Destination: Sicily : Blood and Watermelon : Her bloodlines were northern, but she’d always wanted to visit this island where passions reputedly roil just below the surface

The watermelon man was armed, and he looked as though he could be dangerous.

“EH!” he shouted, stopping us dead in our tracks. There wasn’t the hint of a smile on his face, there was a very large knife in his hand, and that knife was pointed menacingly our way. Our crime had been a small one, with no offense intended. My husband and I had spent the day wandering around Enna, a mountain town located high in the heart of Sicily. As in so many places on that island, human passions and long-held beliefs seemed to surge not far below even deceptive surfaces. We ate in a little restaurant said to have been one of Mussolini’s favorites. Although it was the sleepy part of midday, the antipasto table was stacked as if they thought the Pope just might stroll in. We walked by modern apartment buildings festooned with garlic bulbs to guard against ancient terrors like the mal occhio (evil eye).

Then we saw a truck brimming with watermelons. No big deal, except its wares were advertised by a poster of a naked woman lying in a sea of watermelons. It made us laugh. Snap a picture, we thought. But then the watermelon man saw us.

“Eh!” he said gruffly, still holding out the knife and making it clear he didn’t plan to let us just shuffle away. Why did we have to try to take the picture? What geeks. Why didn’t my father, the son of Italian immigrants, let me learn Italian as a kid? Not that this Sicilian man was likely to understand my grandparents’ far-northern dialect, nor they his. I mumbled what I thought might be the expression for “I’m sorry.” My Irish husband looked at me as though I was nuts.

But then the watermelon man made a move. Satisfied that we weren’t going anywhere, he turned the knife away from us and plunged it into one of his watermelons. With great flourish and care, he cut away and cut away. We shot each other “What is he doing?” looks. Finally, he plunged the knife into the wedge and then, holding the juicy fruit aloft like a prize and grinning broadly, gestured toward our camera. We were never in danger. The guy was just trying to help us make a better picture. Why photograph just a truck? We offered to pay for the watermelon, but he wouldn’t hear of it, shaking his head at our lire and shoving watermelon wedges into our hands.

I don’t think my grandmother would have appreciated my going to Sicily. Our family, after all, was from the north, the land that gave birth to the Italian kings, or so as a child I was told. Even if my grandparents came here as poor as any immigrants, we had nobility coursing through our past.

The southern Italians were something else again. And Sicily? Forget about it. It was a wild land of wild people, the poorest of the poor, the brunt of jokes and the captives of their own passions. To my nonna , now deceased, that meant chaos.

But years later, after visiting other parts of our family homeland, I remained curious about those Italians-in-the-extreme. Last summer, I finally caught an Alitalia flight bound for Sicily.

*

My first impression of Sicily was, well, chaos. (OK, Grandma, OK.) At the Catania airport, there were no signs at the baggage claim but the uniformed airport guard assured us we were at the right carousel. We weren’t. Then getting an espresso at the airport bar was like engaging in a contact sport; there was no line, just a mob moving amoeba-like toward the register. Picking up the rental car was easy enough. But then there was the drive into Catania.

Italians drive fast, and Sicilians drive faster, but it wasn’t just a matter of speed. We weren’t in the city proper long before we realized we were hitting no traffic lights, no stop signs, and if there were any rules of the road, no one seemed to be following them. Later, at night, walking around the city, there seemed to be hardly any people on the streets. Particles of something soot--ash from Mt. Etna?--stung our eyes, and beyond the open shutters of apartments, people lay on beds, surrendering to the heavy heat. We ate Italian food in a Chinese restaurant, about the only place we could find open at the hour. Was this what all of Sicily would be like?

Looking back on it, Sicily is one of the most varied places I’ve been to. Small wonder: Since ancient times, Sicily has been held by the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Saracens, the Normans, the Swabians, the French Angevins, the Spanish and, finally, the Italians, all leaving their mark. In three weeks we saw the peasant poor, the haughty rich, the graceful, the beautiful, the corrupt; sex and piety and lives seemingly lived out of another time. We got a broad sample the very next day.

