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  Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

  Sicily joins me in celebrating this alternative New Year’s and welcomes November and the onset of winter with festivity. All Saints’ Day is followed by All Souls’ Day, officially known as the “Commemoration of the Defunct,” but more familiarly called I Morti, “The Dead.” “What are you doing over The Dead this year?” For years I have puzzled over I Morti, convinced that to understand why it is the most beloved of the Sicilian feast days would be to grasp some basic truth about the Sicilian character.

  If the inner meaning still eludes me, the outer trappings entrance, since I Morti is to the Sicilian child what Christmas is to the American. During the night the dead come out of the convents and the cemeteries where they are buried and go about the town in procession, leaving behind them presents for those children who have been good and have remembered them in their prayers: hidden troves of elaborate toys, of marzipan and sugar statues.

  Just at the time that the countryside turns in upon itself to nurse the dormant seeds and vines, Palermo blossoms forth in this artificial flowering of marzipan, a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables molded out of almond paste. Each pastry shop works hard to outdo its competitors in realism—spiny prickly pears with all their prickles, pomegranates bursting with seeds, roast chestnuts tinged with the bloom of ashes—until the shopwindows rival in miniature the variety and the color of the vegetable stalls in the marketplace.

  Here marzipan is known as pasta reale or as frutta di Martorana, from the convent of the Martorana in Palermo, where the nuns excelled in the preparation of almond paste. It is said that once their mother superior, Sister Gertrude, wishing to celebrate the pastoral visit of the bishop, instructed the nuns to mold the paste into apples, peaches, pears, and oranges, which were then hung on the trees growing in the cloister garden. Strolling in the cloister before dinner with the mother superior, the bishop marveled to see so many different trees bearing fruit all in the same season. Still greater was his surprise when, at the dinner table, he bit into a bright red apple and discovered that it was made of almond paste.

  Today it is still possible to play a practical joke with pasta reale, even if it would be difficult to invent one as enchanting as Sister Gertrude’s: you can buy cakes of soap, sandwiches with the filling dribbling out, even complete meals served on paper plates. I once gave my children fried eggs and peas for supper, and it wasn’t until they put their forks to it that they realized it was made of marzipan.

  There is a pastry shop in the center of Palermo that used to elaborate on a different theme each year. Once they made marzipan seafood—fish of every size and species, clams and mussels, squid and shrimp, all displayed in the shopwindow on the flat wicker trays the fishmongers use, so lifelike as to make the pastry seeker think he had stopped in front of the wrong store. Another time, in an absolute triumph of patience and dexterity, they produced semenza, a window full of baskets of peanuts, hazelnuts, toasted chick-peas and pumpkin seeds, marzipan imitations sold in brown paper cones just like the real semenza the Sicilians buy at street-corner stalls to nibble on as they make their way up and down the main street on their evening stroll.

  The same gay colors of the marzipan are used to decorate the pupi di cena, statues made from melted sugar poured into plaster molds, then painted and stuck with bits of silver paper. The shop windows or tiered street stands selling these pupi are dominated by the paladino, the knight in armor of the Sicilian puppet shows, most often mounted on horseback and brandishing a sword, a snippet of real ostrich plume cascading from his helmet. Next to him will stand a peasant girl balancing a basket of eggs on her hip, a ballerina or a carabiniere in full dress uniform, traditional figures that have recently been joined by Zorro, Superman, and Mickey Mouse.

  The same store of marzipan fame used to make marvelous pupi di cena, each one individually sculptured and painted with the greatest attention to detail. The year I discovered this store one window was filled with sugar peasants, about fifteen inches high, each selling something different, with baskets of fish or fruit on their heads or jugs of wine and oil in hand. They were very expensive, so I bought only one, to give away as a present. In my ignorance I waited too long to buy one for myself, and when I went back a few years later the man who made them had retired, and the store had only run-of-the-mill knights to sell. I have a knight, a more authentic representative of the tradition and very beautiful in his crude and brilliant colors. But I regret those street vendors.

