Sandboat Saturday, Cemeteries and Ceramics: double header!!

SAND BOAT SATURDAY
9/25/2004

Summer is officially ended. I know we will have some more really nice weather, and swim in the sea again. But this last week has been extremely changeable, with weather from the sticky 80’s to the chilly 60’s. That does not seem such a great change, but we have been used to 80’s and 90’s since June. The storms and changes in the sea have been abrupt and amazing. One minute we were down in the water swimming and the next I looked over the hillside and said, “We’d better hurry to get up the stairs, we will just miss this cloudburst.” And we did!
We have no tides as such on the Med, but there is definitely a rise and ebb of water. As all things concerning Sicilian weather, the sea is mostly calm and serene, but when it turns bad, it turns extreme really fast. Every year some jerk leaves his boat on the beach and does not come back in time to keep the storm waves from burying it. This is our third year here and we have seen at least one each fall that we have been here. These “sand boats” become so dragged down with water and sand that they can only be moved by a lot of work. It’s sort of like leaving a boat in the water and the water freezes. Anyway, I have seen it done once, but it takes a lot of effort. The usual fate of these boats is that they get hauled away by the big front end loader in the spring when the beach gets cleaned.
The official change in season means that Enzo, the gardener, is done for the year, so Steve gave him a small tip on Friday. He seemed surprised, and then we remembered that he does not usually receive tips, from Sicilians at least. So this morning he showed up here with a dozen eggs, 16 lemons, and 9 pomegranates. Steve had just picked MORE figs at Paolo’s and now I had more of 3 other things than I needed. Like the squash, sometimes I hate to see people coming with bags of things. We had just received a shipment of books from Wendy, and we felt rich surveying our wonderful fall gifts on the breakfast table. It did not matter that the weather wasn’t hot and dry anymore either, it was great to be into a time of change.

CEMETERIES AND CERAMICS
9/26/04

The weather has not improved, so we again missed the cous cous festival in San Vito Lo Capo. There is no swimming either, and we had already spent time with Melito and Giusi next door who were visiting from Palermo for their last summer weekend. But we went out this AM anyway to see what we could see.
The San Calogero road race is this weekend, but we spent the day there last year, and though I got good pictures, it was kind of boring. There were no stores open, which was a shame as our TV died and we could have shopped for a TV. We knew the bigger cities had stores open on Sunday. But we did not want to go that far because of the threatening weather, so decided to visit-the cemetery!
I have been in Sicilian cemeteries before and for those of us born in the north, they are very different, even from the southern US and Mexico. They normally are set up in street fashion, with individual above ground graves in buildings like motels with doors to open to slide caskets in and out of. But here there are more to the row, with ladders to reach up to the higher levels. This cemetery is like a huge miniature city.
Of course, there are marble vaults and mausoleums too, and there was an old and new part. But I was unprepared for the sheer number of family tombs, many with huge amounts of marble, with windows and tile flooring, curtains and altars decorated with flowers and pictures, and some with stained glass and other interior works of art. As befits an ancient city of this size (populated for well over a thousand years, about 50,000 people live here yearly, 200,000 in the summer), some of the family vaults are much bigger than the others, and quite ornate. And I was unprepared for the variety and amount of artistic style that I saw. Most cemeteries that you see are all of one style and quite uniform in size. Not this one. There were truly unique statues, building shapes, and ceramics, natural in a town known for its ceramics. We found Paolo’s family tomb, as he had brought Steve there before, and I found one with the Lombardo name, like my dad’s mother Rose Lombardo.
The pictures of the deceased also made the place very interesting. You saw a name you knew, checked out an interesting face, tried to figure out the relationships of everyone buried together. Since women keep their maiden name, that is tough to do so there are lots of people with different names buried in the (for example) Montalbano family vault (I saw 4 “Giuseppe Mantalbano’s” in the space of a 5 minute walk). And being Sunday, there were many, many people around cleaning graves and fussing with flowers. The plant sellers at the graveyard entrance do a good deal of business at this site. Everyone but us came in with bouquets and bunches of flowers or plants.
We left the cemetery to go to the ceramics show in Sciacca. We saw the same one at night last year at this time, only in the big central plaza, not this tiny piazza. This time, we found a Mancuso who was a ceramicist. We watched the painting being done and saw a new feature, a ceramic fashion display. There was a fashion show of this stuff last night.

