Have you ever wondered what the very first bar of chocolate, made by the Aztecs, tasted like?

I’ve just found out. I bought some chocolate from Modica, in Sicily, yesterday. It was divine. I found it in the 1,000-year-old market called La Vucciria in central Palermo.

I am quite a chocolate connoiseur. I’ve visited the Lindt chocolate factory in Switzerland, observed the production process and eaten all the free chocolate I could stuff down (quite a lot, as the Lindt board of directors found out to their cost). I’ve toured a chocolate factory in Belgium and gone out probably a stone heavier than when I entered. Yet Modica chocolate is by far the nicest I have eaten anywhere, in my life.

The Spanish invaded Sicily in medieval times and brought cocoa beans from southern America, and the recipe invented by the Aztecs for making it into spectacular chocolate. If anything could make you forgive someone for invading you, surely this must be it?

Modica is now the only place on earth where cold-worked chocolate is still produced using this ancient Aztec technique.

Modern chocolate goes through various stages of production, all mechanised, which results in a product that is completely smooth and melts to liquid in the mouth. It is heated to high temperatures. It is separated and re-mixed with cocoa butter or cheaper fats, and also has other ingredients such as lecithin, emulsifiers, milk and sometimes flavourings added. It is complicated and artificial. I’m not complaining, or anything, I still love it. It’s just that, after tasting Modica chocolate… well, ah!

The only ingredients in a bar of chocolate from Modica are hand ground cocoa beans and sugar. Literally nothing else, unless it is flavoured with one other single ingredient. They toast the cocoa beans and then use a stone called a metate, rather like a mill stone, to grind them. Then they gently warm the ground beans and add the sugar. The mix never goes above 40 degrees centigrade, so the sugar does not melt, and remains granular. This is called cold-working, and it preserves more nutrients and more flavour than modern chocolate-making methods.

At this stage they may also add other ingredients, to make particular types of raw chocolate. Some of the delicious, and typically Sicilian, ingredients added to Modica chocolate are pistachio nut, almonds, cinnamon, orange or lemon zest, mint, jasmine, black or white pepper, chilli peppers, and wild fennel. There is a type of salty chocolate, which is sugary but also has Sicilian sea salt in it. Whatever type of chocolate they are making, they simply add this single additional ingredient, and nothing else.

Finally, the chocolate is transferred into shaped molds and left to set. The chocolate made this way is, of course, dark chocolate not milk chocolate, but it is not bitter and it is not hard. It has a grainy consistency which is simply divine. I do not know how to express how lovely it is! It melts in your mouth as soon as you start to suck on it. Then, of course, you suffer a desperate and urgent need to eat another piece, and another, and just one more, till you’ve finished the whole bar!

The chocolate bar I bought and have already finished eating (Burp!) was chocolate with carob, which had the single additional ingredient of flour ground from carob pods. Carob trees grow all over Sicily. I have picked carob pods straight off the tree and munched them up on the spot, for they are naturally sweet as well as tasty, but in chocolate they are even nicer.

Since the Aztecs invented this marvellous way of making chocolate, I cannot understand why people around the world think they have “improved” the recipe with modern chocolate. To me, it seems typical of Sicilians that they are the only people still following the original recipe. To Sicilians, recipes are sacred. If your grandma knew how to make something truly delicious, you had better make sure you follow her instructions TO THE LETTER! Just try suggesting a new recipe to a Sicilian. They will listen politely, nod, and then finally comment, “Interesting. That’s not how my nonna made it.”

If I have succeeded in making you slaver over your keyboard, you can try Modica raw chocolate for youself, for I have found that it is available (expensively) on Amazon.co.uk .

If you are an even worse chocaholic than me, there’s also this website, which promises “free delivery anywhere in Europe on all orders over 100 euros.” They also say their chocolate will soon be available at a shop called Eataly in New York.

This portal links all the main producers of chocolate in Modica, some of which may also sell online: http://www.cioccolatomodica.it/

All over the world, there exists the myth of a “Healthy Mediterranean Diet,” which everyone is urged to emulate for the sake of their arteries.

The Mayo Clinic (which always makes me think of Mayonnaise, anyone else?) says on its website:

“Mediterranean diet: Choose this heart-healthy diet option“

A cursory search on the Internet will reveal hundreds of other websites, books and newspapers extolling this diet’s health virtues, too.

Of course, all this Mediterranean Diet mythology originated from the British middle class dream of retiring early and going to live on their own vineyard in Tuscany. Britain is full of men who fantasise about becoming a Mediterranean Man, who comes home from work at midday for a delicious lunch eaten under the grapes hanging off his pergola, sloshes down a couple of glasses of his own red wine (no more Chateau Cardboard vintage for him!), and spends the rest of his lunch break shagging his wife in seven different positions like a true Latin Lover. Then he heads back to work for another three hours of lazily chatting in fluent Italian with his vinyard employees about how picturesque the lemon orchard looks at this time of year. Go on admit it, you’ve thought about that, haven’t you?

Middle class muesli-eating British newspaper The Telegraph has printed a truly staggering barrage of articles, proclaiming that the Mediterranean diet is so healthy it just might keep you in busines as a gigolo well past your 100th birthday, whistling while you work for the sheer joy of having clear arteries and gallons of cholesterol-free semen. They have variously claimed:

Mediterranean diet can help women get pregnant
Mediterranean diet extends life by up to three years
Mediterranean diet as good as statins
Mediterranean diet can reduce risk of depression
Mediterranean diet cuts risk of heart disease

I am here to debunk this twaddle using impeccable logic, and incontrovertible photographic evidence.

Here comes the logical part. When you look into the research behind this diet, you discover that what all the “studies have found” was based on a study of about six people, five of whom were still taking their statins and viagra during the Mediterranean Diet experiment anyway.

The food you are told to eat on the Mediterranean Diet isn’t what Mediterranean people actually eat. It’s what north Europeans and Americans like to imagine they eat.

The Dr. Oz Mediterranean Diet shopping list contains foods so far removed from the real Mediterranean diet that not only are they unobtainable here in the Mediterranean, but it is also impossible to find anyone here who knows what they are. He advises such items as whole wheat tortillas and hanger steak – even I don’t know what they are. He recommends kale, which doesn’t grow in the Mediterranean. He advocates canola oil; when I asked for canola oil in my local supermarket a few years back, they suggested I try the hardware store. Oz even dares, I said DARES, to suggest whole wheat pasta.

I once served whole wheat pasta to my husband, Mediterranean Man, when we were in England (they don’t sell it in Italy).

“What the heck is this muck?” would be a loose translation of his reaction. He didn’t eat it. He wouldn’t even taste it.

The most staggering inclusion of all in the Dr. Oz list is chilli powder. I dare you to give an Italian something with chilli on it: they will never speak to you again, and they will bring up their children and their children’s children to kill your children and their children upon sight in a spectacular vendetta that lasts unto the seventh generation and beyond. I am pretty sure the origin of the endless feud between the Montagues and the Capulets of Verona had something to do with chilli.

The real Mediterranean diet is about as healthy as a Big Mac with a side order of fries. What the real Mediterranean Man eats is stir-fried paella and potato omelette swimming in butter in Spain; pasta, pizza, lasagne and flab salami in Italy; and in Greece, back in the good old days, moussaka, and strange lumps of lamb that taste of armpits. (Nowadays, many Greeks are eating whatever scraps they can lay their hands on, and going hungry, since of course starving is far better for them than dropping out of the Euro.)

The level of obesity and diabetes in Italy is simply shocking. That is what happens if you dedicate your life to being a devout Pastafarian, and eat a diet that is 90% carbohydrate, 40% fat and 20% caffeine.

Now we come to the photographic evidence.

The main claim for this diet, according to the Mayo Clinic, is that “Research has shown that the traditional Mediterranean diet reduces the risk of heart disease.”

EXHIBIT ONE: Here’s a photo of my husband, Mediterranean Man, reducing his risk of heart disease by deep-frying some lovely Mediterranean-grown courgettes:

When preparing meals on the Mediterranean Diet, it is essential to wear a white vest to prevent your chest hair follicles from getting cauterised by flying sparks of hot oil. This is proprietary Sicilian Housewife advice you will NOT find on the Mayo Clinic website

The Mayonnaise Clinic advises “Using herbs and spices instead of salt to flavor foods”. This brings me to….

EXHIBIT TWO: This close-up detail will also show you that lashings of salt are indispensable in the authentic Mediterranean diet. My husband has already got through half the barrel of salt, and it’s only mid-morning.

Recipe: Three cupfuls of oil, one cupful of salt, one courgette. I apologise for the soft-focus effect, which was caused by the camera lens being annointed with boiling oil.

The Mayo Clinic asserts that a vital component of the Mediterranean Diet is “Replacing butter with healthy fats such as olive oil”.

EXHIBIT THREE: This is absolutely true. All Sicilians know olive oil is so healthy that the more of it you can eat, the better. In my household, we’re so healthy that a one-litre bottle of olive oil never lasts more than a week.

Mediterranean Man’s penis extension: A one-litre bottle of olive oil, Extra Virgin type

The Mayo clinic advises “Limiting red meat to no more than a few times a month.”

EXHIBIT FOUR: This is half true. My husband, like all sensible Sicilians, limits red meat. He limits it to no more than a few times a week. About 4 or 5 times a week. However, on the other days, one needs to substitute this with alternative healthy foods. Yesterday a friend gave him a suspicious-looking parcel from the butchers.

