Gilead, Matterdale and Montelepre

I've never visited any of them, though probably been within 10 miles of the last two. All are places richly evoked in fact and fiction. Gilead, as anyone already hopelessly in love as I am with the poetic, pithy prose of Marilynne Robinson will know, doesn't exist but is modelled on Tabor in Iowa. It seemed too much to hope that there would be a third angle on the events described from the perspective of Rev John Ames in Gilead and mostly - though not in the first person - through the eyes of Glory Boughton in the even richer Home. But here it is, the breathtakingly bitter-sweet narrative of the woman called Lila, from the wanderings of her youth with the woman who kept her from starvation in the Great Depression to the unlikely love of the old pastor which, as far as her natural pessimism and wariness of other humans permit her, Lila reciprocates.

In a way it's a 'prequel' - horrid but useful word - because it predates the events of the first and second books. You can read them in any order and they'll be just as rewarding in different ways - indeed, having finished Lila I now feel inclined to return to Gilead and Home. These are books for life, or rather for revisiting at different stages in one's existence, like Tolstoy's War and Peace, Cervantes' Don Quixote or Lampedusa's The Leopard (I cite these because I've viewed them differently over 20 or 30 years).

The beauty of the very genuine marriage that is the heart of the book is how Ames questions aspects of religion he has taken for granted, and how a guarded Lila gropes her way towards finding names and words for the big issues of life, things for which she never had the time or the need when she was simply trying to keep alive.

He writes to her: 'You must have thought I say the things I do out of habit and custom, rather than from experience and reflection. I admit there is some truth in this. It is inevitable, I suppose'. She's trying to make sense of the one thing she's known, existence, which she's only learned to name through listening to Ames' sermons:

Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was existence, and why didn't it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear?

Later, there's the kind of distillation which makes Shakespeare great (I think time and again of Parolles' 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live'). Their child has been born; Ames says 'it's all a prayer'. She says 'The best things that happen I'd never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. You do what you can'. Just beautiful in its simplicity.

James Rebanks' simplicity in The Shepherd's Life is often distilled poetry - literally, he tells us. But as the most practical of Lake District farmers with a parallel career outside that world, a rare voice from the inside, he's not inclined to sentimentalise the landscape. And as a scholar who came late to Oxford after flunking exams and messing about at school, he's come to value the things he used to laugh at, like the best of Wordsworth's poetry. He sees all that beauty, but he's part of it. And this shepherd's life is very, very complex.

The descriptions of breeding, rearing, knowing your flock make you wonder how he does it - and, of course, the answer is, by sheer hard work, instinct and by a collective experience that goes back generations. His father and grandfather play a major part in the narrative, but the tradition is much longer than that:

Our farming system is not about maximizing productivity, but producing what we can sustainably from the landscape.

It took traditional communities often thousands of years to learn by trial and error how to live and farm within the constraints of tough landscapes like ours. It would be foolish to forget these lessons or allow the knowledge to fall out of use. In a future without fossil fuels, and with a changing climate, we may need these things again.

Rebanks is now 'full of hope for the future', seeing young people coming to the old way of farming, changing and adapting and 'juggling it with more modern lives, but the heart of it will remain'. I hope so too.

Strange how 'tough landscapes' can sustain, or not, such different peoples. Was Sicily's ongoing human waste man-made or rooted in that island? Norman Lewis in The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed and Gavin Maxwell in God Protect Me From My Friends have different propositions that are not exactly answers. At the centre of Lewis's typically eloquent account, full of irony and savage indignation, and the subject of Maxwell's study is bandit Salvatore Giuliano, a son of Montelepre who, it's implied, had the capacity to be something better in different circumstances.

I feared Maxwell was going to romanticise him, but he has his own fierce take on how this half-educated peasant was, after all, a mass murderer, even if he tried to justify his behaviour as a kind of Robin Hood bound to a code of honour which turns out to be fatuous and destructive. The best context for such a mass of contradictions comes in Lewis's summing-up of the period between 1943 and 1964:

