Sicilian Splendors by John Keahey

Author:John Keahey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

EIGHT

A Day with the Leopard

Be flexible in your plans, because a rigid itinerary is lethal to a good time.

—Anthony Bourdain

THERE ARE a handful of villages, where I only spent a single day, that stand out in my memory. Sutera is one. It sits wrapped around the base of a high stone-faced monolith, Monte San Paolino. The summit is about 820 feet straight above the highest part of the village, and the 183 steps, religiously followed by nearly every Suteresi to honor their patron saints, Paul, Onofrio, and Archileone, connect the two. I must confess I never made the imposing walk, on either this day or the first time I visited the village five years earlier.

Sutera is located several miles from the southern coast in the midst of Sicily’s hilly interior, with villages sprinkled here and there in a land of rolling landscapes. Shafts of stone, like monoliths, seem to spring out of the ground at random. There are castles, or ruins of castles, at the tops of these monoliths. Some are beautifully restored, like the one in Mussomeli. These villages are interconnected by tiny roads, some paved, others dirt, that underscore their origins as paths followed by a people who once walked everywhere, using their beasts of burden only to carry harvested crops to markets.

Driving through land like this is a remarkable experience. There are vast fields, some fallow, others with young, green wheat resembling the visual effect of modern dancers with wind-driven flowing sheets of silk, using them to mimic rolling seas. These seas are sporadically topped with unoccupied, crumbling, stone buildings, not ships. Occasionally, flocks of clustered sheep, looking like whitecaps breaking here and there on this springtime sea, wander across fields of early wildflowers following their tratturi (sheep tracks) over the tops of natural earthen mounds heaped up like sand at the bottom of an hourglass.

In this early spring, fed abundantly by more rain than usual after a winter of snow found even at lower elevations, the beauty of the land was overwhelming. It was the time of year when Persephone, the Greek queen of the underworld, was thought to emerge for her annual visit with her mother, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture.

I grew up in the midst of Idaho farmland and experienced springs like this, captivated by the smells of wheat and corn pushing out of the ground and wildflowers around the edges of fields darkened by moisture. Here, this kind of scene is much grander than my Idaho memories. Wildflowers are not just along the roadside or the edges of fields; they spread across the land in huge swaths, either as crops to be harvested for herbs or perfumes, or simply growing wild across fields long abandoned by absent farmers. It’s emotional in a way that is difficult to describe.

I came across a line in Earthly Remains, a mystery by the American writer Donna Leon, that quickly expresses my inability to conjure up and describe the feelings I sometimes experience in these periodic drives around

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.