The Pillars of Hercules

I could well believe that Messina was one of the Mafia strongholds. Such a place seemed shut and unwelcoming and buzzing with suspicion. There was plenty of money to be made by getting a stranglehold on the port; it was so easy to be disruptive if you controlled the wharves. Organized crime was seldom entrepreneurial; it was mainly a lazy business of bullying and intimidation. The idea was to find someone with a cash flow and strongarm that person or business.

All areas of Italian life, even the Church, had been penetrated by the Mafia. In 1962, the Franciscan monks of the monastery of Mazzarino in central Sicily were put on trial, charged with extortion, embezzlement, theft, and murder. The prior, Padre Carmelo, was the capo of this band of Mafia monks. He was a sinister, sprightly man—greedy and libidinous, with Mazzarino in his foxy jaws. The monks were eventually found guilty of most of the charges at their trial in Messina. And it emerged that what was perhaps the most surprising aspect of their criminality was that it had not interfered with their religious routines. The fact that they entertained prostitutes, and ordered killings, and amassed large sums of money in their extortionate activities never prevented their hearing confessions, saying masses, or preaching at funerals—in at least one case, the monk in question saying a funeral high mass and preaching piously over the body of a man he had ordered killed.

Italians use obscure gestures and elaborate euphemisms whenever they talk about criminal organizations—the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Naples. Even the most specific word in Italian for the fees the gangsters charge to businessmen they threaten is somewhat vague—tangenti. It is a simple word, meaning “extras.” But anyone in the know defines it as “extortion.”

Bored with Messina—and anyway I would be back here next week to take the ferry to Calabria—I caught a train to Taormina, twenty-five miles down the coast.

Lovely beaches! Basilio had said to me, but the beaches outside Messina were littered with old fridges and rusty stoves, junked cars, hovels, plastic trash and rusty tomato cans. Then it was just driftwood, and finally stony beaches. At Nizza di Sicilia station I saw my first tourists in Italy. They were of course Germans, two young women wearing army boots and heaving forty-pound rucksacks and studying their handbook Sizilien; they were sturdy, short-haired, sapphic.

They got off with me at Taormina, the elegant shoreline station. The town itself is high on a cliff, glittering and vertical.

At the station a man approached a conductor of a train going in the opposite direction and said, “Where are we?”

“Taormina Giardini,” the conductor said.

“And where are you going?”

“Venice.” And the conductor turned his back and reboarded the Venice Express, Siracusa to Venice, a long haul of more than seven hundred miles.

I began walking up the hill, thinking that it was not far, but a shrewd taxi driver followed me, guessing that I would get sick of the climb. He laughed when I got in.

“Gardens, lovely view,” he narrated, then glanced at the people by the road. “Germans.”

Farther along, he said, “English church. Beautiful, eh?” and paused. “Germans.”

They were the inevitable low season people wherever I went.

The main attraction at Taormina was said to be its ancient theater, built by the Greeks and completely remodeled by the Romans. But that was simply a backdrop, the classical excuse. Taormina had been taken up by the Edwardians as a place to droop and be decadent. It was a lovely town, but it was now entirely given over to tourists. There was nothing else generating income for the local people. It was one of the more anglicized seaside resorts of Italy, and though it was now simply a tourist trap, retailing ceramics, and postcards, and letter openers, and clothes of various kinds, it had once known true scandals, mainly imported ones, perpetrated by the northern Europeans escaping the cold winter. It was strictly seasonal. In the early part of this century all the hotels in Taormina were closed in the summer.

Taormina had been mainly for wealthy foreigners, though a title helped. Any number of sponging aristocrats idled away their time among Taormina’s flower gardens, and a German baron who was an unrepentant pederast became something of a local celebrity for taking photographs of young Italian boys holding what certainly looked like lengths of salami. These pictures were sold with views of Mount Etna in Taormina’s shops.

D. H. Lawrence had spent time in Taormina, writing poetry. His well-known poem “Snake” he had written in Taormina, describing how he had been standing in his pajamas and seen a thirsty snake and bashed it over the head; and how he had to expiate his pettiness. But snakes were not Lawrence’s problem in Taormina. His daily chore was finding ways to control his wife, Frieda, in her adulteries.