Footprints of the Past

As I sit writing this blog, the rain trickles down my office window and drums on the roof over my head, great puddles cover my driveway and a small river runs down the edge of my road. It is a very wet day in Nottingham and across much of England – and not unexpected. There are flood alerts across the whole country and the weather forecast has been telling us for days that this wet English summer will continue at least for the foreseeable future.

The view from my office on a
very wet Friday

How very different from last week! Only one week ago – last Friday afternoon at this time - Pat and I were wandering around the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Temperatures were in the mid to upper thirties and the brilliant Mediterranean sun burnt down on us. In truth we had spent the day (as we had every other day last week) seeking shade and cold drinks in wayside cafes or churches or narrow shady streets! Our week in Sicily was filled with wall to wall sunshine  - a wonderful change from the wet UK! Pat firmly believes that a bit of sunshine is the solution to all life’s aches and pains and most if not all of the world’s problems – she makes a convincing case for global warming!  It was rather too hot for me, but I have to say, very pleasant!

The Valley of the Temples, Agrigento

We loved our trip to the sun. To be fair, we have visited Italy on many occasions and perhaps of all countries love it the most – the lifestyle, the heritage, the food, the music, the people. I could happily sit and listen to an Italian speak whilst understanding not a word – the rhythm, the cadence and the musical rise and fall of the speech is a thing of beauty.  But Sicily was a new venture.

I can remember many years ago at school looking at maps and hearing Sicily described as the football at the end of the toe of Italy but knew absolutely nothing about it. The island tends to look quite small when placed at the side of the Italian mainland – but it is in fact a large island and so to see it involves much travelling. We bobbed about all over the island packing as much into every day as was possible: Palermo, Agrigento, Taormina, Syracuse..... and what seemed a million other places.....the great cathedral of Monreale with its world famous medieval mosaics, the Valley of the Temples, Greek and Roman amphitheatres, the wonderfully preserved Roman Villa at Piazza Armerina......and so it goes on. Our hotel balcony looked out onto the brooding and smouldering Mount Etna, we travelled through the middle of the island with its lush and fertile rolling countryside and dotted with tiny villages which looked as if they had changed little for hundreds of years. And late each afternoon we struggled back to our hotel to grab an hour or so by the pool in the late afternoon or early evening sun!

A typical Sicilian hill top town

Sicily, we learned, has been a coveted place for thousands of years and undergone waves of invaders – ancient Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish and others – and each left their marks on the island – in its architecture, its culture, its place names, its food and the like. The two hotels that we stayed in reflected the mixed heritage of the island – one in Agrigento a city whose name is a mixture of Greek, Latin and Arabic and the other in Giardini Naxos – a Greek name if ever there was one! Sicily has always been a meeting point and melting pot of cultures – east to west across the Mediterranean and north to south from Europe to North Africa. A wonderful place full of history and tradition.

Restoring the wonderful Roman
mosaics at    Piazza Armerina 

Whenever I go on holiday – and wherever I go, be it a day trip to the seaside or a more exotic trip to some foreign shore I am always intrigued as I wonder about all the people who have, in the past and are at the present, carrying on their lives in these places just as I do here in Nottingham. A useless bit of idle thought, of course,  but I still find it fascinating that people have been carrying on their lives with their hopes and fears, their dreams and ambitions, their great joys and great sadnesses, each day fulfilling their daily grind of work and play, each day being part of a family, having friends and neighbours, bringing up children, losing loved ones and all the other everyday bits of ordinary life that all people, no matter who they are and where they live, go through and experience  every day.  And all quite oblivious of  me and my little life and, similarly, me to them. As we travelled through Sicily I reflected on the millions of people who had been part of the island’s history and who had made it what it is today – each in their own way leaving their impression. As  we looked in awe at the mosaics in Monreale Cathedral, or as we drove through some ancient and timeless Sicilian village deep in the countryside or as we looked down on the Roman mosaics or the Greek amphitheatres I wondered to myself about the millions of people in the past and the present for whom this was their world.  As always it reminded me of how very interdependent we all are and how all human society is a complex web of mankind’s dreams, drives, ambitions, skills, beliefs, hopes, fears, traditions and the rest. As John Donne famously argued in his “Meditation”: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee”.

The Corleone connection!