SEASONS

Today is the autumnal equinox. It is cooler, very quiet now in our resort, and almost warm enough to be summer when swimming (we are quite alone on the beach). Here in Sicily, people pay attention to the seasons. They have a reverence for customs only excelled by their reverence for food, two things that are forever intertwined in this culture. So even though the weather calls for a swim, most town families have moved back into their winter houses. They may still return on weekends but we will not see the crowds that made the constant noise level hum that the last two months have accustomed us to.
Back to the seasons again. In the newspaper I noticed an article on the importance of eating food in season. There is always something fresh from the local fields, so why eat something imported from another area when the food here now is so good? That may be only an ad paid for and supporting local farmers, but it reflects the norm in thinking. It makes sense that food is at its peak when it is freshest and handled the least amount. It was like that when I was a kid. Why then is the US so different now? Why do we buy strawberries in February, fish out of season imported from the southern hemisphere, or for that matter, frozen meals made with ingredients that were picked miles and months away from this time and place? Maybe because it is not important because modern refrigeration methods make food safe and palatable all year. Or at least, it looks good. Maybe it is just because we can.
And Sicilians can now too. More and more they are relying on McDonalds, dried or frozen pre-packed meals, and frozen seafood from the supermarket. Sicilian wives have job pressures as well as expectations to be the perfect mother, house keeper, and lover. With this pressure, they no longer CAN spend hours cooking pranza for the whole family, especially since there are often a few unmarried children, or parents living at the house or extended family unit. Sandwiches and “tavola calda” (take-out foods) make do for many families.
The fall brings the return of school and kids finally went back to school this week. Now the daily family meal gets complicated with kids’ school schedules. Typically, moms and dads pick up their little kids one by one and drive them home from school for the day at 1 o clock in time for pranza. Middle school and teen age kids walk home, while mom and dad come home from work for 2 to 3 hours off in the middle of the day. But this year, things are being threatened with SCHOOL REFORM and a change to all-day school. That’s right, none of this getting home at 1 o’clock 6 days a week (I did mention they went to school on Saturday, right?). The kids are NOT home for a home cooked meal anymore. The family is not together for a meal that they are used to sharing everyday.
So an entire way of life is being challenged. After the summer of being in each other’s laps for every meal, the family members will now maybe see each other for a few hours in the evening. Maybe mom will have a few hours in which she can clean and cook for the next day instead of spending time with her kid. And with more school time and an emphasis on language, maybe the Italian kids who study English from grade one on will learn to talk to us!

CHASING RAINBOWS

It has been awhile, but not much newsworthy has happened, so I waited till I had some nice pictures. The pictures from this last weekend have been incredible, especially the clouds and rainbows. Also take note dirty old men; we have had topless women on our beach all week. I think they are Czech or German tourists, but since there are so few people on the beach, it is noticeable. The water has been warm and clear and full of waves. We know that heralds bad weather, but we took advantage of the hot mornings and swam everyday before the rains. This weekend has been full of lightening strikes and storms. I wish I could get a picture of them, but I get mostly black-I’m not fast enough.
This was also the weekend of the go-cart races in Sciacca, so we went down today for an hour to watch the grown ups act like little kids. Quite a bit of money is spent on this sport too. I couldn’t believe the set-ups, the tool kits, the helmets and uniforms. But it is still loud smelly little cars going round and round a course. We beat off some little kids and got a front place position in a spot with 2 corners so if anyone spun out, we could see it. No such luck. But the spot was good for a few decent shots. As we were leaving out of complete boredom after only 2 races, we noticed a beautiful rainbow and chased it around town, down to the port and San Michele. We found each other at the end of the rainbow so of course took dorky pictures of that. Enjoy!

