A TIME OF FIGS by Dianne Hofmeyr.

Penny Dolan says: I came across Dianne Hofmeyr's beautiful post on another blog and immediately wanted to share her words, thoughts and images with everyone here, so thank you very much, Dianne, for being my History Girls Guest today.

London is subdued in the last heat of summer as August draws to a close over the bank holiday week-end. The pavements lack children careering down on you on their scooters. The streets are deserted. The traffic is quiet. Street markets are full of bright yellow zucchini fiori, tomatoes of every colour and fat purple figs… but no one to buy them. Everyone is away.

On my tiny London terrace under a sparse fig tree stunted forever in its pot, the pages of my book flip close and I drowse through an imagined Sicilian heat. The landscape of aridly undulating hills of Tomasi di Lampedusa …

‘with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.'

Summer in London, is not the blistering 40 degrees of Italy or France that brings back frazzled families when schools finally reopen. I savour the peace with The Leopard under my nose. Drip by drip, Lampedusa feeds me the landscape and customs of the old aristocracy – Sicily that summer of 1860 when Garibaldi arrives.

It’s not the Sicily of the five-star hotel high up on the cliff of Taomina with dramatic infinity pool and a view of Mount Etna and a wander through the tourist-filled main street up to the ancient Greek amphitheatre set above the limpid Ionian Sea.

To see Sicily the way Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina in The Leopard sees it, you must start with the chaos and contradictions of Palermo – the traffic, the grime, the washing hanging from balconies in narrow side streets, the scorched hills that surround it, the glimpse of sea, the architecture ravished by time and neglect, ancient baroque palazzi, interiors opulent with gold and mosaics, convents, churches and oratories on every corner reflecting Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman rule.

The Arabian arches of the Cloister at Monreale outside Palermo

Leopards between olive and date palms in the Room of Roger, Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo

Close-up of the mosaic work by Byzantine artisans 

Describing a ball in one of the Palermo palazzi, the Prince savours the decaying grandeur.

‘The ballroom was all golden; smoothed on cornices, stippled on door-frames, dasmascened pale, almost silvery… It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays (this being 1862) but a faded gold, pale as the hair of certain nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a colour so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers… From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky.’

I've not seen that Palermo ceiling but in Noto I came across the ballroom of the Nicolaci family. The palazzo with its 90 rooms, (not unlike the maze of rooms Tancredi and Angelica get lost in, in The Leopard) makes me wonder how the nobility became so rich? In the earthquake of 1693 the entire town of Noto was destroyed – palazzi and people all lost and the town later rebuilt in the style of the day – Sicilian baroque. Of the noble families only a few remained and through intermarriage became even wealthier built on the shoulders of the tuna industry.

Ballroom at the Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata in Noto

The railings of the balconies curved to contain the voluminous swoop of silk and taffeta ballgowns. 

The pink-washed walls of Modica.

Under my fig tree I dream on... the salmonpink-washed walls of Modica at sunset. Modica, Syracuse, Ortygia – none play a part in The Leopard. They are names from my A Brief History of Ancient Times schoolbook. That incredible lofty Cathedral of Syracuse, the walls wrapping the Ionic pillars of an earlier Greek temple, the old Jewish Quarter close by, its narrow alleys where craftsmen still work, tinged with salt air. So mesmerised am I by the marble inlay of the ancient floor that I forget my iPhone in a pew which is later returned to me with a simple ‘Pronto’ when I call my number.

When I run up the worn marble steps from the harbour to retrieve it, my mind has skittered down another track. I think of the ancient ships arriving, the Greek sailors treading these same steps and Cicero describing Syracuse as 'the greatest Greek city and the most beautiful of them all.'

Yes… the quiet of August in London is as delicious as a fat ripe fig, filled with the dreams of blistering islands where the sun beats down 365 days of the year from an inexorable blue sky.

But a chill creeps into the closing lines of The Leopard.  When the mummified carcass of the family wolfhound is thrown out the window, the shadow of The Leopard hovers in Don Fabrizio's spinster daughter's words...

'its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadraped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.'   

