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Now, of course, all that remains is the marble, the architecture and the art. The power, the commerce, the academies -- the energy -- are all gone. That absence settled over Maria Rita, like a faded veil.

"Yes, the Sagra della Spiga, well, it's a wonderful festival, yes, but really, personally, I don't care so much about that," she started. "It's very nice, I'm sure you will enjoy it, but the really important thing here, the thing that has been too much forgotten, the thing that is so important to the history of Gangi, is at the mountain. There!"

She gestured firmly with her right arm, through one of the baroque windows, out across the rolling plowed fields, to a broken peak a few miles away.

"Monte Alburchia." She paused a beat. "It is on Monte Alburchia where my uncle first uncovered the ruins, yes, so many things, little things of course, like plates, and pots, amphoras, candle-holders and, of course, the little statues carved to Cerere."

Her uncle had been a local teacher and something of an amateur archaeologist. The first ruins had been noted by one of the Bongiorno nobles, in 1761, who found ceramic fragments, coins, a few oil lamps and cremation tombs that clearly dated to early Greeks and Romans. Her uncle had been the first to pick up the trail in the desperate years after World War II, when almost no one in Gangi had any money. Despite a brief flurry of interest, the town fathers had relegated the ancient artifacts to a locked warehouse. Now, of course, she told us, smiling, we could see them in the civic museum.

If her resentment was only barely detectable, it became clearer the more she began to talk about her children and the life that was so plainly disappearing all around her in this failing farm town. They would of course have to go away, to Palermo or to Catania, "or even to Italy," she said -- reminding me that Sicilians still see Rome as a ruler, only slightly more congenial than the Arabs and the Normans and the Spaniards who ruled them in earlier centuries. "No, nothing anymore is really they way I remember it when I would go in the summer to my grandfather's farm. The smell of the hay after a rain, I can't catch that smell anymore. Or, if I can say this, the color of the shit the cows make is somehow different, and even its smell is different. I suppose it's from what they feed the cows now. And the smell of the milk and its texture. Now it's not so thick, even on the farm, as I remember it because it doesn't give so much cream."

Sentiment for lives gone by, for the memories of childhood in the disappearing village life of farm communities, is universal -- it even led the French some years ago to try to preserve village culture by regulating the numbers of supermarkets that could be opened. In Gangi, the layers of fantasy and remembrance seem richer, deeper and darker: our fantasies as foreign visitors (informed at least in part by Francis Coppola and Robert DeNiro) about what lies inside this utterly improbable rock of a Sicilian town, where secret and forgotten passageways are said to be carved deep beneath the surface; the Gangitani fantasies that somehow the old and superficially tranquil life of a farming town will miraculously survive the megalithic machine of global agriculture; the fantastical memory-faith in the mysterious powers that we each silently imagine might still emanate from a distant mountain where artifacts of the great fertility goddess can still be recovered; and, finally, the fearful fantasy that should tourism, or agriturismo, actually come to Gangi in time to save it, that Maria Rita's life and the lives of all her friends would gradually turn into a sepia-toned movie life, that her own words would be snatched away as its script, or as Claudio put it, Gangi would become a sort of rustic Venetian museo vivante in the mountains.

"No! No e come Venezia!" she answered. Yes, people had to leave Gangi, but then they would come back. Always, they come back, and some day, her children, after they had grown up, they would come back, too.

One of her 6-year-old twin sons was standing beside her as she spoke. "So, yes, you could say that all of this life is kind of like a film. The things that I have known in Gangi, the tranquil place where I could play and ride my bike when I was a little girl, the aromas of the farm, and the way we lived then, even if it was a little hard: These things I can only tell my boys about, but they will never smell the atmosphere that I did. I can take this one" -- and she patted her son on the shoulder -- "out to our little piece of land, and he can sit on a mule for a few minutes, but of course it's not at all the same. The experiences you have lived are only that. They are what you have lived. After that, it's over."

As to the Sagra della Spiga , the pagan festival honoring Cerere that had lured us to Gangi, it was a splendid festa , certainly, she said, but the true festival is the week before. "That is the Christian harvest festival, the Festa della Burgesi , when the farmers bring in offerings of grain to Chiese Madre (the central church) in thanks to God. It is much older and much more important."

We thanked Maria Rita and promised to stop back the next day to pick up some archaeological materials she was preparing. Politely, she asked where we were staying.

"Gangivecchio, the old converted convent ..."

"Oh, yes," she answered, her smile and her voice hardening by half a note. "I'm sure you will be very comfortable over there." Then she added, "Well, if you really want to know about the origins of the Sagra della Spiga , I suppose you need to talk to Constantino Muschara. The communist. He invented it."

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