Sicily an Island at the Crossroads of Historyreview

Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

The Cathedral of Syracuse, Sicily, 1988. Ancient Doric columns are incorporated into the walls.

Who governs Sicily? Does it matter? With a population of five one thousand thousand (similar to Scotland'southward, larger than Republic of croatia'south), this island of ten,000 square miles lying off the toe of Italy's boot has a special autonomy within the Italian state: it has its own regional parliament and makes its own laws in such areas equally agriculture, fishing, the surround, and cultural heritage. At the same time, it is very much governed from Rome and subsidized by Rome far more generously than other regions that practise not enjoy such autonomy. Italy itself is to some extent governed past and dependent on the European Union, something that became all too axiomatic in the early months of 2021 with the EU'due south failure to guarantee a timely supply of Covid vaccines, a responsibility information technology had taken over from its member states. On the other hand, it is providing a €200 billion recovery fund to get Italy's economic system back on rails, on the condition that Italy spends the coin in a way the EU allows. Some member states have suggested that much of information technology may end upward in the easily of the Sicilian mafia.

Many other pocket-size and distinct regions of Europe—Catalonia, Corsica, Scotland—are or were in a like position, enjoying limited legislative powers and a certain latitude in the distribution of funds from their capitals, but without ultimate responsibleness for their people's welfare. The question that arises with some force as one reads Jamie Mackay'south The Invention of Sicily, a brisk account of the island's well-nigh iii-thousand-twelvemonth history, is: What happens when for centuries in that location is non only a dysfunctional mismatch betwixt strongly felt local identities and those governing from afar, but also a frequent blurring equally to where power actually resides, who is exercising it, and to what stop?

Mackay, a British journalist living in Florence, begins his story in classical times and seeks throughout to celebrate Sicily equally a place where many ethnicities and cultures meet; he approves when they blend, or at least peacefully cohabit, and deplores periods of disharmonize and intolerance. If this approach risks reducing history to a gallery of heroes and villains—cosmopolitanism good, nationalism bad—it at to the lowest degree gives his narrative a powerful cohesion. From 800 BCE to the present 24-hour interval, we follow with a mixture of sympathy and dismay the plainly infinite means in which a people can exist unhappily governed, their potential thwarted, and their resources squandered—all in a landscape that could sometimes be mistaken for paradise.

Closer to Tunis than to Naples, to the Peloponnese than to Lombardy, Sicily lies at the crossroads between Europe and Africa and betwixt the western and eastern Mediterranean. When the Greeks began to colonize the east coast in the 8th century BCE, in that location were already Phoenician trading posts on the western coasts and a number of indigenous peoples scattered beyond the island. Mackay calls the first half of his book "Utopian Fragments" and ably summarizes the Greek settlements, the dominance of the metropolis of Syracuse, and the trade but also the frequent wars with the Carthaginian Phoenicians and, in 414, with Athens. He also examines the thought of Sicily that gradually took concord of the Greek imagination: a state fertile but arduous, rich but unpredictable—a polarity symbolized by the imposing volcano Etna, spewing smoke and lava but surrounded by the lushest of landscapes.

This is the kind of account that'south worth reading with your laptop open to find images of the places described: the magnificent fifth-century-BCE Doric temple at Segesta in the northwest of the island, built by the Elymian people but to a Greek pattern. The temple erected at Erice—dating back to 1300 BCE, built past nosotros know non whom—to the African goddess Astarte, whom Male monarch Solomon worshiped; it stands on a rocky spur overlooking the western coast. The Dancing Satyr of Mazara del Vallo, a marvelous statuary sculpture from the 3rd or second century BCE recovered from the seabed near Trapani in 1998. The great cathedral in Syracuse with its bizarre façade, Norman nave, and, inside, a remarkable line of massive Doric columns from the temple to Athena that had been built with the reparations paid by the Carthaginians after their failed attempt to invade the island in 480 BCE.

It is exciting also to read of Plato'due south 3 visits to Sicily and his concern almost the islanders' lax morals, of Pindar composing his odes in Syracuse and Aeschylus making an appearance to directly his plays, of Sicilian scholars sailing two days to report in the great library at Alexandria, of Archimedes working on his mathematical formulas, then turning his genius to armed services matters when Syracuse was under siege—in brusque, to realize how many fragments of i's cultural baggage originated in Sicily in the centuries when the island spoke Greek. But it is likewise intriguing to discover that Syracuse hosted the world's first cooking school, dispatching chefs around the Mediterranean, including Mithaecus, who in the 5th century BCE wrote a volume on the art of cooking that included a recipe for scabbard fish with cheese.

