ONE


Street of the Pagan

Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from slavery, from foreign conquests and oppressions, and none have struggled so irrepressibly for emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians. Almost from the time when Polyphemus promenaded around Etna, or when [Demeter] taught the Siculi the culture of grain, to our day, Sicily has been the theater of uninterrupted invasions and wars, and of unflinching resistance. The Sicilians are a mixture of almost all southern and northern races; first, of the aboriginal Sicanians, with Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and slaves from all regions under heaven, imported into the island by traffic or war; and then of Arabs, Normans, and Italians. The Sicilians, in all these transformations and modifications, have battled, and still battle, for their freedom.

—Karl Marx and Friedrich EngelsCollected Works, Vol. 17

MY FIRST, and what I thought would be one of my most important vows—stay on blue highways; avoid the autostrada—was about to be broken. The clock was quickly moving forward; by noon, after leaving Palermo around 9:00 A.M. on SS113, I was only as far east along the Tyrrhenian coast as Cefalù.

Traffic through the small coastal towns was heavy. Cars and produce trucks were parked haphazardly along the narrow streets, as is typical in such places in Italy’s far south. Vehicles from opposite directions would squeeze past each other, often with side mirrors pulled in to allow an extra inch or two of clearance. Or, a car in front would simply stop while the driver conversed with a friend on a sidewalk. I learned long ago to act like a Sicilian while driving in such an environment: There is no sense in honking; the conversation will eventually end, and the driver will move on. Sicilian friends over the years, when I expressed frustration over a bureaucratic snafu or getting hung up in impossible traffic, often would advise me, “Tranquillo, John. Tranquillo!” You will get there eventually. No reason to get agitated.

At this pace, my plan to reach Castiglione di Sicilia on the south slope of the Peloritani Mountains by midafternoon would fail. It would take until long after dark to navigate the final stretch into a town I had never before visited and that looked on my iPhone map to be made up of a maze of narrow, meandering, one-way streets.

So, with a shake of my head, I broke away from the coastal highway, which winds delightfully through villages and olive groves, and entered the sterile north–south Palermo–Messina autostrada with its miles of dark tunnels and high speeds. It was a wise decision. Those miles flashed by. Within thirty minutes, I was at Capo d’Orlando and the autostrada’s connection to SS116, where I could leisurely begin the climb over the western edge of the Peloritani Mountains in Sicily’s far northeast. I could wind my way over the top and down to the base of the north slope of Europe’s largest active volcano, Etna, and into Castiglione. This tiny village would be my home for nearly two weeks as I visited it and a handful of mountain villages in the first phase of my search for the essence of Sicily’s small towns.

I have traversed Sicily and portions of the Italian peninsula many times over the years, nearly always by automobile and, unless absolutely pressed for time, which is almost never, I studiously avoid the autostrada. Paying occasional tolls is not the issue; as on American interstates, it is the fast highway’s avoidance of small places that bothers me. You see a hilltop village in the distance and long to explore it, but you are past the exit before you know it, or there is no specific exit.

By following state, provincial, and local roads, you are forced to slow down. And discover. Such small, narrower roads go everywhere, giving the traveler a chance to stop, enjoy a caffè in a local bar, or eat lunch or dinner in a family-run trattoria with perhaps only a half-dozen tables. The autostrada offers only garishly lighted truck stops and commercial cafeterias.

On this day, in early March with windy gusts and occasional rain splatters, SS116 carried me up, up, up on a road that sometimes felt like I was driving around the rings of a corkscrew. Despite being a state road, the equivalent of a federal highway in the United States, it is, like most roads in Sicily, often just wide enough for cars to pass in opposite directions, and ill maintained. Occasionally, warning markers show that a part of the roadway is slipping off a steep embankment, or there may be short stretches of gravel-only road surface. Many curves are nearly blind, requiring use of the car’s horn to alert opposing drivers. This always takes me some getting used to, but within a day or so I tend to begin driving like a Sicilian, downshifting, then upshifting at will through the curves, laying on the horn as a warning to anyone approaching. On the portions where only one vehicle can go at a time, it becomes second nature to guess when the car coming at you will pause so you can go by, or when you should do the pausing.