For centuries, and as a matter of coolly considered policy, the feudalists had kept back huge areas of Sicily from cultivation. They had developed a neatly effective system for suffocating the periodic outbursts of despair this policy engendered: the desperate spirit turned bandit was enlisted in emergency in the feudalists' private armies, employed like a prison camp trusty to quell the mutinies of his fellow sufferers, and then, the crisis past, coldly destroyed...Slowly they had fused with the Mafia - detached from the peasants it once protected - as the richest men of honour became landowners and the most astute of the feudalists joined the Honoured Society, The Mafia-feudalist combination had pulled the wool over the Allies' eyes in 1943, and the Allies had been tricked into assisting the Mafia's reanimation [because, believe it or not, Mussolini had pursued it close to the brink of extinction, or at least pushed it further underground]. Giuliano had been the puppet of the Mafia-feudalists, and their finger had been on the trigger of his machine-gun when he set off at Portella della Ginestra to teach the peasants what they must face when they dared to vote as free men [this terrible massacre has to be at the core of any book dealing with Giuliano]. The supporters of the feudal system had littered the streets and the waste places of Sicily with the corpses of their opponents, but the damage done by outright violence was nothing by comparison to the crushing of the Sicilian spirit and the anaesthetising of the Sicilian conscience in an artificially prolonged climate of illiteracy, ignorance and fear.

Both Maxwell and Lewis bring novelistic tension to the turning of Giuliano's right-hand man, the romantically handsome Gaspare Pisciotta, both before and after the leader's once-mysterious death. Pisciotta, in fact, is the protagonist of a parallel sweep of story interlocking with Giuliano's. I was captured by his character, too, and surprised to find the name 'Pisciotta' on the card of the nice man who drove us from Scopello to Palermo airport back in June.

Unless you hunt it out, the Mafia tradition in western Sicily needn't be part of any tourist's experience. The reality of life there must be much as Mary Taylor Simeti describes it with so much careful nuance in On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal. Here's an American intellectual who has a right to talk about Sicily as both outsider and insider - the classic 'double consciousness' of Henry James - since she married a man from Alcamo and her children are natives of the island. And a year as she describes it in her multifarious journey weaves Mafia shocks into a narrative of farm and city life - a presence, and potentially fatal, but not the only one. I mention this because it's important, if you love Sicily as I do from superficial experience, to strike a balance between the narratives exclusively devoted to the Mafia and others focused too entirely on the traveller's constant amazement at the archaeological and historic riches such a culture constantly brings forth.

Tonnara di Scopello

'When I first came to Scopello I thought only that it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen,' wrote Gavin 'Ring of Bright Water' Maxwell in the first chapter of The Ten Pains of Death. When we first came there in June, I knew nothing of his time at the tuna fishery headquarters just below the settlement of Scopello di Sopra, Upper Scopello, in the north-west of Sicily. What drew us were friend Cally's lyrical paeans to the Riserva Naturale dello Zingaro, just under two kilometres from Scopello along a dead-end read and a natural paradise with seven kilometres of coastline undeveloped save for a line of pylons and several simple settlements (plus a good deal of land behind it). Of which more anon, though I want to declare, and show, immediately that from the upper coast path, that certainly is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen (but there are so many!)

In the long term, the knowledge of Maxwell's time in Sicily during the late 1950s triggered off a fascination with a notoriously difficult and complex individual, one certainly worth reading about in Douglas Botting's biography, with its prose as clear and eloquent as Maxwell's own but also an excessive coyness about its subject's homosexuality (time for a new study). Now is not the place to write about it, except to note that one of this infuriating but - if only at the end of his life as recounted in the biography - rather lovable man's many dishonesties was not to so much as mention his key to the wonderful series of locals' narratives of which The Ten Pains of Death consists.

You'd think from it that Maxwell was a fluent Italian speaker; he wasn't, and even if he had been, he wouldn't have penetrated the Sicilian dialect. His lifeline was a young barber's apprentice referred to in Botting's biography only as 'Giuseppe M' - why? For reasons of political safety? - 'who with Gavin's support and encouragement was to rise to become a radical political leader in...Palermo'. When this brilliant supporter - and lover, perhaps? - needed Maxwell's help the most in later years, taking the brunt of the offence they had caused the powers backing the Mafia in their first book together, the writer - beset, it's true, with more than his usual tranch of self-made troubles - cut him off.

What needs to be asserted, then, is that 'Giuseppe M' wrote most of the book, or rather that it is his interviews which were translated into English, and yet he gets not a mention; the dedication comes 'with profound affection and sympathy to the common people of Western Sicily, who know the ten pains of death'. It is their chronicle of suffering and courage, a common portrait in which the church and state come off very poorly indeed (in what I presume was Maxwell's ordering, the immediate contrasts between the prostitute and the nun, interviewed no doubt by Giuseppe, leave one in no doubt which of the two is more honest).