The packaging looked relatively non-commital…

“BUTCHERS – QUALITY AND FRESHNESS Every Day” claims the wrapping, beneath a happy picture of happy animals waiting to be turned into lasagne, salami, moussaka and ragù

…but when I opened it, my worst suspicions were confirmed. The gift was a solid two-pound lump of adipose tissue from the belly area of a pig. Basically, the butcher had carried out a porcine tummy-tuck and given the offcuts to my husband for dinner. Please note, however, that it is 100% salt free and instead flavoured with wholesome Mediterranean black pepper.

When I registered complaints about this shocking slab of flab in my fridge, hubby said I could instead have some low fat salami which he had just bought. Italians love salami. As you can see from the sparse distribution of white globules in the photo, they are health-conscious enough to produce a low-fat version which contains no more than 35% fat.

The Mayonnaise clinic, like all other proponents of the Mediterranean Diet, advises “Drinking red wine in moderation (optional).”

EXHIBIT FIVE: There is no exhibit five, because Mediterranean Man simply doesn’t drink red wine more than once a year, at Christmas. Italians rarely drink alcohol and, when they do, they drink tiny weeny amounts. I think the main reason for this is that, when the sun is shining “hot enough to split rocks” (as the Sicilians say), a glass of wine will give you an instant headache.

What Italians actually drink is thimblefulls of coffee, so black and dense you can also use it to polish your shoes. This happens spontaneously, after they’ve drunk so many cups of it that their hands are shaking from all the caffeine and they cannot help spilling the last cupful upon their Gucci footwear.

The whole basis of the claim that you should have red wine with your Mediterranean Diet is that it is rich in antioxidants and polyphenols. Proponents of this diet ignore the fact that you can get over a hundred times more of these substances by eating a handful of fresh grapes. Italians don’t eat grapes very often, though, for they prefer making them into wine to export to Britons and Americans who want to follow the Mediterranean Diet.

Well, ladies and gentleman of the jury, I rest my case. Next time someone mentions the healthy Mediterranean Diet to you, remember that slab of flab in my fridge, and set them straight.

One of my little boy’s milk teeth fell out recently. He now has two outsize grown-up size teeth at the centre of his mouth, and a space each side of them. He looks like a rodent.

“Do you want to leave it under your pillow for the tooth fairy?” I asked him.

“Or do you want to leave it in a cup in the kitchen for San Nicola?” asked his father.

Yes, Italian children give their teeth to Saint Nicholas. Finally, now you know what Santa does all year while waiting for Christmas to come around again. He goes to Italy and dashes about collecting all the kids’ little teeth.

It’s a marvel he’s so fat with all that work to do – it must be the Italian food. I wonder what he wears in the hot Italian summer? And does he get in via the chimney as per usual?

SAINT NICHOLAS WITH A SACK FULL OF ITALIAN CHILDREN’S TEETH

In fairness, he doesn’t actually deliver Christmas presents to children in Italy. That job is done on January 6th by the Befana, a friendly old witch who puts gifts in your stocking if you’ve been good, and a knob of coal if you’ve been naughty.

Choosing between the Tooth Fairy and Saint Nicholas is one of life’s complex challenges for my son. They both leave money and maybe a little toy in return for the tooth, so the choice has to be made on ethical grounds.

“What does Saint Nicholas do with the children’s teeth?” asked my son.

“Erm, I don’t know,” confessed Daddy. “What does the tooth fairy do with them?”

“Cor, don’t you know anything?!!! She makes them into magic fairy dust, to recharge the power in all the fairies’ magic wands!” explained the little lad.

THIS IS NOT MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, THE GODMOTHER. THIS IS A FAIRLY ODD FAIRY GODMOTHER.

He decided the tooth fairy was getting his tooth, again.

“I’m half English and half Italian,” he reasoned, ” and my teeth are one of the English parts.”

So, I am curious to know, what do children do with their baby teeth where YOU come from?

There’s a small road in Palermo called “Via dei Decollati,” which means “Street of the Beheaded People.”

In medieval times, this area was just outside the city and criminals were beheaded here. Unfortunately the Sicilian government was corrupt in those days – not any more, of course! – and many innocent people were beaheaded, too.

For a time, anyone with a lot of money, or a beautiful house, was at risk of attracting the jealous attention of some government official, who would accuse him of a  trumped-up charge and have him condemned, so that he could sequester his assets after he had been put to death. I have been told by a Syrian man that similar events were perpetrated by the government officials in Syria, contributing to the outbreak of the tragic civil war there.

The severed heads of the people beheaded in Via de Decollati were stacked up in pyramids and put on display, to deter others from committing criminal acts, or perhaps from having overly nice houses.

Their bodies, meanwhile, were tossed into an open mass grave across the road. The street was said to be haunted by the screams and shouts of decapitated people. History records that many people went to their deaths screaming and protesting their innocence, railing in fury at those who had falsely accused them and howling with angry protests till their very last breath. It is easy to imagine why many people continued to hear these voices echoing in the street at all hours, and were terrified of walking along the road. Either it was that, or else perhaps the unbearable stench of the bodies – it goes up to 40 degrees here in summer.

Innocent people killed in this way were almost martyrs, and so people prayed to them to grant wishes and help them in their moments of utter desperation. The Cult of The Beheaded Ones was a cult for the truly desperate. Some prayers written in Sicilian still survive, where people would list various victims of execution and ask them to band together to help them avoid the type of injustices they themselves had died for.

In time the executions stopped and, in 1785, a church was built on the execution site, dedicated to St. John the Baptist. There is an oil painting of his head – just his head, on a plate – hanging in the church. If you’re looking for them, the “severed head” theme is visible all over the church. I think most of it was the result of baroque interior design, and unintentional, though.

When the church was built, it was still on the outskirts of Palermo, surrounded by trees and shrubbery.

This picture is from the church’s official website. Click on the image to go there.

Jesus, above the altar of the Chiesa de Decollati. He is wearing a triangular halo and appears to be surrounded by severed heads. Angelic severed heads.

Everyone called the church “The Church of The Beheaded Ones” and, eventually, this became its official name. The beheaded criminals from then onwards were buried in a graveyard in front of the church. For protestants this is normal, but to Catholics, having a graveyard in front of a church is unusual and creepy.

The Cult of the Beheaded People was followed mainly by the women of Palermo, who attested to many miracles that had been granted by the beheaded ones. They left hundreds of votive offerings thanking the Beheaded Ones for wishes they had granted and help they had given. Some are displayed in a glass case in the church. The cult has died out now, but the church still stands and is used to celebrate mass every week.

St. John the Baptist’s head.

A selection of votive offerings, from people thanking the Beheaded Ones for their help; there are silver legs, arms and other organs, which the Beheaded Ones healed. The little head in profile is not connected to beheadings, but rather, from someone who had a medical problem in the head, such as recurring headaches or possibly mental illness.

I’m excited to find my blog is approaching 1,000 subscribers. I do hope you’re all enjoying it!

My readers come from exciting places all over the world. Their blogs are in many language and scripts, some of which I don’t recognise. I even have a subscriber called जागरण मिडिया सेन्टर, and I would love to know what this language is! Every time I get a new subscriber, I look at their blog, even if I cannot understand it. I wish I had time to properly follow all the blogs, but at least I feel we’re connecting into a friendly community, which I find very exciting.

I realise that I need to introduce my new friends to my mother-in-law, The Godmother, who features regularly in this blog. If I’m honest, she’s actually the star of this blog. She is also a major hub of the Auntienet. Old women in Sicily don’t need Internet connections like Twitter or Facebook or any of that nonsense. They have had the Auntienet for generations.

The Auntienet is a network of elderly female relatives and godmothers, which can convey interesting or scandalous information in “real time”. Sicilian children dare not swear in public or pat dirty stray dogs, as The Godmothers Are Watching and their parents will already have devised a punishment before they can get home. The Auntienet is social networking with spanking power.

Anyway, without further ado, let me present my mother-in-law and some of the other main routers and switches of the Auntienet.

THE GODMOTHER

Likes: Making children eat more than their body weight in food before she lets them leave the table

Dislikes: Priests who make mass last less than three hours

Special skill: Stuffing a chicken inside a turkey inside a lamb and roasting it on a spit

My mother-in-law is a fairly typical Sicilian woman of the older generation. She goes to church twice on Sundays and is godmother to seven children: The Godmother. Her mansize nose is usually poked deeply into other people’s busines whilst her mansize hands are usually busy flaying and massacring vegetables, scrubbing household objects to the brink of oblivion, or twirling rosary beads. They can also spank naughty children, or even a fully grown man, into geostationary orbit when necessary.

(Please note, to avoid risk of divorce I hired a model to pose for this photograph. I think I am safe because my husband only speaks broken English mixed with German, French and Expletive, and the only English word that The Godmother knows is “cuppatino”, which is a cappucino made using a teabag instead of coffee.)

SIGNORA ANNA

Likes: Scrubbing children’s faces clean with a technique called “dermabrasion”

Dislikes: People who say “hello” to her when she is studying them from behind her net curtains

Special skill: Hanging her laundry up from a washing line strung between her window shutters and a nearby lamppost

Signora Anna lives in the flat downstairs from the Godmother’s, and they have some special means of communication so rapid it probably relies on telepathy.

SIGNORA MARIA

Likes: Indoctrinating children in the ways of the Lord

Dislikes: People who say they are on a diet

Special skill: Hoisting loaves of bread up three storeys using a basket tied to twenty metres of rope dangling from her kitchen balcony

By the way, please note that Signora Maria just put on fancy dress to pose for the photo. She normally wears cerise, sequinned velour tracksuits and golden trainers, like Britney Spears when she was fat. It’s a total myth that old Sicilian women wear black all the time. They only wear it when they’re trying to look sexy.

