What the Traveller Saw (18 page)

For the Ming Tombs we were allotted thirty minutes. There are thirteen of them. We descended into the ground by a staircase rather like the emergency staircase in the worst sort of department store, into the Tomb of Wan Li, known, charmingly, to Western ears as Ting Ling. It is, in fact, an underground palace. None of the material used in its construction was found on site: the bricks were baked in Shantung, 300 miles to the south; the marble for the huge, self-locking doors came from Honan, 600 miles away, south of the Yellow River; the timber from Szechwan, 1000 miles away in the extreme west of China. Even the earth for the vast tumulus that covers it came from elsewhere, because locally there was only sand.

Down inside the tomb a notice stated, according to one of the interpreters, that it cost one million gold bars and took six and a half years to build, at the expense of 65 million manpowers, whatever that means, and that the effort involved could have produced enough grain to feed a million people for six years. I never liked it, anyway.

En masse
, however, the Tombs were lovely. At that time the rest had not been excavated. They stood at the head of an exquisite
valley among groves of trees under the Tian shou shan hills, a site chosen for its supernatural as well as its aesthetic qualities – the hills sheltered the deceased from evil emanations brought from the Mongolian steppes by a wind called the
feng.
No one was allowed to live in the valley and no one could cultivate it. Now it was being farmed by the Thirteen Tombs People’s Commune.

As it turned out, a wind of change was already beginning to blow through China. Not long afterwards the expert China-watcher, Claire Hollingshead, reported in the
Daily Telegraph
that two Chinese men accompanied by two Chinese ladies had been carried out of the Ting Ling Tomb by officials, the ladies with their knickers down. Perhaps it was the dread
feng
wind that was responsible.

We were ordered back into our coaches by our interpreters, who controlled us as mothers do their children by a mixture of threats, bribes and palpable deceit. In this instance they told us that if we were good they would take us to meet Premier Chou En-lai, and if we were very good we might each be allowed to ask him a question. And just like a lot of kids we scrambled in and were driven away, cheering.

The meeting took place in the Great Hall of the People, in which 5000 can easily sit down, and possibly 10,000 could squeeze in at a pinch. Totalling only about 200, including interpreters and hangers-on, we looked a bit thin on the ground. We were offered red wine (sweet and nasty), white which was better, although it still gave one an awful headache, and
mao t’ai
, a sort of rice wine (really a strong spirit), and beer. If you weren’t careful one of the innumerable waitresses would fill all your glasses at once.

The Premier had very dark eyebrows and looked young for his age – nothing remotely like a walnut and slightly fitter than I had imagined, having heard pessimistic croakings about his condition. After the speeches he walked from table to table, greeting everyone individually, answering gormless,
impossible-to-answer questions, and keeping himself going with an occasional glass of what looked like nasty medicine. I didn’t know what the hell to ask him but finally settled for, ‘Did you really say that you’re not interested in the economics of tourism?’ I was destined never to ask my question. At the next table was the editor of
Reader’s Digest
, hot-foot from Pleasantville.

‘Mr Premier,’ he said when his turn came, ‘when are you going to allow me to confer the benefits of the
Reader’s Digest
on the Chinese people?’ For a moment I thought that the Premier, who was educated at the Sorbonne, might have some kind of seizure. His mind must have boggled, as mine did, at the thought of something like eight million Chinese reading pieces with titles such as ‘Do you need a second car?’ His comment, if he made one, was inaudible. At the same time he signified that the proceedings were at an end. Meanwhile another writer slipped out and sent a cable, ‘
Just had a personal interview with Chou En-lai.
’

After this we all flew back to Addis Ababa.

T
O LAND IN SICILY
is to find yourself in one of the most unfathomable places in the whole of the Mediterranean, a very un-Italian
antipasto
to Muslim Africa just over the horizon. So unfathomable that you will be a traveller of rare insight if you can say on the day you leave it that it and its inhabitants with it are any less unfathomable than when you first arrived. For sheer inscrutability Sicily’s only real competitor is Sardinia.

The best way to arrive at its capital, Palermo, is by ship. Nothing is more memorable than sailing in towards it in the early morning over an indigo sea with the rising sun illuminating the half circle of ochreous limestone mountains that enclose it on the landward side and the plain below, planted with groves of orange, lemon and carob trees, in which it stands – the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Basin. And as the vessel enters the harbour the outlines of the city which has received its roughest treatment in the last forty-five years of its history from bombing and
urbanizzazione
gone mad, are revealed.