No doubt Maxwell's sympathy with the people was genuine, and his book - along with its predecessor, God Protect Me from My Friends about the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, which I have here to read next - gave a richer and more frank portrait of Sicilian peasant life than any other.

How things have changed since then, first with the economic boom of mainland Italy finally reaching southwards in the 1970s and '80s, then with European Commission funding transforming towns and villages, and the fear of the Mafia finally lessened (though of course that spider is far from extinct). Scopello is a case in point (above: a table in the main square. The main Bar Pasticceria, which bakes its cakes above the shop, is so perfect that one wonders how the sad bar opposite ever does any business). When Maxwell visited it Scopello di Sopra was semi-deserted:

Until a very few years ago there were some three or four hundred people living...[there], but because they nearly all had relations in the United States, or Canada, or Brazil, or Australia - (and, if the truth be told, because many of them had bettered their lots by smuggling contraband into Scopello tonnara) - the greater part of them decided to escape from the squalor of life in Sicily and have emigrated. Now there are only some 50 people left, and they too dream for most of the time of escape [later Maxwell explains that most houses are deserted because the emigrants never sold them, hoping to come back one day - which, it seems, many did].

There is a little piazza of crazily uneven paving-stones and loose boulders, with an unadorned stone fountain at its centre [the fountain, against a wall, was being renovated and under wraps when we visited]; above, the bare stone mountains climb steeply into the sky [night shot from the village follows], 

and below, the land tilts abruptly seaward. Already, when one leaves the last of the scarecrow houses and begins twisting one's ankles among the big loose stones of the track, one is on a gradient of one in four; looking back, one is aware of having skirted a cliff upon the very lip of which Scopello di Sopra is built (below, the crag above the Tonnara boathouse).

And immediately one is looking down on the sea a mile below [sic: surely much less than a mile - that would be Ravello to sea level on the Amalfi coast, and that takes hours to reach from the coast], a sea of purple and blue and peacock green, with a jagged cliff coastline and great rock towers or faraglioni thrusting up out of the water as pinnacle islands, pale green with the growth of cactus at their heads.

Now there's a ticket office in the daylight hours at the top of the track leading down to the tonnara. I couldn't work out from my ticket whether it's privately or state owned, but you can stay in the palazzo where the owners lived. The tonnara, used by the Arabs thousands of years earlier, ceased functioning in the 1980s, and when Maxwell stayed here, the season was the worst for many years, forcing him to change the theme of his book. I'd love to return and stay right on the sea in May or October, but even on a mid-June weekday the place was very busy with bathers and swimmers.

I still loved it, and the bathing in the brilliant blue and emerald water was a delight, because you just lower yourself in from the harbour and there's no need to wade out for further depth. J didn't want to with so many folk about, but snoozed pleasantly in a deckchair under the solitary tree with one of the many cats for company.

Later we both swam at another beach along the coast. It was the end of the day so the rather hilarious Italian pop blaring from the beach hut soon left us in peace.

Our accommodation started badly: the warmly-recommended La Tranchina was full, and I'd found a small pensione in the village. It would have been fine, if a tad cramped, had the air conditioning worked. But it was broken and who knew, said the slightly melancholy but pleasant owner, when the engineers would come from Palermo. Since we'd had a sleepless (until 4am) night sweating with the small window shut because, when opened, the noise of other air conditioners was even worse, we moved headquarters to the simple and spacious hotel round the corner, the Torre Bennistra, one of two with magnificent views along the coastline. The other, La Tavernetta, had a charming hostess and our favourite restaurant, looking both ways, not least towards the celebrated bakery where we bought our rich lunches for walks in the Zingaro, Pane Cunzatu.

Its neon sign below the crescent moon is rather flash for Scopello, which is mostly rather quiet and fortunately unexpandable (I hope and pray, but the geology surely wouldn't permit growth). Though things were livening up, and the cafes filling with Italian men in Godfather-style black suits,  for two weddings on the afternoon of our departure.

We managed two big-ish walks, hikes, call them what you will, in the Zingaro. On a morning when the few spots of rain and grey skies, seen here from the hotel room balcony (so yes, we finally got a sea view),

quickly cleared, we made our way to the park entrance. The history is an unusually heartening one for Sicily, especially in the 1980s when I first visited on an Interrailing trip - east coast, Lipari and Stromboli - and found everyone so dour compared to the mainland Italians. A coast road was proposed from Scopello to the bigger resort of San Vito lo Capo on the northernmost tip of the peninsula. Six thousand environmentalists showed up to protest in May 1980 and the result was Sicily's first national park, opened the following year.

