Although Fiercely Proud of the Island's Art Treasures
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The new Although fiercely proud of the island’s art treasures, olive groves and extraordinary cultural legacy, Sicily’s new generation refuses to remain trapped in the past Sicilian with the rise of anti-Mafia associations, boutique wineries and farm-stays. Words by Lisa Gerard-Sharp. Photographs by Lola Akinmade Åkerström >> 112 National Geographic Traveller | October 2012 www.natgeotraveller.co.uk | National Geographic Traveller 113 SICILY SICILY “Don’t go to Palermowith an itinerary, go with an open heart,” pleads Sicilian fashion designer Domenico scenery, the sense of living on the brink. But Dolce. The advice is wise and melodramatic there are stirrings of change, from a movement in equal measure. No map does justice to the against the Mafia to an opening up to outsiders. city’s Moorish muddle, baroque flamboyance The shift has already ushered in Slow and brooding Spanish grandeur. The Royal Food farm-stays, boutique wine resorts, and Palace still astounds with its mosaic-encrusted transformed baroque ballrooms into B&Bs. Palatine Chapel, a picture of oriental splendour. If nothing else, the sleepily seductive ‘Last Persian octagonal stars, palm trees and Leopards’ should still be lurking in their gilded peacocks segue into chess players and entwined lairs, waiting to suffocate their prey with dancers. Around the corner, the red-domed San Sicilian hospitality. My quest is to see whether Giovanni degli Eremiti is similarly Moorish. the Leopard can ever change its spots. Or Nearby, Ballarò Market, reminiscent of an whether the beast, in all its camouflage, is just Arab souk, sells street food, ranging from rice too beautiful to tame. balls and spicy pizza to chickpea fritters. The refined pastry shops respond with pasta reale Into the lair — marzipan sculpted into fruit shapes. You can even stay in the ‘Leopard’s lair’, the The Piazza Marina, meanwhile, provides last home of its legendary author. Owned by shade under the mighty banyan trees. The Lampedusa’s heirs, Butera 28 offers cookery calm belies the square’s violent past as a site courses. Here, Sicilian hospitality is legendary, as of public executions. As the former seat of the cloyingly sweet as the local cassata sponge cake. Spanish Inquisition, the newly restored Palazzo After a long slumber, the city is slowly Chiaramonte pits its great hall against the stirring, renovating palaces and reviving pathos of prison walls studded with pleas for neglected districts. Until recently, Palermo mercy. Close by is the decadent Palazzo Mirto, had turned its back on the sea but a new a princely home that evokes the ‘voluptuous promenade tempts Palermitans to linger in the torpor’ portrayed in The Leopard. waterfront gardens or flirt on funky, marble- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s literary clad beds dotted along the shore. At cocktail swan-song of the Sicilian nobility, still strikes hour, I mingle with the smart set in Kursaal a chord with lovers of Italy’s most inscrutable Kalhesa, a charming spot just off the seafront. island. The definitive Sicilian novel, it Would-be princelings sit in the jasmine- chronicles cultural shifts during the 1860s. scented courtyard, and indulge in Arab-tinged This seductive portrait of a decadent society fusion food and full-bodied Sicilian wine. is also the closest the island has come to The city still occasionally slips into languid exploring its capacity for change. In the novel, Leopard mode, yet, against the odds, a serious, the fictional prince prefers not to raise a finger civic-minded society is also being forged. in politics — ‘it would only get bitten’. The Cosa Nostra (Mafia) has wormed its History is seen as a cruel stepmother to Sicily, way into every corner of Sicilian life, but a despatching cavalcades of Romans, Greeks, sea change is underway, led by grassroots Arabs, Normans and Spaniards to dominate anti-Mafia associations. Pope Benedict has the island. And Sicily has often sleepwalked preached against the Mafia in Palermo, where through its own history. Every `Sicilian the city’s new mayor is the veteran crusader Previous spread: Elderly Sicilian man takes a stroll in renaissance’ runs aground on its inability to Leoluca Orlando. When I first met this fiery the Madonie Mountains; Two teenagers in the sleepy restructure society and dislodge the `shadow white knight, back in the dark days of the mountainside village of Gratteri. state’ of the Mafia. Yet we lap up the brooding 1990s, he was either sleeping in a bunker or Left: Old model Fiat Cinquecento drama, the baroque heritage, the ravishing bed-hopping several times a night to >> 114 National Geographic Traveller | October 2012 www.natgeotraveller.co.uk | National Geographic Traveller 115 SICILY SICILY avoid attack. Now the four-times mayor Sicily also nurtures the revolution against the Mafia” and feels the town of Aidone. This has inspired the creation Sated with Roman sights, but