The Pillars of Hercules

“About a million,” the man agreed.

Surely more? I thought. In fact, there are more than five million people in Sicily.

“A little island. Not many people. And so that makes it all the more friendly,” Basilio said. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer, Basilio.”

“That’s great. Please, when you write”—he put his hands together in a little prayer gesture, then he held them apart, cupping them in a Do-me-a-favor mode—“tell people it’s nice here.”

It’s nice here. Lemons, oranges. Composers on trains. Staranger Een Danah!

“I travel a little myself,” he said. “We find Sicilians everywhere. You don’t have to speak French or English. There’s always a Sicilian taxi driver!”

“You’ve been in Sardinia?”

“To my shame, no, not to Sardinia. The purest dialect is Sardinian—the worst is Bergamo. As for Corsica—what’s wrong with them? Why don’t the Corsicans admit they’re Italians?” He was laughing. “I love to travel, of course. Although I haven’t been to other places in Italy, I have been everywhere in Sicily.”

He sounded a bit like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, I have traveled much in Concord.

“Sicily fascinates me, the way the dialects here reflect Spanish, French, and Arabic.”

“I am headed for Siracusa.”

“One of the best places,” Basilio said. “Ancient. And natural too. Up north, the beaches are filthy. But here they are clean.”

We happened to be passing one that was brown with muddy water from runoff.

“Some of the beaches are a little muddy from the recent rains.”

“Very muddy, I’d say.” And they were strewn with such rubbish and rocks, and bounded by trash-filled streams and open sewers. Italians were such litterers.

“It will pass! Listen, Germans come here in November and go swimming. For them the water is warm!”

Protesting that I was a wonderful person, and urging me to tell people how delightful Sicily was at all times of the year, he called out, “See you again!” and got off at Santa Agata di Militello. Then it was just small hot stations and embankments and so many tunnels it was as though we had traveled to Messina in the dark.

The most God-fearing places in Italy were those that had experienced a natural disaster; such an event was inevitably a goad to Italian piety, and nothing provoked prayer like a flood or an earthquake or a tidal wave. Messina had all three just after Christmas in 1908, when almost the entire city, in fact this whole corner of the island, was destroyed. Part of Calabria was also leveled. Almost a hundred thousand people died in the one-day disaster (earthquake at 5 A.M., tidal wave just after that, then flooding; cholera came later)—it was equivalent to the entire population of the city.

That is why there are no ancient buildings in Messina, though quite a lot of talk about how the Virgin Mary engaged in vigorous correspondence with Messina’s city fathers and reassured them, “We bless you and your city.” There is a large pillar in the harbor of Messina, too, with a statue of Mary, making a gesture of blessing that also looks as though she is dropping a yo-yo, and under it, for every ship to see, the same message in Latin, Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus.

A melancholy plaque at Messina railway station records the fact that 348 railway workers died in the earthquake (A pietoso ricordo dei 348 funzionari ed agenti periti nel terremoto del 28 dic MCMVIII).

It was easy enough to find a place to stay in Messina, and no problem eating, but apart from strolling along the harbor, and admiring the Calabrian coast across the straits—lumpy gray mountains streaked with snow—there was not much to do in this rebuilt city. It had obviously been brought back to life, but it was not quite the same afterwards. Or perhaps it was something else.

I fell into conversation with a man in Messina who told me that, without any hesitation, Catania was an absolute haunt of crime.

Catania is a port about halfway between Messina and Siracusa on the southeast-facing side of the Sicilian triangle.

“The Mafia control the whole city,” he said.

Now and then you got one of these Sicilians who admitted flat-out that the Mafia was pervasive and dangerous; and they could be specific, too, about certain towns or cities.

“How do you explain it?”

“Business is good there. They get a share of it. And the drugs.”

“Because it’s a port?”

“That’s probably the main reason.”

“Palermo and Messina are also ports. So perhaps the Mafia is strong in these places as well.”

His reply was the Italian lip-droop and finger signal, a combination of affirmative gestures that meant Indubitably.