The lower path, even in mid-June, was as busy as the standard Cinque Terre route. Compared to the upper route, its sea views were modest, but looking upwards past the small palms to the heights gave it a different grandeur.

It was a fiercely windy day, so much so that I didn't notice the sun getting at parts which I hadn't suncreamed up properly (result: burnt upper arms and legs). So the sea off the many idyllic little beaches which should provide stopovers was too rough to swim in. I loved the dramatic (and deserted) Cala Marinella where we had our Pane Cunzatu and fruit, though.

Limited geological knowledge gives me only very basic information about the folds and striations which make yet another case of nature outstripping art: the fundamental rock formations of the Zingaro are dolomitic calcareous of 'mesozoic limestone'.

Several lizards with green backs, fearless and obviously on the hunt for tourists' breadcrumbs, added to the wonder of the composition:

After lunch, J made his way back along the lower path and I climbed towards a collection of refuges in a nicely greened zone called Sughero. The ascent was gentle, opening out on to highlands with outcrops of calcereous rock contrasting with what I assume was reddish sandstone.

The vegetation was sparse, and tantalising route markers illustrating a wide variety of orchids suggested it would be good to come a month earlier, but still I found quite a range of plants I could identify and many I couldn't. On the rocks, spotted or clustered with orange lichen, were a type of sempervivum

and some of the lichen was plant-like in itself.

Cistus still flowered in between the sporadic holm oaks

and once descending past the outcrop of the Pizzo del Corvo at about 400m

those strikingly blue eryngiums I've also seen on the dunes of north Norfolk began to appear.

To complement the colour, it was here and only here on two occasions that I came across a number of exquisite small blue butterflies. You only see the eyes, not the colour, when they're at rest on plants:

I think this is angelica flowering with a view up a valley which would make a good start to a different circular walk on a future visit

Now the views back towards the Scopello peninsula open up

and you pass a farm with beehives

before the long descent back to the visitors' centre, with farmland the other side of the boundary fence beyond the park (which of course had also been cultivated as far as it could be before it became a reserve).

Lower down there's Euphorbia arborescens, which is supposed to have shed its last red colours in April, but here they still were.

and the long thryrsi of agaves formed the occasional strong foreground to the coastal scenery.

The walk along the tarmac-ed road is no great hardship, since some of the villas are nicely planted with the oleanders you see everywhere in Palermo

and wilder nature still makes itself felt.

So to the delicious evenings of showering and supping, with the lights changing from pink on the mountains over the bay

to a deeper sunset looking towards Monte Passo del Lupo in the Zingaro heading towards San Vito lo Capo.

Romantic, yes, very; and this wasn't a bad choice for an umpteenth honeymoon, a very specific one just after the wedding on 15 June. I know now that Sicily is a project to explore for the rest of my life. I'd already caught the bug on our last visit, after many years away; now it's truly biting. But then there's Iceland, and India, and...

Palermo ancora

The Sicilian capital made me love it like no other city I've encountered in the past decade or so when I first went there in April 2013 (among towns, Pärnu on what one might call the Estonian riviera worked a gentler charm to the same end last week, but that's another story). So when we decided, post-wedding, to have a little holiday, to spend time walking and swimming around the Riserva Naturale dello Zingaro further west, a night and the better part of a day at the start had to be devoted to Palermo.

We took a beloved route, with crucial variations, on the first morning, walking along Via Butera from our apartment in the palazzo at No. 28 - a different one this time, looking out on the street -

past the three churches with their splendid baroque facades, the fish shops and restaurants and the more closely-packed dwellings at the south-east end of the street

to the essential bar, the lively Rosanero where the cashiers also sell football tickets (the colours of the team in question are rose and black)

and ice cream comes in massive dollops ('pistacchio' in front of 'bacio' on the left).

Then across the Via Lincoln and back to the old Botanical Gardens, their main 'temple' guarded by two sphinxes.

I waxed lyrical about the flora here back in 2013, so I'll try not to be too repetitive or long-winded. Of course the vegetation was more profuse in June, with the datura blossoms so fatal to poor sweet Lakmé in Delibes's opera (Brugmansia versicolor, originating in the Amazon) in full flower.

