Embracing Sicily in Her Many Forms

It’s one thing to visit a Greek temple. It’s another to wonder whether one of your ancestors had a hand in raising that spectacular monument of well-proportioned stone. Fanciful though it is, that’s the thought that has often flashed through my mind during my trips over the past 24 years to Sicily, homeland to all my forebears.

If pressed to locate Sicily, most people will say it’s Italian, and many will know it’s the island off the toe of Italy’s “boot.” Few people know that before Sicily was Italian, it was Greek (and a few other cultures in between).

Ask a Sicilian about this, and you will learn that the great mathematician Archimedes was born in Siracusa. Ask my father, and you will hear that Dante was enchanted by the polyglot Sicilian language, and that God planted the Garden of Eden here.

My father’s relentless boasting of Sicily’s undervalued greatness is what inspired my first trip, in 1976. Who wouldn’t want to see a land that had been ruled and shaped by every great and some not-so-great civilizations? The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and the Serbs, Goths, Vandals, Saracens, Arabs, Normans, Byzantines, Spanish--they all left their mark on Sicily.

On my first trip, panicky about meeting my father’s cousins, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Agrigento and its Valley of the Temples, where four of them stand in a harmonious line on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I had no idea how to invoke the support of the temples’ gods, Castor and Pollux (patrons of sailors), mighty Hercules and the moody Hera, but I left feeling fortified.

More than 20 years later, in 1998, I took my parents there. We found the same pink and gold maritime light suffusing shrines where divine auguries transpired 25 centuries before. My father, a softer patriarch at age 78, sat on a ledge in the scant shade of an acacia tree and said his rosary. My mother and I slowly climbed to pay homage to the gods and goddesses of our ancestors. We rested in the long shadow of the 34 fluted columns of the Temple of Concordia.

Afterward, outside the valley strewn with antiquities--remains of tombs, altars, sanctuaries--we tempered the solemnity of the day with food fit for gods or mortals, pesce spada (swordfish).

Last June, my sister Grace joined me for her first trip to Sicily. The fifth and sixth kids in our parents’ assembly line, we grew up with the same stories from our dad. But I had something else to show her: the cult of the Great Mother.

Our quest began in Erice (pronounced EH-ree-chay), on the west end of the island. (We had flown into Palermo, Sicily’s main city, where we enjoyed an inaugural feast of pasta with fresh sardines and chickpea-flour frittata, before setting off in our rental car.)

Driving up Monte Erice on the serpentine road that ascends steeply from the drab streets of seaside Trapani, we could see what attracted the Elymians, who settled here before the Greeks. As we rose, sweeping views took in Trapani’s sickle-shaped coastline and its salt marshes, and the misty humps of the Egadi Islands scattered offshore.

The village of Erice is dominated by the crenelated turrets and tower of Castello di Venere, a crumbling 12th century Saracen and Norman castle built over a temple to Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans). The castle ruins embrace the remains of Roman baths and a dungeon. There’s nothing to see of the temple, where a cult of priestesses personified Venus in the flesh--”sacred prostitutes” who assisted mortals hoping to sire divine offspring.

The Mediterranean peoples’ worship of the goddess of fertility, be it Astarte (Carthaginian), Aphrodite (Greek) or Venus (Roman), was entrenched in Erice for 1,000 years before Christ. Over the centuries, the church channeled devotion to the goddess into devotion to the Virgin Mary. Yet up to modern times, Erice has been known to celebrate Aphrodite in spring with processional fanfare.

Grace, indulging my penchant for the mystical, stood reverently with me on the grass above the temple site. Then she declared cappuccino time.

Erice is the home of Maria Grammatico, a celebrated baker and master of the craft of painting marzipan (almond dough) to resemble fruit.

Walking toward her shop on Via Vittorio Emanuele, we wound through Erice’s narrow cobblestone streets, admiring flower-filled courtyards. The medieval mood holds up well if you don’t catch a glimpse of the communications towers that lace the town’s skyline.

Sicily’s sumptuous food, like its architecture, is textured by its many conquerors, most notably the Arabs. They brought sugar to Europe in the 9th century, as well as a genius for recipes incorporating almonds, pistachios and dried fruit. To me, this has its highest expression in cannoli, the crisp pastry shell filled with creamy ricotta cheese and bits of all of these sweetmeats, as well as chocolate.

Fortified with Maria’s cannoli, we were ready for our lodgings in Casa del Sorriso (House of the Smile). A hermitage that housed Franciscan monks from 1573 until 1970, the inn rises grandly above a steep pine forest with dizzying views of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It retains its monastic feel with vaulted ceilings, a contemplative cloister and low arched doors that lead to small, spartan rooms converted from monks’ cells. Each was furnished with a twin bed, chair and reading lamp, and each had a tiny private bath.

Dinner was simple and good--marinated scungilli (conch), caponata (an eggplant and olive mix), rigatoni with a spicy meat sauce and the sweet, juice-gorged loquats that burst forth all over Sicily.

We had built flexibility into our itinerary to avoid getting stoned on ruins. Siracusa, the queen of Sicily’s archeology treasures, would be our major stop. But even our leisurely three-day tour of Sicily’s north coast effortlessly exposed us to ancient sites.

Scopello, for instance, a steeply notched beach in the rocky shore about 20 miles east of Erice, is adjacent to the Zingaro Nature Reserve. This stunning park contains caves, to which we easily hiked and in which 12,000-year-old human skeletons have been found.