High near a summit of the first line of Peloritani Mountains, I stopped just past the village of Naso. The observation point overlooked, far below, the tiny enclave of Ficarra, and far beyond to the north, the Tyrrhenian Sea and a cluster of three of the seven Aeolian Islands: Salina, Lipari, and Vulcano. It was a pleasing view, the cover of high clouds diffusing the light so each island stood out in soft, dark relief against what the Greek storyteller Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, called a “wine dark sea.”

This highway passes through the Parco Regionale dei Nebrodi, now protected, ostensibly, from overdevelopment. Once this land, like the neighboring Madonie Mountains farther to the west, was carpeted with vast swaths of pine and hardwood forest. Over the centuries, unthinking deforestation to feed the gigantic maw of shipbuilding required by Mediterranean empires that long raped, pillaged, and looted Sicily for their own gain cleared off these mountains with no thought given to replanting. And Sicily, centuries ago, offered a much cooler climate than it experiences today, so these forests stand little chance of reestablishing.

The first three months of 2016 were cold and wet, then gradually warming, and the mountains occasionally were covered with snow at their high points, but Sicily’s reality is that such winters are the exception. And summers are blazingly hot, giving special meaning to the expressions “burned-over land” and the “Africanization” of Sicily. The Sicilian fir, native to these mountains, is virtually gone. One source says, incredibly, that only twenty-one mature trees of that particular species remain. Replanting fails because of continued heavy livestock grazing and gradual climate shifts to hotter and drier.

* * *

Over the top of the last southward ridge, SS116 dropped down into a great plain along the bottom edge of Mount Etna’s north slope. As I curled my way down through the Peloritani foothills, I passed flocks of sheep and herds of cattle grazing on slopes that were likely terraced to sustain crops hundreds, if not a thousand or more years ago. Many of those terrazze today are overgrown and unplanted, occasionally punctuated by crumbling stone houses and huts. It was obvious that many of the farms have long been abandoned, with families leaving for the Americas or Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Still others left after competing World War II armies swept through with the destruction such events bring. Many never came back to reclaim the property or the second homes in town. Their descendants, being fully raised Americans or Australians, may have had no interest in or even no knowledge of their ancestors’ abandoned property. And so the land and decaying structures sit while the population of these places declines. If they are taken over with an eye toward reoccupying them, either by later generations or strangers, restoration seems preferable, maintaining the character of medieval neighborhoods. Few have the American penchant for tearing down something so old and building a modern structure. There are some restored homes that look ancient on the outside, but whose interiors are completely modern.

The only evidence of crops was in small, private gardens that produce enough vegetables for an extended family or, perhaps, for occasional sale in a village’s weekly market. Cows, sheep, and goats prowl these overgrown swaths of green generated by winter snows and rain—land that will turn brown and dry by July and August and is prone to frequent wildfires.

I parked on a high turnout overlooking the town of Randazzo, a junction point in my drive to Castiglione, and watched a sheepherder and his dogs push his flock up a steep hill, along a slight terrazza leading to a pasture, already green in early spring. The flock disappeared over the crest of a bump in the land caused millennia ago by a now-dormant vent to the gases rumbling deep within Etna.

