Catania Stories

Sicily is my happy place! And here I am getting ready to lead two retreats back to back. The retreats are always unique, always feel fresh to me. Week One begins TODAY. We will go to the airport in a few hours to meet everyone and take them to the villa.

We started out in Catania with an evening arrival at our hotel, followed by a good night’s sleep, and a half day in Catania filled with so much fun before heading over to Siracusa.  I know you will enjoy the photos below and I’ll  capture some of the interesting conversations I had with people during our short stay in Catania.

View from our hotel:

Below: uno gallo, a rooster, my emblem:

We had some serious rain, thunder, and lightning storms in Catania. While we were enjoying a coffee in a piazza, there was a crack of thunder as loud as I have ever heard before and a simultaneous streak of lightning so close to us that I screamed and ducked for cover! Rick said the thunder was even louder than the gunfire he heard in Vietnam.

HOWEVER, we’ve also had our fair share of blue skies.

And Mt Etna looks like a painting:

What I discovered at the market in Catania is that no one uses the Sicilian words for food products anymore.  I saw tiny snails slithering around in a traditional Sicilian woven basket (photo below) and remembered how my parents, whenever we were visiting Nonna, loved to buy these Sicilian delicacies called babbaluci.  I’ve always loved that name. It rolls off the tongue and sounds as exotic as the tiny snails themselves. My mother would buy them in the local market and, back at her mother’s house, she’d cook them in a chicken broth with a ton of garlic and parsley. Then we’d sit around the table and spend a long time sucking the little snails out of their shells.  But we only had them when we were visiting my Nonna in Sicily because babbaluci couldn’t be found in the states. So when I saw them at the market in Catania, I said, “O! Babbaluci!” And the vendor looked at me as if I were from Mars. “NO! Si chiamano LU-MA-CHI!.”  (Translation: No! They are called LU-MA-CHI!)  He said it S-L-O-W-L-Y and LOUDLY as if my brain were muddled and my ears stuffed.  He was correcting me.

And it happened again when I saw the cuccuzza (a long fuzzy serpent-like Sicilian squash, which I do not like at all and which my mother used to make me eat, but the sight of which still fills me with nostalgia for my childhood) and the ‘ittidri, which are the cuccuzza tendril greens to be chopped up and eaten in a soup.  My dad’s garden was filled with these enormous cuccuzze (plural). The cucuzze took a strong liking to the Indiana summer heat and sun, adapted marvelously well.  They grew strong on vines that took over an entire trellis! My friends used to come over to see them and to touch the fuzzy squashes. Another thing I remember is how my dad hand-pollinated the cuccuzza blossoms! I’d watch him bring one big yellow blossom over to another and shake the flowers until the pollen let loose.  As he did this, he’d say to me, “Ora li facciamo maritari.” (“Now we’ll marry them.”)   So these memories swirled in my head as I looked at the cuccuzze in front of me and exclaimed, “Cuccuzza and ‘ittidri!”  The vendor looked at me incredulously and said, “NO! Questo e una ZUC-CA. E queste, pointing to the ‘ittidri, sono TE-NE-RU-MI.” Slowly and loudly he spoke to me, as if I were dense or hearing impaired. Again, I was corrected.

Well, Sicilian has recently been declared a language.  This is a promotion from “dialect”. I grew up thinking Sicilian was a dialect, but no, it’s a language. It’s a language that is dying in Sicily. I am fluent in Italian, but every once in a while, it seems more appropriate to use the Sicilian word to describe something and I am immediately corrected!  How is the language to survive if Sicilians prefer the Italian word to the Sicilian word? How am I to keep the language alive in my head if I am slammed every time I try to describe something that can only be said best in Sicilian? It’s a dilemma for me. It seems the only people I can talk to in Sicilian are my elders.  What happens when my elders are no longer around?

We went for a walk past the market, sat on a bench and met an elderly man named Sebastiano. He shook my hand and I noticed how velvety smooth his large hand was.  But he told me that he had worked hard his whole life. Once upon a time, his hands were rough and calloused. He worked on Mt. Etna, cutting stone blocks from the lava fields. The lava stone blocks are used in paving streets, in building homes and walls.  He worked with a machete and ax.  I imagine the labor was grueling. He was a gentle soul and it was a pleasure to talk to him.

I moved over to the bench near Rick, Barbara, and Denise. At some point, another man, walked by and started talking to us. “Are you American? Oh!”  Within minutes he told us that he was on his way to his hometown, Lentini, and would we like to go with him to visit his town? There was so much to see, he said. He suggested we hop on the bus with him, see his hometown, and then hop on the bus back in time for us to go to Siracusa on the same day. He said there was evening dancing in his town square and, if we wanted to stay longer, he’d dance with us! It was an impromptu invitation, very genuine, but we didn’t take him up on it.  Even so, I was touched by his sincerity and simple-mindedness.

As soon as the Lentini-man walked away, Lava-Stone-Cutter Sebastiano starts telling us to be careful. Don’t talk to strangers. “But we talked to you!” “Ah, yes. But I’m a good person. Just don’t talk to strangers, and be very very careful…” On and on he went, trying to protect us with his old-time wisdom.

We said our goodbyes to Sebasiano, left the park and headed over to the bus station to catch a ride to Siracusa. We ended up waiting over an hour for a bus that was due in five minutes. I looked around and the first person I saw sitting there at the bus station, also waiting for a bus, was Lava-Stone-Cutter Sebastiano! We greeted each other warmly.

