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Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again (continued)

 In 1638, William Kieft came to govern New Amsterdam. He quickly angered many of the inhabitants by closing taverns, but his handling of Indian affairs was even more atrocious. While the Europeans had been living without Indian conflicts, Kieft’s Indian policies soon led to regular bloody skirmishes, and within a few years, Kieft ordered the Company’s militia to massacre 120 Indians. Because the Indians retaliated, New Amsterdam now had to think about defending itself in ways it had not before and it started fortifying the northern reaches of the settlement. First Lesson. The Europeans under Kieft had taken unnecessary, hostile actions against Indians. The actions had not made New Amsterdam safer but the opposite, and the result was that the Europeans now had to defend themselves from threats of their own making that had not previously existed.

The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were not pleased with Kieft’s governance. The West Indies Company realized that the settlement functioned better and more profitably if there were reasonably good relations between the governor and the inhabitants. They sent Kieft packing.

(A pattern seen in Kieft’s New Amsterdam has continued to this day. Kieft may have imposed restrictions on taverns to bring increased morality and order to the settlement, but morality and order seldom win out in New York. Money does. As many others have done after him, Kieft soon sought money more than morality. He built his own distillery and, not surprisingly, relaxed the tavern restrictions. A quarter of the buildings in New Amsterdam soon housed a tavern of some sorts. No one had far to go for a drink. That pattern continues in New York. My local is two short blocks away, and I pass two bars on the way there, and if I strolled a few more feet, I would find several more drinking establishments. Of course, this means that in New York there is often no need for a designated driver–yet another good thing about this place.)

William Kieft, once director-general of New Amsterdam, may no longer be remembered in New York, but reminders of his successor can be found in many places. Peter Stuyvesant’s name has been given to a high school, a street, a square, a housing complex, and city neighborhoods. A statue of him has been erected, and his remains are buried in a New York City church graveyard. But even if Stuyvesant had never made it to New Amsterdam, he would have had a memorable career.

Son of a minister in the Netherlands, he joined the West Indies Company and was sent to Dutch possessions off the cost of Brazil. After a half dozen years there, he was transferred to Curaçao, and shortly after he turned thirty, he became acting governor of that island, Aruba, and Bonaire. A few years later, he led an attack on St. Martin, an island the Spanish had captured from the Dutch. Hit by a cannonball, Stuyvesant had his right leg amputated below the knee. He returned to the Netherlands where he was fitted with a wooden leg, leading to his nickname–no surprise here–Peg Leg Pete. When he regained his strength, he was sent to New Amsterdam to replace William Kieft.

For several years he went about improving the ragged condition of New Amsterdam, and in 1653 he built The Wall. Although there are no records enunciating the reasons why it was built, fear of Indians could have been a cause. New Amsterdam was situated among tribes that were ancient enemies with each other, and that led to a restiveness that may have concerned the Europeans. And, of course, not long before, under Kieft, the Europeans had massacred Indians.

Other forces from the wider world came into play. England and the Netherlands were commercial rivals, and the mid-seventeenth century saw Anglo-Dutch wars in various parts of the globe. (I don’t remember my education ever covering these wars. Why is that?) The leaders of the sparsely settled New Amsterdam were concerned about being attacked by the English. These concerns were heightened by the Dutch colony’s precarious perch in North America. Although the Dutch claimed what is now Delaware, Swedes had been settling there, and to the northeast, New England seemed to be expanding–and warlike.

The Dutch had overlapping claims to land with the English New Haven colony, and it seemed to the Dutch in America that New Haven was trying to expand into Dutch territory. (New Haven was a Puritan settlement, and as far as my reading goes, the least joyful and the pettiest and meanest of the Puritan settlements. This says a lot about New Haven. We can be glad that the New Haven colony did not expand. I will concede that later New Haven did produce good, even if over-hyped, pizza. But, of course, New Haven also subsequently gave us Yale.) Furthermore, rumors flew that a former resident of New Amsterdam was raising an army in Rhode Island to attack his one-time settlement.

(continued December 10)

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Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again

We were promised time and again a wall across our southern border, although we talk less and less about the part of the promise that said Mexico would pay for it. And again, we are having governmental crises about funding a wall. While you may be thinking about that and whether it should be constructed, I have been thinking about America’s first border wall and trying to figure out whether we can learn anything from its history.

We begin with a man who went looking for spices and found beaver. Englishman Henry Hudson, bankrolled by British merchants, had made failed attempts at finding a sailing route from Europe to the Far East. Hudson could not smooth-talk these businessmen into funding yet another voyage, so he jumped across the English Channel and convinced the Dutch East Indies Company to underwrite one more attempt. (I don’t think that the Dutch called it the Dutch East Indies Company. Perhaps to them it was just the East Indies Company.)