Well, there you have it, a sampling of the good Godmothers of Sicily! God bless them, and long may they live to make sure the kids are brought up properly!

I SCHEDULED PUBLICATION OF THIS POST IN ADVANCE, AS I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF AUGUST. MY MUM NEEDS AN OPERATION AND MY SISTER HAS JUST HAD A LOVELY BABY GIRL, SO I DON’T KNOW HOW OFTEN I’LL BE ONLINE.

I LOOK FORWARD TO READING ALL YOUR COMMENTS AS SOON AS I CAN!

I took this photo from the rooftop café of La Rinascente, a swanky department store in central Palermo.

This is PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO. On top of the giant column stands the virgin Mary.

The piazza takes its name from the Chiesa San Domenico, which is out of frame to the left.

The street with red awnings along it is the Vucciria market, founded by the North Africans over 1,000 years ago. Apart from fresh fruit and vegetables, it mainly sells specialist foods, spices and curiosities. You can buy traditional and luxury Sicilian products like Bronte pistachio pesto, sun dried tomatoes, capers, cold-worked chocolate from Modica, cinnamon liquer from Etna, and other types of unusual and luxury foods and drinks.

For one millenium it bustled with people from Palermo buying grocoeries, but over the last ten years the area has filled with immigrants from Africa and Bangladesh (among other places), who buy their food from each other’s ethnic shops. The market is much emptier than it used to be. I do hope it doesn’t just gradually fade away.

Q. What do Socrates and a spleen sandwich have in common?

A. Read on to find out!

There was already a significant Jewish population here in Sicily by the 5th century BC.

They came with the Greeks from Athens, which also had a large Jewish community. Since the Jews influenced Greek culture a great deal without really planning to, and the Greeks brought it over as the foundation of Sicilian culture, I had better tell you about them.

The Jews in Athens unintentionally contributed to the humanist movement and Socratic philosophy, which remains to this day the foundation of Western philosophy and science. How did they do that?

Just imagine you’re an Ancient Greek who routinely sacrifices sheep to Zeus, just to make sure he doesn’t get really pissed off with you and strike you down with lightning. You’re dead scared of suddenly turning impotent too, so you often make offerings at the temple of Venus. Having no food to eat would be a disaster, so you have to ensure the crops grow by offering grain in the temple of Ceres. But on the way there is the temple of Athene, and if she got jealous of the attention you’re giving Ceres, she could make the Persians invade and hack you to death with swords, so you’d better offer her a sheep too. Keeping on the right side of all these different gods is terrifying.

Then you notice these people called Jews. In reality there were many religions in the cosmopolitan city of 5th century BC Athens, but the Jews and their monotheism were the ones who really stood out. They insist only one God exists, and he doesn’t want sacrifices. They never offer anything to your gods at all. They don’t get struck by lightning! The Persians haven’t killed them! They’ve got kids so their willies obviously work properly! And these Jews are rich, too.

Gosh, that’s interesting.

If you’re a thinking man, you reason that religion cannot be an absolute truth. Different nations have different religions. They must have invented them. Whatever religion and rules you choose makes no difference! We think we’ve got the truth all worked out but, really, none of us knows anything.

If you’re Socrates, you go round telling this to everyone you meet. You tell them just when they’re bustling about the marketplace with three shoulder-cracking bags of shopping and a toddler having a tantrum, it’s so hot they feel delirous, all they’ve got for refreshment is some warm water out of a goat skin that tastes of hair, and they’re playing tug of war with a very stubborn sheep which they want to drag to the temple of Ceres, whilst the sheep has just peed on their sandals and wants to go in the other direction and eat some wild clover. Eventually everyone in Athens found Socrates so damned irritating they decided to kill him.

Socrates (from the Louvre): Seeing this pain in the arse in the market place of ancient Athens always triggered “Jehova’s Witness Syndrome,” and the urge to run away and hide behind a very large amphora of olive oil.

After he was dead, his students Plato and Aristotle continued pursuing the humanist implications of realising that religion is arbitrary, and optional. And that led to science, mathematics, and astronomy (as opposed to astrology). This led to navigation by the stars, and exploration. The rest, as they say, is history.

And the Jews who had inspired it all just carried on as usual.

As I said, the Jews came to Sicily with the Greeks. By the middle ages, the Jews of Palermo were part of the very rich elite. The North African Muslims who conquered Sicily made them wear a distinguishing badge, usually a yellow cord on their clothes – which gives me the creeps because of echoes in more recent history – and charged them extra taxes, but allowed them to follow their faith without harassment.

When the French Normans arrived, they banished all the restrictions on the Jews and allowed them to hold public office. The Jews could hardly believe it, and were delighted. They were allowed to govern their own community under Halakah law (whilst the Muslims governed themselves under Sharia law). Most Jews at that time were traders, goldsmiths, translators and scribes. The majority of the educated classes in Sicily at that time were Jews. They flourished in this period, even though the Normans resumed the Christian obsession with trying to convert them. As time went by, the attempts at religious conversion were becoming obnoxious, and perhaps for this reason breakaway Jewish communities spread into other cities in Sicily. They also diversified into other professions. All the best doctors in Sicily at time were Jewish.

They were a community of 5,000 at its peak, yet hardly a trace of them remains in Sicily today. What does remain, in modern Sicilian society, is Palermo’s Classic Offal Cuisine.

Jews don’t eat offal, do they? And that’s the whole point. For every rich Jewish family in Palermo, there was a dirt-poor Christian one whom they kept alive, by giving them every last scrap of offal every time they had an animal slaughtered for dinner.

A classic Palermo delicacy: small intestines wound around spring onions, barbecued by the roadside and eaten by happy Sicilians

The Catholics of Palermo used these poopy-tasting scraps to create a palatable menu which they relish to this day. Fast food in Palermo, which you buy on the street the way a New Yorker buys a hot dog, is exclusively made of offal. You can pick up spleen sandwiches (U pani ca meusa), small-intestine kebabs (stigghiola), or fried-subcutaneous-fat-chunks in a bun (frittola). If you want a ready meal from the supermarket your choices are limited in Sicily, but you can always find tongue and hoof salad salad. (I know, you want to know what it’s like eating a hoof, don’t you? It is like terrifically chewy jelly, with no taste.)

A spleen sandwich – ah, delicious!

Well now, let’s change this offal subject and get back to the Jews.

Jewish charity did not stop at dishing out entrails to the needy. The oral history of Sicily passes down the memory that the rich and highly educated Jews sustained many impoverished Catholics with a wide range of charitable works.

In the 13th century the Spanish took over Sicily, and brought the Spanish Inquisition with them. This was when persecution of the Jews began in earnest. They were fined, taxed to the hilt, and punished for perfoming maintenance work on their synagogue. In 1492 a Spanish edict declared Judaism was banned, so all Jews must leave, or convert. The Jews disappeared from Palermo.

Just when the rest of Europe was passing from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance, Sicily was truly entering its own Dark Ages. With the departure of the Jews, and the Muslims long gone, almost the entire educated class of Sicily vanished. The number of literate people fell to nearly nobody. There were almost no real doctors at all. Foreign diplomats and envoys could not find interpreters. The client families that depended on Jewish charity were left destitute and many must have starved.

The synagogue fell into dereliction, and eventually a church was built where it had stood. Eventually, the Catholics who remained in Palermo had so totally forgotten what being Jewish actually meant that they named the road where the synagogue once stood, “Mosque Street.”

Nowadays, there is a tiny revivial of Judaism as some Sicilian families discover their Jewish roots.

Q. What do Socrates and a spleen sandwich have in common?

A. They were both inspired by Jews!

I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF AUGUST, BUT GREATLY LOOKING FORWARD TO READING YOUR COMMENTS AS SOON AS I CAN GET ONLINE!

Do you eat offal? is it forbidden by your religion? Or do you just think it tastes like poop?

In Palermo, fast food sold in the streets is almost all made of offal.

One of the absolute classic dishes of Palermo is U pani ca meusa, which means, “bread with spleen”. I ususally give this to visiting foreign friends without telling them what it is, and reveal the offal truth after the last mouthful has been swallowed. They say it is delicious. If they knew what it was in advance, they would refuse to try it.

As I explained in my previous post, the offal at the heart of all Palermo’s fast food is a legacy of the now-vanished Jewish community, which handed it out to all the poor starving people who gathered round their doors. The roadside Offal Chefs of Palermo are celebrities. They don’t need to be on TV to be a celebrity chef in Sicily. You just need a loud voice, a deep fat fryer and the ability to cook 200 spleens a day without baptising your customers in boiling oil.

Check out this 3-minute documentary about Rocky, il Re della Vucciria (The King of the Vucciria Street Market), talking about the REAL “fasty food” like spleen sandwiches. Don’t mention junk-food like “MecDonal” to me, he warns. Who would want to eat a boring sandwich wrapped in polystyrene when they could have some tasty and wholesome fried offal, he wonders?

My favourite celebrity offal chef has sadly retired now. He was simply known as Gianfortuna the Stigghiolaro. A stigghiola is a sheep’s ileum wound tightly around the whole length of a spring onion and grilled on a street corner by the Stigghiolaro, a Sicilian word I can only translate as ‘Small intestine kebab chef’.

Stigghiolari are esteemed as folk heroes for their ability to spend twelve-hour working shifts inhaling smoke so thick and pungent it would make mere mortals need artificial resuscitation and maybe an oxygen mask. They tolerate a constant dousing by droplets of hot fat and, not least, they stay alive despite dining on small intestines for lunch and dinner almost every day of their lives.