Rick started talking to a Sicilian tattoo artist.  Meanwhile, a little boy came up to Barbara, tugged on her jeans, and said, “Topolino!” She turned to me and said, “Fran, what does “topolino” mean?” I translated for her, “Little Mouse”.  “Funny, this little boy must think a mouse made these holes in my jeans.” We both laughed since everyone knows holes in jeans are fashionable.  But then, we saw the mouse, a real mouse, a tiny cute mouse eating crumbs.  We watched the topolino dart under the ticket booth and then out again to eat a crumb.  And I think now everyone waiting for the bus was studying the cute tiny topolino. Were we fascinated or was there nothing else to do? I noticed that our elderly friend Sebastiano got up was now standing with his cane very close to the mouse. Seabastiano stood still as a heron hunting for fish, eyes fixed on the topolino. Suddenly, fast as a chopping ax, old-man Sebastiano nearly crushed the topolino with his cane! Everybody screamed.  “NO NO NO! Lascia-lo. Povero topolino!”  (No No No! Leave it! Poor mouse!”) Topolino just barely escaped a terrible fate that day.

Meanwhile, Rick had stopped talking to the tattoo artist and now three very odd looking men started talking to the tattoo artist. Each of the three men was taking turns showing off their tattoos. The tattoo artist feigned interest. At some point, the tattoo artist took off.  I couldn’t resist starting up a conversation with the three men.  They were really unusual and had peaked my interest.  As they spoke to us, I immediately noted their Chicago backstreet talk, but they also had a Sicilian accent. They reminded me of Joe, Mo, and Larry of  The Three Stooges. I started the conversation with, “I bet you three are brothers!”  They were delighted that I guessed correctly. And in no time at all, these three guys were telling us their life story.

“Yeah. I’m the oldest. My name is Salvatore, or Turri. I’m the oldest.” Turri’s front teeth are blackened and rotten to the gums. Other teeth were simply missing. His lower jaw jutted and revealed two lone incisors, making him look sort of like a bulldog. ” And dis here is my brother Joe, you know, Giuseppe.” Joe somehow gave me the creeps and I was just hoping Rick wouldn’t innocently volunteer information about where I was born or where my relatives live here in Sicily.). “And dis one here’s my little brother.  His name’s Paul. We all live right here in Sicily!”

They are weaving with happiness because we were talking to them, or listening to their strange story.

“You live here in Sicily! Cool!”

Then Paul tells us, “Get this! I got deported.”

“What? You are American and you got deported? Deported to Sicily? Who gets deported to Sicily??”

“Well, we immigrated to America when we was kids. With our ma and pa. Turri here was 10, Joe was 6 and I was a baby. See, I had a bar and I had to cut someone’s drinks off ’cause he was drunk. When I cut ‘im off, he reached across the bar and hit me.” Joe slugged his arm into the air at this point in his story to demonstrate the slugger’s action. “And I jumped over the bar and beat him up!  So when the cops came, instead of arresting HIM, they arrested ME! And I end up gettin’ deported. We never got no papers in America because my Aunt Grace she told me we don’t need no papers. So we never got no papers! So I got deported.”

Paul’s chest is caved in. His back is one big curved hump, seriously kyphotic. He is scrawny and looks undernourished. I have a hard time imagining him beating up a drunken man at a bar.

Giuseppe-Joe steps forward and says proudly, “So we stuck together. Yup. We brothers stuck together! Our ma and pa are gone now so we all came back to Sicily with Paul. If Paul gotta leave, then we all gotta leave. We stick together. We take care of each other. We’re brothers! I bought us a house and land.  We got hundreds of acres, 250 acres of land! We got sheeps, three pigs ready to slaughter, goats lots-a goats, and sheeps, and, oh-man, trees and almonds, hazelnuts, grapes, figs. You name it we got it. Yeah.”

Turri says, “See I’m not married. None of us is married. My wife died. She got cancer real bad. And she died. Look. Here she is.” We look at the tattoo on his arm of his dead wife Lisa Mae. She was beautiful. Or at least, her tattoo suggested she was a great beauty. Oh, we all exclaimed, “She’s beautiful!” The look on Turri’s face is so sad, a bulldog holding back tears.

Rick said, “What a loss.”

A moment of quiet.

Giuseppe-Joe, with his gray grizzled beard, jumps in on the conversation. “I was married, too.  That b___!  You know what she done? I came home and found her shooting up cocaine in the shower. Yeah. She was using MY money to shoot cocaine into her body. MY MONEY!”

His face was all twisted.

Giuseppe-Joe continued. “I had her put in jail is what I did. I had her arrested and got her in jail. And we all come to Sicily where I bought us all a house and a farm and we live like three kings. Oh, yeah, we’re living the good life!”

Slaughter Slaughter Toothless Grins Undernourished Living the Good Life My-Oh-My

I look at them: scurvy spines, undernourished, blackened tooth nubs, unshaven…on the stinky side of life, proud as could be, redeemed by returning to Sicily.  And I say, as our bus now approaches, “Well you brothers keep sticking together.  Look after each other and keep your mom proud. You know she’s smiling at  you from heaven.”

They bask in my words. Their love of mother is fierce. It’s as if my words are the words of an angel. The brothers stand together.  The last image I take with me is their crooked grins.