Stepping away from the mafia, I found this postcard while we were walking around Erice. While on the one hand it evokes Josephine Baker and her famous and problematic banana skirt, on the other it encapsulates everything I studied in my independent study this past fall.

Italian Unification with the Risorgimento is considered by some colonialist as the south was drawn into northern Italy more or less against its well. As Northern Italy modernized and industrialized, the South was a font of natural resources and agriculture upon which the North depended. Furthermore, Italy also found itself in the throes of a debate in greater Europe: where does Europe end? For many, Italy, Spain, and Greece represent a liminal zone between Europe and Africa. In order for the industrial Northern Italians to aspire to northern ideals, a line is drawn, splitting the peninsula in half somewhere around Rome, Naples, or even Florence depending on the depiction.

In order to rarefy the South, the North has used an easily identifiable semiology and grammatical. The South is pastoral and beautiful. The North is urban (read: civilized) and less beautiful. The South is innocent, the North has civilization.

In this postcard, Sicily is identified by all of its symbols, which deny any of its associations with modern civilization. We see symbols of nature an agriculture with the sun, conch, tree, fruits, fish, and of course Mt. Etna (symbol for the indomitable southerners). The wheel of the Sicilian horse carriage is a quaint gesture to the past and the temple points to the island’s antiquity. Here we see no Baroque cities, no third largest theater in Europe, no Norman mosaics. Instead, the rugged, exotic picturesque.

Similar to my post for Day 1, today I’ll also be looking at the mafia but in another way. On our second night in the city, we went on a walking tour with a guide from Addiopizzo. On Monday evening, we met outside the Teatro Massimo (the third biggest theater in Europe) to go on a tour with a guide from Addiopizzo. The mafia makes business owners pay “pizzo” or protection money, but Addiopizzo was founded to support business owners who don’t pay. Today, a list of businesses that don’t pay is easily available in the city for people who believe in the organization’s philosophy: Pago chi non paga, I pay those who don’t pay. Our tour guide Erme brought us to a couple different sites like the Coppola Storta, the cathedral, and Piazza delle Vergogne to talk about the mafia’s interactions with different parts of the city. One good point I thought Erme made was that the mafia is more entrenched in smaller villages as denouncing the mafia means often turning on family in those places. Palermo and other cities with Addiopizzo can serve as a model, though, for those smaller towns.

As a Sicilian-American, I remember my grandmother getting upset whenever people would ask her about the mafia as soon as she mentioned she’s Sicilian, as for so many people the mafia is all they think of when they consider Italy, especially Sicily. Our visit to the Coppola Storta was one of my favorites. The owner taught us about this hat which is traditionally popular among mafiosi. His store is part of a project in which people reclaim this hat from mafia iconography and instead own it as something for everyone. Today, people can send in old fabrics or materials and have them custom made into a coppola. While the store was making an appeal to tourists (the owner offered us half off during the tour), as a souvenir a coppola is much healthier for Sicily’s image than The Godfather aprons and mafiosi magnets that proliferate throughout the island.

Hello to the readers of this Bowdoin Sicilian Expedition blog. I’m Michael, a senior Romance Languages major, and a lot of my posts will focus on the representation of Sicily in tourism. After doing an independent study with Professor Gavioli last semester on the orientalization of Southern Italy and the country’s North/South Divide, and as a travel blogger, I’m interested in considering how historic prejudices against the island live on today.

On day one, we hit the ground running once we landed in Palermo, and after a visit to La Zisa, we went to a photo exhibit at the Cantieri Culturali where Letizia Battaglia’s work was on display. Battaglia is an Italian photographer who focuses on Sicilian life but is most famous for her work on the mafia. While the mafia is sensational in a lot of ways today, for so long its existence had been denied. Leonardo Sciascia was among the first writers to confront the mafia, and Battaglia has been similarly important in exposing it through her work.

The exhibit, located inside an old factory building, is striking as her black and white photographs hang in several rows from the ceiling. Guests wind up and down the aisles and disappear behind photographs, some harrowing and others light. Many pictures are disturbing, like this one of children holding guns, and I think they do a good job showing the real, lived consequences of the mafia in a medium different from something like The Godfather.