Gianfortuna the Stigghiolaro was one of my husband’s old school friends. He was a cheerful and spherical fellow who lived inside an impenetrable column of smoke which rendered him invisible and rose to the stratosphere, where it spread out into an atomic mushroom shape, visible across the whole bay of Palermo and, on a good day, as far away as Sardinia.

The day he retired was a tragedy though his wife said it was great to wash his clothes once instead of three times. It was also good for his health. I nearly walked right past him the last time I saw him. He was unrecognisable. He actually had a neck.

Another major celebrity chef of Palermo is Nino u Ballerino (Nino the Dancer) – so named for his choreographic abilities to hold five bread rolls in one hand, whilst frying spleens, wringing two litres of oil out of them and launching them into the buns with the other hand. He does this all in 25 seconds. I timed him.

Home cooking in Sicily uses offal too. The Sicilians have a sweet-and-sour way of cooking liver that stops it tasting like poop. I’ll give you that recipe soon. It’s actually delicious.

Sometimes my husband tucks into a steaming plate of cow stomach soup, a dish so repulsive that I have to create a barricade of mineral water and condiment bottles along the centre of the table to make sure I cannot see his plate. I find the sight of him eating a stomach so stomach turning that, otherwise, I will end up going to bed with an empty stomach myself.

Hubby once ate a dish which I could only name “The inside of a goat”. His dinner plate had a trachea with one lung hanging off it, half a heart, a spleen, some really massive and rubbery arteries and a few other bits of interior anatomy which I declined to examine.

Give me a spleen sandwich any day. They are delicious. Honestly, I swear.

I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND UNTIL THE END OF AUGUST AND I MAY OT BE ABLE TO GET ONLINE TO REPLY TO YOUR COMMENTS FOR A WHILE. I GREATLY LOOK FORWARD TO READING THEM AS SOON AS I CAN!

Sicilians, like many other Mediterranean people, give little gifts of sugared almonds to all their friends when celebrating the key events in their lives. If they are fancily wrapped sugared almonds, they are called confetti. If the almonds also have a gift attached, the whole thing is called a bomboniera.

Sicilians take this art form to a higher level than any other people, and they attach more importance to them than anyone else.

You give friends, relations, acquaintances and neighbours confetti or a bomboniera when you get married, when your baby is born, and christened, and when your child has first communion. You give them for every life-changing event you live through, as a way of requesting good wishes from everyone. You have better not miss anyone out, for that would be one of the many unforgivable social gaffes that can make living in Sicily feel like picking your way through a minefield for outsiders.

The almonds as well as the packaging have special colours. Weddings are white, baby boys have light blue and girls have pink. The confetti for a first communion are usually yellow. When you get your degree, you give everyone confetti in red. For your silver wedding anniversary you can actually get sugared almonds coated in edible silver.

There’s a whole cultural background to know in this art form, for not only do you have to get the right colours, but you have to know the symbolism of different types of flowers, or animals, or even materials used.

Confetti are for celebrations, so the only important life event which is not commemorated by giving them out is a funeral. Eating the sugared almonds you have received is a way of bringing good fortune and good wishes – auguri – to the person who gave them. The confetti for any social event will cost several hundred euros, but even poor people always spend money on them, which shows how important they are considered.

Each slice of these “cakes” are made of porcelain and have sugared almond inside.

Bombonieri are so beautifully wrapped and decorated that their creation is an art form. When people have eaten the almonds, they usually save the gift and display it in their glass cabinet, or somewhere else in the house, as a memento of the wedding or christening party they enjoyed. Glass and silver are popular materials for bomboniere gifts.

When ordering confetti, you first choose the almonds: some are not just coated with coloured sugar, but have a layer of chocolate or other flavours between the almond and the sugar layer. Then you work on the design together with the shopkeeper, choosing from her massive selection of ribbons, materials, figurines, silver trinkets, porcelain and glasswares. You collect your confetti a few weeks later when she has made them all.

Sugared almonds for confetti

A shop that makes confetti and bombonieri.

A view of the confetti shop window

I found a website based in Sicily which supplies all the paraphernalia for confetti online. Their online calatogues are simply amazing.

This “cake” is the traditional form of bomboniere for a christening party. If you look carefully, each slice of the “cake” is actually a little cardboard box. It has sugared almonds wrapped in coloured material inside, and a little gift on the top.

The variety of confetti available is limited only by the confetti-maker’s imagniation. I had never seen one like this before – it’s a two-tier cake made of nappies! Where do the almonds go, I wonder? And would anyone want to eat them?

I AM STILL ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF AUGUST. THE WEATHER HERE HAS BEEN ABOUT 36 OR 37 DEGREES FOR THE LAST MONTH, WHICH HUBBY (WHO IS AT HOME WORKING OVERTIME) TELLS ME IS HOTTER THAN SICILY THIS YEAR.

This event happened when he was six years old, and he lived to tell the tale, obviously. The story startled me, though, as he was so blasé about the whole thing that he only got around to telling me about it last month, after eight years of marriage.

He had been hanging about by the entrace to his home, a skinny little boy in shorts and baggy socks. It was the afternoon, still hot and sunny and well before the 6pm curfew that the residents of his dangerous neighbourhood, Brancaccio, imposed on themselves voluntarily for their own safety.

One of the neighbours, an old man who had just retired, was popping out to the baker’s for the fresh loaf of bread which everyone in Palermo seems to consider indispensable with their evening meal. He suggested little Hubby accompanied him, so he could buy the evening loaf of bread for his Mother. After getting permission from Mamma, otherwise known as The Godmother, he skipped off, trying to keep in step with the long strides of old Signor Gambino.

They were coming out of the bakery when suddenly little Hubby heard a rapid series of explosions. They were going off all around him, so loud and close that they sounded as if they were exploding inside his own head. He was petrified and froze, rooted to the spot.

A scene from the film “Brancaccio”, which tells the life story of Padre Puglisi. Click on the photo to go to my post on his life.

The old man grabbed him, tucked under his arm, and started running back towards their apartment block as fast as he could. Despite being 66 years old and carrying a six-year-old and two loaves of bread, my husband is absolutely sure he went faster than Usain Bolt. Little Hubby started crying and asked what the noise was. While running, the old man told him that some naughty big boys had been setting off fireworks in the street, but there was nothing to be scared of.

It was a small miracle that no stray bullets hit my husband or his elderly protector.

“At least I got him back without dropping the bread,” the old fellow joked, as he safely delivered little Hubby back to The Godmother.

My husband gradually came to realise what had really happened as he grew older and overheard adult conversations going on around him. He asked the elderly man about the event some years later, and learned that several people had been killed that afternoon.

He was not allowed to go and buy the bread again until he was an adult.

Kids in Brancaccio recently, in a protest march against paying “pizzo” (Mafia extortion money). The idea of doing something like this when my husband was their age would have been completely unthinkable.

Part umpteen of an occasional, hysterical series on DRIVING IN SICILY

Car rental in Sicily is quite a surprising experience for most people the first time around.

Firstly, it is blood-curdlingly expensive. The insurance will be exorbitant but heaven help you if you opt out of that!

If you book online, or even if you pre-pay, you will find that when you arrive you have to pay a lot more, “for extras”. These “extras” will be different every time. The rep at the sales desk will not take you to the car to inspect it for any existing damage. You will just be given the key and the number plate and sent off to search round the car park full of five hundred silver Fiat Puntos.

When you do finally discover your own Fiat Punto, you will find that it has a fairly impressive selection of dents and scratches. These are not regarded as “damage” in Sicily and will not, therefore, be marked on the rental contract. A dent is regarded as ‘normal wear and tear’ unless it exceeds a depth of three inches or has actually breached the body of the vehicle and reveals what lies beneath.

Sicilians drive three types of cars. The first type of car is an “old car“. If you have an old car, it is a white Fiat Uno. The second type of car is a “new car“. People with a new car have a silver Fiat Punto. The third type of car is the “girlie car“. This will be a white Fiat Cinquecento. Sicilians don’t bother with other types of car because they cannot get the parts.

There are few foreign car factories in Sicily, and few authorised dealers, so you have to order the parts from Rome or some other far flung place and possibly wait weeks. And pay a fortune. Sicilians don’t have a fortune (unless they have “earned” it in creative ways, but we won’t talk about that just now.)

Outside the category of “car” is the commercial vehicle, the Ape, which means “bee”. This is a microscopic van-type vehicle, consisting of a Vespa type Scooter (Vespa, for those of you who don’t know, means “Wasp”) with a miniscule cab encasing the front wheel and handlebars for steering, and an outsized baked bean can wrapped round the back wheel, wherein to store one’s wares such as artichokes, oranges, fish, bread, or anything else one might be able to sell at the roadside. These vehicles exist exclusively in the colour light blue. I believe other hues are illegal.

The bee and wasp names are, I presume, inspired by the fact that these vehicles are powered by something like suped-up lawnmower engines which make the same loud, persistent buzzing noise as an oversized stinging insect. If you find yourself stuck behind one in your rental car, you may discover you have developed tinnitus after they eventually disappear down a side road, in exactly the same way as you hear deafening static after emerging from an overly loud nightclub.

Sicilians spend a great deal of money on their cars. Firstly, to insure any car for a year you have to pay about twice what you paid to buy the car in the first place, and that’s only for third party cover. I have never met anyone in Italy who had anything more than third party cover for a vehicle. This is why your car rental will cost you less than half the price you pay for car insurance on your car rental.

Then there’s petrol. A litre of petrol in Sicily costs more than a litre of champagne (OK, I’m not talking about Moet Chandon here). Then you have road tax. Then you have speeding fines. These can be hundreds of Euros and often include confiscation of the driving license for a month or more. They are particularly costly as they are graded depending on the margin by which you exceeded the speed limit.