Randazzo is a medieval town, heavily modernized after World War II, but still with its requisite medieval churches and a handful of ancient buildings that survived the war or that have been restored. It has been a major crossing point for vast armies over the centuries. It was through here that the Spanish king, Peter of Aragon, after landing far to the west at Trapani, marched with his army in late summer 1282 en route to Messina on the northeast coast. He had offered to help rebellious Sicilians depose the French during an event that became known as the Sicilian Vespers in exchange for him becoming king of Sicily. And nearby, in 1719, at the village of Francavilla, the ruling Spanish fought and lost to the Austrians in one of the biggest battles on the island since Roman-Carthaginian times. It was during what historians call the War of the Quadruple Alliance. Messina then fell, and the Austrians besieged Palermo. The Austrians’ victory was short-lived. Just fourteen years later, the Spanish returned, taking Naples in 1734, and Sicily the following year. Francavilla, which grew up around a late-eleventh-century abbey, had “di Sicilia” added onto its name in 1863 to distinguish it from seven other Francavillas found throughout Italy.

Randazzo is one of the major population centers in the area closest to Etna’s main crater, but lava flows over the centuries have graciously spared it. Several years ago, I drove along the town’s edge en route elsewhere and, while the town didn’t appeal to me, the area around it did. It was early July during that long-ago trip, and vast stretches of well-irrigated vineyards shimmered in all directions with intense skies free of clouds. Etna wine is produced here and elsewhere along Etna’s vast flank, and the countryside hangs heavy with well-ordered vines.

Various roads cut through younger swaths of lava rock in stages of turning into that productive volcanic soil. Hundreds of years from now, new fields will grow out of the soil produced from the black rock disgorged as lava from deep within Sicily’s northeastern edge a few thousand years ago. Small plants and bushes already are taking hold in these old lava fields, including the hearty ginestra, known in English as “broom,” and its powerful roots that nature uses to inexorably break the lava apart. Meanwhile, lava stone is used for rock walls dividing land and bordering roadways, and, since ancient times, in buildings, temples, and churches.

* * *

Thanks to the respite I got by jumping onto the autostrada, I still had plenty of daylight left to help me find my way into Castiglione di Sicilia, known by the Sicilian name Castigghiuni before Sicily was unified with mainland Italy in 1860. Rome, the new conqueror, like it did with Francavilla, added the “di Sicilia” so the Sicilian version would not be confused with the handful of other Castigliones on the peninsula.

Just moments after I left Randazzo and sooner than I expected it, the turnoff popped up around a blind curve ahead. I made a sharp left and just ahead, high on a hill and scrunched into a saddle with what appeared to be the remains of a castle at one lofty end, clusters of mostly pale yellow buildings emerged in this village called Castiglione. Packed helter-skelter across the face of the mountain saddle, these structures showed themselves off in the increasing peachlike glow of midafternoon light.

For a few miles, the road passed vineyards closed off behind strong fences and large iron gates, through patches of freshly pruned olive trees, and, occasionally, those untouched fields of ancient lava flows. Within a few moments, the asphalt gradually, then suddenly, steepened as I moved off the valley floor, carved eons ago through ancient lava by the Alcantara River. The state highway made its way up into the town, tapering down to one very steep lane within a few hundred feet. I pressed along, hoping a car would not meet me wanting to come down. I got lucky, and the street crested a hill and lowered down into a tiny town square with a series of other streets shooting off in confusing directions. Some were one-way, others two-way, but all were narrow and lined with parked cars that shriveled down the driving space even more.

I could see I would have an adventure finding my bed-and-breakfast, Borgo Santa Caterina, which had the strange additional name of albergo diffuso. I pulled alongside a cluster of elderly men standing, as they usually do in small Italian and Sicilian towns, in front of a bar. Glancing inside, I could see tables of men, middle-aged and elderly, playing cards.

“Buonasera. Dovè la Borgo Santa Caterina?” Then I added on the phrase that I picked up from the B and B site: “C’e ‘albergo diffuso.’” I had no idea what that term meant, but the men immediately knew. “Ahh, Valentino!” one said, giving the hotel owner’s name on my confirming email. “Sì,” I said, thrilled to know they knew him and the hotel. One man then rattled off a series of directions in what sounded more like Sicilian than Italian, but I got the drift. Go down this street, turn left, turn left again, and go up the street.… There I lost the drift, but I figured I would take it a step at a time. Years of traveling by car in Italy and Sicily gave me a willingness to be bold.

