The Pillars of Hercules

Night in Taormina was silence and skulking cats. These tourist towns shrank in the off-season, and yet at this time of year eighty years ago the place would have been thronged with visitors. Taormina’s season was the winter. Now it was busy mainly in the summer.

The next day, I found Lawrence’s house on the Via Fontana Vecchia, and walked up and down the main street, looking at the shops. I looked at the old amphitheater. The only other people there were the two German women from yesterday’s train.

But the spectacle here was not the amphitheater—it was the volcano, Mount Etna. I had not expected to get such a dramatic view. With lantana and palms and bougainvillea and marigolds, sunny and serene, it was hard to imagine a prettier place or a more dramatic setting. The ancient Greeks praised Taormina in similar terms. But these days it exists only to be patronized and gawked at. It was not a place to live, only to be visited, one of the many sites in the Mediterranean that are almost indistinguishable from theme parks.

Looking down the coast, I was startled by the sight of it, an old bulgy mountain covered in snow, with a plume of smoke rising from its cone. The morning light took away its shadows and its grandeur and made it clumsy and pretty, with a splendor all its own, because its potbellied shape was unique for a mountain on this coast—and the sea so near emphasized its height.

In a fit of self-aggrandizement, Empedocles jumped into the crater of Mount Etna. In doing so, the Greek philosopher, who believed in reincarnation, hoped to inspire the sense in others that he was godlike.

In a different fit of self-aggrandizement, the writer Evelyn Waugh, passing through here on a cruise ship, refusing to go ashore to visit Taormina, peers from the deck and gets a glimpse of the volcano beyond.

“I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset,” he writes in his first travel book, Labels (1930), “the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel gray, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of gray smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a gray pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.”

Sudden and strange, the description is marvelous for its utter perversity. You have to read it twice to make sure you haven’t missed a word. Labels is full of such snap judgments and hilarious generalizations. It recalls Cyril Connolly writing “a chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west”—Waugh and Connolly were friends and in mocking a sunset they believed they were against nature. Theirs was the ultimate rebellion—so they thought; defying every notion of harmony, by refusing to be impressed or admit that such loveliness could be moving. It was a self-conscious and envious way of needling other writers, but most of all it was diabolical blasphemy, for isn’t criticizing a brilliant sunset an English way of blaming God?

Waugh’s work is always a salutary reminder that satire is usually more purposeful than veneration, and that one of the virtues of a good travel book is the chance to see a traveler’s mind, however childish, ticking away.

Nothing held me in Taormina. I took a taxi down the hill and caught the train to Siracusa. Traveling towards Catania, we crossed the lava flow from the volcano. At Carruba there were blackish cedars by the shore, and lemon groves sagging with fruit. Then, Cannizaro, Lentini, Paterno: almost every town in Sicily reminded me of the names of my high school friends, and a Sicilian railway timetable looked like a list of the Medford High Class of ’59.

Catania was big and grim, the sort of place only a mafioso would tolerate, and that for its opportunities to whack it for money. The coast here was miles of great ugliness, oil storage depots, refineries, cracking plants, and cement factories. Offshore, a man was rowing backwards in the sea, pushing the oars instead of pulling them. By the side of the track, the scrawl Cazzo—Italian slang for the male member, when spoken sounding like gatz.

The end of the line was Siracusa.

“But what could I do at Syracuse? Why did I come there? Why did I buy a ticket just to Syracuse and not to any other place? Choice of destination had certainly been a matter of indifference. And certainly being at Syracuse or elsewhere was a matter of indifference. It was all the same to me. I was in Sicily. I was visiting Sicily. And I could just as well get on the train and return home.”

This paragraph from Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversation in Sicily had a definite resonance for me. Vittorini was born in Siracusa the year of the earthquake, 1908, and was a young man in the fascist era, the period described in this novel and some of his stories. All this I discovered in Siracusa.