In Sicily, a favourite of the Italian traffic police, the Vigili Urbani, is to denote a section of motorway or a major state road as having a speed limit of thirty kilometres an hour. This is less than twenty miles per hour. It’s about the speed at which your granny can tow her tartan shopping trolley on wheels.

The Polizia, another police force, participate in this money-spinning activity too. They put up lots of notices saying the speed limit is seventy kph just before the go-slow section, then lie in wait with their radars, ticketing every vehicle that comes past. The Polizia are particularly good at camouflaging themselves inside luxuriantly leafy shrubbery. So stamp on the brakes every time you go past some oleanders in full bloom or a squat, spreading palm tree!

As a foreign driver of a rental car, you will be expected to fully understand all the road rules. Your headlights must be on at all times while driving on a motorway, even if it is high noon and the sun is blazing down at 40 degrees centigrade, you need two pairs of polariod sunglasses to be able to squint out of the windscreen without crying, and the car’s plastic handles are so hot they’re melting. The reason for this law is that the accident rate in Sweden fell by nearly 20% when they introduced this rule. The Italian governemnt wants to reduce the car crash rate, naturally, but failed to take note of the fact that Sweden only has two hours of daylight in the winter whereas Sicily is not so very far away from the tropics.

Another important signal you’ll need to understand is the headlight flashing. If you are waiting to turn left and a bus slows down and flashes its headlights at you, in England and the rest of northern Europe, this means “you can go, I’ll wait for you”. In Sicily it means “DO NOT GO! I AM ACCELERATING AND WILL MOW DOWN ANYTHING IN MY PATH!”

Motorbikes are also something you must know how to handle. Sicilians are generally in love with their motorbikes. With the kind of traffic one encounters in rush hour, the vast majority of men travel to and from work by motorbike every day, taking their wife on the back and leaving her at her place of work first. Unlike mainland Italians, it is unusual to see a Sicilian man on a Vespa, a scooter, or a farty little motorbike. These are for the teenage boys, who cannot afford anything else (including a crash helmet), and for the girls – that is, the ones who haven’t got boyfriends or husbands to give them a lift.

Sicilian men travel on serious motorbikes with large, fast engines, Honda or BMW being regarded as the elite. Be careful not to kill them! They are very prone to speeding and will overtake you to the left or the right, or even by driving over the roof of your car and down the bonnet.

Maybe that was an exaggeration. But they would love to buy a motorbike to do that with, if one existed. If you still believe that Concorde was the fastest motorised means of transport created by man, you clearly have never witnessed Sicilian men on their motorbikes trying to get home before a thunder storm begins.

I should explain that, when it rains in Sicily, it buckets down like a tropical monsoon. The sky is capable of depositing so much water in so little time that, not only do the poor motorcyclists get drenched through their waterproof jackets and trousers and even get their hair wet inside their helmet, but also the sewers cannot cope and half the roads in the city get flooded to a depth of up to three feet.

This means that the man on the motorcycle cannot get home to eat his pasta. He may have to travel four times his normal commuting distance to find usable roads.

Therefore, when the sky turns black and you start to get blinded by flashes of lightning and hear thunder which makes the car windows vibrate, think of the poor Sicilian men on their Honda bikes desperate to get home, drop all their sopping wet clothes into the shower tray, blow-dry their chest hair and finally eat their plate of spaghetti. Slow down, keep to the kerb, and give them room to pass. You won’t actually see them, as they will be about as fast as the speed of light, but believe me, they are there.

Finally, don’t fret about all the dents, scratches and components of the car missing when you take it back to the Car Rental office. They won’t charge you for that type of normal wear and tear.

So chill out, relax, and enjoy driving in Sicily!

I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF AUGUST, BUT LOOKING FORWARD TO READING ALL YOUR COMMENTS AS SOON AS I CAN GET ONLINE!

Walking through the doorway of a magnificent Baroque church, and finding youself in a gloomy cave with water dripping on your head, has to be one of life’s most interesting experiences.

The church is the Sanctuary of Santa Rosalia. It stands at the very top of Monte Pellegrino (Pilgrim’s Mountain), which overlooks the whole bay of Palermo.

Palermo used to have four patron saints, but they were all fired for incompetence when the city suffered a prolonged epidemic of the plague which they could not cure. They were replaced by Rosalia, who did cure it. The people around Palermo still affectionately call her La Santuzza, which means “the cute little saint”.

I suggested climbing up Monte Pellegrino on my first ever date with my husband. I fancied going up there because I like climbing mountains. What I did not know was that Sicilians only climb up Monte Pellegrino for one reason; to make a religious pilgrimage. Of course! There could be no other reason why an Italian would risk scuffing his shoes.

By the time hubby-to-be and I were ready to set off, word had spread around his entire extended family that I was not only beautiful, educated, spoke good Italian and even had blue eyes – all of which are highly commendable qualities in equal measure to Italians – but was also so very devout that I had insisted on making a pilgrimage to their very own saint. A large posse of relatives had assembled to see us off at the foot of the mountain. The Godmother, my Mother-in-law-to-be-if-only-I-knew-it, brought me a set of rosary beads as a gift.

The long climb up passed very pleasantly, since I was in a fabulous state of fitness at the time. It is a two hour hike if you go at it hell-for-leather. If I tried it now, I would need several days, and paramedics following me all the way, and would probably die anyway before I reached the top.

The terrain changes as you gain altitude. The plants are mainly prickly pear cactuses lower down and a Mediterranean variety of broom as you get nearer the peak. Artistically placed rocks lie about all over the place and make it look almost like a giant garden, almost too perfect to have been left simply to nature. Sometimes you see an emerald green lizard flashing in the sunlight as it darts across a rock in hot pursuit of some tasty-looking insect or other morsel on the run.

When you arrive at the very summit of the mountain, you are faced by a magnificent baroque facade. Then you walk through the door, into a cave.

Before you reach the main part of the church, or sanctuary as it is officially called, you walk through the craggy (and less drippy) entrance, which holds a statue of Rosalia. Here, people leave votive offerings thanking her for wishes she has granted. They are so munerous that the priest has constantly to remove them. She is festooned with little arms and little legs and miniature kidneys or other internal organs, specially crafted out of silver by people who have survived illnesses or injuries. She has thick sheafs of hand written thank-you letters wedged in her hands. She often has a motorbike crash helmet in one of her hands, left by yet another young man who has thankfully survived a near-fatal accident by praying to her despertely, while lying in the road waiting for an ambulance. She is also sometimes draped with jewellery and other valuables.

Some of the offerings are outstandingly previous and are placed in glass display cases. There are pearl and ruby necklaces, antique earrings and other jewelled objects, and there is a complete ship about three feet long made of solid gold and encrusted with precious gems.

Beyond this area, the main body of the church really is a very bat-cave-like place. Water drips constantly off the ceiling and is channeled by honreds of brass guttering tubes, suspended from the ceiling at all angles in a crazy meleé that looks like a modern art installation. Members of the congregation sit beneath them during mass, and periodically wipe themselves with hankies when an occasional stray drop splashes them.

The statue of Rosalia that takes pride of place in this mountain-top sanctuary follows the iconography created by Van Dyck, who happened to be in Palermo when plague broke out. Like everyone else in Palermo, was quarantined and banned from leaving. The statue is made of gold and ivory. Rosalia reclines, holding her own skull in her hand, and a pick axe for hacking her way through rocks in the cave.

Why the skull and the pick axe? I’ll tell you the story of Rosalia’s life in my next post. I ave only found very brief versions of events online but, in Palermo, the oral tradition is detailed and exciting and always, infallibly, told with deep affection for the Santuzza.

I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF THE MONTH. I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOUR COMMENTS AS SOON AS I CAN GET ONLINE!

I described, in my previous post, the sanctuary of Saint Rosalia, which is a baroque church facade with a drippy cave behind it. Now I’ll tell you about her amazing life.

Santa Rosalia painted by Van Dyck in Palermo, whilst the artist was desperately hoping NOT to catch the plague

Santa Rosalia was born in about 1130, when Sicily was ruled by the Normans. The king was Roger the Second. I’ve been inside his bedroom, by the way, in the Palazzo Dei Normanni in central Palermo. It is entirely lined with mosics of tigers, mountain lions, deer and the other animals he loved to hunt on Monte Pellegrino, all of them depicted in exquisitely colourful detail against a background of solid gold chunks.

King Roger’s bedroom. I’ve been in here but Santa Rosalia never entered. He was a Norman King, but notice how Islamic the floor looks.

Before Roger conquered Sicily, it had had been ruled by Arabs, and they civilised the place a lot. They built palaces and set up courts that were much more advanced and magnificent than anything the Europeans had ever seen. So, although the Normans were from France, and were Christians, they started to live like Arabs. They wore Arab clothes, ate Arab food, and ran their palaces like Arab palaces, with harems. The only thing about them that was not Arab was their religion, but they even modified their version of Catholicism to be more in line with Arabic traditions, by making the women cover their heads in public for example.

Rosalia grew up in Roger’s court, in the Palazzo Dei Normanni, and she must have been kept in the harem with all the other women. She was a daughter of Duke Sinibaldo of Quisquina delle Rose, who was a nephew of the king. Since she was living in the royal palace, that meant the king was in charge of her.

Palazzo de Normanni in Palermo, where Santa Roslia grew up.

One day King Roger went out hunting on Monte Pellegrino. He was with a group of men from the court, and among them was Count Baldwin, who was a guest at the palace. Roger was attacked by a wild lion and Prince Baldwin very bravely fought it off, and saved the king’s life.