Waving and shouting my gratitude, I took off. Within a few moments I was back, driving past the same group of men. I had simply made a circle rather than going down another road. I waved, they smiled and nodded, but I didn’t stop. I tried it again, this time opting for a lower road at a small junction. There, near the edge of the village center, was a hotel sign with an arrow pointing right. I turned and drove about 150 feet. The road quickly squeezed down to almost less than a single lane, but ahead was the brightly painted front door. I pushed a button in the car that automatically brought the side mirrors in—the street was that narrow—and stopped at the door, where the driveway opened up enough to allow me to climb out.

Inside, the clerk Rosario greeted me in English. He filed my passport information and went out with me to retrieve my luggage. Hauling it up to my room was when I learned what albergo diffuso meant. Three short stair flights (I hate to use the word “narrow” again, but they were) later, with landings leading off in different directions to different buildings, finally got me to where I would sleep for the next eleven days.

This was not a traditional hotel with all the rooms under one roof. And there certainly was no elevator. The buildings, while separate, were in a cluster. “Twisting and narrow,” for steps leading up hills to local streets, is commonplace in these Sicilian hill towns first built in the early Middle Ages or laid out even centuries before, sometimes by Greeks, other times by Romans, Arabs, or Normans. After all, how wide did a road back then need to be for a carriage, or a donkey-driven cart when buildings could be built right up to the road’s edge? Tearing down medieval buildings to make roads wider is virtually unheard of there, except perhaps on occasion in large cities.

Then I had to move my car. “Parking is back there,” Rosario said, pointing to the wider part of the street. He saw my consternation. I came in okay, but backing up would be much harder. I am not good at it. “I will do it for you,” he said with a hopeful smile. “I do this all the time.” No, I said confidently. Then, in strong Italian, “Proverò (I will try).”

That bravado lasted a few minutes. Although the earth had not moved since I first drove in, a building on one side and a low rock wall on the other seemed much tighter as I backed out. Rosario stood behind, motioning with his hand, then quickly shaking his head and yelling, “Stop! Stop!” I pulled forward, got out, and motioned him in. It took him ten seconds, and my car was free of that cursed driveway, never to darken it again. I parked a few dozen feet down the road up against a high stone wall covered with heavy vines, walked back to my room, showered, and changed my shirt before navigating those three stairways down to the reception area, where Rosario was fixing a nice late lunch of pasta pomodoro.

A nap was in order. Castiglione, now in the midst of a riposo pomeridiano, or afternoon rest, would be empty of people; shops and the one or two bars would be shuttered. Rosario told me nothing much would be happening until around five thirty or six o’clock “at the earliest.” It was late February, the skies were darkened with gray clouds and a light rain—Sicilians refer to such moisture as a chioviri assuppaviddrani, or a “peasant-drenching drizzle”—and I figured it was worth it to wait.

My large room was warm, the bed looked comfortable. It was in a restored medieval building two levels higher than the building with Rosario’s reception desk and breakfast area. The street above the complex leads to the upper part of the village, which has its own central piazza, a bar, various markets, and the village’s only bank. I unpacked, dove in beneath the covers, and slept for a good three hours—plenty of time to work out the kinks of a long day’s drive on twisting mountain roads.

* * *

Nap over and dressed for Sicily’s late winter wetness, I made my way to the street level and began the fifteen-minute walk to the lower center. The light rain persisted. I imagined that the expression “peasant-drenching drizzle” referred to a time long ago when field-workers had to stay on the job despite the wetness, while the landowner remained indoors in front of a fireplace or rode around in a covered carriage.

The walk was slightly downhill, and there was just enough late-afternoon light to make out, just beyond, a seven-hundred-year-old sandstone tower, called U Cannizzu in Sicilian. New friends a few days later told me that a lightning strike at some point long ago had split the tower; a large cement patch holds it together. This tower and the ruins of the twelfth-century Norman castle high above the village dominate the scene and underscore a sense of history that the traveler can never get away from in Sicily.