The story goes that Hudson was ordered to sail east, north of Russia to see if he could reach China. Apparently, Hudson was not enamored of the charms or likely success of such a route. He had heard rumors of a Northwest Passage through North America, so Hudson disregarded his bosses’ orders and went west, and in 1609 he found himself sailing up the Hudson River. (What are the odds that he would go across the Atlantic and then proceed up a river that bore his name?) He found that the Hudson petered out. This was not the Northwest passage, and he was not going to be bringing back cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg. But around the headwaters of the Hudson River, he found beaver, boatloads of beavers. (All those beavers building dams no doubt made this a much more exciting place than the Albany area has ever been since.)

Europeans then were in love with beaver fur. (Ever hear anyone talk about beaver meat? Ever see a beaver recipe? Europeans may have salted cod caught off North America and brought it back, but I never heard of salted beaver.) When Hudson returned to Holland, I do not know how he explained his wrong turn away from the rising sun, but his company overseers saw a moneymaking opportunity in the beaver sightings. Hudson also told them about this island with a great natural harbor at the mouth of his river. It was a marvelous place for a trading post for all the beaver skins that could be taken from the luckless animals and shipped to the fur-mad Europeans. The Dutch then laid claim to the land from what is now Delaware, up the Hudson and to what is now western Connecticut. They began a settlement, New Amsterdam, in 1625 on the southern tip of Manhattan.

(A few years later Hudson was up exploring Hudson Bay—again, what are the odds? He wanted to press on after some significant difficulties in those cold waters. His crew did not. You know those stories about how the Inuit set adrift their aged parents for the parental last voyage. I don’t know if the indigenous people learned from Hudson’s shipmates, or the Europeans learned from the natives, or it was merely coincidence. Having had enough of Henry Hudson, his ship fellows set him adrift near the arctic circle, and–surprise, surprise–he was never heard from again.)

The Dutch thus began a New World settlement. It was a commercial place, and it was run by a commercial enterprise. Not long on imagination on this front, it was called the West Indies Company. Beaver was the moneymaker, which explains why a beaver is on the seal of the City of New York. (I have never seen a beaver in New York City, not even in a zoo. I have only seen a few beavers anywhere. Perhaps my first sighting was as a boy with the family in a car driving to northern Wisconsin. A beaver was waddling across the road. The father came to an abrupt halt. Beaver do not move quickly on asphalt, and we waited for quite a while. The father looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Assuming that the beaver had finally made it to the ditch next to the car, he inched on. Thump. The left rear wheel clearly drove over something. The father drove a little further and stole a glance in the mirror. He looked as if he were going to be sick. I glanced back and saw the beaver’s tail wave feebly once, twice and then stop. Total silence in the car. I never heard any of us ever mention this incident.  We certainly did not try to collect its fur.)

The heads of the Dutch colony in North America were employees of the West Indies Company. Few of us know the names of the first two, but the third one, Peter Minuit, has fame. He is the one who selected the Manhattan location as the headquarters for the new Dutch enclave, and, of course, many of us have heard that in 1626 he bought the island from the Indians for $24 worth of beads.

Surely it tells a lot about our national character that this story has been passed down through the centuries. What happened is now murky to say the least. I have read several accounts. They agree that there was a transaction in the 1620s between Indians and Minuit. Was it for $24? Well, since dollars did not exist then, probably not. Instead it is accepted that the Dutch valued the deal at 60 guilders, but, of course, money was not exchanged. Of what use would Dutch currency have been to the Indians? Instead, some sorts of goods went to the Indians. Was it beads? We do not know. Maybe it was a mixture of goods—a pot, sewing needles, clay pipes. Maybe beads. We simply do not know except that I am positive that we can rule out Bic lighters even though they would have been handy. The question then comes up, “They got it for 60 guilders. What would that be worth today?” Again, the historians don’t agree. For example, I have seen a source that says that the guilders would be about $1,000 in modern money, but I have no idea how that equivalency was calculated. I do buy into a valuation method–the beer one. Sixty guilders could buy 2,400 steins of beer in New Amsterdam. I pay $7 or $8 for a beer or ale today in New York, so at this beer rate, the transaction would be worth about $18,000 now.

But there is another set of questions? Did the Indians sell all of Manhattan to the West Indies Company? Some accounts suggest that the transaction only concerned the southern tip of the island, a small plot of ground. Others suggest that the Indians were not selling the land in a European sense because it is not likely the Indians had the same sense of “property” or ownership as the Dutch did. The Indians might have only been leasing the land or merely permitting the Dutch a non-exclusive access to it. Of course, an underlying message of the version that has come down to us is that the Dutch were sharp traders. In another version, however, the Indians were the clever ones. This story contends that the Indians who traded with Minuit had no claim to the land but were Canarsies from distant Long Island. Most versions, however, say that the transaction was with Manhattan-dwelling Lenapes. In any event, the transaction was a success. No Indian tribe bothered that tiny settlement at the tip of Manhattan while Peter Minuit ran the place. The wall and the troubles came when a less successful governor was head of the colony.