On the drive north from Catania, we passed brilliantly flowering vines, old villas left to ruin, and Etna smoking in the distance. The road cut through mountains with towns perched precariously on top. We sped by Taormina, the seaside resort of the jet set, until we hit Milazzo, where we would catch a ferry for the nearby Aeolian Islands.

The Aeolians, sometimes known as the Liparis after the largest island in the archipelago, were to be the R & R part of this trip, but they were a lot more interesting than that. On Lipari, the island we stayed on, we climbed up narrow, winding streets where families live one on top of the next and men hang signs for homemade Malvasia wine. Out of town, farmers eked out a living from the soil, growing tomatoes and grapes, with makeshift scarecrows to keep the birds away. On the far side of the island, pumice mines make the sea look like pastis.

We could have stayed on Lipari for days, but other islands beckoned.

Vulcano was another lesson. Vanity at times seems like an Italian national pastime, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see people lining up on Vulcano to breathe in allegedly beneficial sulfur fumes seeping from a hole in the ground, or lolling about in a sea made bubbly by volcanic activity. And believe me, you haven’t seen it all until you’ve seen a family of 12--grandmother, daughters, sons, grandchildren, cousins--caked in mud said to have therapeutic qualities, yakking on the beach and passing around sandwiches of mozzarella and prosciutto.

*

Back on Sicily, we headed west on the northern coast, past the Monti Nebrodi mountains, along cliff-like roads. About midway between Milazzo and Palermo, we stayed in a small beachfront town called Castel di Tusa at the Hotel L’Atelier sul Mare. By day on the beach, pouty teenaged girls of leisure flirted with posturing boys who played U2 loudly on car stereos. By night, families walked to the piazza on the beach to the open-air cafe to listen to the sea, laugh, debate and eat gelato. Most mornings, we took the train into Palermo, thanks to the strike that didn’t happen. A strike is always looming in Sicily.

Palermo would have given my grandmother pause. Chaos under the guise of control. It is grand, sinister, dark and gay. And perplexing. Well-heeled Palermitans read their newspapers in the lovely public gardens, but just a block or so away, you have to leap out of the path of a pack of speeding motor scooters. Palaces, churches and statues have survived for centuries, but damage done during World War II still remains. The Mafia wasn’t exactly boasting its presence, but why do so many of the men have scars? And the banks were equipped with state-of-the-art security systems. But try getting an explanation as to why changing money on that given day or that given hour was absolutely non e’ possibile .

The contrasts of life in Palermo come back in mental snapshots. An ancient-looking street with laundry billowing from the balconies and a man sitting on a step below, doing animated business on a cellular phone. A tractor-trailer truck with a porn poster on one window and a picture of the Virgin Mary on the other. The old priest stationed outside the chapel at Monreale and the young women in shorts he forbade to enter. I remember a street that sold almost nothing but wedding gowns the most opulent imaginable.

Somewhere I once read that Agrigento was an unremarkable city, except for its famous Greek temples. I don’t know what they were talking about. True, the temples are hauntingly beautiful, whether lit up at night or gridlocked by tourists by day. But one of the things I remember most is the passeggiata in the evenings along the sloping Via Atenea. People-watching elevated to a communal rite, the passeggiata starts every day around 6 p.m. in just about every Sicilian city and town. Families, couples, young women and young men, they all take to the streets to see and be seen in this nightly stroll.

The Hotel Kaos, a restored villa where we stayed, somewhat lived up to its name with wedding after wedding checking in to be photographed in its elaborate gardens. Sicilians take their weddings seriously. One day we saw a car approaching with so much white fabric in the back seat I thought it was the hotel laundry. It turned out to be a bride.

Gentle Agrigento gave way to Sicily’s mountainous core. What strikes you when you get into the countryside is how incredibly empty it seems. Some 90 percent of Sicily’s population is jam-packed into its cities and towns. But traveling through the island’s heartland, you can be left speechless by the solitude of the panorama.

The road turns down in a small town. Outside a bar, a girl sings into a play microphone to an old man. He applauds with gusto. You can’t help but smile. But in moments, you’re back in the yellow hills again with nothing but olive trees and pines, white rock and the play of shadow and light.

Still, we were getting the hang of Sicily by then. We had gotten used to extremes that could change without warning. And that was a good thing, because we were to be staying in the town of Caltanissetta.

