As I took my first steps into Sicily, I did so while working my way through the opening pages of two books, Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily and John Julius Norwich’s Sicily. While the former focuses primarily on Cosa Nostra in the late 20th century, and the latter is a more expansive survey of the island’s history, they both spotlight the same quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which is regarded by most to be Sicily’s greatest novel.
“For over twenty-five centuries,” Lampedusa explains, “we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.”
He continues: “This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
For Norwich, this quote exemplifies the defining characteristic of Sicily–its sadness. What strikes me the most about Lampedusa’s observation is its emphasis on the “lovely mute ghosts,” the “magnificent” monuments left behind by millennia of colonizers. What some might view as a silver lining, the presence of these transcendent landmarks, is no balm at all, but rather a twisting of the knife.
My arrival in Sicily brought me soon after to one of those ghosts, the cathedral of Messina, which was first established by Norman colonizers in 1197. A fitting start to my Via Normanna. And yet, most of what is visible today is actually of 20th-century origins, due to the double-whammy of the devastating 1908 earthquake and a barrage of incendiary bombs during World War II in 1943. And, of course, the imposition of Catholicism came on the heels of a long line of other faith traditions on the island.
My original plan had been to take a day off today, split between Reggio Calabria and Messina. Neither of the pilgrim accommodations in Messina were open in October, though, so I split the next day’s distance and gave myself a short start in Sicily. The original plan was the right one. Those last four days in Calabria were intense and an emotional letdown was inevitable, regardless of how excited I was to finally reach the island. I also, it has to be acknowledged, had a ton of catch-up to do once I finally had wifi. Leaving Messina, my heart wasn’t really in the walk. The cold cappuccino that I was served in the center didn’t help.
The Via Normanna departs Messina on what technically is a two-way road, but is rarely wide enough to actually permit consistent flow of traffic in both directions. The sidewalks, meanwhile, are employed for a long list of purposes, with walking ranking low in priority. I passed groups of middle-aged men huddled around stone tables playing cards, cars receiving oil changes, motorcycles being repaired, cars getting washed and detailed, portable displays of cheap plastic goods for sale, dog shit smearing the rare open sections, and most everywhere else I had to navigate around the cars parked halfway onto the sidewalks. Even as the heart of the city faded behind me, this narrow road just kept going, ticking ever higher into the hills. When it curved and passed under the staggeringly high expressway, and as the wooded mountains pressed in from all sides, I thought I might finally be in the clear, but it just kept going, even as it split in half in order to accommodate a creek, in the midst of which I saw goats foraging. A surprising sight marked the end of town–what seemed to be a castle, but in truth was the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Valle. I might have left the Cammino Basiliano, but the Basilians haven’t left me, as this was once one of their monasteries.
I can’t complain about the trail from there, which generally moved through pine and eucalyptus forest, climbing up over a ridge and then descending right back down the other side. On most days, I might think of this as a highlight, but on this walk I was just going through the motions. The now-familiar experience of walking through a dried-out riverbed followed, delivering me to Villafranca Tirrena on the north coast, where I snagged some supplies for dinner. I passed two people along the way, offering up my customary “buongiorno” or “salve.” Both went unanswered.
My accommodation for the night was in a Franciscan sanctuary in the town of Calvaruso, two kilometers off the main route. I didn’t receive a particularly warm reception. Over the speaker, the disembodied voice asked me to confirm the name of the person with whom I had arranged my stay. “They didn’t offer a name on Whatsapp,” I tried to explain. A couple minutes later, my interlocutor arrived at the door, asking to see the communication. With that, he couldn’t turn me away, but it was clear that I was inconvenient. He set me in the church to wait, and then returned with a monk, who I came to understand was not the boss, but maybe had a little more pull. The monk evaluated me, confirmed that I should be accommodated, and then the other man led me upstairs to an empty guestroom with eight fully made beds. He instructed me to take one, showed me the bathroom, and then disappeared. I never saw anyone else.
The following morning, I almost gasped when I awoke, shocked into consciousness by the stultifying heat of the place. Maybe I’m not the only one who has been thrown off by the return to warm temperatures over the last week after some early previews of winter. I made coffee but that only exacerbated the overheating; as I blew on the mug, I felt beads of sweat crashing onto my stomach, which has to be among the most underrated of unpleasant feelings.
The first half of the walk from Calvaruso was more riverbed trekking, and I confess that the thrill is diminishing at this point, as the novelty of the experience is replaced with the annoyance of constantly needing to manage loose stones underfoot. In time, though, the trail shifted over to the road for a sharp ascent to Rometta, where I was quite happy to have my first mid-walk cappuccino and croissant in a week. More surprising, though, was to suddenly be cold again, as the weather shifted over to dark clouds and heavy winds, pummeling away over the second half of the walk.
The best walking of the day followed, pushing deeper into the interior on a series of minor roads and dirt tracks that brought me towards the stunning sight of Monforte San Giorgio, a lovely hill town perched just beneath a massive rocky crag. Even this felt like it was tinged with fool’s gold, though, when I discovered that most of the churches that I had spotted in the skyline were ruined, crumbling husks.
My destination for the day, San Pier Niceto, was the next hill town over, and I arrived so early that I didn’t want to encroach directly upon my accommodation for the night. Instead, I popped into the grocery store to buy a couple extra items for dinner. I asked for 100 grams of cheese. I received it… in powdered form, which was not what I had in mind. I then grabbed a coffee at Bar Sport, where I discovered that I hadn’t updated the day’s gps track to include my destination. I asked the bartender if he could point me in the right direction. He said the place I was looking for was in Messina. I disagreed, but thanked him and turned to leave. “ASPETTA,” he growled, commanding me to wait for a minute, while he phoned his sister for a second opinion. And sure enough, he found the correct location for me, leading to a funny conclusion when both he and his assistant were practically yelling “Diretto, sempre diretto!” and waving their hands in unison, as they instructed me to keep going straight downhill.
I’m spending the night in a church-run retirement home, which sets aside a few rooms for pilgrims and other unfortunates. After ringing the bell, I was buzzed inside, where I found five different doors leading onward, none of which contained a person immediately visible within. And so I waited. And waited. Five minutes later, I heard a voice in the distance calling “avanti!” I picked the correct door and saw the head of a nurse hanging down and around a staircase. She delivered me to my room, with a smile, and then said to await other information. That came later via Whatsapp, which mentioned that it would take a little while for the hot water to activate; I’m still waiting. I never saw anyone else again, though I could hear the chatter and shouts of some of the other residents coming down the hall–from which I was separated by a divider. The winds continued to whip outside, causing the shutters to bang repeatedly, while the very walls of the building seemed to shake at times.
Good lord, this is among the whiniest things I’ve written. On some level, I think my mind still cashed the day off ticket, even if my body couldn’t. But I can’t entirely shake that notion of the sadness of Sicily, of the reality that a 30-minute boat ride delivered me into an entirely different historical context (even if Calabria’s has its own exhausting run of colonial dominance and feudal oppression). How much of this is me, just being fundamentally off my game, and how much of this is reflective of a tangible change in cultural expressiveness?
I’m putting most of it on me.