(continued December 6.)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (finally concluded)

Perhaps you already knew this, but I only learned on my recent Sicilian trip that while Archimedes may have been Greek, he was also Sicilian. He was born, lived, and was killed by a Roman soldier in Siracusa, which in English is, of course, Syracuse. Of course, his famous discovery that the volume of an object could be calculated by submerging it in water was made there, and I was told that Sircusan university students, perhaps in the days of streaking, paid homage to Archimedes by running down the streets naked shouting “Eureka!” (Every trip brings some regrets. I regret that I did not buy the Archimedes tee shirt that I spotted in Siracusa but nowhere else.)

We stayed on the island of Ortigia, which is the ancient center of Siracusa, connected to the mainland by two small bridges. Ortigia was filled with houses and businesses fronting on the narrow streets and alleys. Many of the structures had wonderful doors and sometimes glimpses through gates revealed tiny courtyards. It reminded me of the less touristy parts of Venice, but without the canals. I loved it.

I went out for a walk. Our hotel was on the water, and I thought that as I long as I could find the water, I could get back to it. I strolled along the waterfront and walked a block away from the water and then came back, easily finding the hotel. I then went in the opposite direction and walked perpendicular to the water. I came upon a major commercial street and turned on to it, looking at the shop windows and then going into a bookstore. Not surprisingly, almost everything in that shop was in Italian, but here and there was a book in English. I did not understand the organization of the store, but it looked like a good place to browse for books. I continued down the commercial street until I came to a square with a wonderful fountain. I turned and thought that I would run into the water. Wrong. I thought that the commercial street ran parallel to the water, but it angled away from it. Of course, getting a bit lost is part of traveling, but I was tired and wanted to get back and angry with myself for being disoriented. At the end of a narrow street, I saw the open doors of a church (I learned that it was deconsecrated until it was renovated) that seemed to be having an art exhibition. I went in and saw hundreds of pop art paintings of the same face. I learned that the artist was obsessed with a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation in Palermo, and this was his homage to it. But I wasn’t there for the art. I asked the woman in charge whether she could help me. And in this ancient place, she pulled out her smartphone, hit the Google map icon, and showed me that I was but a four-minute walk to my hotel.

The next evening the spouse wanted to see the commercial street. I knew how to get there, I thought. I got lost again, but after instructions from a handsome Sicilian man we found it. I went back into the bookstore and bought a novel by Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal translated into English. It cost more than I would normally pay for a book, but I considered it my souvenir of the trip. I read the book when I got home. Mattia Pascal runs away from an unhappy marriage and finds a newspaper story a few weeks later that states a decaying body found in his hometown has been identified as him. He feels liberated, but he soon finds that living as a non-person has disadvantages. The strange story is simultaneously dark and comic, and while it takes place in various parts of Italy, there are no Sicilian scenes.

I did not read any Pirandello novel or listen to any Bellini opera to prepare, but I did read some Sicilian literature in advance of the trip. I had read The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa a decade ago. I remembered thinking that it was quite good, and I reread it. I now know a bit more Sicilian history, and some of the references made more sense the second time around. The book is set in the time of the unification of Italy and Garibaldi’s conquest of Sicily, but it was written in the 1950s, and many of Lampedusa’s observations of the Sicilian character were seemingly meant to describe Lampedusa’s Sicily as much as that of a century before. Since many of these descriptions are not flattering, I could see why not all Sicilians venerate the book. (And now that I think about it, my image of dry, brown, and dusty Sicily comes not just from The Godfather (see last post) but also from The Leopard.)

The Sicilian writer who most whetted my appetite for the trip was Andrea Camilleri. I don’t remember how or when I first discovered his Inspector Montalbano mysteries, but it was more than a decade ago. I have not read all of them, but I have read many. The characters are complex; the mysteries good; and the Sicilian atmosphere often seems to inform. And then there is the food. The books describe Montalbano’s lengthy meals, all of which sound delicious and made me want not just to visit Sicily but also to eat as much of its food as I could. (Camilleri is not just popular in his English translations. I saw rows of his books in Italian in different formats all around Sicily.)

I had admired Camilleri long before I went to Sicily, but reading in preparation for the trip introduced me to another Sicilian writer, the wonderful Leonardo Sciascia, who was born, taught school, and died in Sicily at the age of 68 in 1989. He wrote essays, historical novels, and plays, but he is most known for his crime stories. They are not traditional mystery stories, however. The solution to the crime seems apparent early in the story but remains unresolved at its conclusion. Beautifully written with obscure and philosophical dialog, the goal is not crime-solving. Instead, the crime is the setting for Sciascia’s characters to confront the meaning of justice and to maintain morality in a corrupt political world that is haunted by its fascist past and entwined with its mafia present. Camilleri, who in his own way tackles similar themes, seems to have been greatly influenced by Sciascia. Sciascia wrote powerful stuff, and when I saw a book in English by him in the Siracusan bookstore that I had not read, I snapped it up. It now rests on the top of my to-read pile. The Sicily trip was filled with many discoveries and one of them was the introduction to Leonardo Sciascia.

