Armchair Traveller

Roberto Alajmo

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781909961500
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Palermo's heart lies hidden under its many outer layers. In this unusual guide to the beautiful Sicilian capital, Roberto Alajmo uncovers each stratum to reveal its true character. Although disguised as a tourist's handbook, Palermo has much more to offer than ordinary recommendations for the intrepid traveler. Alajmo gives an insight into the city from a lifelong resident's point of view, showcasing its hidden cultural and culinary jewels; portraying its people, and their secrets; touching on its politics and contentious mafia involvement. Seeing Palermo with one's own eyes is an ineffable experience, even for Alajmo; the essence of the city, its beauty, is the only aspect left to the reader to discover.

1

Welcome to the city

You have to get yourself a window seat and arrive on a clear, sunny day. These occur even in winter, because the city is always anxious to look good, whatever the season. As the aircraft begins its descent, you can see from the window the red rocks of Terrasini, and the sea aquamarine and blue, with no way of telling where the blue ends and the aquamarine begins. Even the houses, the so-called villini, may strike you as over abundant, but from up above they don’t look as clumsy and pretentious as they do when seen from the ground. You take all of this in and imagine you’ve been put down in the most beautiful spot on the planet. Be honest, you thought you had some inkling of the city and the island because it is hard to escape clichés; but when faced with the view of the coastline by the airport you have to drop every preconceived idea.

As you look out of the window you have time to formulate such thoughts, to melt at the sight of so much beauty, even to entertain the notion of dropping everything – work, family, roots – and coming to settle hereabouts. And just when you’re all agog with the idea of everlasting summer, along comes a countermand. This comes as usual from the window because, while you are still wholly taken up with sunlight and sea, all of a sudden a mountain surges up, a huge, grey mountain into which at any moment the aircraft seems bound to crash.

The airport at Punta Raisi is built on a narrow strip of land separating the sea from the mountain; indeed, before now, one plane has fetched up against the mountain (5 May 1972) and another in the sea (23 December 1978). That’s the city airport for you. That’s the city for you. You, the traveller, knew all about this before you set out, but the dazzling beauty of the landscape made you forget. Now you find yourself in a bit of a panic because the mountain is getting closer, and that is a worry. But relax, nothing will happen because today’s pilots can judge to a nicety how to pass along the available strip between sea and mountain. In your subsequent moment of relief you will have leisure to reflect on the fact that nothing in these parts is what you would expect at first glance. Which is not to say you can give yourself up to the contemplation of beauty as if we were in Polynesia or Tuscany. Here, there’s nothing to be relied on, and indeed it is precisely when you think you’ve reached nirvana that you get a whack across the chest, one to take your breath away and force you to establish a proper distance from your surroundings.

The pilot’s problem on landing – how to avoid the twin disasters of sea and mountain – is a metaphor for the daily difficulties arising out of simply living on the island in general and in the city in particular; beyond being the island’s capital, the city is also a sort of large-scale exasperation. Better therefore never to relax but to be forever on your guard. From one moment to the next something irretrievable might occur.

Once you’ve picked up your luggage – and not even this is a doddle at Punta Raisi, not as bad as landing but almost – take a taxi and keep your eyes skinned. Often you can understand a city simply by taking transport from the airport to the city centre. If you can’t manage a fuller acquaintance – maybe you’re only stopping over between flights – all you need is to take a taxi there and back. On the motorway you meet a good part of what the city, consciously or unconsciously, wants you to know about her. Not everything, nor all that spontaneously. But if you keep your eyes open there is at least something you can grasp. Between the airport and the city centre you’ll pick up a visiting card to the city. There are towns which know what they’re about – they’re self-conscious and make sure to present the best picture of themselves. And there are towns that don’t give a hoot about their self-image and leave everything to chance. The city falls into this second category. Even chance, however, keeps a trick up its sleeve, and within a few kilometres it will have seen to providing at least three focal points.