still seeking In Il Duomo, Ragusa’s gastro-haunt, celebrity can snooze in his own bed rather than fear Mob is slowly being challenged. An Addiopizzo of a new circuit embracing the neighbouring signs of a Sicilian resurgence, I head through chef Ciccio Sultano concurs: “My cooking is ‘sleeping with the fishes’. Law-abiding Sicilians seductive fantasy that logo in the shop window signifies ‘Beware of town of Piazza Armerina and the newly-restored dusty hills to baroque southeast Sicily, which voluptuously baroque because I am baroque are also challenging the long arm of the Mafia. you’re a treasured guest the dog — we bite, we won’t back down’. Villa Romana del Casale. Although Piazza feels beyond the reptilian gaze of the Mafia. — I never remove anything from my recipes Paying protection money, known as the pizzo, If bitten by the anti-Mafia bug yourself, Armerina is upstaged by the villa — Sicily’s “This is the Val di Noto, an island within an but just pile on more.” is widespread but, led by the Addiopizzo rather than a common take a dedicated tour through northwest greatest wonder of the Roman world — the island,” says my impromptu guide, Florenzo Ragusa Ibla (the old town) encourages (Goodbye Pizzo) organisation, more than 700 tourist. But it may not be Sicily and enjoy tasty home-cooking as well as rust-coloured hill town has a faded elegance Melia. “While the west of Sicily was ruled aimless wandering, leisurely lunches, and Palermitan businesses have signed up to an Mafia lore and lairs. Far from being a ghoulish all of its own. Beside the cathedral, the new by absentee barons, here the local gentry has ruminations amidst a crumbling cityscape. anti-extortion charter. Following their ethical an illusion — on boutique Godfather trip, it’s a sensuous journey into a Palazzo Trigona museum endeavours to make always cherished the land.” He doesn’t add Snapshots capture secret shrines, family crests map, you can eat, shop and sleep in places that wine estates, the marquis Sicily rarely seen by outsiders. By staying on sense of the story. that, elsewhere, the embryonic Mafia slipped and balconied palaces, often concealing are standing up to the Mafia. farms confiscated from the Mob, you’ll drink Outside town, Villa Trigona, a baronial into the power vacuum, as estate managers. bohemian bars. The Palazzo Cosentini’s This walk takes in the moody Arab-Norman probably doubles as ‘uncontaminated’ wine while listening to spine- B&B, is home to the gracious Baroness Adele Instead, here, near Chiaramonte Gulfi, balconies are a melange of fantastic bare- cathedral that has witnessed countless wailing the winemaker or the tingling stories of captured Dons. There’s an Trigona, who shows little remorse for the loss rural enterprise is all around us. We gaze over breasted sirens and monsters with flaring tributes to murdered magistrates. Built on the undeniable frisson in devouring spicy aubergine of her ancestral city home: “We adapt with the limestone terrain, carved into crests and nostrils. Leering faces proffer serpents instead site of a mosque, the cathedral is a Sicilian baroness may be turning caponata (stew) near Corleone, on an organic the times,” — spoken like a wise Leopard. In canyons, and dotted with carob trees, olive of tongues, a warning not to gossip. Following hybrid of Norman tombs and Moorish tracery. down your bedsheets farm once owned by Godfather Toto Riina. keeping with Sicilian noble tradition, the family groves and low-slung farmhouses. Some have my nose, I plump for Artemisia, a boutique In the Piazza della Memoria, we fall silent at still has a private altar, where I say a prayer been snapped up by foreigners, while others B&B, and a breakfast of Modica pastries before the stark memorial to anti-Mafia martyrs. Hill towns and Greek gods to Demeter for the preservation of the ‘last have featured in glossy feature films. embarking on the well-trodden ‘Inspector Moving on to the Antica Focacceria Looking for a Sicily beyond the Mob, I drive Leopards’ — along with their wild fennel pasta. The 1693 earthquake wiped the Montalbano’ trail, linked to the popular restaurant, we tuck into Palermitan street food to the desolate, sun-parched province of Enna, Just southwest, among oak and hazel woods, architectural slate clean in the Val di Noto detective series. The books’ fictional Mafia boss in the first inn brave enough to denounce its home to crumbling hill towns, ancient Greek the Villa Romana’s mosaics have re-emerged and gave free rein to the flamboyant new lives in Donnafugata Castle, a One Thousand extortionists to the police. The beef spleen in a ruins and former Roman outposts. Here, the after a lengthy restoration. In the Corridor of tastes of the ruling class. The baroque and One Nights fantasy whose tarnished gilt, bun is not for the squeamish, but then neither Sicilian revival takes the form of a cultural the Great Hunt, a swirling mass of movement period ushered in a golden age for Sicilian dusty chandeliers and patina of nostalgia evoke is extortion.