50 years ago ~ notes from Palermo ~ August, 1971

After booking passage on the ship from Naples, I spotted the bay of Palermo, the Conca d’Oro. My family was supposed to be meeting me at the dock. I felt like Vasco da Gama, or Amerigo Vespucci, in reverse.

My grand aunt and uncle were there with their family, welcoming this young, gawky Americano in jeans, carrying a back pack. I must have been a sight.

They spoke very little English, the younger ones more conversant than the elders. I spoke a smattering of Italian. But we were family! We can do this!

In fact, learning Italian by immersion works. I’m not saying it worked on me then, but I was thrust into a culture and a language and I had to find oxygen. I had to speak Italian.

Stuck on the Island - My Sicilian Obsession

The ferry is closed, rough waters in the Strait of Messina. Airplanes cannot fly in and out of Catania airport, too much ash from Etna. And the long anticipated bridge has yet to be built. I’m stuck on the island.

I’ve been home two weeks now and am going away again, soon. But I am obsessed with Sicily. I fear I need an intervention.

Palermo ~ The Persistence of Memory

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’m awake. Done with sleep. My rattled skeleton is still trying to pull itself together. Coughing is painful at times. And that darn left leg is still swollen. But all I can think about is Palermo.

I’m not necessarily an urban lover. When I go to Italy I usually avoid cities. Yes, I still manage to get in and out of Rome and Milan when a flight calls for me to be there. But I can’t wait to get out into the country, with the vines and the wind and the silence. Palermo, that’s a different story.

Sicily 2013: Palermo Street Scenes

Parental Advisory: Some of these images might make you hungry

We're far from the dog days of summer but that was no consolation
for this poor little  abandoned dog near the train station

I’m deep in the heart of Sicily now and the Wi-Fi is irregular. I thought to put this post up, shots of street scene in Palermo on the one day I was there, which was the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. Palermo is an epicenter for street food and many of the vendors have disappeared into history. Two that remain are Zio Toto and Giochinno Campanella, near the al Capo neighborhood, where there is also a famous outdoor market. Feast your eyes on the food and the scenes. It was a hot day in Palermo.

Sicily 2013: Palermo "Full Immersion"

Il Genio di Palermo

If you are reading this then you know I made it to Sicily from France. From the dark, rainy cold of Bordeaux to the sunny, warmth of Sicily. An immersion of sorts, starting in Palermo.

The plan was to meet up with Manuela Laiacona, native Palermitan and a wine journalist and editor at Cronachedigusto.it and the girlfriend of my Calabrese friend Giovanni Gagliardi. Manuela agreed to meet up and show me her Palermo. Manuela is my spirit guide incarnate. I really feel she has taken a life form to usher me though this time and place and I am very grateful for this. Her companion Giovanni is a wonderful fellow - this is all because of the internet and the blog- who cares about monetizing your blog when you can have the possibility to make deep and meaningful friendships?

Palermo: One last stroll before leaping

La Vucciria and beyond...

I love the legend about the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles, who at the age of 60 leapt into the abyss of Etna. In the summer of '71, who knew a mere 40 years later one would find themselves standing on a similar precipice? A year later at the base of Mt. Shasta in Northern California in a Zen Monastery a retired restaurateur would repeat his favorite Zen koan, “Nothing above, nothing below, so I leap off.” Time is no longer linear, but stitched together perfectly for this traveler.

Palermo: It’s now or never

“Se Non Ora, Quando?”

I was young, but there were younger. And now they like to think they run things in Palermo and Sicily. And sure, they should know better in places like Padova and Modena. Italians should be running a fairly smooth country by now. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Italy is stuck. A generation of endless childhood, contrived by a previous generation of folks who ran things expecting entitlements. Like retirement money and health care and sex with multiple partners, 20-30- 40 years younger. Italy is mired. How, when the country is in a mess like it is, can things still happen and people still take the month of August off?

Palermo Underground

Another sleepless afternoon in Palermo. Tossing, the noise from outside on the Via Roma. The smoke, the heat, the life outside waiting, waiting for me to walk among the living and the dead. All of Palermo is throbbing to the heartbeat of a distant Etna. I can feel the heat, searing my youth with its eternal flame. I must get out of this room.

Again, slipping out. Taking the stairs down the four floors so as not to disturb any family with the sound of the ancient elevator. The man guarding the entrance to the family compound on Via Roma sleeps in his chair by the gate.

Palermo: Baptism, Confirmation and Shotgun Wedding

The first Sicilian wines I had in Palermo were in restaurants. I have memories of being in a place with family and they brought a bottle of Corvo Rosso. My first taste of nerello. It was a wine from the 1960’s. At one point later in time in the 1990’s I had a bottle of the 1964. It was luscious. Corvo, luscious? You raise an eyebrow? Well, let me tell you in those days, most Sicilian wine was naturally delicious. Sun kissed, ripe and ready.

I had just turned 20, and was immersed in Sicily ala natural. Baptism, confirmation and shotgun wedding all at once.

Later on in the 1990's I would find a bottle of 1971 Gattopardo rosso in an enoteca on the Adriatic. It was as if 1971 was still trailing me, making sure I stayed on course, initiated in that gestation period in August, in Palermo, in 1971.