3rd Year: MAZARA DEL SATIRO

It is the beginning of our third September in Sciacca. The noise and distractions of the summer people are gone and the skies are again showing some impossibly gorgeous sunsets. This is my favorite weather time, and I want to store it all up before the rain comes and the wind starts to blow. Today, the now-familiar planned electrical outages returned (from 9 till 3) so we took a trip to Mazara del Valle to purchase an outdoor porch ceiling light that we had seen a while back, and also for a sight that we have been waiting for ever since we heard about it.
Mazara has finished its new Museum of the Sicilian Channel and has installed the prize the town has waited over 5 years to have returned from the researchers and restorers in Rome. It is the famous “Satiro Danzante,” the Dancing Satyr, found in the nets of fishermen from Mazara in 1998. First they found the leg, and then they hoped to find the body in the same area, and then they did! Local lore has it that it has been found before tangled in nets, but fishermen just threw it back in and considered it as a nuisance. Anyway, it is a significant historical find, probably from the third century BC, and the fishermen of Mazara that ply the waters between here and Tunisia are convinced there’s lots more down there than the bounty that has already been found. Hence this museum. It is in a restored church that has just opened after a major construction job that of course took several years longer than planned (and of course several hundreds of thousands of euros more). There are anchors, oil jars (amphore), some plates and clay water jugs, and even several elephant feet were there also. A well made movie with English subtitles re-enacting the discovery of the satyr and its restoration was also available for viewing.
Pictures of the bronze statue, which is just a bit larger-than-life, are forbidden. But I did manage to photograph the poster of the head and the ceiling of the building before I was stopped. The figure is mounted higher than eye level and you can walk around it so that you can see the way the body is turned and the feeling of motion is there, especially with the rippling hair. It only has one leg, and that is thrown back to balance as it whirls. There are many representations of figures like this on antique Greek clay jars and plates, and they always are portrayed showing in one hand a staff with a pine cone on top and in the other, a handled drinking jug festooned with flowers. Even incomplete, it is a figure in the midst of an ecstatic joy, related to wine drinking and the intensity of dance, like the whirling dervishes of Turkey. The eyes are original, of some hard white material, and the centuries of plant and animal life were painstakingly removed layer by layer by restorers in Rome. And although the body lacks the arms and a leg, the trunk and curving back really show motion and joy from so many centuries ago in the past. I bought a reproduction of it over a year ago and I show it to you here as a mere suggestion of its real form.
Interestingly, Mazara del Valle has begun to represent itself as “Mazara del Satiro.” They will really capitalize on the fame of this ancient object, and I wonder how many people have jobs because of this find?

THE ZUCCHINI SYNDROME

I always like exchanging things with neighbors, but that process reached new heights here. Everyone has had too much zucchini and tried to give it away. Well, it started with the basil that I planted in three different spots to make sure that I had enough. I was freezing basil before anyone came for the summer. My freezer was full of strawberries and basil by June. But the basil kept coming, and I kept wondering what to do with it.
Although I can be quite timid, I found the act of getting rid of the stuff helped me get my nerve up to meet new people, so I started offering neighbors basil. I did not know what I had started. In rapid succession, we got dinner invitations, bottles of olive oil, peeled prickly pear, half bushels of tomatoes, cakes and other delicious sweets, bottles of wine…well, you just cannot let a good deed go by without getting something in return here. Of course, the figs we kept giving away became almost too much so that neighbors started to admit that they were giving them away to their friends.
One really sweet thing I noticed was that once I was invited to their houses, I saw that each of the neighbors that I had first given basil to had their own basil plants! They may not have been as tall or bushy as mine, but they weren’t in dire need of any basil.
The same thing happened here in terms of music, film, and computer generated pictures and videos. Again, to overcome my shyness, I started taking pictures of people and events and printing them up for neighbors. Then I would get a neighbor showing me his pictures and offer to give me shots of the same events. We swapped three of four times and by the end of the summer, I had a collection of beautiful black and white shots from Enzo, a video of all the cabarets and events, and shots of almost everything we had participated in (including me!). For Mariangela’s 19th birthday, I made her a copy of the CD my son had given me for Mothers Day. Then Federica brought over the CD her rock musician boyfriend made. Melito and Francesco have looked with interest at our Italian video collection, and Melito borrowed one that was his favorite and put it on his computer. Now we are looking for a movie that our neighbor Toto was in that was shot in Caltabellota, The Sicilian. I bet the next time I ask these guys, one of them will have a copy of it for us to see!