It is a mostly grittily modern town, its industry mining, and judging from the graffiti, its politics socialist. We got the feeling our hotel was not exactly loved by the townspeople. Big and modern, with a convention center feel to it, it was guarded by men with automatic weapons. But unexpected things happen in places not jaded by tourists. At the train station, a man who had gone there to see his family off insisted on giving us a ride to our hotel. Then one night, after a very good dinner in a restaurant called Cortese, we asked the owner if it would be possible to call a taxi. He said he’d do it for us. When we were told our ride was ready, it turned out to be two of the owner’s friends who had agreed to give us a lift. No money, please, the very nice gentlemen insisted. They chatted to us all the way. Again, I wished I spoke Italian.

And Caltanissetta was a good base from which to visit nearby towns. One day, we went to Enna, home of the watermelon man. Another day, we went to Piazza Armerina. Most people go there for the Roman villa outside town, and we did, too. But the real treat for me was Piazza Armerina itself.

It turned out that our visit coincided with the Feast of the Assumption, which, in Piazza Armerina, we learned, is a big deal.

A brass band was tuning up on the steps of the Duomo, and a throng of people and cars was gathering in the square below as a Mass went on inside the church. Just when the square looked as if it could hold no more, the big doors of the church swung open, and the band broke out in a very loud, somewhat off-key rendition of what sounded like the theme from “The Brady Bunch.” Then the bishop appeared from within the church. Stepping up to a microphone, the bishop began to speak. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but I knew his last words were a blessing.

The crowd erupted:

“BRAVO!”

Honk! Honk!

Ah-OO-gaa, ah-OOO-gaaa!

“Yea!”

For fully five deafening minutes it went on until the crowd, happily shouted-out, began to leave the square for home.

Suddenly alone, we wandered through the streets. Inside houses, we could hear the intimate sounds of families and plates, and the rich smells of sauce, pasta and meat. It reminded me of Sunday afternoon suppers in my grandmother’s kitchen.

The day of our flight home, we got to the airport early, so I had time to shop for postcards. I went to change some lire back to dollars, and the clerk playfully tsked-tsked when, after reading my surname on my passport, learned I spoke no Italian.

“Sicilians speak Italian,” he told me in English. “But only more beautifully.”

Over at the airport cafe, the amoeba line was moving at its expected pace. As I neared the register, an uppity American woman tried to cut in. “It’s what all these people do,” she told the man she was with.

I looked the part, and I couldn’t resist.

“Scusi!” I objected, trying my best for Italian indignation. She kind of shrank away, muttering excuses.

I just gave her an annoyed, noncomprehending look, and ordered un espresso, per favore .

My grandma would have liked that.

GUIDEBOOK: Sicilian Connections

Getting there: From LAX to Sicily, all connections require a change of planes and usually another stop. Some of the most direct connections to Cantania include United Airlines, changing to Alitalia in London and stopping in Pisa; TWA to JFK, changing to Alitalia in Rome; Alitalia all the way, stopping in Milan, changing in Rome. One may end up in Palermo for about the same price: about $960 round trip for a 21-day, advance-purchase ticket.

Where to stay: Lipari: Hotel Giardino sul Mare, Via Maddalena 65, 98055 Lipari; from the U.S. telephone 011-39-90-98-11-004, about $110 per room for a double including breakfast and dinner. Nice, near harbor.

Castel di Tusa: Grand Hotel L’Atelier sul Mare, Via C. Battisti 4, Castel di Tusa; tel. 011-39-9-21-34-295, about $80, including breakfast. Modern hotel owned by a patron of the arts who uses rooms to exhibit art works.

Agrigento: Hotel Kaos, Via Giovanni XXIII 12, 92100 Agrigento; tel. 011-39-9-22-598622; about $140 a night, including breakfast. Restored villa with extensive gardens, large pool.

Caltanissetta: Hotel San Michele, Via Sasci Siciliani, 93100 Caltanissetta; tel. 011-39-9-34-553750; $114including breakfast. Large modern hotel on the outskirts of town, pool.

Taormina: Villa Fiorita, Via Piandello 39; tel. 011-39-9-42-24122; including breakfast $97. Pleasant small hotel across the street from the cable.