  If the culinary delights of I Morti find their highest expression in Palermo, the smaller towns generate a more festive air. The main street of Alcamo, the town where my husband grew up, is lined with stalls: in addition to the usual (and this time genuine) semenza sellers, who have their wares spread out on barrows painted with the bright primary colors of Sicilian carts and strung with lights and paper garlands, there are the torrone vendors, their stall shelves groaning under the weight of vast trays of almonds and hazelnuts in caramelized sugar and spread with slices of the holiday version of torrone, hazelnuts smothered in tricolor nougat striped pea green, white, and shocking pink, a travesty of the Italian flag that is reminiscent of the election night scene in The Leopard and is so bilious in aspect as to have discouraged me from ever tasting it. It is nonetheless a gay addition to the holiday scene, as are the toy booths offering something for every pocketbook: elegant dolls ripple their long satiny skirts in the wind, bicycles and push-pedal cars sparkle next to soccer balls and plastic tea sets and compete with clusters of red plastic donkeys on blue wheels, a local version of the hobby horse that appears to be the most beloved—or most economical—of Sicilian toys: they are ubiquitous, propelled by stout little legs along every street and sticking up from every rubbish dump.

  The flower sellers brandish bright masses of color, great bunches of yellow, white, bronze, and purple chrysanthemums, the flowers of the dead, which are destined to decorate the tombs. From both sides of the street the calls of the vendors vie for the attention of the endless stream of families enjoying the passeggiata and comparing the wares, dressed in their best and walking arm in arm, pushing baby carriages, cracking semenza and leaving a train of peanut shells behind them.

  Even on a normal Sunday or at the end of a weekday afternoon the passeggiata is a solemn rite, the moment when business is transacted, social ties renewed, news spread, and public opinion formed, not to mention an important occasion for asserting one’s economic status and ability to dress. Back and forth, arm in arm, the current of people flows along the Corso, diverted into small eddies as it passes the bars, swelling in front of the churches as new strollers come out from mass, impervious to the few foolhardy drivers who attempt to fend the flood. The passeggiata has a morbid fascination: I think of how my husband and his friends, in their rebellious youth, could find nothing more nonconforming to do than to move to another street, where they walked up and down in solitary superiority. The poverty of alternatives, although much alleviated by the economic boom of the last twenty years, is still depressing to me, as is the idea of having to carry out the bulk of one’s social relations under the careful scrutiny of the whole town. But my children, who have grown up in the anonymity of a modern residential neighborhood in a big city, are intrigued by the passeggiata; when they were younger and we were in Alcamo of a Sunday, they would never refuse their father’s invitation to “go as far as the piazza” and would come back wide-eyed with wonder at the number of people their father knew to stop and speak to.

  Until a few years ago I Morti was a long holiday: the first of November was All Saints’ Day; the second, All Souls’ Day; and the fourth was a national holiday celebrating the end of the First World War, so the third crept quietly in to join the party, schools and offices closed for four days, and a bonus came whenever the four days fell on either side of a weekend. Then, in one of its periodic outbursts of efficiency, the Italian government decided to suppress a great many of the nation’s twenty-odd national
and religious holidays, or to make them into movable feasts that always fall on Sunday, so now only the first of November is officially recognized. Actually, as often happens, the government’s efforts in this direction have had ridiculous side effects. All the middle and secondary school teachers in Italy now have four days’ vacation, to spread out during the year as they choose, since the government cannot afford to pay them for the work they do on the four days that were formerly holidays. And most Sicilians, whose respect for the dictates of Rome has always been marginal, continue to enjoy I Morti at length.

  Be it long or short, the holiday culminates in the visit to the cemetery. The women of the household make a preliminary trip to clean out the family chapel or spruce up the tombs, sweeping, dusting, throwing out dead flowers, and spreading a fresh cloth, rich with lace and embroidery, on the chapel altar. Everything must be clean and in order for the official visit, and a tomb that is neglected causes comment.

