In Sicily

My god: Sicily! I've studied it for years, taught its history (antiquity to the late middle ages, anyway) at least 3 dozen times. But nothing prepared me for this. Sicily is AMAZING. Gorgeous, mysterious, alien, and comfortingly familiar all at once.

Our trip through Sicily lasted a week, and --let's be honest-- I groaned more than a few times at the thought of getting up and dragging my suitcase back to the bus, every day, moving on. 2 or 3 historic sites a day (and not always the ones I would have chosen to see myself). But, man! What an education this trip was. I saw so many Doric temples built during the period when Sicily was part of Magna Graecia (Great Greece), I still can't keep them straight. Several of these were built in the 5th century BCE, when Syracusa rivaled Athens as a seat of power and glory. One can see why the Athenian Navy came to grief here: the Sicilian Debacle. This land has conquered me, too.

The views from the bus windows, especially in the interior, were almost as stunning as the "sites" to which all the tourists flock (our group among them). The interior between Piazza Armerina and Agrigento consisted of rolling cultivated hills, as far as the eye could see. Few roads. Almost no fences and no trees. Pure gold, that soil: the breadbasket of the Roman dominion (until they got hungrier, and needed Egypt as well). And the Normans loved it just as much; with Sicily's riches, they were transformed from petty knights traveling out from chilly Normandy to rich Orientalizing KINGS.

Here's what Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim traveler from Spain, had to say about Palermo in 1184-5:
"Al-Madinah [Palermo]...is the metropolis of these islands, combining the benefits of wealth and splendour, and having all that you could wish of beauty, real or apparent, and all the needs of subsistence, mature and fresh. It is an ancient and elegant city, magnificent and gracious, and seductive to look upon...it dazzles the eye with its perfection....The King's palaces are disposed around the higher parts, like pearls encircling a woman's full throat. The King roams through the gardens and courts for amusement and pleasure. How many--may they not long be his--palaces, constructions, watchtowers and belvederes [pavilions with magnificent views] he has, how many fine monasteries whose monks he has put in comfort by grants of large fiefs, and how many churches with crosses of gold and silver!" (transl. R. Broadhurst, p. 348).
Of the allure of oriental culture, he notes "the Christian women of this city follow the fashion of Muslim women, are fluent of speech, wrap their cloaks about them, and are veiled. They go forth on this Feast Day dressed in robes of gold-embroidered silk, wrapped in elegant cloaks, concealed by coloured veils, and shod with gilt slippers....Thus they parade in their churches...bearing all the ornaments of Muslim women, including jewellery, henna on the fingers, and perfumes" (p. 349-50).


A few of my favorite shots of Sicily are given here, including one of me at Segesta (above), taken by my colleague at the Academy, John Hopkins, a Classicist from UTAustin. (And yes, I think that's called "gawping".)

On Leave (and learning).

This year, as a result of winning the Rome Prize, I'm on research leave from my normal job, which involves teaching courses on Western Civ, Medieval European History, the History of Medicine, and similar. In theory, I'm supposed to be "nose to the grindstone," traveling from archive to archive, autopsying and comparing all 65 surviving manuscripts of my specific medical text--Gariopontus of Salerno's "Passionarius" or "Book of Diseases"--and churning out a publishable critical edition of this important 11th century author. I am (quite honestly) the world's leading authority on this topic, though only Historians of Medicine might know, or care. This is my "thing": manuscripts, and this text my specialty. I should be a pure hermit, living in the libraries or camped on the microfilm reader in the basement, doing nothing else. The project is, in truth, much too large for one year's work, but with more free time, I am making substantial progress. It feels wonderful.

But in addition to this, I'm learning much more than which manuscripts were produced in Italy, and which in England; which are complete, and which fragmentary; who owned and used them, and whether they wrote any comments in the margins and on flyleaves that can help decipher how people in earlier centuries viewed this text, and how they used it. The libraries and archives keep only normal business hours, which are shorter than one might expect, and the Vatican Library, alas, is closed this year and for several years to come for essential structural repairs. So my project can only proceed at the pace such limits allow.