The first of them comes almost at the start. Looking left, seawards, more or less at Carini, you’ll find a shanty town built right on the beach. The rundown condition of the huts, the fact that they seem to be made out of bits and pieces found on a tip, all rusted away, makes you think this has to be an illegal site. People obliged to live in Third World conditions. You are even entitled to think that somebody will have pulled a fast one, making a virtue out of necessity: as they had to make a roof over their heads, a place to sleep, why not make it by the seaside? But no, it’s nothing to do with housing need: these shacks are the second homes of the city-dwellers – the places where the urbanites move to in the summer for their holidays.

In due course they came to be built in ‘Cowboy Style’. Nowadays anyone trying to be witty calls it ‘creative architecture’, though the term is gradually losing its ironic overtone, so that before long ‘creative architecture’ will become an accepted designation. The walls are not plastered because there’ll always be time for that later on. The metal struts stick out from the roof because, who knows, one fine day a second storey may be added for the daughter who’s getting married. The houses remain unfinished on the outside for various reasons – some of them practical others, let’s say, aesthetic. Meanwhile, all that is awaited is a stamp of official approval which will serve to put the place beyond the reach of criticism by the fiscal authorities. At all events, indoors is one thing and the outside quite another.

On the island, what happens a yard away from one’s front door is considered irrelevant, if not downright vulgar. To check this out, just go and visit a condominium. Any condominium, even one where the rich live. After six in the evening each flat will have a wee garbage bag sitting on the ground just outside the door. In the preceding hours the bag will have been filling up, until the worthy lady of the house gets to parcelling it up and banishing it to beyond the sacred circle of the dwelling. At the earliest moment the trash will be passed into the care of the community, be it only the neighbourly community represented by the outside landing of a condominium. Once the bag is closed and its neck tied, it is no longer any concern of the inhabitants. Trash is the preserve of the public authorities. The house must not be desecrated by the world’s garbage. Thus you may bet that the internal arrangements of the beach houses at Cinisi are quite meticulous, in total contrast with the exterior. How things look on the outside is not the problem of these homeowners, they couldn’t care less. The outside is rubbish, and as such is up to the state.

But there is another reason why these houses are so seedy-looking. The city-dwellers nurse a heathen aversion to anything that smacks of completeness. If they inaugurate a theatre, they always do so in the absence of some essential requisite to make it fully functioning. If it’s a dyke they are constructing, then the conduits will remain uncompleted. Completion? We’ll get round to it in due course, when and if we can.

Beneath this systematized inconclusiveness we may discover an ancestral profile of superstition. It would almost seem that the city-dwellers have an unconscious sense that total completion carries with it an inbuilt sorrow. The ancient belief that fulfilment may attract the Evil Eye of the envious survives to this day, but there’s more to it than that. The real worry arises out of the discomfort of not possessing something which you thought you did possess, once you have actually realized all your hopes. There’s always something that slips through even the tiniest mesh in the net we have made with our own hands. So why not wait just to see how things turn out? For all we know it could be an Arab net. In the perfection of the carpets they wove, the old Persian master-weavers always introduced a tiny error. They did this precisely in order not to challenge God in an area which was within his exclusive jurisdiction: perfection. But here, in these seaside houses at Cinisi, this form of devotion has clearly been carried to excess.

Some years ago, there was a mayor who tried to get them knocked down despite the complaints of their owners. When these owners appeared on television it was clear that they did not conform to the image of shanty-town dwellers. They didn’t look like people who broke the law because they were driven to it. Rather they were solid citizens in possession of all the means, cultural and economic, to fight their corner. In fact the people from City Hall just had enough time to pull down a couple of these dwellings in front of the television cameras before the demolition stopped. At the next election the incumbent mayor did not get back in, there were changes in City Hall, and that was the last anybody heard about demolitions.