  On the appointed day, traditionally November 2, the family assembles, arms laden with flowers, to pay their visit. While this is certainly a harrowing experience for those who have recently had a death in the family, on the whole the atmosphere of festivity spreads from the Corso to embrace the cemetery as well. Children play tag around the cemetery paths while the grown-ups, women to one side and men to another, stand around gossiping, pay visits back and forth between tombs and chapels, observe carefully the quantity and quality of the flowers at each sepulcher, pluck out a few blossoms from their own bunches to lay on the tombs of more distant relatives or friends.

  In Partinico, in the years when I was first living in Sicily, the children from the local orphanage were brought to the cemetery to beg contributions for the orphanage funds. No decent funeral in Partinico was without the orphans: a double row of brown rain capes over blue smocks marching at the head of the funeral procession with a fat red-haired woman in attendance. Probably the trips to the cemetery on I Morti were an exciting change in routine for the children, as well as a profitable undertaking for the institution, since anyone would be an easy touch for an orphan on such an occasion. The children themselves did seem cheerful and unperturbed by their constant association with death, and even the funeral processions were rocked by surreptitious shoves and smothered giggles. Nonetheless to me these were scenes straight out of Dickens, and I would be happy to learn that the practice has been discontinued.

  Sicilian history is a bitter and bloody succession of wars, conquests, pestilences, and famines. Small wonder, then, that the Sicilians have come to seek consolation and even to luxuriate in the funeral panoply. The coffins still journey in glass-sided carriages drawn by black horses with black plumes nodding on their harnesses, and even the motorized hearses often have large gilt angels weeping on the four corners of the roof. The funeral procession is headed by the priest, together with two or three altar boys; then come the wreaths of flowers, six feet high and bearing black ribbons with gilt letters announcing the names of their donors. A new custom, recently introduced at some funerals in Alcamo, demands that a small group of friends and relatives walk behind the wreath-bearers, carrying armfuls of flowers from which they tear off petals to strew before the coffin. (Although some onlookers derisively describe this, together with chewing gum and other dubious novelties, as an americanata, it is in fact a return to the customs of ancient Greece.) The hearse bears the coffin—carved wood for married adults; white for children, spinsters, and bachelors in tribute to their chastity—followed by the family, dressed in black and accompanied by the friends and relatives who bring up the rear of the procession.

  A few years ago there was a clamorous case in the Palermo newspapers, when a young girl was severely beaten by her brothers because she hadn’t cried in their father’s funeral procession. Yet stranger than the need to feign grief where affection is lacking is the preoccupation with public opinion even among those who have nothing to hide. When her eldest son died, my mother-in-law was prostrated, and no one could have doubted the genuineness of her grief, and yet when we would manage to persuade her to come out for a drive so as to have some air and distraction, she would insist on leaving the house by the back door, lest someone should note these outings and take them as a sign of indifference.

  Still strictly observed in most parts of Sicily, although in the big cities and among the middle class it has been much curtailed or even eliminated, mourning has many strange rules. The summer her son died, for example, my mother-in-law would not allow us to turn on the lamp in front of the summer house by the sea; if we wanted to enjoy the cool of the evening in the garden we had to do so in the dark. She herself was married, together with her sister, just a short time after her father’s death. Her older brother, finding himself with two nubile but engaged sisters on his hands (their mother had died long before), was in a hurry to get them settled, but since they were in mourning, the double ceremony had to be held very simply, and at four o’clock in the morning.

  I am fascinated to read, in a footnote to the Greek myths collected by Robert Graves, that the wearing of black for mourning was originally a message to the dead rather than to the living, a disguise adopted to escape being haunted by the ghost of the deceased. This connection with their most distant history has long since lost its original significance for most Sicilians, but I wonder if in the deepest recesses of the uneducated peasant mind it still lingers, a thread in the peculiar time warp that weaves so much of Sicily’s ancient past to its present. Certainly the belief in spirits is still strong: my friend Gabriella, who teaches in a junior high school in one of Palermo’s poorest neighborhoods, was instructed by her students to avoid clearing the supper table completely and to leave out some bread and wine overnight “for the spirits.” Gabriella was very upset at her failure to dispel this superstition, and yet she occasionally finds herself saying buon giorno when she is the first one to come home at noon, greeting out loud the spirits of the empty house as her grandmother taught her to.