The best hotel, one of the two best in Sicily (the other is the San Domenico Palace at Taormina), is the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea at the foot of Monte Pellegrino at the north end of the Bay, on which is situated the cave once occupied by Santa Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo. Her effigy is paraded through the streets on a colossal processional car on 15 July each year, among scenes of wild enthusiasm. Built in 1900 to the order of Ignazio Florio, an immensely rich producer of Marsala, the hotel was for years the preferred retreat of royalty (Constantine of Greece actually contrived to die in it) and
remarkable photographs of great groups of them decorate its immensely long corridors. What was originally the restaurant is an Art Nouveau, what the Italians call
Stile Liberty
, tour de force, embellished with wrought iron work of astonishing complexity, glass screens mounted in convoluting frames of caramel-coloured wood and mirrors set so high in the walls that no one other than those who installed them can ever have seen their reflections. Other decorations include the frescoes of Ettore de Maria Bergler, in which scantily clad, ginger-haired ladies, apparently of Celtic origin, cavort in green meadows among beds of lilies.

Palermo itself is like a pot full of seething stew, the receptacle being the city, the contents its 723,000 inhabitants. The concoction can be sampled at various levels, but with care and without digging too deep. Otherwise, you might get burnt.

These people, the majority of whom are poor, some of whom are excessively rich, are genetically an extraordinary mixture of all those who have come to the island since the beginning of recorded history: Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Swabians, one of whom, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, made his court at Palermo the cultural centre of the Mediterranean, drawing on Jewish, Mohammedan and Christian sources, a channel through which Greek and Arab learning passed to Western Europe. And they were followed by Angevins, Aragonese, Catalans, Neapolitan Bourbons, Piemontese and, at the time of writing, returning émigrés from the United States. All of whom, mixed together, would seem more likely to produce some deadly gas than a homely cook-up.

In 1957 an Italian writer, Guido Piovene, described Palermo as the most Arabic, the most baroque, the most backward, the most obscure (he used the word
cupa
, dark and gloomy are other equivalents) city and the city with the greatest
potenza latente
, referring to the Mafia.

It is this latent force, generated by the Mafia, which makes it, as is Naples which has the Camorra, a most cruel city to live in. One in which the pillars of law and order, and even the present mayor of the city, a gallant Jesuit, Leoluca Orlando, have to travel in armoured cars and spend the rest of the time in fortified blockhouses simply to stay alive.

If you really feel you must, ask any Sicilian westwards of a line drawn from Cefalu on the north coast to Gela on the south coast, where Mafia gangs are currently fighting for control of the drugs market, which is all Mafia country, what effect the Honoured Society has on their lives. But do not expect anything other than an evasive reply. Best of all don’t ask.

If you want to get close to one of the old, heartless hearts of the Mafiosi, visit the Mercato Ortofrutticolo, the wholesale market out in the no-man’s land beyond the Prison, down by the railway tracks. Now that Palermo processes 85 per cent of the world’s heroin, veteran Mafiosi must feel positively nostalgic about the days when their ambitions were satisfied by taking a percentage on each case of fruit and veg. that went in and out of it.

As a visitor the only trouble you are likely to encounter is with petty criminals, most of whom are nothing to do with the Mafia at all. Wherever you go in Palermo (and this applies equally to the non-Mafia city of Catania which is equally dangerous) never carry a bag with valuables in it, even driving a car, or wear expensive jewellery. The streets are the hunting grounds of the
Sciffatori
, teenage thieves on motor scooters. Teams of smaller children work the buses. Don’t linger on the streets in the evenings when the shutters begin to come down.

The heart of old Palermo is the minute Piazza Vigliena, also known as the Teatro del Sole, because of the golden light that pours down into it from morning until evening. In it four baroque façades, the Quattro Canti, face one another diagonally across it, each one loaded with statuary: sculptures of the
Seasons on the ground floor, Kings of Spain above and at the top Saints representing the four old quarters of the city which meet here at the Piazza. They are the Loggia, the Kalsa, founded during the Arab occupation of Palermo down near the Albergaria, the Old Port, and the Capo.

It is in these quarters, and sub-divisions of them, that the roaring street life of Palermo can really be savoured. In them, in the proper season, you can get
stighiole
(hot ox guts),
o’mosso
(cold pig’s trotters) and hot chestnuts at the street corners. Here, the shops sell
Pupi a Cena
(dinner puppets), figures of Christian knights, their ladies and evil-looking, mustached Saracens; and
Frutta Martorana
, lifelike facsimiles of fruit, vegetables, meat and various pastas, modelled in coloured marzipan. In each of these quarters the inhabitants can distinguish visitors from one of the others by certain words and intonations, and until recently they would not marry anyone from outside it.

This is where the great street markets are in what are often areas of poverty although the streets themselves may be lined with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century palazzi – the Vucciria, the U’Borgo and the Albergaria.