The panorama of vineyards and almond groves far beyond, laid out against the north slope of Etna and cut through by a silver sliver of road leading to the out-of-sight coast of the Ionian Sea far below, are changed little, I suspect, from how the land looked hundreds of years ago.

The gas station at the bottom of Santa Caterina’s street, Via XXIV Maggio, was open, so I knew riposo was over and there would be activity in the lower heart of the hillside village. I turned left onto the village’s main street, which took me past a small garage lit up with a welder’s sparks. A helmeted man with the torch glanced up as I walked by, raised his protective hood, smiled, and gave a short wave to this complete stranger. I would see him nearly every day that I spent in Castiglione, and each time he would nod in growing recognition as I wandered into town for an evening meal at the one ristorante, or to pick up a few items from the druggist or small grocery store, or simply to sit on a small park bench among teenagers and elderly men enjoying the dwindling twilight.

During that first walk, I noticed a ceramic tile bolted to a wall. It featured a person’s name, in light blue paint on an off-white background, and a date: August 18, 1943. I saw similar tiles scattered throughout the village. I asked around, and found out that they marked where sixteen Castiglionesi were executed at the hands of retreating German soldiers following the Allied invasion of Sicily five weeks earlier, on July 10. What made the deaths particularly barbarous was the reality that Germany and Italy were still World War II allies when this tragedy occurred.

British and Canadian troops were fighting the Germans all along Sicily’s eastern coast toward Messina. American troops were sweeping diagonally across Sicily much farther to the northwest, toward Palermo. Units of the retreating army had stopped, briefly, in Castiglione. Townspeople, caught in the midst of this Allied invasion, were hungry. A German truck carried food for the troops, and some locals pilfered supplies from it. The outraged Germans executed people in various locations around Castiglione, wounded twenty, and briefly held two hundred hostages. Each marker, installed just a few years before my 2016 visit, identifies a spot where a villager was shot. One marker carried the identity of an elderly woman who had been thrown, for some inexplicable reason, from her tiny balcony high above the street onto the pavement below.

This atrocity, committed against Italians while Italy was still a German ally—Italy did not surrender to U.S. and British forces until two weeks later—was the first of 180 German massacres of innocent civilians on Italian soil over the next twenty-one months of the war. Historian Massimo Storchi points out that, ironically, the last massacre carried out by Germans on the peninsula took place in Bolzano, in Italy’s far north, on May 3, 1945, the day after German forces in Italy surrendered to the Allies. There, fifteen people were murdered.

Many Italian and Sicilian villages have war memorials in their town centers, marking one war or another and listing the names of the dead from those towns. This is to be expected for those in uniform. But when plaques mark the spots where innocent men, women, and children were gunned down in twentieth-century memory, it gives the sensitive traveler pause. While wandering Castiglione di Sicilia’s streets and alleyways over nearly two weeks, I suspect I encountered all sixteen of those ceramic plaques. All the people I talked to during my visit, young and old, know the story of what happened in their village.

Nearly all know older history as well. Townspeople told me about Castiglione’s once-thriving Jewish Quarter, dating back to at least the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Its remaining, crumbling, and mostly unoccupied buildings are just off the curiously named street Via Pagana, or street of the pagan. Cettina Cacciola, an executive with Castiglione’s tourist office, pointed it out to me and said simply, “This is not a Christian street.” She didn’t mean it as a negative comment; it simply marked the place where non-Christians lived and where medieval Catholics rarely trod.

This discovery led to another story that offers insight into why the abandoned Jewish district was left alone over the centuries. In 1491, the town’s Catholic priest led a procession of the faithful, complete with a statue of the dead Christ. The procession made its way to a house in the ghetto, next door to the home of Rabbi Biton, who viewed the Christian procession as a slight to Jews. No one today knows the motive of the priest to lead his procession there. Perhaps it was to provoke a confrontation or simply to assert the church’s authority.

