The Pillars of Hercules

Dr. Pulvino was one of a number of people in Siracusa who warned me to be careful of thieves. Mr. Giarratana had mentioned “clippers”—bag snatchers, known as scippatori. They were notorious in Sicily for their merciless efficiency, and I heard many stories of people who had lost passports, wallets, handbags, watches, jewelry. But perhaps because this was not the tourist season the thieves were on holiday.

There was “A Very Important Notice” displayed in each of Dr. Pulvino’s tiny rooms. “The hotel’s esteemed guests, especially our lady guests, because of unpleasant incidents which have already happened, are advised, when going out of the hotel, to avoid taking any bags, or handbags, for the possible risk of becoming victims of bag snatchers and even of being hurt. The manager Dr Calogero Pulvino, together with the entire City of Syracuse, apologizes for this situation.”

The next time I saw him I said, “You speak English.”

“Without any doubt,” said Dr. Pulvino.

• • •

Another amphitheater, more broken columns, assorted marble slabs. Just by three pizzerias was the Fountain of Arethusa, with ducks bobbing in it. It is not really a Greek ruin. It is a place Siracusans take their kids to say “Look at the duckies!” and throw pizza crusts at them. Probably the Greeks did the same thing. The Temple of Apollo was just down the street from Emporio Armani. The Catholic cathedral had been built into and around a Doric temple, probably Athena, and so you could see Grecian columns inside and out, and crucifixes, and bleeding hearts and gilded halos, and more old columns that even Cicero had praised (“in his oration against Verres”).

The exaggerated attention in Siracusa as in much of Italy was this guff about Greeks and Romans, all glory and harmony, and then silence, as though nothing else had happened in the last two thousand years. Nothing about the years of lecherous and satanic popes settling into big feather beds with their mistresses and fondling them under gilt crucifixes, or plotting murder, stranglings and poisonings in the Vatican cellars. Never a word about Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who commercialized the papacy and sold pardons, and who had a hooligan son by one of his mistresses whom he set up in style; nothing about Pope Alexander VI and his seven children, one of whom was Lucrezia Borgia, another Cesare Borgia, who was made a cardinal, along with his uncle. Apart from the poisonings and murders, one of the highlights of Alexander VI’s papacy was a bullfight that was held in the piazza of St. Peter’s to celebrate a victory over the Moors. Nor anything about Leo X, who handed out cardinals’ hats to his cousins, or Sixtus IV, another murderer. Not relevant? But surely these were the ancestors and inspiration for Padre Carmelo and his Mafia monks at the Franciscan monastery in Mazzarino.

The Middle Ages had not occurred. There was never anything about the centuries of rape and pillaging, cities destroyed by hairy Vandals or Ostrogoths in furry pelts; nothing about bubonic plague or cholera, nothing about the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufens, who goose-stepped all over Sicily, nothing about those religious fanatics and show-offs, the Crusaders, who went clanking around the island in their rusty suits of armor building castles and sniffing out Muslims to murder for Christ, nothing about Muslims and their weird depredations (though the occasional mutter about “Saracens”), nothing about the Jewish expulsions, the cruelty and intrigues, little villagers ratting on the local rabbi and then seeing the old bearded Jew carted off or tortured; and never anything about the war that ended just the other day, how they had changed sides; and nothing about their cowardly little dictator—just the mentioning of his name in polite company was immeasurably worse than farting.

“Never mind Mussolini, look at the exquisite statue of Archimedes,” was the exhortation of people who couldn’t put two and two together. Or it was classical trivia: “Archimedes said ‘Eureka!’ in Siracusa,” or, “The philosopher Plato was made a slave in Siracusa!” the Siracusans said, which was just about all they knew of Plato.

Looking at glorious ruins always put me in a bad mood. I walked around instead. I saw a cake sale in a piazza. Cakes and pies were stacked on a number of tables, and there were about thirty people hawking them.

“Buy a cake,” a woman said, as I slowed down to look at them. “They are really delicious.”

“I’m traveling. I don’t have room.”

“Where have you just come from?”

“Sardinia.”

“Lovely place. Rocky. Natural. Unspoiled. Not like here at all,” the woman said. And then, “Buy a small cake,” she said. She showed me two or three.

Some other women gathered around, boosting their baked goods, all seeming very earnest.

“Are you trying to raise money for a particular purpose?” I asked.

“Not for us. It is for the families in Bosnia.”