In Palermo these very animated markets are among the safer places, both the stallholders and the Mafia who take a percentage from them, both being averse to having the customers frightened away by bag snatchers.

It is here, too, that the characteristic eating places are to be found which are famous for the liveliness of their customers who, unlike Piovene’s Palermitani, although they are dark show no signs of being either gloomy or obscure, at least while they are eating. Such a restaurant is Piccolo Napoli, in Piazza Mulino-a-Vento, which will never make the pages of Michelin but in which you can eat such dishes as
Pasta con le Sarde
, a sauce made with anchovies, fennel,
pasoline
(small grapes), pine nuts and saffron.

What you can see of Palermo depends on how much time
you have – no one in their right mind would spend an entire vacation in it. There are about twenty-five churches well worth a visit, some of them of a kind unique to Sicily, displaying elements of Muslim Arab and Byzantine art. Of these the most astonishing is the Cappella Palatina built between 1132 and 1140 by the Norman King, Roger II. Another great assembly of mosaics is in the Cathedral of Monreale on a hill west of the city built by an unknown master for the Norman King, William III. The finest Norman church in Sicily, also with Sicilian-Arab decoration, it is embellished with more than 6300 square metres of dazzling mosaics which are among the wonders of the world. Mosaics that, as do those in the cathedral at Cefalu, 60 km or so east of Palermo, literally overpower the beholder with their mystical beauty. Back in the city, in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Abbatellis, are four works of art which, alone, would make a visit to Palermo worthwhile: a mid-fifteenth century fresco, Death Triumphant, by an unknown artist, in which Death, a skeletal archer, rides through the world on a skeletal horse, trampling sinful humanity underfoot; a fourteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin by Riccardo Quartararo; a late fifteenth-century bust of Eleanora of Aragon by Francesco Laurana, and a fifteenth-century Annunciation by Antonello da Messina.

If you are not squeamish visit the Catacombs under the Church of the Capuchins in which some eight thousand skeletons and mummies, all dressed in their Sunday best, some in tricorne hats, are tastefully arranged along gloomy corridors, either in groups or hanging from nails. Last to arrive was the infant Rosalia Lombardo in 1920, still perfectly preserved.

What makes Palermo more than a brisk whisk round is the large number of things worth seeing, some of them highly eccentric, that are either on the outskirts or even further afield.

Among them is La Zisa – the name derives from the Arabic
el aziz
, splendid – a pleasure palace begun by the Norman
William I and completed by his son William II in what was an enormous hunting park, now hemmed in by modern buildings, a rather ruined but beautiful building. Another, to the south of it, also built by William II and well worth seeing, is the Cuba, otherwise the ‘Solatio’, the Sun Palace.

Further afield, north of the city in La Favorita, the hunting park laid out by Ferdinand IV of Bourbon in 1799 when he fled from Naples to escape the French, now used by tarts and joggers, is the marvellously dotty Palazzina Cinese, a building in the Chinese manner with flanking spiral staircases which he also built. Next to it is a museum in which every sort of Sicilian peasant artefact from ex-votos to painted carts is on view. It also houses a Sicilian Teatro di Pupi in which real puppets, unlike their sugar counterparts, the
Pupi a Cena
, every day enact, as they do in other parts of Palermo, an almost never-ending saga in which Christian knights such as Orlando, who always wears an eagle on his helmet and a cross on his shield, and Rinaldo, who always has a lion on his shield, do battle with the Saracens and save the fair Angelica from a fate worse than death.

Out beyond La Favorita, on the north-west outskirts of the city, are what remain of the beautiful villas constructed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of them now shamefully neglected and hemmed in by hideous apartment blocks. Among them is Villa Lampedusa, built about 1780, in which the Prince of that name installed an observatory in 1845, mentioned in
The Leopard
, in which it is called Villa Salina.

A number of other villas also survive in the south-eastern environs in and around Bagheria, buildings with single-storey flanking wings, now mostly submerged in tides of speculative building, much of it never completed; among them Villa Butera, Villa Villarosa and Villa Valguarnera, built between 1709 and 1738 by the Dominican monk Tommaso Maria Napoli.

Another is Villa Palagonia, commissioned in 1715 by Ferdinando Francesco Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, a beautiful, elliptical building with a monumental outside staircase. His son went mad and ordered the curtain walls to be decorated with hordes of hideously deformed figures executed in the local tufa. The interior was equally eccentric.

‘In the house,’ Goethe wrote, while on a visit to Sicily in 1787, ‘the fever of the Prince rises to a delirium. The legs of the chairs have been unequally sawn off, so that no one can sit on them, and we were warned by the castellan himself not to use the normal chairs, for they have spikes hidden under their velvet-cushioned seats. Our entire day has been taken up with the madness of the Prince of Palagonia.’