 

As we waited for a flight to Rome for the trip home the rain dripped from the ceiling of the Catania airport into plastic containers that seemed to be in their usual places. This was not a foreshadowing. The flight was fine.

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

Sicilians with a desire for lingonberry jam have a problem. There is but one Ikea in all of Sicily.

 

“The Sicilian language is the only one in Europe that has no future tense.” Albert Mobilio, “Introduction” to Leonardo Sciascia, The Wine-Dark Sea.

 

When I commented that the hotel numbering did not have a Room 17, a Sicilian man responded that seventeen is considered bad luck in Italy.

 

As I placed a Sicilian history onto a bookshelf in a hotel lobby, I immediately concluded that I was not going to exchange it for the Italian copy there of Bartleby the Scrivener.

 

Aristotle’s Poetics “is remarkable for many reasons, including the pleasure to be found in reading Aristotle on tragedy, as if it has just been invented, speaking confidently about how no one knows the origins of comedy, but that probably it is from Sicily.” Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

 

Before going, I consulted a reading list about Sicily. It contained more books than I was willing to read. I decided to eschew travel guides like Michelin and Fodors, but even so the listins of histories, travel writing, books about Sicilian art, architecture, or food, and novels and short stories set in Sicily was long. I used a happenstance method to make my selections. First, I went to my local library and read anything they had on Sicily. (See post of June 19, 2017: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=barrett) Then I went to my favorite bookstores to see what they may have that was on the list. (See post of December 22, 2017: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=strand)

The histories taught me that Sicily was subject to many foreign rulers: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, Bourbons. I read about Sicily in World War II and how the Sicilians treated the Allies as liberators as they pushed Germany off the island. I wondered how the Sicilians reconciled that response with the fact that Italy was fighting side by side with Germany. I read shocking histories about the Sicilian mafia; I read a memoir of an English woman who wrote charmingly about the house she inherited near Taormina and her guests there; I read a cultural history which blended many different aspects of Sicilian culture and history; and I was introduced to a writer of significance who was new to me.

From my reading, I learned that two Sicilians had won the Nobel Prize for literature. One was the poet Salvatore Quasimodo, whose name I tried to learn how to pronounce on the trip. (See post of November 19, 2018.) I had not been aware of him before, but I seldom read poetry, and I did not seek out any of his works.

The other was Luigi Pirandello, who lived from 1867 to 1936. I had read his controversial play Six Characters in Search of an Author in college (see post of May 9, 2018: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=Downer) and consequently thought of him as a playwright, but I now learned that he wrote novels and short stories. His works, however, did not appear on the Sicilian reading list. He was born in Sicily, but he moved away and did not write specifically about the island. Sicily may claim him, but he was not so much a Sicilian writer, as an Italian writer.

Pirandello was akin to the opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, who died at the age of 34 early in the nineteenth century. Bellini was born in Catania, Sicily, but he left for Naples when he was eighteen where he lived for eight years. He then moved to northern Italy, London, and finally Paris. His operas were not composed in or about Sicily, but Sicily claims him. He died in Paris and was buried there, but forty years later his body was disinterred and taken for reburial in Catania.

Bellini was famous and successful in his lifetime, but his works became less popular in the first half the twentieth century. That changed with Maria Callas, who often sang his operas, most notably Norma, which contains one of the most famous and difficult of soprano arias. I have not seen much opera, but I have seen Norma twice. Both were notable. The second time for the beauty of the music; the first time for an audience reaction. A famous soprano had the title role (I don’t remember who), but she was aging, and the aria had been transcribed down for her. The opera world seems to love controversy, and this was controversial. Decades ago when this happened, the Metropolitan Opera House had a room for a private dinner club before performances. The members were all men and all in formal attire. They sat together in the first ring. As the aria was about to begin, they stood up in unison and silently filed out of the theater.

“Norma” is now the designation for a pasta in Sicily. Pasta alla Norma consists of sautéed eggplant, a light tomato sauce, basil, and ricotta salata and can be found on almost any Sicilian restaurant menu. (I also saw pizza Norma.) This is apparently a traditional Sicilian dish, but its designation seems to be a recent creation. On the trip, we visited an old farmhouse surrounded by olive and almond trees. We had a cooking demonstration by the charming owner, who was, I guess, about seventy and had lived her whole life in Sicily. Somehow pasta alla Norma came up, and she scoffed at the designation. She said she had first heard that term only in the past two decades. I asked what the dish was called when she grew up, and she replied, “Fettucine with eggplant, basil, and ricotta salata.” Sicily is an ancient place with many venerable traditions, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t succumb to some modern marketing too.

(concluded Dec. 3)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition

I was surprised when I saw a tee shirt in Sicily with Marlon Brando’s likeness as the Godfather. I don’t remember any Brando scenes that were shot in Sicily, but his Godfather image adorns souvenirs all over Sicily–coffee mugs, lighters, ashtrays, magnets, aprons. While the likeness of Al Pacino, who did have scenes in Sicily, appears on souvenirs, sometimes paired with Brando’s face, Brando’s image overwhelmingly predominates. (I only saw one tee shirt with Homer Simpson as the Godfather. I surprised myself by not buying it.)