A salute to all my past History teachers. Other books on Sicily: The Land where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee and Syracusa recommended by Adele Geras. Do any History Girls or readers have any other recommendations?

www.diannehofmeyr.com
twitter: @dihofmeyr

Dianne Hofmeyr's picture book, Zeraffa Giraffa, about a Giraffe sent as a gift from Egypt to Paris in 1826, will be on stage at the Little Angel Theatre in Islington and the Omnibus in Clapham over the next nine weeks. Zeraffa Giraffa is illustrated by the artist Jane Ray, who also illustrated their forthcoming picture book: The Glassmaker's Daughter, which is set in Venice. Both books are published by Frances Lincoln.

SUNLIGHT ON LEMON TERRACES AND THE SWEET SMELL OF FIGS – Dianne Hofmeyr

There’s a small corner of the Western Cape that could pass for being part of the Mediterranean. I grew up here with the sweet smell of figs and sticky pine-nut sap on my hands. Two huge old stone pines stood at the bottom of my road and as a child I painstakingly spent hours chopping the hard kernels against stones to get at tiny morsels of sweet nut. I grew up with the scent of hot sun on tomatoes, on the leaves of rose geraniums and on clipped cypresses, with oleanders whose flowers seemed deadlier by moonlight and long ropes of wisteria and grape vines dripping from pergolas.

It could have been the Mediterranean … but it wasn’t. Then when I was fifteen I read a book that transported me to the real Mediterranean where lemons and olive trees grew along terraces and houses were surrounded not just by stone pines but by towering, almost black cypresses and ancient amphora.

The book was The Story of San Michele and even the Swedish author’s name, Axel Munthe, was enough to transport me into a reverie of sunlight on lemon terraces, where a peasant girl just my age called Gioia, with lips as red as her coral necklace, was kissed by the eighteen year old Munthe, as she showed him up the mountain to the village piazza of Capri. But she refused to climb further and left him outside the church of St Stefano.

Munthe goes on: ‘I sprang up the Phoenician steps to Anacapri. Half-way up I overtook an old woman with a huge basket full of oranges on her head. She put down her basket and handed me an orange.

Just over our heads, riveted to the steep rock like an eagle's nest, stood a little ruined chapel. Its vaulted roof had fallen in, but huge blocks of masonry shaped into an unknown pattern of symmetrical network, still supported its crumbling walls.
"What is the name of the little chapel?" I asked.

" San Michele."

the restored chapel of San Michele as it stands today

In the vineyard below the chapel an old man was digging furrows in the soil for new vines. The vineyard was his and so was the little house close by. He had built it mostly with stones and bricks of the Roba di Timberio that was strewn all over the garden.

How much of the book is dream and how much truth, is hard to say. When he meets a polar bear at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris while studying to be a doctor, Munthe recalls:
‘Of course we spoke in Swedish, with a sort of Polar accent I picked up from him. I am sure he understood every word I said when I told him, in a low monotonous voice how sorry I was for him and that when I was a boy I had seen two of his kinsmen swimming close to our boat amongst floating ice blocks in the land of our birth.’

As a girl of fifteen I take bits and pieces of the book on board. It jumps about as if the author can never be still. An Italian dictionary might have helped but I have a smattering of Latin that gets me through. I fathom that cacciacavallo means ‘cheese on horseback’ but what exactly is ‘cheese on horseback’? And did Munthe truly see a sphinx in his dream?

‘And here where we stand with this beautiful island rising like a sphinx out of the sea below our feet, here I want a granite sphinx from the land of the Pharaohs. But where shall I find the sphinx?’

The Villa of San Michele as it stands today with its stone pines and oleanders. 

Last week I walked down the loggia of Villa San Michele, past the chapel and saw his sphinx. It sat looking out over Capri, face hidden from view, carved in Egypt, transported to Italy by one of the Caesars ... perhaps by Julius as a gift from Cleopatra ... perhaps by Tiberius who built his summer home on the foundation of San Michele, but most likely by Nero who built a villa in Calabria on the mainland, beneath whose ruins Munthe saw the sphinx, in a dream. Decades later he recovered the sculpture and transported it up the 777 Phoenicians steps and placed it on a wall jutting out from the San Michele chapel.

