My Summer in Sicily

It always starts with the squint.

Aircraft door or railway platform, it makes no difference: the sun hits, my eyes half close for a second, and I have arrived. The train from Berlin via Munich takes nearly ten hours to manage it, but you don’t notice the border from the station sign. You notice it because south of the Brenner the concrete turns warm, the shutters green, and someone in the carriage starts talking noticeably louder on the phone.

Yes, I love the food. The coffee culture, the architecture, the people. But if I’m honest, I mean something else when I say I love this country. I mean the light. Everything lies in that glaring light I otherwise only know from Los Angeles.

Light is the sense that fires first with me. If the lighting in a restaurant isn’t right, with lamps too bright or a colour that is simply uncomfortable, the evening gets at least 10% worse. Nothing a good wine couldn’t make up for by the third glass; but it shouldn’t have to come to that.

Italy doesn’t have this problem. The light there is good. Even when it only happens inside my head. Because yes, apparently Italy has grey days too.

The theory holds up best in the south. So I flew to Sicily.

Catania is the exception I hadn’t counted on. The city is built almost entirely out of the black lava stone Etna has delivered over the centuries: the churches, the façades, the paving, all of it dark. And black stone doesn’t throw light back, it swallows it. So the sun hammers down and the city gives none of it away. It still took me a good hour to notice that I like it. Catania is raw and loud and slightly unwashed, by midday the fish market already smells of the entire day, and somehow that is exactly right for the first half hour.

Then a rental car, ninety kilometres south. The landscape dries out: carob trees, dry stone walls, prickly pear on the embankments. And just before Noto, the stone changes colour.

Noto is built from a limestone that is almost white when freshly cut and darkens over the years. Sand, then honey, and in the late afternoon, when the sun comes in low, the whole town turns gold for half an hour. That was the point where I actually parked the car and just walked.

What I didn’t know before: this town is nowhere near as old as it looks. On 11 January 1693 an earthquake of roughly magnitude 7.4, the strongest ever recorded in Italy, flattened the entire southeast of the island, the old Noto up on its hill included. They didn’t repair it. They gave it up and built a completely new town ten kilometres further down, on a drawing board, in one go, in a single style.

Eight towns went down in 1693 and were rebuilt in the decades after it. Catania, Noto, Modica, Ragusa, Scicli, Palazzolo, Militello, Caltagirone. They went onto the UNESCO list together in 2002, for exactly that. So Catania and Noto are not two places I happened to see in one week. It is the same earthquake, answered twice. The difference is the stone. Catania had the mountain and keeps the light. Noto had the limestone and gives it back. My whole theory about this country, and in the end it hangs on which quarry was closer.

People even say the Corso was deliberately laid out so the sun lights it along its full length. I don’t know whether that’s true. But it works: you climb the steps to the cathedral, turn around, and the street lies there as though someone had lit it for the take.

Two minutes off the Corso stands Palazzo Nicolaci, begun in 1737. Six balconies, and every one of them rests on corbels carved into something different. Lions, mermaids, winged horses, chimaeras, faces.

That half hour is best spent up high. In its old palazzi Noto has a handful of small hotels that have turned their roof terraces into bars. One is the Gagliardi, an 18th-century palazzo two minutes off the Corso: ten rooms, black marble and chandeliers inside. Up on the roof you stand above the whole baroque skyline, the cathedral dome at eye level, and behind it the plain sloping away towards the sea.

Rooftop bars sound much the same in every warm country. I was standing in the middle of it with a Negroni, in Linen, because after a day in that heat nothing else is wearable.

And then the evenings turn surprisingly contemporary. On the ground floors of these baroque palaces sit restaurants that could just as easily be in Copenhagen: open kitchen, wooden tables, no tablecloths. And it works, which I hadn’t expected. Probably because in both cases somebody decided every single detail, from the proportion of the façade to the height of the lamp above the table. The town is a design project itself; it was simply three hundred years earlier.

One evening in particular stayed with me. A courtyard, warm, after ten, and on the stone wall at the back an old film running off a projector. No sound, nobody really watching. But limestone isn’t smooth, it has joints and pores and three hundred years of chipping, and the picture laid itself around all of it. A face ran across a joint, an eye disappeared into a pore. I forgot my wine over it, and the glass was empty all the same by the time I noticed I had been staring. You build a town out of a stone that holds light, and three hundred years later somebody throws light back onto it.

I ate pasta alla Norma, of course, repeatedly. Aubergine, tomato, basil, shaved ricotta salata over the top. The dish is supposedly named after Bellini’s opera. Bellini came from Catania, and someone is said to have called it ‘a real Norma’, meaning: a masterpiece. Whether the story is true I honestly don’t care.

I stayed outside town, on a lemon farm. A stone house, a pool, a few horses, and lemon trees as far as you stop looking. Nothing happens there during the day, the leaves are hard and glossy, and it smells of wet grass, because sprinklers are running all over the farm. In the evening, once the sun is gone, the whole slope tips over, and the smell stands above the rows until well into the night.

In the mornings the horses were at the fence, and I went over every morning. As a child I was in a riding club, and apparently that doesn’t wear off: these graceful animals still do something to me. Most of all when you’re allowed to brush them down. You start at the neck, the horse shifts its weight, gets heavier and calmer, and at some point leans slightly into the brush. Some mornings I stood there half an hour before I’d even had a first coffee.

And then Syracuse. The city was founded in 734 BC by Corinthians and at its height was more powerful than Athens; Archimedes was born here and died here; Cicero called it the most beautiful of all Greek cities. The best of it is the cathedral on Ortigia: it isn’t a cathedral with a few ancient remains in it, it’s a Greek temple to Athena whose Doric columns simply stayed standing. They walled up the gaps and carried on building around them. Temple, church, mosque, church again.

Ortigia itself is small enough to get lost in and be back at the water ten minutes later. The lanes are so narrow that at midday only a strip of light falls on the façades, and I caught myself automatically walking on the side where it lies. After dark somebody strings bulbs across them, and the whole thing starts over at a tenth of the wattage.

The rest of the week I moved to the beach. Vendicari, Calamosche, San Lorenzo, Marzamemi in the evening. Vendicari looks like nothing but reserve and sand until you come around the headland and find a ruin standing in the water. A tonnara, a tuna fishery, documented on that spot since 1655 and fished until the middle of the 1800s by the Nicolaci, the same family whose balconies I had been standing under in Noto. People have been catching tuna here far longer than that. There are Hellenistic tanks in the ground nearby where they made garum, the fermented fish sauce the ancient world put on everything. It finally stopped in 1943, when the Allies came ashore on this coast. A Greek fish factory, a baroque family’s tuna money and a war, all within sight of a beach where people now lie on towels. Behind it, one of the most important stopovers for migrating birds in the Mediterranean. The flamingos come in autumn. I was two months early and saw herons.

I had sold this to myself as an escape from everyday life, but honestly: I checked my phone three times a day there too. You don’t escape your everyday life by putting it under better lighting. You just mind it less.

And yes, maybe all of it is only down to the lenses of my Sunglasses.

Author: Max Johann Hubert Hasenohr