My wife’s announcement: “Let’s go to Sicily; you’ve always wanted to” was a bold one, considering the dire financial situation we’d found ourselves in the year before.
Aware that my plan to return to South Africa for good after a long sojourn in England might scotch any notions of visiting the homes of my ancestors in the near future, I quickly convinced myself it was a good idea. I’d often wondered whether some faint echo of race-memory still lingered.
Trapani and Castellammare del Golfo on Sicily’s West Coast, the birthplaces of my great-grandparents, were targeted as possible keys to unlock this particular landscape. Before setting off, I got hold of Gavin Maxwell’s The Ten Pains of Death to swot up on the privations suffered by Sicilians in the early 1950s.
For some reason, though, Sicily’s recent history, which includes dramatic improvements in its standard of living during the past few decades, seemed to elude us.
Yet the buffeting for twenty-five centuries by any number of colonial powers and oppressors, including the Phoenicians and Arabs, was readily apparent, while Greek myths, including the ancient fertility cults of Demeter and Persephone, still insinuate themselves into the bones of the living. More sponge than tabula rasa or blank slate, Sicily has absorbed throughout its tempestuous history snippets of language, art and culture in its own eclectic fashion: a possible reason why faint whispers from the past still seem to echo in the mind’s corridors today.
Fishing for documentary evidence of family proved to be a trying occupation, however: archives, municipalities and cemeteries in both towns revealed nothing, and our “little Italian” wasn’t very helpful either.
The climate and vegetation, so similar to the Western Cape’s, immediately made us feel at home. As Sicily is essentially a sun-scorched island, spring’s an excellent time to tour rather than during the dog days of sweltering August. The architecture in the north-west, however, is unmistakably North African.
The humble Castellammarese house in which my great-grandfather lived as a child now appeared almost chic, having been recently transformed by a lick of plastering and painting, and it reminded me of the dwellings in the Bo-Kaap.
Altogether more photogenic was Erice: an impressive medieval town perched on a hillside above the regional capital, Trapani. A Sicilian Assisi, this beautifully preserved focal point presents the viewer with spectacular sights and vistas from any of its winding streets. .
The pace of life in these parts is pleasantly slow. The evening constitutional or passeggiata (stroll) in Trapani is a timeless ritual enacted each evening, and includes such simple pleasures as buying an ice-cream at one of the many gelateries, doing some casual some window-shopping or even people-watching.
We travelled by bus to nearby Segesta to view its spectacular Greek temple, a timeless memorial to beauty and sensible order.
A few days earlier, I’d been swimming at Scopello in bright sunshine, buoyed up briefly in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
We should have returned the following day after a three-hour flight but an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland put paid to that quaint notion.
We eventually arrived back in England after travelling roughly 2 500 km for approximately 50 hours, by train, coaches, and car. - Weekend Argus