The Greeks colonized Sicily, merely they did not govern information technology from distant. Their settlements remained separate, autonomous. Nor did they gain control over the entire island. It was under the Romans that Sicily would exist unified for the offset time and governed from abroad. It had inevitably become a pawn in the long power struggle between Rome and Carthage, and to hold it was to hold a decisive advantage. In 227 BCE, later on a slow but determined invasion, Sicily was declared a province of the Roman Republic, its territory carve up upwardly and administered along Roman lines, its various peoples—Greek to the due east and s, Phoenician to the north and w—obliged to obey Roman laws. The isle's agronomics was reorganized to provide grain, wine, and oil for Rome. Large farms were bought as commercial investments by citizens on the mainland. Made to work harder, armies of slaves rebelled and for two periods in the 2nd century BCE briefly took control of the isle.

Mackay is at pains to forbid his book from condign a list of battles, tyrants, governors, and viceroys. His focus is on cultural change. So though he tells united states of america nigh Gelon, Hieron, and Dionysius, principal rulers of Syracuse in its Greek phase, he skips the pragmatic Timoleon and the monstrous Agathocles, both extraordinary in their way. It's understandable. Just it does seem an oversight to skip Verres, the Roman governor of the province betwixt 73 and 71 BCE. In Sicily: An Isle at the Crossroads of History John Julius Norwich observes:

Sicily suffered greater depredations from Verres than she had from the Punic Wars and the slave revolts combined. He taxed, he impounded, he confiscated, he seduced, he raped, he tortured, he imprisoned, he robbed, he looted.

Eventually the islanders persuaded the Romans to think Verres and to put him on trial, hiring the slap-up Cicero as their lawyer.

A pattern was forming: an island fabricated up of many different communities had to larn to live with temporary governors bringing ideas and agendas from elsewhere; Sicilians had to seek to understand those governors' status in their home countries, where ultimate ability and perchance justice resided. Over the centuries Sicily would be invaded by the barbarian Vandals (468–476 CE) and ruled past the Goths (476–535), Christian Byzantium (535–827), Muslim Arabs (827–1061), the Normans (1072–1194), the Swabians (1194–1266), the Angevin French (1266–1282), the Aragonese and the Spanish Hapsburgs (1282–1713), the House of Savoy (1713–1720), the Austrian Hapsburgs (1720–1734), the Spanish Bourbons (1734–1806), the British (1806–1815), and finally the Bourbons once again (1815–1860) until, at last, in 1860 Sicily was captivated into the new nation of Italy. Each government brought its own administrators, its barons and nobles, its taxes. Inevitably, over time, strategies of resistance were developed—how to exploit a new arrival's ignorance of local reality, how to accept change superficially but not deeply—together with a certain skepticism about the elapsing of whatever ruling grade.

Christianity established itself on the isle in the third and fourth centuries. Mackay notes a Sicilian fascination with martyrdom—especially female martyrdom: Saint Agatha, who had her breasts burned off, and Saint Lucy, who had her optics poked out—suggesting that there was a quality of social and political resistance in such veneration. With time, however, the Church would become and so much a part of the condition quo and such a large landowner as to further confuse the locus of power, something already evident during the Byzantine administration of the island beginning in the 6th century. Loftier taxes were levied and many splendid churches built. Syracuse became home to an important ecclesiastical library. And then in the early on ninth century the Aghlabid Arabs, who had long been colonizing North Africa, turned their attention to Sicily. In one case again the island was caught up in a larger power struggle. In 878, after a long and terrible siege, Syracuse brutal to the Arabs; the city was sacked, its citizens enslaved; from then on the island's eye of ability shifted to the due north coast and Palermo, which was built up in line with Arabic architectural and urban traditions.

Both Mackay and Norwich enthuse over Sicily'southward Muslim Arab menses and the Christian Norman domination that followed. These centuries were the island's aureate age. The Arabs were efficient administrators who showed a sure religious tolerance and offered educational activity to converts to Islam. They knew medicine and mathematics. They brought innovative systems of terracing and irrigation together with new crops: cotton wool, papyrus, melon, pistachio, citrus, date palm, sugarcane. They congenital mosques and markets, and intensified trade. Muslims, Jews, and Christians thronged into the souks. Mackay seems disappointed to have to recount the growing disharmonize between Sunnis and Shias in the tenth century and the revolt of the Berbers, treated as second-class citizens, in the eleventh. On the continent to the north and east, the two sides of an equally divided Christendom—Rome, Constantinople—were already in competition to meet which could take advantage of Arab disarray and reclaim the island.