Someone, from a window of the rabbi’s house, threw a stone at the priest. It missed him and hit the statue, breaking off one of Christ’s arms. The faithful were outraged, and two brothers—Andrea and Bartolomeo Crisis—attacked and killed the rabbi. The news of this isolated event traveled far. Ferdinand and Isabella, the royalty of Spain, heard about this attack and lavished praise on the brothers. In 1492, these same rulers who supported Christopher Columbus in his expedition to the New World created the Spanish Inquisition. Initially it tested whether Jews who had converted to Christianity, known as conversos on the Iberian Peninsula and neofiti in Sicily, really were true believers who hadn’t simply converted for convenience.

Ferdinand and Isabella later decreed that the unconverted Jews of Castiglione, as well as Jews all over Sicily, be banished from the island. Jewish assets were confiscated and divided between the church and the island’s noblemen. These expelled peoples had been an economic force in Castiglione and Sicily. Their departure led to economic repercussions that plagued the island for years.

* * *

Cettina, following our walk along Via Pagana, piled me into her car and drove to the village outskirts, turning onto a single-lane country road with a sign and arrow pointing to Cuba Bizantina. This was an Orthodox church, one of the earliest and most important in Sicily, locally known as Cuba of Santa Domenica. It is very old, perhaps dating back to perhaps the twelfth century, when the Normans ruled and allowed Orthodox houses in this part of Sicily.

I had driven, on my own, in search of this historic structure a few days earlier, getting badly lost the first time and finding it when I decided to turn right onto a cobbled pathway instead of left. The heavy, steel-webbed front door was padlocked; I could only walk around the structure, small by most church standards, and imagine what the inside was like. The exterior is dark, rough stone, some native but others mostly chiseled-out lava rock. There is evidence that mortar was used and some bricks.

Cettina had a key. She opened the heavy, rust-encrusted doors, and we stepped inside and gazed around at the slightly crumbling walls. The structure itself was rigidly geometric, and the interior was in the form of a stubby Latin cross with three apses. Two side apses would have had small chapels. The pillars were square and delineated the center sanctuary from the two shallow sides. The window in the rear apse, behind where the altar would sit, faced east. This placement, I learned later, captured the light of a full moon around the time of Easter.

Here and there, on the walls and inside the dome, were faint traces of color, all that remained of what I was sure were glorious frescoes by unknown artists. I enjoyed the solemnity of that interior, standing where the altar once stood, feeling the coolness of the air in contrast to the Sicilian heat outside. After a while, we closed up those large, swinging doors and walked around where I had been a few days earlier. A low, broken wall framed what would have been an addition onto the main structure—the space now overrun with weeds. Around the back, there was scant evidence of more scattered stones. Cettina told me there once was a convent in that small space. Obviously, many of the convent’s stones, over the centuries, had been commandeered and reused by farmers for fences and huts.

The term “cuba” was new to me. I later discovered that it was a style used in Eastern Orthodox churches, after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Byzantines of Constantinople took over control of the island in A.D. 536, building several of these Greek Orthodox churches. When the Muslims took over three centuries later, they, like the accommodating Normans, allowed many of them to function for the region’s Christians, particularly in the island’s east.

Cettina motioned for me to follow her along a side road and then onto a footpath. We covered perhaps a few hundred yards across a boulder-strewn field; the sound of rushing water rose up, and within a few minutes we were alongside a small river, full of late winter rain, weaving its way among boulders and small rocks and kicking off light spray from a myriad of small, shallow waterfalls. “This is the Alcantara,” Cettina told me in Italian. “It is one of my favorite places to be.”