As a well prepared traveller you’re bound to know that in the city and its outskirts, unauthorized building is just about the only venture in urban development of recent years. Downtown, and on the shore side in particular, the bylaws are singularly strict and nobody risks any construction work, except for those ne’er-do-wells who have no scruples. Leaving aside the new Palace of Justice, there has, since the war ended, been scarcely a single architectural development of any worth, whether public or private. The rule of thumb being that there must be no contamination between ancient and modern. The result of this rule is that here we have the first and only generation in human history that will have left no trace of its passage on earth. At least, nothing of any distinction. When, a thousand years from now, art historians look into the architectural styles obtained between the years 1900 and 2000, there’ll be no getting away from the answer: jerry-building. Or else pagodas. For there are pagodas as well. Once you’re in town you’ll see plenty of them, to the point of assuming that they are called for in a clearly determined piece of landscaping – they are all the same, and all of them white.

The Greeks have left us the perfect model for their temples. The Romans perfected their ideal of the amphitheatre. The Byzantines their basilicas. The Arabs aqueducts and mosques. The Normans their churches with small domes. The Spaniards Gothic-Catalan portals. From the baroque era we celebrate the splendour of the oratories designed by Giacomo Serpotta. The nineteenth century left us the severe tranquillity of those urban house fronts. And in the same way, today’s urban dwellers of our city will bequeath to posterity some proof of the level of architectural civilization achieved. I mean that after 10,000 years’ evolution of taste along the shores of the Mediterranean, they have been able to elaborate something original and progressive: pagodas.

Were the island to fall to ruin or be swallowed up, if every memory of it were erased, and in 2,000 years’ time archaeologists brought to light the ruins of the inhabited quarters, here is the name by which they would call our culture: The Pagoda Civilization. This would be a reference not to the Chinese Palace, still in existence, but rather to the gazebos in the shape of a white pagoda that populate every corner of the city. Above all, being made of plastic, the pagoda is not readily biodegradable, and future generations of archaeologists will have ample leisure to study the Pagoda Effect in all its most intriguing manifestations.

The plastic pagoda is to the inhabitants of the city what those dry-stone round towers, the nuraghe, are to the Sardinians. They are what the huge stone heads are to the Easter Islanders. What the conical-roofed house, the trullo, is for the peasant civilization of Apulia. What the igloo is to the Innuit. There is not a garden, piazza, car park, or seafront promenade that is free of them. Wherever there is space, sooner or later there will be a pagoda. It has become a conditioned reflex of urban development, a form of horror vacui. Every gap in the fabric of urban development, every sea view is now experienced as a sort of embarrassing rip in the seat of our trousers, and the pagoda represents the ideal patch.

Whether its object is to sell gifts or books, whether it plays host to a review of artistic objects or paintings, or is a place where charities collect signatures or contributions, a pagoda will always be the favoured framework. Indeed the only one. The pagoda is convenient. It is easy to put up and might easily be dismantled. Might, I say, because we have no solid information about any such thing, given that the pagoda of its nature tends to stay put. It beds itself in. It fosters squatters’ rights on the public land on which it has been erected. If one is put up to serve as a toy stall for 2 November, there’s little point in pulling it down with the New Year’s festivities coming along, when it can be used for Christmas decorations and cribs. After that there’s the carnival: masks and make-believe shit. After that, Easter: eggs and doves. On to summer: lifebelts and canoes. Before you know it, it’s autumn, and the everlasting cycle of the pagoda can begin again, now and for ever and ever. You just have to take it on board and get used to it. It is for this that in future we, today’s inhabitants of the city, will be remembered – for the pagoda and for unauthorized building with a sea view.

What you see as you flash past along the motorway is a string of rotting houses, somewhat reminiscent of a set of teeth that have gone badly wrong. The dentist has tried extracting a decayed tooth, and through the gap you get an occasional glimpse of the sea. On its own, the sea would be a happy sight. But the impression created by the gaps is, if possible, even worse than the worst of the building blight that is standard along the coast. With the house pulled down, only a part of the resultant rubble has been carted away, nobody has got round to a proper site clearance. That is why the gaps through which you may see the sea are painful indeed – they are the memorial of a lost battle. They are a reminder that there was a time when certain battles were worth fighting, maybe even worth winning.