Norwich, even more than than Mackay, tries to give the reader a sense of the bewildering complexity of competing migrations in southern Italian republic in the aftermath of Roman imperialism. And where Mackay proceeds with a dogged earnestness—"This was by no means a 'white' civilisation," we are reassured at one point—Norwich (1929–2018) has the old-fashioned ease of the raconteur born long before the era of political definiteness. Information technology is curious to see how these different Anglo-Saxon outlooks colour their histories of this Mediterranean island. By comparing, in Storia della Sicilia by Francesco Benigno and Giuseppe Giarrizzo, 5 slim volumes for loftier schoolhouse children, ane gets little sense either of Mackay's moral concerns or Norwich's glamour, merely a wealth of facts that must seriously burden the Sicilian pupil's heed: "It was the enmity between two qa'id, Ibn al-Thumna, lord of Syracuse, and Ibn al-Hawwaàs, lord of Castrogiovanni, that induced the onetime to turn for help to Robert Guiscard who landed in Messina in 1061."

For Norwich—who dedicated two volumes to the Normans' reign in Sicily: The Normans in the South, 1016–1130 (1967) and The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–1194 (1976)—Robert, head of the Hauteville family unit, is "the almost dazzling armed services charlatan between Julius Caesar and Napoleon," a judgement unthinkable for Mackay, who is relieved to tell us that despite setting out "under the imprint of Archangel Michael…this was not an especially xenophobic campaign." In brief, Pope Nicholas Two, anxious nigh the ambitions of Norman marauders south of Rome and eager, in his quarrel with Byzantium, to bring Sicily back into Roman Christendom, offered Guiscard, with what authority it isn't clear, the dukedom of Sicily if he could conquer the place.

It would proceed him decorated: information technology took the Normans xi years to fight their manner to Palermo, where Robert's brother Roger remained to govern the island. This he did with exemplary wisdom, retaining Arab administrators, tolerating both Muslim and Greek Orthodox religious practices, and refusing to bring together the Crusades to recover Jerusalem. None of this the pope had foreseen. Latin, Greek, French, and Standard arabic were all official languages. Roger'southward son, Roger Ii, crowned king of Sicily in 1130, "was obsessed," Mackay tells us, "with the task of building unity amidst the dissimilar cultures in his kingdom." Hence the great cathedral congenital at Cefalù some forty miles east of Palermo, which mixed Romanesque, Arabic, and Byzantine influences in "a artistic piece of political propaganda." Sales of relics were banned; women adulterers were no longer condemned to death (merely flogged). Coins were minted with Byzantine religious symbols on one side and Islamic inscriptions on the other. In a higher place all, like many before and later on him, Roger 2 tried to impose a rationale on the privileges and responsibilities of land ownership.

"The nigh effective solution," Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, "for a ruler occupying a new state with different community and institutions" is "to go and live there himself." Much of the success of the Norman kings depended on their presence, their complete delivery. They had no kingdom in the north to return to; Sicily became domicile, and they thrived on its cultural and linguistic richness. Even so, they were only keeping the lid on an intercommunal hostility that would break out as soon as their charisma waned.

"There was, even so," Mackay tells u.s.a., "one further moment of cultural flourishing in the island's medieval history," nether Frederick II, the son of Roger 2's daughter, Constance, and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI of Swabia. Nietzsche would see Frederick as "the offset European…an atheist…[and] ane of the people most closely related to me." Norwich recounts the complex negotiations and shenanigans surrounding Frederick's accession with the greatest verve: The Crown pales by comparing. Mackay focuses on Frederick'southward decision in the 1220s to forcibly deport 20,000 Sicilian Muslims to Puglia following an Arab rebellion on the island. Frederick, who had been brought up aslope Muslims in Sicily, granted the exiles freedom, employed some of them equally bodyguards, and eventually congenital himself a palace in their settlement. Nevertheless, this displacement was the end of a substantial Arab community in Sicily. Otherwise, Frederick quashed factional wrangling on the island past centralizing all power around the monarch. He banned judges from hearing cases in which they had a conflict of interest, established a lay-educated administration, and presided over a cultural flowering that saw Sicilian poets invent the sonnet course. Norwich gives details of the emperor's harem and countless debauches.