This Godfather imagery also surprised me because it now seems accepted by Sicilians that the mafia has severely harmed the region. Histories indicate that while the organization may have had nineteenth century roots, Benito Mussolini effectively suppressed it in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the mafia emerged again during and after World War II, with the aid of the occupying United States army. (The histories differ on whether the US wittingly or unwittingly helped the mafia resurgence.) The mafia siphoned off money that was meant for the postwar reconstruction of Palermo and other places keeping Sicily a backward place longer than was true for other Italian regions. The mafia’s protection rackets harmed commerce at every level grossly damaging Sicilian business; its smuggling of cigarettes and other items hurt governmental revenues; and the Sicilian mafia was brazenly violent, killing many people of all ranks including mayors and other politicians.

In the 1980s investigating magistrates led by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino went after the mafia, resulting in the Maxi Trial in 1986. Almost 500 mafioso, including all the major leaders, were put on trial in a specially built, bunkered courtroom inside a Palermo prison. Three-quarters of the defendants were convicted. While a few of them had their convictions reversed, an appellate court in January 1992 upheld the convictions and sentences of the rest.

The mafia response was brutal. Nearly a ton of explosives was placed under an elevated highway, and Falcone, his wife, and several police officers were blown up on May 22, 1992, when the explosives were detonated as Falcone’s motorcade passed on the highway. Two months later Borsellino was assassinated by a car bomb that also killed five police officers. Today, Palermo has memorials to and commemorates the anniversaries of the two magistrates’ deaths, and there are memorials around the city to many others who were mafia victims.

The Maxi Trial may have lessened the power of the mafia, but most think it still has power. Arrests of mafioso continue, but however it may have been viewed in the past, fewer Sicilians today see it as something romantic or quaint, and more see it as a brutal organization that has harmed Sicily.

For these reasons, I was surprised to see all the souvenirs of The Godfather.

 

I saw no tee shirts with the likeness of Salvatore Riina. You can look him up.

 

Perhaps because of scenes from The Godfather, I had expected Sicily to be brown and dusty. Instead, it was lush and green, maybe because of unusually heavy rains in the weeks before we came. Whatever the reason, the countryside was beautiful.

 

The guide more than once mentioned that with solar and wind power, Sicily could be energy independent. It has intense sunshine for much of the year, and the island has nearly constant winds. Even so, I spotted only a few solar panels and power-generating windmills. I thought back to a trip to Turkey where many homes had solar panels to heat water. It seemed like a good idea, but I saw nothing comparable in Sicily.

 

I noted the gasoline prices. They were quoted in Euros per liter, but my rough calculations had the cost at about $6.50 per gallon. I wondered how Americans would react to such prices. A Sicilian response is to drive small cars. They dominate the roads; I spotted few SUVs. In some way I envied the high gas costs. I wish Americans drove smaller cars and used less fuel. On the other hand, I drive and like low gas prices. I want, as I could in my youth, to get three gallons for a buck and also get a steak knife if I fill the tank up. I checked my memory and looked up gas prices from fifty years ago, and it was correct: I could get three gallons for a dollar. However, an inflation calculator told me that thirty-four cents in 1968 was the equivalent of about $2.47 today. The last time I filled up, I paid less than three dollars a gallon, so I don’t really pay much more for gas now than I did back then. But I no longer get a steak knife with the fill-up. The car from back then is gone (see post of October 17, 2018), but a steak knife or two from those days may still be around.

 

The guide told us that Sicilians do not have clothes dryers and, therefore, laundry is hung outside. This is also true for Lisbon, but in Portugal the drying clothes seemed colorful and charming while in Palermo they seemed only utilitarian.

 

“Sicilians care about their own private space, but the public dimension rarely engages them.” Joseph Farrell, Sicily: A Cultural History.

(Continued November 28)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

A fellow traveler to Sicily, who was my age, had come from Germany to the United States when his father accepted a job with a brewery in Tampa, Florida. He said that it had been hard to leave his friends, but America was then very exciting, and, of course, it was the setting for the western stories he loved of Karl May (you can look him up) and for American movies and TV. He said that many Europeans view the United States differently today than they did back then and now had no desire to move to America. They do not want to live without universal healthcare; have expensive “public” colleges and universities and other “public” education that has to be supported with bake sales; and do not want to live where the middle class is shrinking.