Many a battle of this kind has been fought in the city. Just as many are the involuntary monuments which stand as a record of them. Another memorial of a lost battle is to be found a few kilometres further, on the right, at Capaci.

Up until a few years ago, when people were chatting in the car, or anyone was chatting on the road between Punta Raisi and the city, there was always a sudden pause. That was when one was passing by the red-painted guard-rail. If there was a visitor on hand, he would be warned of it a couple of dozen yards short of it: ‘Look, we’re about to pass the spot where the assassination attempt took place.’ Then, the silence. It was a moment’s silence during which everyone would recollect where he was that day, what he was doing. Then the pause would end and the conversation resume.

But that stretch of road has changed. They’ve put up an obelisk on either side with names, date, the lot. Often there’s still the wreath left there from the previous 23 May, and, as the flowers wilt in a few days, even this detail serves to depress the majesty of the scene.

In time, the two obelisks and the withered wreath have become part of the scene. Passing in front of them, people no longer feel the need to stop talking. One gets used to things. At the most there is a brief moment’s reflection on what we were doing, how much time has passed, and so forth. That’s normal. It is the normal elaboration of grieving, especially when the state has assumed the task of recollection by means of monuments and ceremonies.

And yet there is a sense of guilt that is very much of the island. After each Mafia crime, usually on the anniversary, it has us asking ourselves rather foolishly: ‘Was his death really needless?’ As if there were some utilitarian purpose for a person’s death. As if it were possible to establish some threshold of utility beyond which there was no point dying. As if death could be weighed on the scales. As if death were a commodity for sale. As if there were an exchange and mart for death. As if there were some other commodity that might be offered in exchange for a person’s death.

Up to a point yes; however, it seemed possible to say, a posteriori, that there was a difference between the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino. However disgusting it may seem, there was a fair amount of time during which many people felt that those deaths could, at a pinch, be considered not needless. Between 1992 and 1994 this utilitarian approach found an application, for once, that was positive, with the revolt against the Mafia. For two years the city persuaded itself that it was prefiguring a better future for the whole of Italy. They always say that it is in the city that things happen first. True, they happen all too blatantly. Then one section of the city-dwellers asked themselves: why can’t a moral revolution start right here?

Prior to 1992, the general practice was to delegate the war against the Mafia. Judges and policemen were sent to their deaths, and then there would be a lather of indignation over their demise. Thereafter, the parabola of indignation began its descent, in parallel with the indignation of the state, until everything evaporated and nothing was left. The anniversary was kept, a trial was instituted which served to prolong the memory simply by the length of time it took, and in the end everything reverted to the normal business of survival, of live and let live.

To understand why the murders of Falcone and Borsellino marked a turning point that led to the first, authentic, unique and brief anti-Mafia revolt, we perhaps have to go back to August 1991, when Libero Grassi was murdered. Compared with the others, Grassi was a unilateral anti-Mafia member of parliament. He was entirely on his own. He had received no official commission. He was neither a policeman nor a magistrate. He was not professionally engaged in the fight against the Mafia, and he wasn’t paid for it. He was not even the first member of parliament in the history of the war against the Mafia; but he was the first one to use the mass media. He made his denunciations on television, safe in the conviction that this was for him tantamount to a life insurance policy. Here he miscalculated, as witness the fact that he was killed, indeed that he had to be killed, precisely due to the publicity he had given his denunciations. Libero Grassi wanted to be an example so as to encourage honest businessmen, and he was killed in order to destroy such an example.

On the morning when they shot him he was on his own, and he was virtually alone at his funeral, when the city skulked behind her shutters, as shown in so many Mafia movies. This time, however, it was not a conspiracy of silence, it was shame. The city was ashamed of herself because the motive for the crime had been ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Welcome to the city
• 2 Commonplaces
• 3 Nostalgia for the city
• 4 Death is not as bad as they make it out to be
• 5 Faces and expressions
• 6 To do with eating
• 7 The sea does not bathe the city
• 8 The villas, the gardens
• 9 The practice of auto-exoticism
• 10 It’s do or die