Of course, when one today talks of Sicily it is not long before the word “mafia” comes into the conversation. Indeed, as we travelled around one could not ignore it. I commented to Pat that the wonderful 1970’s trilogy of “The Godfather” films must have made a very significant contribution to the island’s development and economy. Wherever we seemed to go it was not long before we heard the strains of the theme music from those films wafting down streets. At each tourist venue and in each town and village one would soon spot souvenirs and memorabilia celebrating “The Godfather”, the face of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone glaring down from T shirts, tea towels, drinking mugs and the rest. So often the immortal words from the film crept into my mind and mouth “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse” – more than once we heard other tourists talking about waking up in bed at the side of a horse’s head! As we drove to Palermo we passed the signpost to the village of Corleone, home of the fictional mafia don and the radio played the Godfather theme and it seemed as if for a few minutes a sense of foreboding crept over the coach as we half expected men with guns to stride into the middle of the road and ask us to stop and show respect for the Don!

Sicily's rolling, lush and fertile
landscape filled with corn fields -
the "bread basket of Rome" it was
known as two thousand years ago.

Etna's brooding presence from
our balcony

The ancient Greeks and Romans who populated the island two millennia ago could, surely, never have conceived that in time a Hollywood film would have such an impact on the island and be such a major element in its economy –  an impact perhaps almost as great as theirs – and certainly one of the defining  features of the island. I wondered what some ancient Roman general and his lady would have made of it as they sat in their mosaic decorated villa at  Piazza Armerina if they had known that two thousand years on their home  would be surrounded by souvenir filled tents and workshops each selling children’s mosaic making kits, plastic Roman soldiers (often made in China!), guide books about their home or beach and tea towels showing maps of Sicily and the like. And from all of these tents would peer the face of Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone – the face of Sicily and yet a man who never actually existed except on the pages of a book or on Hollywood celluloid!  It almost makes Donne’s poem even more resonant today when fictional characters can be part of and influence the lives of ordinary people and even nations!

The stunning mosaics of
Monreale

And yet is it so surprising? – the mafia are as much part of Sicily’s heritage and past as any other aspect. Indeed they are a product of it. Its seeds were planted in the upheaval of Sicily's transition out of feudalism and its later annexation by mainland Italy.  Under feudalism, the nobility owned most of the land and enforced law and order through their private armies but by the early nineteenth century land was steadily sold off to private citizens.  After Italy annexed Sicily in 1860 there was a huge boom in landowners: from 2,000 in 1812 to 20,000 by 1861.The nobles also released their private armies to let the state take over the task of law enforcement. However, with less than 350 policemen for the entire island. Some towns did not have any permanent police force leaving criminals to operate with impunity. With more property owners came more disputes that needed settling, contracts that needed enforcing, and properties that needed protecting. Because the authorities were undermanned and unreliable, property new landowners turned to quasi-legal arbitrators and protectors. These “protectors” would eventually organize themselves into the first Mafia clans.

The Greek amphitheatre at Taormina
being made ready for a modern
day pop concert!

All this, of course, is a long way from a Hollywood blockbuster – but it is the root from which it came – and re-affirms, perhaps, the interdependence of time and space – in Sicily’s and indeed all our pasts and futures. The mafia grew out of the situation as was – dependent and interdependent – and Don Corleone’s story merely built upon this. As Donne reminded us we are not islands!

And within all this there is another dimension that I pondered as we travelled around. I read, as we journeyed, Colin Thubron’s wonderful travel book “To a Mountain in  Tibet” – the tale of Thubron’s very personal “pilgrimage” to the holy Mount Kailas the spiritual home of the world’s Hindus and Buddhists – about one fifth of the world’s population. Thubron discusses the  underlying beliefs of these religious groups. A key theme running through much Buddhist philosophy and belief is the transitory nature of life and being. Buddha taught that all life and being is impermanent and largely an illusion and in a strange way all the invaders and settlers who came to and moulded Sicily’s culture and landscape might prove that. At the time, like us, they, and their way of life was real and supreme.........and yet, and yet, it passed and has gone forever so that today it is difficult for us to imaging their lives and dreams. People and the world “moved on”.  Only the stones remain as memories and reminders of their lives and their passing. We see in Sicily and the rest of the world physical manifestations of what was the past........a great cathedral here, a roman amphitheatre there, a “t shirt” celebrating some fictional character who in turn reflects a way of life that is part of the islands very real history but now gone forever.

And so back each night to the pool!

Nothing is permanent, nothing is forever. We are all transitory.......but, as the cathedrals and amphitheatres show, as the landscape evolves, as language is formed and changes reflecting the users and their interests and worlds, as traditions and diet and indeed culture become intermixed and develop into something quite new  then we all leave a small footprint..............as John Donne reminded us, we are not islands.