Meanwhile, Mackay tells u.s.a., "Sicilians of all social classes were beginning to speak to one another using a distinctive romance language with common Latin-rooted grammar and syntax." It was the first of a linguistic identity heavily influenced by Latin, Greek, and Standard arabic, intensely felt, often in opposition to authorities from abroad, but potentially divided against itself. One of the folk tales told in this linguistic communication celebrated the antihero Giufà, a boy plainly dim-witted yet at the same fourth dimension mysteriously sly, who "profits from the untruths, anxieties and deceptions of a…range of authority figures including sultans, kings, father figures and taxation collectors." A Sicilian character-blazon was emerging: superficially deferential, opportunistic, dangerously innocent, and ready to face up half-dozen centuries of Angevin and Bourbon rule.

First came a French Angevin rex imposed by the pope, governing nigh of southern Italy from Naples and replacing all the Swabian barons with French barons. And then in 1282 a long revolt—the and so-called Sicilian Vespers—whose leaders invited the Aragonese king to accept over the island and bring Spanish lords to replace the French. Since Kingdom of spain and France were now locked in a long struggle for European hegemony, this evolution would split the island from the Italian mainland throughout the Renaissance—a terrible impoverishment. It also deprived Sicilians of access to the academy that Frederick had gear up upward in Naples to train authorities administrators. "A new form of provincial despotism began to develop on the isle," Mackay tells us, "which would undermine the concepts of police force, order and justice for centuries to come."

In the mid-fourteenth century, this depressing situation was immensely exacerbated by the Blackness Decease, which wiped out as much as half the island's population and led to a prolonged breakdown of law and order. In the belatedly fifteenth century an e'er more doctrinaire Christianity encouraged anti-Semitism to the bespeak that in 1474 350 Jews were massacred in the small town of Modica. In 1492 Judaism was outlawed and the Inquisition arrived. Ten m Jews left the island. In 1513 there were xxx-nine public burnings. Mackay describes the graffiti nevertheless visible—in Sicilian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—on the walls of Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, which served as the Inquisition'due south prison in Palermo. I "depicts the Inquisition itself…[as] a terrifying monster." Sicily's "historic cosmopolitanism," Mackay concludes, "was finally eclipsed by a Cosmic monoculture."

The first of the Castilian kings had lived in Sicily, waging frequent wars with the Angevins in Naples. Still, in the fifteenth century the crowns of Aragon and Castile were united in a unmarried Spanish crown, which in the sixteenth century was united nether the Hapsburgs with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. 1 man—Charles V—now reigned over such vast territories that Sicily became vanishingly irrelevant. Spain'due south attention in particular turned to the Americas. In Palermo, unashamedly corrupt viceroys could pursue their individual interests without scrutiny. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Church banned trade with the Muslim world in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Sicilian economy stagnated. Communications deteriorated. Piracy was rife.

In 1693 two huge earthquakes destroyed many of the cities on the eastward coast. The Hapsburgs sent strange architects to rebuild the expanse in the style now celebrated as Sicilian baroque; Mackay sees it equally "a Spanish-led effort to drive Sicily's long and complex cultural history, and replace it with the fantasy of a homogeneous, ordered club." Norwich enthuses over the "loveliest baroque" and sees a growing alignment of Sicilian and Spanish aesthetics: the Sicilians "loved colour and brandish…the pomp and splendor surrounding the Spanish Viceroys." The ii positions are non birthday incompatible. Mackay acknowledges that throughout these centuries of Spanish rule, "the Sicilians experienced a complex procedure of adaptation and integration which combined public devotion…with individual subversion."

Let u.s. now fast-frontwards to the mid-nineteenth century and meet how this uneasy collective mindset reacted at the culminating moment of the Risorgimento. Since 1734 Sicily had been governed by kings from the Castilian house of Bourbon reigning in Naples. There had been serious rebellions on the island in 1820 and 1848. In 1860, with pro-unification fervor on the rising throughout the peninsula, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed on the west coast of the isle with a thousand volunteers to take reward of nevertheless another rebellion. He swept away a 20,000-stiff Bourbon army and claimed Sicily for the future kingdom of Italy.

Ghigo Roli/Bridgeman Images, Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo

Robert Guiscard and Roger I inbound Palermo; fresco past Giovanni Patricolo, circa 1835

Lucy Riall'south Nether the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town offers a meticulously researched account of a notorious incident that marred Garibaldi'south achievement and posed a corrosive counternarrative to the positive myth of Italian unity. Two months subsequently the garibaldini captured Palermo, a mob of peasants fell upon the pocket-sized town of Bronte on the western slopes of Etna, burning property and killing seventeen people. Garibaldi dispatched 1 of his most trusted officers to restore social club. The rebellion was put down and, afterward a summary trial, five of the presumed ringleaders were executed. Giovanni Verga would give his version of events in the ferociously ironic novella Liberty (1883), presenting the Bronte rebellion every bit the moment when southern aspirations to a better life under a united Italy were showtime betrayed. The fact that the main landowners in Bronte were British prompted sinister interpretations: the peasants had risen up against foreign oppressors, and the new government had upheld the status quo. It was the kind of event that appears to justify the skepticism famously expressed in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel virtually the Risorgimento, The Leopard (1958): "Everything must modify for everything to remain the aforementioned."