  The Feast of the Dead always ends on a tragic note, as the newspapers publish accounts of the children who have been wounded or blinded by the BB guns or other weapons that the dead have ill-advisedly brought them. The statistics arc always accompanied by articles signed by famous educators on how badly the Italians choose their children’s toys, everyone clucks his disapproval, and the Sicilians settle down to the winter.

  Actually winter is still far off at the beginning of November. The Sicilian climate is divided into wet, cold winters and hot, very dry summers; with the exception of a few brief rainstorms that sometimes come at the end of August in answer to the winegrowers’ prayers, there is usually no rain from early April until mid-October. The October rains are heavy, often causing flooding and damage to the crops, since this is a land of extremes in weather as in many things, and an extreme drought follows more water per minute than one would have ever thought possible.

  But the deluge brings Indian summer, here known as Saint Martin’s summer in honor of the saint whose feast day falls on the eleventh of November. All over Italy in these days elementary school children are writing on the blackboard: “Per San Martino, ogni mosto è vino.” For Saint Martin’s Day all the must has finished fermenting and become new wine, ready for tasting, accompanied by the biscotti di San Martino, little round anise-flavored biscuits as hard as rocks, which appear in all the bakeries at this time. My husband, Tonino, spends hours in the wine cellar, testing, tasting, mixing, and squinting at the light through glasses of new wine, still slightly cloudy, which end up all over the kitchen, deathtraps for the last of the myriad tiny gnats that gather for the grape harvest and stay as long as the cold holds off.

  Real summer has slid into Saint Martin’s summer with only the slightest drop in temperature this year, and as we drive out to Bosco for the weekend, a brilliant sun lights up the landscape. The leaves turning yellow in the vineyards and dark red in the peach orchards are pale reminders of weekend drives in New England during my childhood. In Sicily the October rains, the c
rystalline air swept clean of heat haze by winds that bring a suggestion of cold, the smells of must and of roasting chestnuts are harbingers of a very different season. After the long dry summer in which only the stubborn vines and the citrus trees keep their color, when all the grass and the roadside weeds are scorched and withered and the light and dust together bleach the countryside monochrome, Sicily in November turns unexpectedly green. Grass springs up overnight along the roadsides and under the grapevines, which suddenly march across a carpet of cavoliceddi, a wild cousin of the mustard family whose intense, almost bitter flavor when boiled and tossed with oil is perfect company for Sicilian sausage spiced with fennel seed. The giriteddi, a wild variety of Swiss chard, also spring to new life, and soon we will see old men with sacks over their shoulders out in the fields and along the hedgerows, gathering wild greens to sell in the city markets, where they are still much appreciated despite the increasing industrialization of the urban palates.

  The miracle of water repeats itself each autumn. Sicily is green, intensely and springishly green all winter long, green in the vineyards and the olive orchards where the grass grows wild, green in the vegetable gardens where lettuce, spinach, chard, and cabbages will flourish throughout the season, and green in my flower beds, where the weeds, kept under control in the summer by sheet composting and parsimonious watering, now leap into new vigor and battle their way through a foot of mulch. Last summer’s petunias are still in bloom, and next spring’s ranunculi and nasturtiums are already sprouting their first leaves. This is heady stuff for my northern blood, and my first steps when we arrive at Bosco each Saturday are toward the garden, to see what has come up. Autumn is a race: wait for the rains to soften up the earth for the plow, but make haste before it is too late to sow the vegetables that will keep us through the winter when the tomato vines, the peppers, and the eggplants have given up.