 

At least one Sicilian, however, enjoyed his trip to the United States. After the server in a Taormina restaurant gave me some Italian instruction (if you want the check, you don’t say “conto” as I had said, but “il conto,” I think. He continued that Americans said “grazie” with two syllables when it has three), the server talked, at considerable length, about his trip to the United States. He and three others started in Miami, the home of his boss’s wife. They drove across the southern United States—Alabama and Mississippi, he reported—to New Orleans. They continued into Texas and he scored a seat to the Super Bowl–$800 for the ticket—even though he knew nothing about American football. (He should have talked to that Palermo server. See post of November 21.) Then on to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and California. He loved San Francisco and hated Los Angeles. He said several times that the trip took forty-five days and cost 10,000 Euros. We listened. We asked some questions. He talked at length. And then some more. When we left, the bartender stopped us and gave us two free limoncellos. As I had concluded on previous trips to Italy, it is a disgusting drink.

 

I had not known that limoncello is a generic name for a lemon liqueur. I thought that there was one brand. Instead, I was told that each region of Italy that grows lemons has its own limoncello. To me, that just means the proliferation of something that should not be drunk. The spouse likes it fine.

 

I will never regard tiramisu the same again. A guide stated that the dessert originated in the brothels of the Veneto region where it was thought to help patrons . . . um . . . get it up.

I had many wonderful Sicilian desserts and pastries: almond cakes, a puff made from pistachio flour, gelato, but my favorites were the cannoli. I learned they were not all the same. The shells varied as did the texture and the sweetness of the fillings. The best was in a Palermo restaurant. The filling was the lightest of all the cannoli I had and barely sweet. The shell was not the typical cannolo tube, but two fried pieces of pastry, puffed and crunchy, forming a sandwich with the creamy cheese. Delizioso!

 

The strangest confection is known as St. Agatha’s breast. I don’t know if St. Agatha of Sicily is the patron saint of all the island, but she is the patron saint of some of its regions. Agatha lived in the third century and made a vow of chastity. A Roman lusted after her, but she spurned his advances. He, knowing that she was a Christian, had her arrested during a time of Christian persecutions. She was sent to a brothel where she was raped, but she refused to renounce her God. She was then further tortured, and her breasts were cut off. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake, but a timely earthquake saved her. (What it did to others is not mentioned.) She was sent to prison, where she died, but not before St. Peter healed her wounds. (Hearing this story, I am again reminded that so much of religion is about sex.)

She is commemorated in many ways in Sicily—in paintings and sculpture and churches—but most bizarrely in a sweet confection. It is a white mound with a cherry on top, representing a breast of St. Agatha. This may seem to be sacrilegious, but apparently not so. We visited an old convent, and we ended up in the gift shop. Pastries were for sale that the vendors swore were made from the convented-nuns’ recipes. These included row after row of Agatha’s breasts.

I bought one at a shop in Catania. It was a white cake with a gloppy fruit filling covered with a too-sweet white frosting and what I took to be a maraschino cherry nipple. Awful might be too strong a word, but it was assuredly not good. Something that seldom happens with me—I did not eat it all, and I wondered what it would have done to my sexual development if I had grown up with this bizarre “treat.” I speculated on how it had affected all the Sicilians who had grown up with it. You can quote me on this: St. Agatha’s breasts are not as good as real ones.

(continued November 28)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

Sicily has many ancient remains. They reminded me of something I learned in Turkey: If you have seen one Greek ruin, you have not seen them all.

 

The guides often mentioned the architectural style of a temple, and I wondered why of all the many things that might be learned, my generation of grade school students had to learn the distinguishing marks of a Doric, Ionic, or Estonian, or whatever, column. What things did we not learn as a result? Why was this considered important instead of, for example, more about Greek government, science, or literature? When I raised this to some fellow travelers, the conversation morphed into a discussion of the decline of civics teaching. Surely understanding the basic structure of our government is more important than distinguishing fluting on old pillars.

 

The Romans often built on top of Greek structures, frequently changing a Greek theater into a Roman amphitheater. I learned the distinction between a theater and an amphitheater. Now I am looking for ways, which turn out to be few, of casually dropping my new knowledge into a conversation.

 

The Greek theater in Taormina is striking. Taormina is a mountainside resort town. The theater, carved out of the mountain, is a short walk from Taormina’s center. The Greek architecture kept the area behind the stage open. The Romans enclosed the entire structure. Open on one side, it could not be used for gladiatorial contests; the wild animals and the combatants could escape, and thus the difference between a partially open Greek theater and a completely enclosed Roman amphitheater. Part of the Roman addition behind the stage has fallen in Taormina, and the existing structure resembles the original Greek theater. When sitting in the ancient seats, one gets a view that the theater-goers had twenty centuries ago. It is beautiful. You look out at the Ionian Sea (extra credit: where is the Ionian Sea? Where is the Tyrrhenian Sea?) with Mt. Etna.

 

The remains of another Greek theater were twenty-six centuries old. My mind can’t really comprehend that, and perhaps that is why I thought that even if I waited centuries, I still couldn’t afford seats I wanted to Hamilton.

 

Mt. Etna is visible from the main square of Taormina. I saw it at dusk. Steam regularly escapes the volcano, and with the setting sun, the vapor took on a soft pinkish color as if a benevolent fire were causing the glow.