Diverse lilies were flowering both in the small pond by the cast-iron greenhouse, largest and most beautiful of the ones here

and in the Botanics' central pride and joy, easily the most fascinating structure here, the so-called Aquarium of 1794-8, where we had found turtles basking around the rim on the first bright day of spring. They were more elusive this time, but still to be found among the lilies

along with a restless baby moorhen.

The massive Ficus magnolides, introduced to Sicily in the early 1800s from its home on Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia and quickly spreading, is still casting its slightly ghastly influence, though beyond it the reddish-orange flowers from Brachytora acerifolius, also an Antipodean guest and just about visible here, provide warmer terrain as they cover the ground.

There's a nice collection of mimosas in this southern corner, with Albirizza julibrissum in fluffy-flowered abundance

and the outdoor cactus garden looked especially impressive (here with Opuntia pailana in the foreground).

Along with many-berried coffee plants, Bougainvillea glabra graced the iron-cast greenhouse

with the avenue of spiked Chorisias from Brazil beyond

and jacaranda blossom contrasting with fallen clementines just outside the cactus greenhouses.

Then we crossed back into the Kalsa quarter of the old town, the part I know and love the best, and had to pass the beloved Magione

on the way to the major museum we hadn't quite had time to see on the last visit, the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia in the beautifully-sculpted Palazzo Abatellis. The main objective for me was to see the four Antonello da Messina portraits (last time I only got to see the remarkable Portrait of a Man in Cefalù's Mandralisca Museum, then under threat of closure, but going back to the website, it looks as if it's still open). It's easy to overlook the subtleties of three saints - I blush to say I only really noticed them on the postcards, because reflective glass didn't make it easy to see them - but the Mary of the Annunciation is a gem of instant appeal, partly because of the face and mantle,

partly because of the positioning of the hands.

I admit I did what I usually avoid, photographed because of the detail, but of course without flash. Other unpostcarded treasures needed recording, not least where there's individuality in the works of the Gagini clan. Antonello Gagini's virgin and child might have come straight out of a very beautiful workshop

were it not for the trouble he's taken to show her hair behind.

The room with the celebrated 15th century fresco of Death's Triumph was closed, but we could peep in and catch such details as the bony head of the Grim Reaper's horse and the minstrel below it.

The upper rooms seem to have been handsomely restored, not least the great gallery with two superb painted crucifixes in the centre.

After the Antonellos, it was a case of bigger canvases and lesser pleasures, with a few exceptions like an exquisite Jan Gossaert Nativity painted for the Lanzas of Gattopardo fame - the crest of the not-quite-leopard is on the back -

and upstairs a Bronzino on loan and some lovely Sicilian wooden figures of shepherds redeem the decadent dregs. But it was high time for a late lunch, so we headed to the nearby Antica Focacceria San Francesco which had been closed for renovations when we were last here. And now it was summer, so we could sit in my favourite Palermitan square looking out on the facade of San Francesco d'Assisi with its beautiful rose window

while opposite is the old establishment, serving a tasty selection of traditional street food for starters including the notorious Panino alla Milza, veal spleen and lung in a bun, and superb fresh pasta dishes.

Definitely the best meal we had on the holiday, though all the food was good and several others ran the Focacceria close. We strolled back to Via Butera chancing upon the oddities that make Palermo always a pleasure: a vegetable cart with a pre-recorded cry to come buy repeated over and over, a car passing with an accordionist playing away in the passenger seat and a string of shoes hung up to dry.

The meal required a siesta, which J took but I - rather foolhardily - didn't, determined to experience the Via Maqueda from the Teatro Massimo down to the Quattro Canti as a newly pedestrianised zone (albeit a temporary one).

 I approached it via the justly celebrated ensemble of buildings including the Martorana and Arabic-domed San Cataldo churches, quiet two years ago, very busy now

and took an excursion into the more complex streets of the Capo district, not so familiar with the market over for the day, lost my sense of direction and had to run back to Via Butera where our taxi to Scopello awaited. And so it was that within a couple of hours we were strolling around the former tuna factory beneath the village, finding the huge thyrsi of the agaves outlined against a dramatic evening sky

and looking back across the bay towards what we'd left behind.

Next Sicilian instalment, with fewer photos - I promise - must be devoted to Scopello and the wonders of the Zingaro.