I stroll through the open courtyards of the Villa where terrazzo floors are almost identical to those left behind across the bay in Pompeii.

I sit up on the roof terrace in the sunshine drinking coffee and listening to birdsong, as Munthe probably did – surrounded by his orange and lemon trees, looking through the stone pines to that incredible view and I try to imagine that fifteen year old girl who disappeared into the pages of a book called The Story of of San Michele 

But it’s impossible to write of Mediterranean gardens, without mentioning another garden high above the sea at Ravello. The Villa Cimbrone stands on a treed rocky outcrop from which it got its name – Cimbronium – the Roman word for a wood or forest used for building ships. The earliest references to the villa date back to the eleventh century AD, when the villa belonged to the Accongiogioco family.

Earnest William Beckett visited the villa during his travels in Italy and fell in love with it. He bought it from the Amici family in 1904, and with the help of Nicola Mansi, a tailor-barber-builder from Ravello restored and enlarged the villa and garden and its battlements, terraces and cloisters in a mixture of mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian architectural style. The original layout of the Italianate garden was kept, but a strong influence of the English landscape gardeners, Edwin Luytens and Gertrude Jekyll can be felt.

Villa Cimbrone became a favourite haunt of the Bloombury group, and guests included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keyes and Lytton Strachey. Other visitors were D. H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville West, Diana Mosley, Henry Moore, T. S. Elliot, Winston Churchill and Great Garbo with her lover, the conductor, Leopold Stokowski.

I visit in a quiet time between seasons when the wisteria has finished flowering and the first flush of roses is over and the hydrangea are not yet in bloom. But without the distraction of colour, the garden shows its bones and its tracery of veins. The villa is reached on foot via many steps from the Ravello piazza and the garden is strung out all along the cliff high above the sea.

Immmediately beyond the 16th century entrance, is the cloister with its graceful little courtyard in Moorish-Norman style.

This leads along an avenue that takes you to the Belvedere and the Terrazzo dell'lnfinito, lined with marble busts.

The Seat of Mercury overlooking the terraces, is an 18th century bronze copy of ‘Hermes at rest’. The original is on display at the national museum in Naples.

The Hortensia Avenue with it wrought iron well at one end and pergola supported by substantial round terracotta columns, shows renaissance references and inspiration of the Medici villas.

Through a meandering clipped box hedge is the bronze statue of David, produced by the Neapolitan sculptor Gioacchino Varlese, in imitation of the one by Verrocchio in Florence.

In the rose garden there are strong Moorish influences with wonderful tiles and a stone bench with a verse by Omar Khayyam: “Ah moon of my delight which knows no decline, the moon in the sky is rising once more. But as it rises again in future, in this very garden, it will look for us in vain.”

And in the rose garden the wrestler, Greucante.

Visit late in the afternoon when the tourists have left and the light is sublime, and the views that drop down to the steep terraces below, spectacular.

From these gardens, caught midway in taking off my hat, I say goodbye to the History Girls. It's been wonderful being part of this group. But just because I'm not writing won't mean I'm not following.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

GOLD and COCA in COLOMBIA ­ – Dianne Hofmeyr

Gold is the most exquisite of all things… Whoever possesses gold can acquire all that he desires in this world.’ Christopher Columbus, 1503, in a letter to the King and Queen of Spain. 

He was referring to the gold rumoured hidden deep in the forests of Colombia. Even now in the 21st century, Colombia is still a place of secrets, brought to our attention with the recent exhibition of artefacts from the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, entitled Beyond El Dorado, at the British Museum and brought especially into our minds this last week with the death of Gabriel García Márquez.

It was odd to see the exhibition after I’d already completed an Indiana Jones-style adventure story for 9-12 year olds, set in the Colombian forest… odd because so much of what I’d put into the book about where the gold might have been hidden was mirrored by what was portrayed in the exhibition. In my story there is a waterfall and a cave. In the Beyond El Dorado exhibition there were records of a sacred lake.   