 

It rained one night while we were in Taormina. The next day the upper tier of Mt. Etna was covered in snow—a beautiful sight, as the first snowfall often is (but not the too-early one we got when I returned home.)

 

We went part way up Mt. Etna and walked around a crater that had been produced by volcanic activity but was no longer a vent for the volcano. The ground was covered in black, volcanic rock, which we could collect. I filled a pocket with stones and pebbles even though I can’t imagine what I am going to do with them.

The crater was a nearly perfect bowl, perhaps thirty yards across and deep. Somehow this made me think about Italy and Sicily’s present economic difficulties. They can use more revenue. Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio has soared, giving concerns to other members of the European Union. I suggested to travelers and guides that the crater be asphalted over and used for international skateboarding contests. This could raise much needed revenue. No one else thought that this was a good idea.

 

An ancient bowl in a museum depicted men drinking. A guide informed us that such gatherings were stag affairs. I thought that Greek society might have produced more offspring and lasted longer if women had attended the drinking parties.

 

I smiled every time by the frequent use by our guide of the term, “Mama Mia!”

 

I had known before going to Sicily that we Americans misuse the word by saying, “Give me a panini.” Panini is plural, and we ought to say, “May I have a panino, please?” In Sicily, I realized that we also misused “cannoli,” which, too, is plural. We should say, “I would like a cannolo.” (I ate many delicious cannoli on my trip, one cannolo at a time.) The guide pointed out that we misused “biscotti” in same way. I replied that biscuit meant something different in England and America, and that what the English call a biscuit, we call a cookie. The guide inquired what a biscuit was in the United States, and as I started to explain, her eyes lit up and she said, “Like Bisquick!” To my surprise, she had grown up with that American product.

(continued November 26)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition (continued)

We visited salt pans near Trapani. Someone mentioned that flamingoes become pink when they eat tiny shrimp. Some skeptics did not buy this, but I had heard this explanation before on the Discovery or National Geographic Channel, and therefore felt it must be true. Even so, that evening I googled why flamingoes were pink; the shrimp explanation was given. That was the end of the exploration of that topic for me. Like many others I believe something on the internet when it confirms what I thought in the first place.

 

I asked the server in a Palermo restaurant how he had learned such excellent English. He responded that he had studied it in school but became more proficient because of American teammates on his professional football teams. He rattled off names as if I should recognize them. I was surprised that there were so many Americans playing professional soccer in Italy. Only as the conversation progressed did I realize that he was talking about American football. I had not known that there was American football in Italy, much less a professional variety. He had played for teams in several Italian cities and proudly reported that he had been on the Blue team, which is the national team. He did not look big enough to play professional football in America, and he said that his weight had dropped from 215 pounds to 170 since he stopped playing. (He did not use kilograms for his American football weight.) He said that he was not smart enough to play offense and asked me to guess what position he played. Thinking of professional football in America, I responded cornerback or perhaps safety, but he said that he had been an outside linebacker and was proud of his pass-rushing ability. I jokingly said that professional football must have made him wealthy. He laughed and said that he made more waiting on tables than in playing American football. He had made only $1,000 a month (he did not give his football salary in Euros), but went on to say that he also got his food, a place to live, and the use of a car. He no longer played football. He gave American football up after a number of surgeries. Now he was working on being a power lifter.

 

They say that travel gives new experiences and expands the mind. That was true for me. I did not expect when I went to Sicily that I would meet an Italian who played professional American football in Italy.

 

I don’t remember how it came up, but the Italian guide expressed her disgust that Americans put their feet on tables and desks, a practice she had seen in American movies, TV, and photographs. She could not imagine a civilized Italian ever doing such a thing. One of my fellow travelers chimed in with her displeasure with the practice and said that is why she had a hassock for every chair. I did not agree. I would not put my feet up on someone else’s table. I would not put my feet on a dining table. I would not put my shoes on my coffee table. However, I often put my stockinged feet without shoes on the table in front of my couch. I said, somewhat facetiously, to the feet-off-the-table duo that it was an efficient way to dust the surface, but somehow that did not convince them of the civility of the practice.

And I put my shod feet up on my desk. Why have a reclining desk chair if at least once in a while you don’t recline and put your feet up? And, of course, there are famous pictures of President Obama with his feet in shoes on the Oval Office desk. Conservatives cried out about Obama’s disrespect for the Oval Office, but then pictures of President Bush the Younger and President Ford surfaced with their feet on the same desk. What is there to say? American men put their feet on desks. Instead of being disgusted by this, I would say a man is not a real American if he does not do so.

 

In Sicily, I learned once again that even Italian men cannot pull off carrying a man purse.

 

The guide struggled for an English word, and someone told her that she was searching for “toothpick.” She thought that this was a funny word and said several times, always laughing. I thought that it was funny that she thought toothpick was funny.