A few miles up the road is the beach resort town of San Vito lo Capo. We spent some time there with two of our siblings who were staying in a condo. I remember a marvelous lunch on the terrace of Trattoria Galante: briny-sweet shrimp and tender calamari polished off with a bottle of chilled Corvo, Sicily’s crisp white wine.

Taking the scenic coast road instead of the express autostrada (except to skirt Palermo), we drove east to Cefalu.

Cefalu, with its Rocca, a landmark crag that towers over the town, is a popular vacation destination. The shell of a temple to the goddess Diana survives at the top of La Rocca. It’s possible to hike up, but I was content to admire it from a road leading out of town.

The drive along the coast from Cefalu to Taormina took five or six hours. We made one extended stop at Santo Stefano di Camastra, a ceramics paradise, where Grace stocked up on vases, tiles and bowls. After that I switched to the autostrada, and our only stops were at service areas, which serve the best espresso drinks.

Taormina, the island’s aristocratic jewel, sits on a hill above the Ionian Sea, with a view of Mt. Etna’s smoking volcano to the west. It has been a favorite resort of the elites since Greek days, and is worth a splurge.

I had booked a room for one night at Taormina’s highest-rated hotel, the San Domenico Palace, at $250 worth every lira.

Being a former monastery does not diminish the hotel’s air of luxurious indolence--spacious rooms with huge baths, gardens for strolling, a lap pool with bar service--but medallions and frescoes of martyr saints still watch from above doorways.

Dinner on the elegant outdoor terrace was superb, if formal. I longed for the antics I’d experienced with my parents at nearby Ristorante Da Lorenzo. The waiters all but kissed the ground we stood on when they learned my parents had 10 children (and 30 grandchildren). They addressed my father as Padrino (Godfather). When he pretended that the wonderful veal parmigiana was only so-so, the headwaiter said, “I will kill the cook.”

I was looking forward to seeing Siracusa with Grace, not only for the Greek city’s treasures, but also because it is the birthplace of Santa Lucia, who in our household loomed like a deceased godmother.

The road to Siracusa, on the built-up east coast, took us through an oppressive brown industrial haze. We were relieved to find the city, once surpassed in beauty only by Athens, washed clean by sea breezes.

The original nucleus of the city is Ortygia, where the Duomo (cathedral) exemplifies the revolving-door culture of Sicily. It began as a 5th century BC temple to Athena, was consecrated as a church in the 7th century, used as a mosque by the conquering Saracens soon after, reconsecrated and adorned with mosaics in the Middle Ages, ravaged by an earthquake in the 17th century and renovated in the Baroque style.

There is so much to see, from so many eras, that Siracusa can be quite distracting. One afternoon, exhausted, we dropped into chairs at a cafe on the seafront promenade in Ortygia. Next to us was the Fountain of Arethusa, a freshwater spring.

We sipped our mineral water and read this about Arethusa: While splashing in a river in Greece, the water nymph sensed the river god looking at her with desire. Wanting no part of his advances, she fled to Siracusa, where the goddess Artemis turned her into a spring.

We thought of the story of St. Lucy that we grew up on: A Christian virgin of a noble family in Siracusa, she gouged out her eyes in martyrdom rather than submit to the lust of a pagan who had admired their celestial blue color.

Whichever legend you prefer, pagan or Christian, you have to marvel that Sicily has kept both alive over the centuries. And that all of its cultural heritage is still accessible. Ah, but now I sound just like my father.

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GUIDEBOOK

Savoring Sicily and Its History

Getting there: Alitalia has service from LAX to Palermo with one change of plane. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $785. Major U.S. car rental firms have outlets at Palermo airport.

Where to stay: In Erice, La Casa del Sorriso, 9 Contrada Cappuccini, tel. 011-39-0923-869-136, has beautiful grounds. We paid $45 per night double, which included two meals.

In Taormina, San Domenico Palace, Piazza San Domenico 5; tel. 011-39-0942-23701, fax 011-39-0942-625-506, Internet https://www.thi.it. Doubles start at $200.

In Siracusa, the Park Hotel, 80 Via Filisto, tel. 011-39-0931-412-233, fax 011-39-0931-28096, is modern with friendly, helpful staff. Doubles run about $75.

My sister and I lodged 20 miles outside the city, thriftily if ascetically, at the Benedictine convent in Noto, tel. 011-39-0931-891-255, fax 011-39-0931-894-382. A donation of about $15 per person will suffice.

In Palermo, on an earlier trip, I was as happy as a duchess in a former palazzo, Grand Hotel et des Palmes, Via Roma 398; tel. 011-39-091-58-3933, fax 011-39-091-33-1545. Doubles $125.

In San Vito lo Capo we met my brother and sister, who had rented condos through Sicilian Getaways, 103 Weldon Farm Road, Rowley, MA 01969; tel. (877) 474-2459, https://www.siciliangetaways.com.

Where to eat: Trattoria Galante, 95 Via Regina Margherita, San Vito lo Capo; local tel. 0923-972007.

The San Vito Bar Cafe on Via Regina Margherita was a great morning hangout for espresso drinks and pastries.

In Taormina, Ristorant Da Lorenzo, 12 Via Roma; tel. 0942-23480.

In Agrigento, Il Casello, a trattoria and pizzeria with a pleasant outdoor terrace, on Viale Emporium; tel. 0922-26208.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles, CA 90025; tel. (310) 820-2977, fax (310) 820-6357, https://www.italiantourism.com.