Yes, yes, yes. I wasn’t going to stray. My Sicilian godfather wouldn’t let me. I would be a good soldier for the wines from Sicily. And when they tasted like those early wines, it set my inner sensibilities in a way that cause me to keep looking for them today.

The Midwives of Palermo

in search of Marsa Allah

“Where did you go? We were worried about you!” My Aunt Vitina thought something had happened to me out in the streets of Palermo. And indeed it had. I witnessed my birth in an ancient bodega, filled with Marsala and surrounded by the midwives of Palermo. I was too invigorated to even speak; she must have seen the look on my face. “Thank God you are alright, if anything had ever happened to you, I don’t know what I would tell Alfonso and Giulia.”

I would slip out again and again. And for the next moments, months, years even, I would go back into that delivery room in the quiet little alley, filtered with shade and sunlight, and sit there, listening to the barrels tell me their history.

Palermo: The Invisible Prints

Love in the time of Catarratto

The front has been perched above the city for days now. Hot, humid, hovering. Stalled. All the while I have been locked in the time machine, trapped in another place and era, Palermo in 1971. And while I go back there to retrieve an image or a memory, this time I am walking the streets in August, alone, invisible, camera in hand. What will I bring back this time?

Pictures, poetry, imprints from a time that seemingly was just yesterday. As time will have it, it was nearly half a century ago, mind boggling to grasp something like that. But the tunnel of life shreds time as the wind blows hot and steady across the Sicilian plains.

Palermo and the Invisible Man

Passing through a cloud of unknowing

Notes from a journal, not about my grandfather, but my great grandfather. In Palermo. He died before I ever knew about him. But one day many years ago, in the family home on Via Roma in old Palermo I was introduced to him in a vision. It was August and all of Sicily was an inferno. The road outside my window was filled with noise and smoky little Vespas filling the air with all manner of intrusions. I was feeling queasy and disoriented. An omelet I had eaten near Alcamo hadn't set well with me. That, and the sizzling heat. My aunt would bring me water with anisette in it, cloudy, cool, refreshing, soothing. But my stomach was a mini Etna.

" If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change. "

My grandfather Alfonso and Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa were the same age and from the same town. Both families frequented certain circles of Sicilian society. But when my grandfather was fifteen, he traveled to Texas and never moved back to Sicily.

I’ve often wondered why he never looked back. The family business was doing very well. I wonder if his father advised him to go to America in search of wider horizons. Perhaps my great-grandfather saw that Italy wouldn’t fit in my grandfather’s future.

When my father and his sister were born in Dallas, it wasn’t too much later that the family moved to Los Angeles. My sisters and I were born in Southern California and they still live there, as does most of my father’s family. Most of my family in California have very good business and are in good shape for the future.

Somehow, thirty years ago, I decided to move back to Texas, one step closer to the Italian reality that my grandfather left 100 years ago. And while I doubt I’ll complete my grandfather’s circle and return to Italy permanently, I somehow am attached to Italy more than my grandfather. All of this through a period of change, revolutionary change. It seems the last 100 years has been one giant change machine. And it looks like more is on the way.

I look at the life we hold up and want to continue, but know it was never sustainable. The large fast cars and even larger houses, the piles of money needed to warm a 9,000 square foot home that houses two, maybe three people, those days are coming to a close. Maybe not in two or three years, but in the next 50, most likely that will all be a memory of a time when folks took more than they needed.

If you’ve gotten this far, if you’re not a scanner of the first paragraph, then you’ll probably want me to get to the point.

Just like the book, “The Leopard", by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, which chronicled the last days of an era that had outlived its purpose, so now we are living in a time when in order for us to keep an equilibrium in our lives we must be agents for change, embracing it and moving with it. I am ready for this. Looking forward to it. This is our destiny and it is an electrifying time.

Further, with Italy and Italian wines, I feel purpose-bound to be a transmitter of that energy that will unbound us, to express the thoughts and necessities that those of us involved in Italian wine and culture must be cognizant of. I’m aware of the game. A line from The Leopard, “Forgive me for saying say, Colonel, but don’t you think all that hand-kissing, cap-doffing, and complimenting went a little too far?”, conveys a bit of the root problem, in places like Montalcino, Verona and Nuova York.

And because of the comfort zone that some folks in the Italian wine business have arrogated, I feel Italy is unwilling to go forward in these times. Some of it from hubris and some from lack of hope. But the numbers don’t lie. If Italy does not get beyond personal self-gain and self-inflicted drama, the market will leave them behind. There is too much energy coming from places like Argentina and Australia and California, wines and people who will tap into their spirit of place and send creations that will commend our new era.

Italy can do this, with the help of the many who can constantly recalibrate the momentum forward into the future, not stagnating along some tributary held hostage by narcissism.

“The Leopard” or “Il Gattopardo” is, for me, one of the greatest books ever written. Maybe because it taps into a level inside me that is molecular. DiLampedusa’s Sicily, from outward appearances, is gone. Without regards to the broken shards that are strewn all about, the steady flow of the molten dreg pushes us ever so steadily towards transformation.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy