One of my favorite pages was an illustration for a long article on Charles Kingsley’s
Water Babies,
the Victorian children’s classic. The other was a series of illustrations—I remember them as black-and-white photographs, but of course that was impossible—of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes. Nothing in the text informed me (or perhaps I didn’t want to know) that some of these places no longer existed, if they ever had. In any case, that was information I didn’t want, since it would have interfered with my ambition to someday visit them, one by one.

Frequently, traveling in Sicily, I find myself remembering that page in the encyclopedia, because it seems to me that what I am seeing, that what I am lucky enough to be seeing, is as close as I will ever come to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that so many astonishing places are so close together. Within a single day you could, if you wished—given enough stamina and a really hot car—visit Segesta, probably the most majestically sited Greek temple and theater in Sicily; then you could head west to Mozia, the ghostly island that was once the home of an important Phoenician settlement; and, finally, drive north, slightly east, and then straight up to Erice, a town so exquisite that it became the raw material for legends and was, for centuries, the center of the cult of the goddess Aphrodite. You
could
see all three places in one day, but each of them makes you want to stay (only in Erice is it possible to spend the night) or to keep returning to watch the effects of the changing weather and the mercurial Sicilian light.

What Segesta, Mozia, and Erice share in common is that they are not only lovely, but mysterious. No one knows why the temple at Segesta was left unfinished (there is no roof, and the thick columns were never fluted) or exactly when it was built, though most scholars agree that it was constructed in the fifth century
B.C
., by the citizens of Egesta, a settlement of Hellenized Elymians, members of one of the earliest indigenous groups—the same tribe that founded Eryx, as Erice was originally known.

Segesta

In their ongoing battle with their rivals in Selinunte, the Egestans repeatedly switched sides, allying themselves with the various factions and city-states warring for control of the island. In one famous story, the Egestans—hoping to convince the Athenian envoys that they would be wealthy and useful allies—rounded up all the gold and silver vessels from neighboring towns (including Eryx) and moved them around to each of the houses that the Athenians visited.

Lonely, moody, surrounded by mountains, overlooking the patchwork fields in the valley below and (from the theater, a brief bus ride uphill from the temple) a vista that extends all the way to the Gulf of Castellammare, Segesta is one of those places where the sky itself seems to expand (as it does, say, above the Grand Canyon) as if in response to the heroic scale of what lies beneath it. For centuries it has been the sort of popular tourist destination that has inspired romantic voyagers and travel writers to contemplate the sublimity and transience of earthly existence, the vast scope of eternity. And, indeed, Segesta makes you see why their musings might have led them in those reverent, transcendent, and gloomy directions.

When Goethe visited Segesta the site had not yet been restored and, tired from the effort of “clambering about among the unimpressive ruins of a theater,” he cut his visit short. And yet his description of the temple’s setting still seems fresh, accurate and recognizable: “The site of the temple is remarkable. Standing on an isolated hill at the head of a long, wide valley and surrounded by cliffs, it towers over a vast landscape… The countryside broods in a melancholy fertility; it is cultivated but with scarcely a sign of human habitation… The wind howled around the columns as though they were a forest, and birds of prey wheeled, screaming, above the empty shell.”

When we arrive in Erice after the brief but dramatic drive from Trapani—a series of hairpin turns providing vertiginously seductive vistas of the sea and the cliffs below and taking us up almost 2,500 feet in less than half an hour—the town seems as deserted, as lonely as Segesta. It’s midafternoon, on an unusually bright (Erice is famous for the mists and fog in which it is often shrouded) and chilly Saturday in February. Too narrow for cars, the cobblestone alleys of the medieval town are so quiet that we can hear our footsteps. Strangely, it reminds me of walking, late at night, along the quietest canals and through the emptiest, most wintry piazzas of Venice. The sense of solitude is so eerie that my heart speeds up when we turn a corner and see other people: a couple of expensively dressed Italian tourists ascending the steep street. What are they doing here—and why is she carrying that Fendi shopping bag?

It’s the perfect time to visit Erice. You want to be here when no one else is, very early in the morning, in the quiet of an off-season afternoon, or late at night. For to be in Erice is to indulge your fantasies of time travel, of what it would be like to live in the fourteenth century, to see its ghosts come alive, to lose all contact with modern life. Gazing out from the parapets of the fortress and the twelfth-century castle, looking down across the sea (supposedly on especially clear days you can see all the way to Africa) you feel as if you’ve left the world behind, down below, and that the only way to rejoin it is to let go and plummet straight down. For many reasons, Erice is not the first place I’d recommend to the acrophobic.

It’s hard to imagine what this place would be like on a summer day, when the narrow streets and tiny piazzas are choked with pedestrian traffic. I’d been oddly resistant to coming here, partly for fear of finding a crowded souvenir bazaar. Yesterday, at our hotel in Trapani, I heard an American businessman say he was planning to “buzz” up to Erice—he pronounced it “Aero-shade,” so that at first I thought he meant some trendy Italian design firm—to buy some “trinkets” before his flight home the next day. I’d also feared that it might turn out to be just another pretty hill town, like dozens of other towns we’d visited in Italy and France. I’ve always loved those towns—but now I worry that the attractions of Erice might seem a little thin after the glory and monumentality of Segesta.

But Erice, as it turns out, is not just another hill town. The height, the view, the sweep of ocean and hills below—it seems almost laughable that any place could be so lovely. But the town itself is sobering, so austere that it makes cities like Gubbio or the most melancholy Provençal mountain village seem as cozy as a New England hamlet, as sensual as a Polynesian island. Erice is so severe and frosty that being here feels like how it must feel to be inside a diamond; its perfection is almost physically painful, as if its edges were as sharp—and as cutting—as a diamond’s.

Even the paving stones are aesthetically satisfying. The grass that grows up through the crevices between the polished stones arranged in regular geometric patterns is such a pleasing shade of green it could have been chosen from a catalog. It looks more like set design than like an organic, living town. Except for the televisions tuned to the sports-and-racing channels in the few cafés that are open, except for an occasional car braving the capillary-thin streets to deliver luggage to one of the town’s hotels, there is nothing to spoil the illusion that we have left our own century and moved back into another.

Erice’s beauty—and the fact that we know so little about the town’s history and origins—has created a sort of vacuum into which people have, for thousands of years, been moved to throw myths and legends, like propitiatory offerings. Something so perfect—and so undocumented, so unaccounted for—must surely have its roots in divinity. And so we hear that the Temple of Aphrodite-Venus was founded by Aeneas, who landed here to perform the funeral rites for his father, whom he had rescued on his shoulders from the sack of Troy; because a fire had destroyed some of Aeneas’s ships, he was obliged to leave behind several of his men, who became the town’s first residents. Daedalus is said to have worked on the Temple of Aphrodite; it was here that he designed, as a gift for the goddess, a honeycomb made entirely of gold. And, according to legend, the goddess herself came here to live with her lover, the Argonaut Butes, whom she rescued from the sea after the Sirens’ song enticed him to jump into the ocean. Heracles, too, is supposed to have stopped by on his way home from carrying off the cattle of Geryon—and, during his stay, killed the Elymian king who tried to steal them.

Yet these stories seem too vital, too full of life and health and ingenuity and sex to have much to do with Erice. Because the strange thing is that what’s most beautiful about the place is how dead it is, how unchanged and unchanging, how perfectly preserved, like an exquisite corpse embalmed by some alchemical formula of altitude, wind, fog, and water.

Suddenly, I know what Erice reminds me of: Les Baux-de-Provence, the ruined medieval town that sits on a hilltop in the south of France, rising out of the living town beneath it. There’s that same sense of seeing something that will never change, or change much, that will remain untouched by the forces that keep shaping and refashioning whatever is alive—that is, by life itself. To walk the streets of Erice and then drive back down to Trapani is almost like being Persephone—like being permitted to enter the realm of the dead and then return to the noisy, disorderly, and precious province of the living.

From the start, the prospect of going to Mozia makes me a little edgy—the idea of sailing across a lagoon to an island on which no one lives, an island that was once the outpost of a highly developed and cruel civilization, but where there are now only its ruins and a small museum in the former home of Joseph Whitaker, one of the Englishmen who came to Sicily and sensibly intuited that a fortune could be made by exporting Marsala wine.

In winter, the museum (and, by extension, the island) closes at one in the afternoon. I can’t help thinking that, unlikely as it seems…what if the fisherman who ferries us out there gets distracted and forgets about us, and we’re stuck out there all night? What if we’re stranded, exposed to the elements, alone with the spirits of the Phoenician traders who first came to Mozia in the eighth century
B.C
. and who lived in harmony with their Greek neighbors until the Carthaginian wars, when Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, using catapults, missiles, and battering rams—state-of-the-art tools of fourth-century warfare—destroyed the settlement and much of its population?

I phone ahead from Trapani and the woman who answers at the museum gives me directions for finding the ferry port, roughly halfway between Trapani and Marsala. The signs directing us to Mozia and the port—just a parking lot, really, beside a small building, with a solitary fishing boat waiting at the dock—are reassuring. It’s not exactly unexplored wilderness, uncharted territory. Going to Mozia—and back—is something people do. All the time.

Boatman, Mozia

But not, as it happens, today. The fisherman working on his nets at the back of his boat seems delighted that the morning has brought him at least a little business. He couldn’t be friendlier as he points out the postcard-pretty view from his boat of the windmills and the salt pans for which the western coast of Sicily is famous; he shows me where to sit for shelter from the brisk wind. The ride isn’t long—about ten, maybe fifteen minutes. The water is so shallow and still that we could probably swim if we had to. And the boatman is very clear about the fact that he’ll be back to pick us up in two hours. Still, as he lets us off at the dock that serves as the island’s small harbor, I feel a sharp, irrational stab of panic and abandonment.