I was familiar, from a previous journey to Sicily, with the Alcantara River. But the part I saw then was farther downstream to the east, where it had slashed its way deep into a wide gorge, the Gole dell’Alcantara, next to the town of Francavilla di Sicilia. At that time, I watched as Sicilians and tourists splashed about in waist-deep water flowing through towering walls of stunning, multicolored lava that had poured across the original streambed, millennia after millennia, eruption after eruption. Free of that long-ago obstacle, the Alcantara races around the southern end of the Peloritani Mountains and toward the Ionian Sea near Giardini-Naxos.

Cettina’s favorite section, brimming with runoff fresh from the slopes of the Nebrodi Mountains and next to the Cuba Bizantina, was as small and wild as a mountain stream in the American Rockies. Here, there was no hint of what it would become perhaps fifteen miles farther east. Weeks later, someone told me that this river was beginning to grow, once again, a species of native trout—a freshwater fish that had all but disappeared as Sicily’s rivers, some even navigable in the distant past, dried up over the centuries. The Alcantara, at thirty-two miles long, is one of the last constantly flowing rivers in all of Sicily. Others—there are at least twenty-eight listed for Sicily—are dry much of the year. Two large ones, flowing with spring rains and snowmelt but dry later, are the River Salso, which rises in the Madonie Mountains and flows south to Licata, and the Grande, which follows a leg of the autostrada and dumps into the sea near Imera on the north coast. Strangely, in ancient times these two rivers flowing in opposite directions shared the ancient name: the Himera.

* * *

On days when I stayed in Castiglione, I often walked around the “street of the pagan,” meditating on the Inquisition and its torturous effect on thousands of people. Over time, it would be brutally expanded far beyond simply uncovering false converts among the Jews as Inquisitors went after those lifelong Christians they thought were heretical. Along the tiny street, I would choose a low wall and sit studying the abandoned buildings, clumps of yellow wildflowers and other plants spilling out of cracks in their honey-colored stone walls and underfoot in twisted, potholed walkways. The roofs, in various stages of collapse, reminded me of a passage I read in a book by Sicilian-Tuscan writer Dacia Maraini: “this desolation of roofs on which anything and everything grows, from chives to fennel, from capers to nettles.” She was describing the battered roofs of abandoned structures in the eighteenth century; not much was different on this spot in the twenty-first century. None of the windows had glass, allowing interiors to become filled with birds’ nests.

This former Jewish ghetto area was the most tumbledown of all the structures I saw in Castiglione. Nunzio Valentino, the energetic, forty-two-year-old owner of my hotel, had told me that four hundred houses were standing empty throughout the village—with many in the old Jewish Quarter. A year after my visit, in April 2017, I read a message from Nunzio that his albergo diffuso concept was expanding beyond his Borgo Santa Caterina complex. He announced that an additional twelve structures in that falling-down Jewish Quarter, known as the Santa Maria District, would be converted into an albergo diffuso, with twenty units and forty-five beds. He told me that the project would take three years, and he was doing it with financial help from the European Union. The EU is expected to provide one hundred million euros to be spent through 2023 toward the recovery of abandoned buildings in Sicilian historic centers. The money certainly is not enough to help all of the thirty-six hundred villages with populations below five thousand residents. But it’s a good start.

This past winter, there were problems with buildings in the Santa Maria District that had been, for decades, “left in abandonment and reduced in very poor condition.” In a message to me in January 2017, Nunzio singled out a group of houses “which may present a serious threat to the safety of pedestrians [and] tourists[;] the beams that support the safe houses are now old and in bad condition, and the structure becomes even more to risk when there are heavy rains.” Apparently heavy rains hit this northeast corner of the island during the fall and winter of 2016, and loosened stones from some of these abandoned structures tumbled into the street.

He concluded his January message by asking rhetorically, “Who are the owners?” In the spring of 2017, apparently he expected to be the owner—and willing restorer—of some of them.