In reality, moreover, I'm learning how to get by with only a limited ability in spoken Italian (in graduate school in the US, we learn how to READ 5 or 6 foreign languages; speaking them is for the privileged few who can afford to spend years abroad, which I definitely was NOT). I'm learning with intense pleasure how to appreciate the sheer beauty of another culture, where historically significant artifacts are found on every street, in every corner--even inside some of my favorite shops! Buy a pair of shoes, admire the Roman columns embedded in the back wall of the shop. Need a cafe macchiato? Look! that fountain in their courtyard is 2,000 years old. The ease with which Romans accept their city's heritage is very similar to the ease with which they walk down the cobble-stone streets of Trastevere, on 4" heels, talking on their telefonini and dodging killer traffic. And looking glamorous all the while! This is, truly, the country that invented Fashion. And invented Sprezzatura.

There's a lot for an outsider to learn here. And I am learning. Every day presents fresh opportunities. One can't, after all, blink oneself, Genie-style, from the top of the Gianicolo straight into the reading-room at the Biblioteca Angelica. One has to walk there, down the hill, through the streets, and past the fruit and flowerstalls --sweet with freesias and hyacinths-- that circle the feet of the great scientist/philosopher, Giordano Bruno. (At the mere thought of him, bibliographic listings flash before my eyes, as do imagined scenes of his execution.) I’m not the most talkative of persons, not gregarious by nature. I don’t strike up conversations with total strangers easily. But I have a nodding relationship with at least two of the flower vendors on the Campo de' Fiori—I buy from them every week, after all, spending as much on flowers as I do on wine, both of which are incomparably cheap here—, and also with the bartender in the cafe opposite the Palazzo Farnese, where they make wonderful coffee, tasty tremazzini (little triangle sandwiches), and rosy-red spremuta d’arancia made from Sicilian Blood Oranges. Both are on the way to and from the libraries, so justifiable (especially since one can't eat a sandwich while examining a unique 11th century manuscript).

I'm learning, slowly and humbly: an American scholar abroad. There are so very *many* things I do not know, despite my very expensive, very prolonged graduate education at one of America’s premier universities. This a momentous year. For me, certainly; but also for the world. A sense of change is in the air at home: political change. It rumbles here, in La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, and other newspapers, and everyone talks of it. At home, the Dems may win; Barack has the momentum. What a great thing that would be. Change is happening here as well, the opposite of what we’re seeing in the States: a return to conservatism, an old government renewed. (Hard to believe Berlusconi could make a comeback, but the current government has fallen and it looks like he'll be re-elected.) A big year for many people. But HUGE for me: my first year in Rome.

Acclimatizing is a Breeze...

...until you realize that you should only BUY as many groceries as you can CARRY the 8 blocks home, uphill. (Not like driving to Costco and loading up on 2 weeks' worth of gourmet goodies!) Getting by without a car is one of the largest adjustments we suburbanites have to make here.

...until you find yourself in a crisis, and all your carefully-learned Italian vocabulary goes *right* out of your memory, to be replaced by [!shudder!] German, which you learned first.

...until you're sitting in the chair in the Parrucchiere where their English is even worse than your Italian. And then you realize the woman with the scissors in her hand, inches from your head, has her *own* ideas about how you should do your hair....and they're nothing like yours (snip snip).

...until you get called into the Questura to be interviewed for your Permesso di Soggiorno (Permission to Remain in Country), and they take so many types of finger-prints, palm-prints, and (one suspects) bio-metric scans, you realize you're now in some Interpol Database. Forever. (Kind of like that ink, that's never going to come off no matter how many times you wash your hands.)

...until you run out of something crucial, like Tylenol PM, and find that you can't even buy it here in la Farmacia. But --cheer up!-- that you CAN buy things over-the-counter that would otherwise be carefully controlled in the dear old US of A...