A wicked lion

The king offered him anything he wanted as a reward, and Baldwin asked to have Rosalia as his wife. Rosalia had long blonde hair and blue eyes and was about twelve or thirteen years old.

Baldwin, like many other men at the time, was overwhelmed by her beauty. Rosalia was clearly not overwhelmed by his. The day after his proposal, she appeared in court with all her long blonde hair chopped off, and said she wanted to become a nun.

First she took refuge in the Convent of the Basilian nuns in Palermo. That’s a church now, by the way, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But even there she could get no peace. She was visited constantly by her parents and by Count Baldwin, trying to convince her to marry him. In the end she was so desperate that she just ran away completely and lived in a cave.

Nobody knew where she was at first, and they were all desperate. She lived for twelve years all alone on Mount Quisquina and then moved to Mount Pellegrino, and lived in a cave on the mountain till she died, aged about thirty. She lived her whole life praying and devoting herself to God.

The cult of Santa Rosalia is connected to a particular event that occurred in Palermo during an episode of plague, three centuries after she died all alone on the mountain top, sheltering in her cave.

On the seventh of May 1624 a trading vessel arrived from Tunis and docked in the port of the city. Previously the vessel had called at Trapani, where it had been impounded because the crew was suspected of spreading the plague. The alarm was quickly raised, but the Viceroy of Palermo, one Emanuele Filiberto (who was absolutely tiny, by the way), was talked into letting the ship unload. The ship’s captain, one Mahomet Cavalà, together with the harbourmaster, headed off to the Royal Palace to give the pint-size Viceroy numerous gifts – camels, lions, jewels and tanned hides – sent to him by the King of Tunis. Silly, greedy little Emanuele was one of the first to die of the plague.

As feared, plague started spreading through the city. It lasted the whole month of May and to the middle of June, with people dying in their thousands. The authorities blocked off the ports and the streets, banning anyone from leaving the city. Thus the people in Palermo at that time knew they may be living under a death sentence, in mass quarantine – the only means of protecting the rest of Sicily and Europe.

The artist Anthony Van Dyck happened to be visiting Palermo at that time, and he was trapped there too. He started working on a self portrait, perhaps intending something to survive him when he died.

I once visited the Palermo City Archives and saw the original books there, handwritten and bound in cream parchment and brown string, listing the names of all the people who died of the plague in those terrifying months. There was shelf after shelf of them. Following that was shelf after shelf of books listing the property left behind by people whose entire families had died; they had no heirs, so their property devolved to the state.

The city archive of Palermo

The citizens of Palermo prayed day and night to their four patron saints: Santa Cristina, Santa Ninfa, Santa Olivia and Santa Agata. They organised religious processions. The churches were packed with masses going on around the clock, begging God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary for help. Yet the plague killed more and more people.

According to contemporary records, Vincenzo Bonelli, a soap-maker residing in Via dei Pannieri who had lost his wife to the plague, went up on Monte Pellegrino for a walk and got lost in a storm. Some versions of the story say he liked hunting, and was hoping to catch some wild animal to eat.

Whatever his reason for being on Monte Pellegrino, he experienced a vision: Saint Rosalia appeared to him and guided him to the cave on top of the mountain, where he found some bones. These were her bones, she told him, and if they were taken to Palermo and given a Christian burial, the plague would stop.

Vincenzo went straight to the Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Giannettino Doria, taking the bones of Saint Rosalia with him. At first the cardinal sent this crazy soap-maker packing. The plague continued. The soap maker returned.

Offerings to Santa Rosalia, left in her grotto in thanks for prayers she has answered

Vincenzo refused to take no for an answer, pestering the cardinal again and again as the plague raged on through the city. Eventually he agreed to organise a procession and conduct a funeral. The bones were carried in solemn procession through the streets of the city, and finally given full funeral rites.

As Rosalia had promised, the plague immediately stopped spreading. She was instated as the new patron saint of Palermo and the four old saints were fired. They still stand, looking ashamed and redundant, around the four corners of the spectacular Quattro Canti crossroads in Palermo.

Meanwhile Rosalia is honoured in statues all over Palermo.

Statue of Santa Rosalia in her grotto on Monte Pellegrino, which follows teh iconography developed by van Dyck

The iconography of Saint Rosalia was created by van Dyck during his stay in Palermo, enforcibly prolonged by the quarantine sanctions imposed on the city. He painted over his unfinished self portrait with a magnificent depiction of Rosalia, and painted image after image of her, always dressed in a simple brown nun’s habit, holding a skull (her own, no less) and a pick axe, a symbol of the axe used by Vincenzo to enter into the cave where her bones had lain for three centuries.

I AM ON HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND TILL THE END OF THE MONTH, BUT I LOOK FORWARD TO READING YOUR COMMENTS AS SOON AS I CAN!

One day, when I went to collect my son from school, a rat eight inches long was spotted sprinting across the playground. Being Sicilian, the mothers knew how to do “hysterical” with great virtuosity. Yet they were calling the rat a “mouse.”

Let’s weigh this up. Mice are fairly harmless compared the rats. People even have them as pets. Mickey Mouse is a mouse, after all.

Rats, on the other hand, spread the plague. Is it really possible Italians think they are the same?

Know in Italy as Mickey Rat

Recently a friend of mine informed me her husband had just bought two ducks. When I arrived at her house and descended from her car, there were the two biggest, most monstrously overgrown to-foot-high geese I’ve ever seen, hell bent on eating my calves. She calls them ducks or geese interchangeably, you see.

Italians are similary confused about mules, horses and donkeys.

I remember when I was a litle kid, thinking there was some kind of inherent connection between rats and mice, and between cats and dogs. Before I found out the real nature of the difference between males and females, I vaguely imagined perhaps dogs were masculine and cats were feminine. In the distant haze of my memory of toddlerhood, I also believed  rats were masculine and mice were feminine. I certainly thought they had some special connection.

Italians still do, even when they’re adults.

Known in Sicily as Donald Goose

Italians in general, and Sicilians in particular, are equally pathetic when it comes to identifying foreigners.

They call all North Africans “Moroccan” even if they already know the individual they are talking about is from Tunisia or Egypt. They use the words “Japanese” and “Chinese” interchangeably, as if they were synonyms, and they apply them willy nilly to anyone from the far East.

I mentioned the Jews of Palermo in a recent post. Nowadays there is almost no trace of them. The street where the Synagogue used to stand was, by a later generation, called Meschita, which means Mosque. I suppose the confusion may have arisen from the fact that the synagogue formed one corner of a smallish rectangle whose other corners were: the Bah’lara Souk (the market opened by the moors of north Africa); the Martorana Church; and the Greek residential area. With a city as cosmopolitan as this is might be easy to get muddled up. On the other hand, it’s just like a Sicilian to think Jews and Muslims are basically the same thing.

The Star of Mohammed, or someone like that

Next time you meet a Sicilian, I dare you to call him Spanish. Let me know if he notices!

What do Sicilians drive when they’re not driving their Fiat Puntos?

This.

It’s called a Carro Siciliano (Sicilian carriage) and dates back to… oh, goodness knows how long ago. Each successive invading culture added some extra detail and decoration to it: at a glance you can easily estimate how many times Sicily has been invaded!

When my husband was a kid they were still widely used to sell fruit and veg in the street – it’s only in the last 20 years or so that they have been replaced with motorised ape vans. In the Palermo area, some owners of these vans paint them in the traditional way; a yellow background, covered with all the beautiful pictures of the medieval knights from the legends of Orlando and the knights of Charlemagne, and some religious images included.

Nowadays these carriages are only used in processsions, and the town and village festivals that celebrate the local patron saint. Among a cery small group of afficionados in Palermo, they are still used for racing. Yes, racing! There are about three highly skilled craftsmen in Palermo who know how to make them, and continue crafting these works of art. When they pass away, they will truly become museum pieces and be made no more.

You can trust an Italian to make chain mail look stylish.

I snapped these fine young fellows in a medieval town called Caccamo. They were attendants at a wedding, waiting to take the bride and groom to their reception in this carriage.

Did you notice that the nearest one has a falcon on his shoulder and a barn owl on his hand?

They had other birds of prey too, including this magnificent tawny owl. I adore owls and, since it was midday, this fellow was so sleepy that he let me stroke and even cuddle him.

I have always wanted an owl as a pet. If anyone can suggest how to convince my husband to authorise this, please submit your ideas in the comments box below.

The Chain Gang were very friendly. One of them let my nephew and me try on his heavy metal gloves.

These young men are highly skilled equestrians who participate in medieval style tournaments, jousting events and other competitions on horseback practised in Italy for over 1,000 years. They invited us to visit their training school later, where we saw the way they learn these skills and keep in shape. It takes remarkable physical stamina and a great deal of practise to achieve their standards.

Caccamo boasts a marvellous medieval castle which looks like this.

It is built not only upon a giant rock, but also around it. Notice the wall on the left is partially made of a cliff.

Inside the castle, you can see a large array of extremely painful-looking medieval weapons, and a few torture implements.

You can also see this deluxe Renaissance toilet. You would sit on it, do your worst, and then shout for a servile wench to take the pan out of the bottom and launch its contents out through some of the castle’s crenellations. Perhaps that would discourage invaders from climing up that steep rock to storm the castle.

One of the many carved coats of arms on the castle walls shows a Sicilian Trinacria and a severed horse’s head. I suppose the message here is “Don’t Mess with Sicily.”