Many abandoned buildings in Castiglione di Sicilia and elsewhere in remote Sicilian villages are available for purchase by individuals as well as potential hotel or pensione buyers—provided the owner or the owner’s heirs can be found—usually for very low prices. The catch: Buyers must promise to renovate, usually within two years of purchase. Renovations likely will cost well into the thousands of euros. According to news reports, foreign buyers, including descendants of original residents who emigrated to America during the last century, are showing interest in these small Sicilian villages.

Nunzio said that in the 1960s, twelve thousand residents lived in Castiglione. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some 3,200 remain in the town and its surrounding neighborhoods, or frazioni. One thought is that many of the structures in this quarter first associated with the Jews may have been occupied up until the end of World War II, when many Sicilians, desperate for jobs abandoned in a war-damaged economy, emigrated in the last major Italian diaspora.

“Second- and third-generation Americans come here to stay at my albergo diffuso and show me old photographs taken of the homes that were occupied by their ancestors before they emigrated,” Nunzio said. “The homes are still there—some occupied, some not. It is emotional for many of these visitors.”

* * *

I would learn a lot about the albergo diffuso concept slowly growing in Sicily and Italy over my time at Borgo Santa Caterina and much later in my trip during a meeting with a member of the Sicilian Parliament in Palermo. Nunzio Valentino claims credit for creating, on the island, one of the first hotels of this type. In late 2016, he opened another albergo diffuso in the tiny village of Gallodoro, high in the hills above Taormina, and held discussions with mayors of other area villages.

He lives in Giardini-Naxos, a handful of miles away down on the Ionian Sea coast from Castiglione. He makes the commute to Borgo Santa Caterina several times a week to deal with guests. Nunzio opened the hotel in 2004 with four rooms that drew only a handful of visitors that first year. By the time I got there twelve years later, he had bought neighboring buildings above and to the side of the original cluster, expanding to sixteen rooms, and was drawing six thousand guests a year. His ten-year goal: one hundred units with two hundred beds. Nunzio’s property is on the edge of the historic center, next to the ancient and abandoned Jewish Quarter that he will expand into over the next three years. Two traditional hotels are self-contained and higher up on the mountain.

I don’t doubt that he will reach his ambitious goal; if all his success depends on his energy, he has a lot to spare. He speaks in short, rapid bursts, and is always moving. He sits down to talk, then jumps up and paces back and forth, constantly praising the diffuso concept and making suggestions about other villages I should visit in day trips.

I had two villages on my long list of places to visit while based in Castiglione: Novara di Sicilia and Montalbano Elicona. Valentino recommended another two, Motta Camastra and Gallodoro. All were within an hour’s drive, and the eleven days I planned to stay in this part of northeastern Sicily would be ample time for visits. This grouping provided many of my favorite memories of my journey across the island.

Novara had been recommended to me by a couple of Sicilian-American friends. And I must admit I chose Montalbano Elicona because of the first part of its name: Montalbano, the surname of my favorite Sicilian detective, who had come alive for me through a couple dozen books and television shows. I had corresponded with the writer, Andrea Camilleri, over the years and have written about his detective and how the Salvo Montalbano mysteries give the reader a legitimate inside look at the Sicilian mind-set and the island’s culture.

For this journey, I emailed Camilleri and asked if his character’s name comes from Montalbano Elicona and, if so, why. His assistant wrote back, pleasantly shattering my illusion, saying the detective is named for a close friend of Camilleri, the Spanish writer Manuel Vasquez Montalban. Vasquez Montalban, who died in 2003, was a prolific writer who also wrote mysteries involving a Spanish detective, Pepe Carvalho, who, like Salvo Montalbano, was a gastronome, a lover of food. Interesting irony, but the village high in the Peloritani Mountains north of Castiglione had nothing to do with my Sicilian detective. I would go anyway. On the map it seemed small and isolated, deep in the mountains. But first, I would drive to Novara di Sicilia, a small village of perhaps 1,600 souls.


Copyright © 2018 by John Keahey