Riall, an Irish historian, returns to the archives and reconstructs the story in all its bewildering complication. A sixteen,000-hectare estate, together with the title Duke of Bronte, had been given to the British admiral Horatio Nelson by King Ferdinand 4 in 1799 in return for his assistance in quashing a republican revolution in Naples. Nelson never visited the place. His heirs and administrators had tried to run the remote property along modern commercial lines. In particular, they had sought to rent the state directly to the peasants who worked it, cutting out the middlemen betwixt distant owners and uneducated laborers; this change would accept benefited both landowners and peasants. The middlemen—essentially Bronte's wealthy classes and administrators—fought back with interminable legal cases, exploiting relations with complicit judges and inviting the peasants to unite against the evil foreigners.

When in the 1840s the regime in Naples decreed that meaning proportions of all big estates must exist handed over to the town council for distribution to the peasants, the quango members held on to these properties themselves. Convinced of their cultural superiority, the British administrators continued to human action as if they were in Surrey or Buckinghamshire. The council divide into factions, fighting over the use of the new properties they had grabbed, and it was the losing faction that stirred up the peasants who, imagining that with Garibaldi'south victory change was now possible, attacked the leaders of the dominant faction controlling the town council.

To read Riall's wonderfully detailed account, cavil by cavil, intimidation by intimidation, is to empathise what an intractable and perverse world Sicily had get afterward centuries of foreign rule. Her volume offers a disarming rebuttal to any piece of cake attribution of blame, and indeed to the aestheticizing skepticism of Tomasi di Lampedusa. Mackay notes of the passage in The Leopard in which the Sicilian character is described as "hankering for voluptuous immobility," "What's so striking…is how lilliputian [this] actually pertains to the real emotional and cultural life of the Sicilian people."

In 1998 Umberto Eco offered some reflections on the Beati Paoli, a legendary, Robin Hood–like band in Sicily that supposedly preyed on the rich to assist the poor. There is no evidence it ever existed. This "illusory project of resistance and liberation" arose, Eco thought, in response to the Castilian colonial project, just as afterward Cosa Nostra would class in response to the failings of the mod Italian state. Rather than liberation, the result was nothing more than "a state within a state…another form of domination."

In 1861 Sicily became part of an independent and unified Italian nation. Two Sicilians, Francesco Crispi and Antonio Starabba, were prime number ministers of Italia in the 1890s. In 1891 Palermo was chosen to host the Italian Expo. Yet resistance to authority and the sense of being imposed on from afar did not diminish. All three books under review offer an account of how the mafia developed later on Italian unification every bit a sort of shadow government, offer "protection," jobs, and sustenance in return for unquestioning loyalty, while drawing its wealth from criminal activities. All of them record the mafia'southward extraordinary resistance to both reform and repression. The liberal governments of the early twentieth century could make no headway against it. Mussolini made xi,000 arrests only could non crush it. The Allies negotiated with it in grooming for the invasion of Sicily in 1943, appointing the mafia dominate Tasca Bordonaro as the outset post-Fascist mayor of Palermo. In the 1990s, Mackay remarks, "many Sicilians still saw the local administration every bit finer indistinguishable from Cosa Nostra." Still, he ends his volume on a positive annotation, convinced that the many African immigrants who have arrived in Sicily in recent years, bringing with them new energies and a determination to "phone call out mafia involvement" in the refugee camps, "can become active protagonists in shaping the future of life on the isle."

Such optimism is admirable but hard to share. In crises of every kind, Italian leaders rush to remind their citizens that "the state is present" and that "no one volition be left behind." Even so as the mafia observer Roberto Saviano insists, the Covid lockdowns and the government'southward slowness in compensating those who have lost their livelihoods in the pandemic offer the ideal environs for criminal organizations to step in with high-interest loans and "culling" employment. "How the Mafia Is Ready to Get Its Hands on the [European] Recovery Fund" was the headline of an article in the Italian edition of the online magazine Money on March 4. The "invention of Sicily" continues.

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Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/08/19/sicily-the-eternal-colony/

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