(continued November 23)

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Snippets–Sicily Edition

We thought we were in the line for the flight to Rome where we would make connections to Palermo, but we were wrong. We were not the only ones to have found the signage (when did it become “signage,” and not just “signs”?) unclear; others traipsed after us to the new queue. The man behind us said something amusing about our situation, and we started talking when we settled into our new line.

He described himself as a “scholar.” He was a university professor from Naples. He had been visiting an ethnic center at the University of Minneapolis and had then spent a few days in New York City with his daughter who was traveling with him. They were now headed home.

His field was a new one for me—Italian-American literature. He studied American authors of Italian descent. When asked for examples, he offered Don DeLillo and Richard Russo. I was surprised. I have read novels by both these authors and had never thought of them as Italian-American. I regarded both as quintessentially American. Russo’s capturings of small-town life and academia just seemed to me to be, in the best sense of the word, Americana. DeLillo has portrayed other aspects of the country to me, often its paranoia, but again, I thought of him simply as an American writer, not an Italian-American writer. Standing in line to check in for a flight was not the time for a deep literary discussion, but in another setting, I would have liked to have heard the Neapolitan professor talk about how, if it all, he saw that the Italian ancestry of Russo and DeLillo influenced their novels.

In response to a question, the professor, without hesitation, said that Underworld was the best of DeLillo’s books. I told him that I had read the book twice. The first time I was mostly confused by it, but the second time I thought that it was a masterpiece. I continued that each time, however, I had considered the opening chapter marvelous—some of the best writing I had ever read. Its setting is the legendary playoff game that decided the 1951 winner of baseball’s National League, which ended with the dramatic home run by Bobby Thompson. The professor smiled and said that the chapter was just incomprehensible to him. I guess that one needs to know something about American baseball to grasp the genius of the piece.

We talked a little about some of the Italian authors the spouse and I have read. He speculated that the first of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of Neapolitan books was written by more than one author. If so, the spouse and I had not noticed. The professor taught me how to pronounce the last name of Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian poet who won the Nobel prize for literature, but I did not master it and asked my guide again in Sicily. The “s” sounds like a “z,” and the emphasis is on the second syllable, not the third as we would say for the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The professor’s daughter said that she was finishing college in the spring. She did not know what she would do then, but she was studying “languages.” As one who cannot speak anything other than English, I noticed the plural.

The professor said that he was now studying a John Fante novel. I stated that I had never heard of Fante, and the professor responded that he was mostly known for writing B-movie scripts, but that he had also written some outstanding novels. On one level, it was humbling to have an Italian inform me about an American writer; on the other, I like reading good authors whom I have not read before, and I have now vowed to read Fante’s Bandina Quartet.

As we finally made it to the head of the line, we exchanged contact information, and the spouse and I told the daughter she could stay with us if she visited New York City again, which seemed to excite her since she had enjoyed New York so much.

I thought that this was a good start for our trip to Sicily. Before even boarding Alitalia, I had had an interesting conversation and learned things from a person whose path I would like to cross again.

(continued November 21)

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Snippets

The spouse asked me what time I wanted to leave to be on time for our restaurant reservation. I answered. She immediately said she wanted to go five minutes earlier, and it was clear that we were going at her preferred time. As I started to ask why she asked me what time I wanted to go, I, of course, knew the answer. If by happenstance I had stated the time when she wanted to go—the time when we would go–she could look like she was merely acquiescing to my wishes.

 

If a mirror flips your image so your left side appears to be your right side, why doesn’t it also flip top and bottom? Why don’t you look as if you are standing on your head when you look in a mirror?

 

The two had co-authored the book of a play I attended. The credit for Leo Schwartz in the Playbill said, “His musical, Till, about Emmett and Mamie Till, won the Mainstreet Musical Theatre Festival in 2016.” The credit for DC Cathro said, “His musical Till, written with award-winning composer Leo Schwartz, was one of three winners in the 2016 Mainstreet Musical Festival.”

 

The Christian radio station gave a few brief Bible readings, although where the sacred words left off and commentary began was not always clear. It also presented short inspirational stories and exhortations. Mostly, however, it played music, and mostly that music fell into the rock category. I remembered back to when rock started. (Alas, I am old enough to remember when “Rocket 88,” Bill Haley, and Elvis Aron were all new.) I recalled how ministers smashed 45s saying that rock was music of the devil. This made me think about how powerful He is. In only the short span ofmy lifetime, He had transformed a genre that would send me into eternal damnation into music that was now for the devout. Hallelujah!

 

“There is no such thing as hell, of course, but if there was, then the sound track to the screaming, the pitchfork action and the infernal wailing of damned souls would be a looped medley of ‘show tunes’ drawn from the annals of musical theater.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

 

I was driving midweek in central Pennsylvania. Signs seemed to be everywhere for a weekend church festival. I was sorry that I was not going to be there then because the festival offered not just the usual entertainment and food, but something that I have never experienced and could not entirely imagine: A Polka Mass!

 

“But, despite the convictions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs and practices are identical with those of the founders of their faith, religion must change in order to survive.” Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History.