The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
September 22, 2010
In the Monti Madonie region of Sicily
WE were standing in the piazza of the Italian town of Castelbuono waiting for the remains of Jesus’ grandmother. It was hot. It was dark. It was crowded. For the past 45 minutes, my boyfriend, Chris, and I had stood watching as processions of hooded monks carrying candles and banners painted with the images of saints come down the steps of the town’s 15th-century castle. Finally after a deafening burst of fireworks, the soup-tureen-shaped reliquary began to descend the stairs, carried by a group of local men in dark suits and priests dressed in gold.
As the reliquary drew closer, I peered into the opening cut into its front, imagining I’d see a piece of the saint’s femur, a shard of her tibia. What were the odds that any significant part of the woman believed to be the mother of Mary would turn up in a small Sicilian town?
What I saw instead was a skull. Gray, with maybe a few teeth.
St. Anna’s head.
Parading a saint’s skull through the streets is the sort of centuries-old ritual that’s a regular occurrence in the Monti Madonie, the hilly landscape that careens from the coast above Cefalù inland to the edge of the Catania-Palermo highway. The Feast of St. Anna takes place in July, but had it been May, we would have seen the statues of 35 saints carried through the nearby town of Gangi. In April, we could have participated in the Feast of the Fritter in Isnello, or the Feast of the Mules (which involves no actual mule-eating). In this rural region, where the towns sit fortress-like atop craggy mountains, rituals persist more than in almost any other part of Italy.
It’s this tie to custom that makes the Monti Madonie especially appealing to travelers who seek a glimpse of a traditional (and often disappearing) way of life. A glimpse that could include a saint’s not very well-preserved head.
One of the biggest promoters of this kind of cultural tourism is Carmelina Ricciardello, a Sicilian-born Australian who offers personalized visits with local artisans and books vacation rentals in her hometown of Sant’Ambrogio (host of the Feast of Fried Cardoons). The apartment she arranged for us was definitely rustic: the stove was gas-bottle-fueled, and the paint on the ceiling was starting to peel. But the view of the Mediterranean off the narrow balcony more than made up for it.
Carmelina is serious about showing visitors the local customs, and on our first morning in town, she insisted we watch a goatherd named Giulio make fresh goat milk ricotta under a tree. Well, a tree and a corrugated metal roof; the rest was open air and goats. Giulio spoke no English, which did not prevent him from talking to us continuously — about politics, nightclubbing, goats — while he cooked the ricotta in a black caldron over a wood fire. Giulio shaped it in a plastic basket, squeezing out the excess water with his fist. Then he spooned out a couple of big bowls of creamy ricotta, which we ate under the tree, washed down with something brown and slightly poisonous-tasting that Giulio swore was wine.
That afternoon, Carmelina offered to take us to meet another Giulio, this one a manna harvester.
“Manna?” Chris asked her.
“It’s a laxativo. Very delicious.”
This is the same manna the biblical Israelites are supposed to have found scattered on the ground while roaming the desert. In Italy, it’s harvested from the sap of ash trees, and Giulio’s stone farmhouse is surrounded by hundreds of these trees, oozing strings of white syrup into little cups made from prickly pear leaves. Giulio showed us the flat wooden boxes where he dries the strings of manna in the sun until they resemble pieces of macaroni. Under a bamboo awning we sampled a few pieces; they were sweet and a little waxy. Giulio then served us a bar of manna chocolate followed by a manna liquor called Man-Hu, which had enough of a medicinal taste to remind me that I was drinking a laxative.
The next day, Carmelina sent us to the medieval town of Gangi to meet a falconer named Domenico Vazzana. In his falconry attire — cream-colored trousers, brown suede riding boots, leather vest — Domenico looked extremely dashing. It didn’t hurt that he was also sitting astride a white stallion with a large bird of prey on his arm.
Falconry was introduced to Sicily in the 13th century by Frederick II, and Domenico still communicates with his hunting birds the way noblemen did then, in Arabic. With his teeth, Domenico untied the leather hood that covered the bird’s head, then sent the falcon flying over the fields with a low-throated command. The bird came back empty-beaked and eventually Domenico had to abandon the hunt to go make his 4-year-old daughter a sandwich.
The next day, we headed inland, driving the curvy roads that wind through the scrubby landscape between the villages, an area that was declared a regional park in 1989. For most of the Middle Ages, the Monti Madonie belonged to the Ventimiglia family, which crowded its hilltop towns with castles and churches. We stopped at two of the prettiest towns: Petralia Soprana, where we ate big slices of sfuogghiu, cake made with ricotta, chocolate and cinnamon (a star player during the Feast of Pastry); and Petralia Sottana, where we stumbled across a spontaneous festa — a half-dozen casually dressed Sicilians carrying a banner of the Virgin, and an assortment of shopping bags from high-end boutiques — through the streets.
We ended at Monaco di Mezzo, an agriturismo that is part working farm, part inn. Its stone buildings sit in a fold of hill with nothing around them except views. Next to its swimming pool filled with cannon-balling Italian families is a row of stone-walled apartments and a wood-beamed restaurant, where a wild boar skin was drying on the terrace. Dinner that night was a locavore’s fantasy — caponata from the inn’s garden, olive oil from the orchard behind the horse stables, ricotta from sheep whose bells we could hear clanging just beyond the next hill, and veal raised on Monaco di Mezzo’s local ranch.
The next morning, we drove to the old town of Gangivecchio for a cooking class with Giovanna Tornabene, whose cookbooks on Sicilian cuisine, written with her mother, have won two James Beard awards. Giovanna teaches in the 14th-century abbey the Tornabene family has owned since 1856, a pink-walled building with a courtyard filled with diving swallows. Under her supervision, we made pasta with cherry tomatoes and zucchini flowers, chicken with raisins and prunes (much of Sicilian cooking is Arab-influenced), and a tart filled with mulberries from Gangivecchio’s orchards. Afterward, we ate everything in the abbey’s windowed restaurant.
Driving back to Monaco di Mezzo, we stopped to read one of the official signs scattered along the roadside. “Monti Madonie,” its English translation read. “Creadle of smells and old and genuine flavours.” Which felt entirely accurate.
Slideshow:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/09/21/travel/20100926MADONIE.html?ref=travel
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