Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Wanderlust
Arabian nighties
Among Egypt's minarets and mosques, covered women buy a ton of teddies.
By Susan Hack
[10/08/99]

Travel Advisor
Get thee to a nunnery
Our travel expert offers advice on convent and church accommodations in Poland, trips to Baja and finding that perfect hotel/Broadway package in New York.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/07/99]

Robbed on Lombok
Bandits strike a group of travelers in the wilds of a remote Indonesian island.
By Brent Hannon
[10/06/99]

Laughing with the Dalai Lama
From Lhasa to Dharamsala, a Westerner pieces together the poignant puzzle of Tibetan Buddhism and its exalted leader in exile.
By Rachel Louise Snyder
[10/05/99]

Russia on the edge
With bombs exploding from Moscow to Chechnya, nerves are tense everywhere. Is it all a power-saving ploy by Yeltsin? Or is the country on the verge of collapse?
By Jeffrey Tayler
[10/02/99]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Monte Alburchia, Sicily:

Our object was plain enough: to wind our way into these most superstitious and least touristed of mountain towns, the homeland of the Sicilian banditry that had helped give rise to the Mafia, to witness what had been described as a pagan harvest and fertility festival whose roots could be traced to Roman times, or possibly earlier.

Claudio, a Neapolitan architect friend of more than mildly pagan impulses, had been telling me about these simple festivals -- most of them Catholic underlain with obvious pagan elements -- since I first met him in Naples six years earlier. He had once taken me on a walk through the back streets of old Naples, where shrines to those suffering in the heat of purgatory mark nearly every block. "No Neapolitan really believes he will go to hell," Claudio had said, his voice twinkling, "so we suppose those people who have had some troubles will stay warm a while in purgatorio until the spirit world releases them." Although he called himself an atheist, he confessed that he had always been captivated by the icons and rituals dedicated to invisible spirits and other worlds -- which is why he often found himself drawn into ecstatic religious processions and ancient festivals. I knew immediately we were kindred spirits.

Our plan was to meet in Palermo and drive up into the Madonie range, through exquisite towns with names like Polizzi Generosa and Petralia Sottana and Castellana where hotels and restaurants hardly existed, over roads that 50 years ago were barely paved and often were in fact simply ditched and graded wagon trails, to an impossible shale mountain covered by a honeycomb of rock houses and alleyways called Gangi.

The festival was called La Sagra della Spiga and was dedicated to the great mother goddess of grain and fecundity, Cerere -- Ceres to us, or to the Greeks, Demeter. Of all the local town festivals we had found in newspapers and on the Internet -- some dedicated to a local bread or a particular olive, one celebrating the annual tuna slaughter at Trapani, as well as the famous Catholic feast days where often shoeless men walk across the scorching summer pavement bearing enormous, heavy monuments to the Virgin -- only this festa in Gangi was directly dedicated to the pagan gods of ancient Rome. And more, the advance program for the festa was a toney four-color, 6-by-8-inch, three-panel brochure, accompanied by a slick, heavy-stock photo magazine celebrating the town's architectural, archaeological and artistic heritage, including tantalizing essays from prominent university scholars -- all plainly produced with promotional lire sent from Rome. Dazzling and magical.

Turning the mountain bend that grants first sight of Gangi is equally bewitching, but as you rest there at roadside studying this solitary, thousand-foot hill town, there is also something strange, unsettling, about the place. The closer you come to Gangi, the stranger that feeling becomes.

To drive up the front of Gangi, through the web of cobbled walls and streets, promises almost certain failure. Rising and falling with the terrain, the medieval passages become stairways or else grow so narrow that even a Fiat 500 would drop its axle over the outer edge if it advanced another yard, leaving the hapless driver to back up over the dusty stones to the second or third previous division point in this interconnected dreamway that only those born to it can navigate with confidence. To ascend the front of Gangi it is better to walk. Hoof yourself up past the ancient Norman tower and the Capucine monastery and the criss-crossing stairs that replicate the stations of the cross, to the 17th century palace of the Bongiorno noblemen that is now home to the town council, where, panting and parched and wet with sweat, you find yourself unsure whether the stone silence that surrounds you is a measure of the town's tranquility or its suspicion of almost anyone whose great-great-great-grandparents were not born there.

There lies the conundrum of Gangi and scores of remote jewel towns like it, for as suspicious as the eyes behind the curtains are, this is at the same time as warm and generous as any place could be. Only after you step into the cafe bar and talk to Cicio, home from his studies in Palermo, do you begin to understand that both your gut reactions have been correct, that -- as an old friend of Sicilian parentage put it to me -- everyone in Sicily exists on parallel planes.

Next page | Fertility statues on a mountaintop