The highlight of the castle for me, though, was the trapdoor down to the dungeon. There was a carved wooden altar opposite the long dining table, with an antique rug upon which visitors could kneel while praying. But the rug hid a trap door, operated by a lever the other side of the room.

The wicked count who owned this castle would lure his enemies into his home with the offer of lavish dinners, feigned friendship and terribly expensive imported wines; wait till they were inspired by the urge to pray; and then send them down the chute directly into his dungeon, which had no exit.

Then he would sit back down, thump his fist on the dining table and shout “More capons and a flagon of wine, wench!” as he listened to his victim howling about having two broken legs.

The wooden trap door is now replaced with glass. My nephew and I peered down and could see a few rocks, which he insisted were spattered with blood and brains. I think his imagination was helping him though, as it was VERY, VERY dark down there.

Caccamo has a town festival each year called La Castellana di Caccamo, with fabulous processions of people dressed as the aristocrats who lived in the castle in medieval times. They wear lavish costumes, some of them embroidered in thread of real gold.

There are several beautiful murals around the town which show typical scenes from the festival.

Each year, a pretty girl from Caccamo is chosen as the Castellata, “the girl of the castle” and given the keys of the castle for a day, as the “castle owner”. The whole town turns out to escort her from her house to the castle, where the Mayor presents her with the castle keys. People with medieval skills (jousting, falconry, firing cannons, tossing enemies into dungeons, slaying dragons, that type of thing) travel from various parts of Italy to take part in this festival each year.

On our way out of the castle, who should we bump into but the blushing bride and her 30-foot veil! In Sicily, the general rule is, why be subtle when you could be magnificent?

I have been back in Sicily for a month and I’ve only just got my head together well enough to write a new post.

After three months in the quiet English Cotswolds, I was suffering from extreme culture shock. I realised how much I love this place, and I also realised that having dozens of Sicilians around me all shouting different conversations at the same time made my brain short-circuit.

In the Cotswolds, going shopping means pootling down to into town and rubbing shoulders with all the oldies in green wellies and green anoraks (“They dress like quilted bogies” says my sister) as you browse around the antique shops, and then stop off for a relaxing tea and a cupcake before wandering into the supermarket. In Sicily, shopping consists of entering a demolition derby till your vehicle eventually comes to a halt, sometimes unplanned, then dashing into the nearest sequinned clothing shop to cool off under the air-conditioning before facing your pasta dash in the supermarket.

While away, I was interested to see that Sicily features regularly in the British press. It seems the journalists are still fascinated with this lovely place.

I read one article in The Telegraph claiming property prices have plummeted so heavily that ‘Cianciana is attracting English buyers looking for houses that cost little more than a railway season ticket in the Home Counties.’

Then I read another saying that the mayor of Salemi is selling off houses for 1 Euro each.

What? Really? Should I sell my current house and buy a street in Cianciana? Or the whole town of Salemi perhaps?

Of course, there is always an explanation, a catch if you want to call it that. Sicily is actually still part of Europe, still part of the world, and still in 2013. You cannot buy a house for 1 euro unless it is really truly only worth one euro.

The reason you can buy a house in Salemi for one euro is because the houses are derelict and have been so since the town was destroyed by an earthquake 40 years ago. So if you buy a house there, you have to practically rebuild it from scratch, and that will indeed cost you more than one euro. It will cost you approximately the price of a house! And at the end if it, you’ll have a house in an earthquake zone, in a town which may not offer running water or sewage facilities or gas. Do you even want gas pipes running under your house, in an earthquake zone? You do know when there is an earthquake your house insurance pays you exactly NOTHING, don’t you?

Oh, and have I mentioned that you even need planning permission to paint your front door or window frames a diferent colour in Sicily? If you’re going to restructure a house, oh deary me! You pay for any planning permission, you usually have to do it piecemeal, and the process often takes years rather than months. You see, Sicilians aren’t idiots. There are good reasons why it’s foreigners buying these 1 euro “houses”.

I had probably better tell you, whilst I’m being disappointing, that if you buy a house in Italy that had a mortgage on it organised by the previous owner, that debt becomes yours. So just imagine what a bummer it would be if you bought a derelict dump for one euro, then found out you had a mortgage of 200,000 Euros to pay off.

In Italy, always ALWAYS, the rule is CAVEAT EMPTOR.

Meanwhile in Cianciana, I found out there is basically one estate agent that is selling heaps of houses via a UK website called Rightmove. All the cheap ones, that the UK newspaper raved about, were a lot like this house, which I spotted for sale in Tindari a while back:

And they were described like this:

A CHARACTER HOUSE FULL OF ORIGINAL FEATURES: [by which they mean the antique electrical wiring and bucket-based plumbing I presume], well-lit and airy [thanks to the well-ventilated front door and lack of a roof] The property features a rustic- style facade, a lusciously planted green roof garden [growing out of the remains of the roof], with additional garden areas both inside and out, and an open-plan interior [it's just one room]. This character home would make an ideal pied-a-terre for those seeking a Mediterranean villa with character.

Why are there so many abandoned houses for sale in Cianciana? The area is so economically depressed that the original inhabitants had to move away to find work. Sicily is rather full of ghost towns like this. If you’re a foreigner looking for a holiday home, of course you don’t care if there is work to be had locally or not, you just care if there are sights to be sightseen, and around Cianciana, there are.

You do care, however, if you can get running water, electricity and a company to rebuilt your bargain wreck for less than the total value of your home in London. I’m not saying don’t buy a holiday home in Sicily, I’m just saying, CAVEAT EMPTOR.

If you want to know more about buying a house in Sicily, here’s a realistic and actually intelligent article about the pros and cons of buying property in Sicily. You can also ask me for advice if you like.

Sicily sits on the edges of two completely different weather systems. The edges overlap.

What this means in practise is that Sicily gets way more weather than other places.

This weekend, for example, Africa blew the Scirocco wind at us. This starts in the Sahara desert, builds up to 150 degrees centigrade (I never exaggerate) and picks up tonnes of red sand before departing from the shores of Libya, expressly for the purpose of tipping it all over any Sicilian cars that have just been washed.

It wasn’t even Saturday lunch time before Europe retaliated.

The cool Maestrale blew down from the north with all its might and blasted some of my laundry away. It was a stained dish cloth and a sock with a hole in it, but that’s not the point. Whilst the two winds battled it out head-to-head, my washing line became a tangled mass of sheets twisting themselves up in knots, with simply no idea which direction to flutter in. They were also red with embarrassment – or was it Sahara sand? I decided to bring them in before they took off, too.

At that point, the rain came.

This wasn’t African rain and it wasn’t European rain either. I’m sorry if you Indians didn’t get your MONSOON this year – it sneaked away and doused Sicily instead. We ended up with an almighty meteorological mess which left most of Palermo under water.

Click here for a slide show of pictures taken by waterlogged citizens.

http://www.palermotoday.it/foto/cronaca/palermo-sott-acqua-foto-dei-lettori/sottopasso-viale-lazio-foto-riccardo-campo.html

Go on. It’s worth it.

I didn’t take any photos at all, because I was barricaded inside my house, toiling alongside my dear hubby with a mop and a bucket trying to stem the tide of muddy water creeping across our garage towards our precious, floor-to-ceiling stack of winter fuel.

Our winter fuel is pellets, which would turn into solid sack-sized lumps of papier maché if they got damp. The reason we run our heating from a pellet-burning stove, instead of a gas boiler like normal people, is because here, in Weirdland, they don’t send gas to our houses. We have to buy it in bottles of the kind normal people only use when they go camping (if the kind of people who like to go camping actually are normal – I still haven’t made my mind up about that.)

Outside, the scrolling garage door was exactly ten centimeters deep in water. The only thing that stopped the water gushing in freely was the rubber seal along the bottom of the door, which pressed against the tiles on the floor. If you ever want to buy a strip of self adhesive rubber seal, I do suggest you order one from Sicily. It’s about the only thing they make really well here.

I know the external water height was ten centimetres because a helpful neighbour was standing right outside, giving us a running commentary.

He was wearing a pair of thigh-high green waders he had borrowed from one of the fishermen in the village. Even though this man is one of the more “traditional” sized Sicilians, one of the sort whose kitchen sink would look like a bidet to anyone of normal stature, that water was nowhere near his thighs. It was round his ankles (OK, maybe his calves).

So exactly why he wanted those waders, and even more amazing, how he had convinced that fisherman to lend them, remains a mystery. Yet I can confirm I saw them with my own eyes, when I dashed upstairs and peered down at him from the kitchen balcony during a quick investigation of the rain situation. He was keeping his upper half dry with a pink Tweetie Pie umbrella.

It was still raining like the Niagara Falls.

“Car approaching too fast!” warned Wader Neighbour, just seconds before a great slurry of water and mud sloshed at us under the door.

“Thoughtless fool” shouted Hubby in Sicilian after the reckless driver. “Go to That Country, you piece of donkey!” That Country is a euphemism for hell, a word Sicilians will never pronounce aloud either in Italian or Sicilian.

“They’re Horned Ones” shouted Wader Neighbour in agreement. Horned Ones is a euphemism for devils, another word Sicilians will never say aloud. He sounded angry. He probably shook his Tweetie Pie umbrella after them menacingly.

We mopped and we squeezed and we emptied buckets like maniacs. My back hurt. My mop handle was too short, I realized, and I was stooping.

“Why do they make the mop handles half size?” I muttered grumpily, mainly to myself.

“They’re for traditionally sized people,” said hubby, who was stooping over his mop worse than I was.

“Most people in Sicily are normal size,” I objected.

“Just keep mopping!!!!!!” he shouted. The stress was getting to him. “How’s the rain?” he called out to Wader Neighbour.

