Another face of Sicily that doesn’t get discussed in the vision of the picturesque is the island’s baroque side. Among the many rulers of the island are the Spanish who brought with them baroque design and aesthetics.

Modica was one of my favorite places we visited on the island. Visitors are greeted by a wall of stairs and are encouraged to taste the famous chocolate, made without any additives. As a traveler, Modica is enjoyable, and it made me wonder why 1800s travel magazines, like Cosmorama pittorico, that I looked at in my independent study never talked about it. Then again, I remembered that of the ten depictions of southern Italy in one year, they all show only scenes of nature and the landscape. Talking about a place like Modica would acknowledge civilization.

The next day, we continued following writers through Italy. After visiting downtown Porto Empedocle to see traces of Montalbano and Camellieri, we drove to Agrigento to see Pirandello’s house. I loved looking at handwritten drafts of his writing and noting where he had edited the works we know today.

One particularly good story, though, was that of his burial. Yet again, Italy makes a spectacle of itself and visitors get to enjoy its comical inefficacy. Pirandello had expressly written that he wished to have his body burned and his ashes scattered with no public funeral. The Sicilian writer died in Rome during Mussolini’s rule, and the fascist dictator capitalized on the opportunity to make a spectacle of this adored writer, giving him an elaborate funeral and burying his body in Rome.

Shortly after, his family pushed to have his ashes moved back to Sicily. Some American pilots agreed to fly them down in a helicopter and brought some Sicilians who needed to get back home along with them. Once the Sicilians found out about the contents of the mysterious box, containing Pirandello’s ashes in a Greek vase, they all asked to be let off because superstition told them it would be bad luck. Consequently, the pilots refused to fly the ashes back.

Next, someone took the ashes back by train, but he fell asleep, and a group of people took the box and used it to play cards. In any case, the ashes finally made it back to Agrigento and there was a small, local funeral and his ashes were buried (though there were complications with using the Greek vase as the priest wouldn’t bless it and it didn’t fit in the memorial). The story continues with a third funeral once his monument is finished fifteen years later, and ultimately the ashes of seven others are found inside of the vase and they’re finally scattered as he wished.

Literary parks are a peculiar Italian institution. While some places capitalize on writer sites for tourism (like Sherlock Holme’s fictitious home in London or Mark Twain’s in Hartford), Italy has created a series of parks that honor its literary tradition, and many of these abound in Sicily.

Racalmuto, a small town further inland, is home to the important writer Leonardo Sciascia. Signs indicate places important to Sciascia, and his statue can be found in the town center (a man who works at a nearby museum assured us that the statue’s small stature is that of Sciascia: he used to see the writer walking around town but informed us that he was much, much fatter than the statue). We passed by the Circoli, a sort of social club meets workers union, and his home. We walked the streets of the town that inspired Regalpetra.

What was striking to me was the complete absence of tourists. An Italian man walked by with his son and said, “Look. Tourists.” They half-walked away and half-stared at us, a spectacle in their small town. Though this is anecdotal and might just be special to the day that we visited, what I gathered is that people aren’t interested in visiting Sicily for its rich literary tradition. Instead, there’s a distinct tourist route of ruins, temples, a couple big cities, beaches, and baroque cities.

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.