“It’s still raining like dogs and cats,” answered Wader Neighbour. I imagined him moving his Tweetie Pie umbrella to one side to check the sky. “That’s what you say in English isn’t it?”

“Kind of,” I said, slurping my mop to and fro against the garage door in a kind of hunchbacked frenzy. I felt like Quasimodo trying to transfer Lake Windermere into a bucket using a paper tissue.

Eventually Wader Neighbour gave us the very welcome news that the rain was abating. The mopping slowed down, and at long, round-shouldered last, I could go and have a cup of tea.

It was the best cup of tea I had had in about ten years, I reckon. Before I got to the end, though, I was telephoned by a friend whose son is in my little boy’s class.

“Have you heard about the school?” she asked. “Apparently some vandals broke in, smashed the windows, destroyed the furniture and caused so much damage that the school is closed until they can repair it. We have to home school the kids until it reopens.”

Home schooling? Oh dear God.

I tell you, it never rains but it pours.

Have you ever wondered how you’d cope if you were stranded in the wilderness with nothing useful at all? Tom Hanks in “Castaway” lived on a desert island for several years, using an ice-skate as a multi-purpose cutting tool, part of a heinously tasteless party dress as a fishing net, and a football with a face painted on as a friend.

Tom Hanks, looking rather hirsute as a castaway: apparently ice skates don’t make ideal hairdresssing implements

Sometimes I randomly select three absurd items and fantasise about how I could adapt them for survival. This is just daydreaming to pass the time during insufferably boring situations, such as having my hair dyed the colour that it already is. (OK, I have a few white strands and don’t feel ready to grow old gracefully just yet.)

Sicilians must spend their every waking hour engaged in this kind of fantasy. I know this not only because they are such bad drivers that their minds must, clearly, be somewhere else completely, but also because I keep seeing them improvise stuff that the rest of us could never dream of.

Sicilians call this l’arte dell’arrangiarsi. This literally means “the art of arranging yourself,” but if you want to know what it really means, I’ll have to give you examples.

Once, my father-in-law was in a shop when a woman came in asking for a gazebo. Sicilians planning to spend their summer holiday on the beach put these up so they can eat their lunch in the shade and prevent their babies from getting skin cancer.

An Italian gazebo, available to order: click on the photo to buy it online

“They’ve all sold out, I’m afraid,” this lady was told.

“Well in that case, give me seven packets of black bin liners, all those garden canes in that bin over there, and three rolls of sticky tape,” she answered without hesitation. ”I’ll arrange myself.”

A Sicilian gazebo, ready to be erected: Buy it in any supermarket

Later that day, Daddy-in-law spotted a grandiose, black, plasticky erection on the beach. It was made out of an uncountable number of black bin liners, sticky tape and… yes indeed, the whole thing was supported by a framework of interlinked garden canes. It was… drumroll….. a gazebo!

“Was it fairly well made?” I asked him, incredulous.

“All the shop-bought ones were blowing away, and I saw the canvas tearing off a few of them because the Scirocco was blowing strongly,” he answered, “but her one looked rock solid. She was under it with about twelve children and fourteen other adults. They were having pasta al forno.”

That lady definitely knew how to “arrange herself.”

I think she was rather a novice compared to my brother-in-law, though. One day, we went with about twenty members of Hubby’s family into a beautiful forest up in the mountains, to have a barbecue. There is a clearing with wooden picnic tables and stone-built barbecues for this very purpose, but sadly everyone else in Palermo seemed to have had the same idea as us, for it was packed.

“Oh dear. We’ll never find three tables close together,” commented The Godmother, my mother-in-law, as she staggered up a dusty path with about seven cool-bags full of raw sausages, steaks, dead chickens, a turkey, a fleet of octopi and a couple of buffaloes.

“You’re right,” I agreed, following her with a bag containing half a field of artichokes and about three trees worth of lemons on my back.

Whilst we walked along, my brother-in-law spotted a length of blue rope lying on the ground, and like a good, nature-repecting citizen he picked it up, no doubt to put it in the bin when we found one. He picked up a few fallen branches as well. Then he gathered more rope. All this whilst also carrying his little boy, and folding chair, and a vast bag of fish, prawns and a few million sea urchins.

When we reached an empty space with one picnic table in it, he erected this sideboard buffet table in about two minutes:

My brother-in-law, the master cabinetmaker

We used it to set out all the cooked food, and he even lay down on it afterwards as a hammock.

Even he was unambitious compared to the people who built themselves a holiday home on my local beach, though. It was there all summer, and everyone in the village took to calling it “Buckingham Palace” after a while.

They had a gazebo-and-tent complex, all interlinked. It included a dining room with their wooden dining table from home, and their dresser, complete with ketchup and a range of other condiments in it as well as all the family china. There were no less than three barbecues for cooking, two for meat and veg and one upon which they propped the coffee pot and saucepans of milk for the children.

Next to this was the children’s bedroom area, with curtains for privacy, and beside this they had a chemical toilet with an “occupied” sign for when they did not want to be disturbed.

Of course, people who holiday in five-star accomodation don’t always want to bathe in the sea, sometimes they want their own private pool. The (paddling) pool was near the edge of the sea to maximise on the glamorous view. They had dug up some of the succulentplants that naturally grow out of the sand on some Sicilian beaches and re-planted them around the pool, to give it that touch of class and exclusivity.

The thing I found most impressive of all was the way they created their own pizza oven in a hole that happened to have occured naturally in one of the cliffs to one side of the beach. They gathered driftwood, dried it in the sun, then lit a fire in the back of their “pizza oven” and slotted their pizzas in. I think they were even beaking fresh bread each morning in there. They were certainly catching fish each day and cooking that up nicely.

Of course, an arrangement as grandiose as this could not possibly have just one storey. Oh no, they had an upstairs, accesible via the staircase from the carpark to the beach. This was usually their delivery lorry. It opened amply on one side for them to get the bread out, but it was, for the duration of their summer vacation, the master bedroom area, stocked with mattresses, sheets and even a nightlight and music centre connected to the car battery.

One day I arrived on the beach very early and I spotted the mistress of The Buckingham Palace Summer Residence - Her Majesty, so to speak - having a shampoo in a little angle of sea sheltered by a rocky outcrop.

“Can you give me the washing up liquid?” she shouted out to her husband, “I’ve run out of shampoo!”

Even with toiletries, she knew how to arrange herself.

The Royal Family stayed on our village beach for most of the summer. I think the only reason the police didn’t clear them away sooner was because, frankly, their set-up was so darned impressive that the cops were actually hoping to book a room in it for a weekend break themslves.

A beach residence improvised by Sicilians

Maiolica is Italian tin-glazed pottery made in dazzling colours. New methods for making varied colours of glazes were initially brought to Sicily by the Arabs of North Africa in medieval times, and the art of making Maiolica then spread from Sicily throughout Italy during the Renaissance.

Nowadays the art has shrunk back down again and Sicily is by far the most vibrant and active centre for Maiolica or Majolica production. It is made with a passion in towns throughout Sicily, but some stand out, such as Santo Stefano di Camastro and Caltagirone. There are many different styles, distinguished by their colour-schemes, the type of objects made and the motifs painted on the pottery.

I went to Taormina recently and was introduced to a particular shop (OK, dragged there through the streets) by a friend who told me I absolutely MUST see this particular ceramics shop. I wasn’t complaining. I am not sure which of the two of us is more potty about these magnificent pots.

Luckily I had safely installed hubby and our son with another friend in a coffee shop nearby, which meant I had the chance to look around and make a small sneaky purchase without being harassed. Hubby is still enforcing The Great Economy Drive.

This is the shop owner holding a Moorish head which my friend bought. Her husband doesn’t seem to be on an economy drive at all at the moment. Lucky her.

The very nice lady in the shop gave me permission to photograph every plate, pot, vase, sculpture and Moorish head in the entire place. Which I duly did.

She told me they stock work by about a hundred different artists – when you look along a row of Moorish heads on a shelf, for example, it is clear in an instant that they are made in radically differing styles. These were the ones I fell in love with at first sight.

The shop contained every type of object you could possibly think of making out of ceramics. Here is a pedestal sink and a selection of table tops in various sizes. The pine cones in various colours around the sink are traditionally used to top gateposts, as are the Moorish heads.

I would love to know who or what that creature below on the right represents. He is vaguely like a Sphinx, but he looks so upset, poor little thing. The lady’s head below him, with three legs and no arms, is called a Trinacria and is the symbol of Sicily. It derives from the triangular shape of Sicily.

From the shop doorway, we could see this Moorish head in a turban, mounted high on a gatepost with a plant growing in it, as they are supposed to be.

Moorish heads, also called Saracen heads, are typical of Caltagirone, which is near Taormina and which was the first centre of majolica production established by the North Africans in Sicily. The shop stocked them in all sizes, ranging from larger than a real human head down to as small as an egg cup.

Majolica ceramics are so much a part of the culture in Sicily that you see shop signs and walls like this everywhere. I photographed this example in Taormina.

I also snapped this majolica satellite dish in Taormina. Aren’t these Sicilians inventive?

The shop I photographed for this post is called Il Girasole and it has its own website with hundreds of photographs. The artists they work with also make anything you want, to order. You can have a dinner service made with your name or portrait all over it, you could get a complete set of tiles with a landscape on them to decorate your kitchen. The more you look at this wonderful art, the more you realize your house needs completely redecorating!

They ship all over the world and, if you bear in mind these items are all hand made, one-off pieces of art, their prices are extremely modest. So modest, I may even have a chance of convincing hubby to let me buy just one more thing!