It was the fabulous stories of gold, which the first explorers of Colombia took back to Europe that fuelled the rush to South America. Explorers and adventurers including Sir Walter Raleigh, set out in search of this mythical place. On a map of the world in 1529, the region is shown as Castillo del Oro by the Spanish Crown. It was believed gold offerings were thrown into a deep lake by a ‘golden man’ to placate the gods. Lake Guatavita was thought to be the lake where the gold would be found. An etching from 1813 shows a notch cut into the lake by the explorer Antonio de Sepúlveda who attempted to drain the lake in the 1500’s. 

Indigenous people from ancient times believed the glow of gold imbued it with special qualities that would connect them to the sun. Certain animals were repeatedly used in the designs of the pectorals, nose ornaments, ear spools, necklaces and masks. Snakes, bats, birds, monkeys, frogs, crocodiles and the jaguar – all creatures of the forest. But more importantly, creatures who lived in two realms – earth and sky, water and land – or in the dark, as with bats and jaguars. They were seen as the significant bridge between the world of the living and the spiritual world.

Often the pieces had hanging discs and moving parts that reflected and make flashes of light or a tinkling sound as the wearers moved through firelight or sunlight. 

A hammered nose ornament with dangling strips of gold.  

It’s interesting that the goldsmiths used techniques that are still used today, including hammering and lost wax casting. Beeswax was used to make the most intricate coils and design details. The wax was then covered in clay leaving tiny openings as pouring holes. The clay piece was baked so that the wax melted out through the holes but left behind a mould that could have molten gold poured into it. Once the gold had hardened inside the clay mould, the mould was broken to release the gold piece. For this reason seldom are two pieces the same. 

Amongst the exhibits were numerous lime dippers that were licked first and then dipped in pots of lime, which when mixed in the mouth with a wad of coca leaves enhanced the stimulating affect the leaf had on the person. Some of the lime dippers go back as far as 200BC. Producing cocaine might be a fairly young industry in Colombia but growing the coca plant and chewing the leaves aren't. 

Gold cast finials of lime dippers.

My story, Oliver Strange and Forest of Secrets, tells of the present day Embera people who live deep in the forest and hunt using a special poison obtained from the sweat of the highly poisonous phylobates terrribilis, a drop of whose poison can kill up to 20 people. The boy hero in my story has a father who is a herpetologist. 

At one point in the story when the Embera have saved their forest and protected their secret horde of ancient gold from the hands of the guerrilla fighters, they conduct a special ceremony. What I found fascinating is that today’s Embera people use carved wooden rollers dipped in plant dye, to make patterns across their arms and legs for their ceremonies. I decided my character would make a jaguar and a snake design. Then discovered after seeing the exhibition, that this method of roller stamping the body goes back as far as 200 BC when ceramic rollers were made with complex patterns. I saw rollers with representations of jaguar spots and snake coils. In the ceremonial dance the person would take on the spirit of the creature whose patterns covered their arms and legs.

Ceramic body rollers with snake and jaguar patterns 

This book is the final in a series called The Frog Diaries, which were written to encourage children to connect with the natural world and to understand that we have the power to take action to save this world. Fiction allows writers to broach subjects and make things more accessible and immediate than might be possible in non-fiction. Oliver Strange and the Forest of Secrets is based on the fact that the forests of Colombia have always hidden secrets… whether ancient gold treasure, plantations of coco, guerrilla hide-outs or the deadliest frog known to man.

Cocaine production in the heart of the forest

And all these factors have contributed to the destruction of a swathe of irreplaceable rain forest. The 22nd of April was World Earth Day so my book published in April seems timely. Oliver Strange and Forest of Secrets, published by Tafelberg, is available in South Africa, but will soon be available in eBook format online. Unfortunately the Beyond El Dorado exhibition has already closed. A trip to the Museo del Oro in Bogotá anyone? 

www.diannehofmeyr.com 
My most recent picture book, Zeraffa Giraffa, illustrated by Jane Ray, was chosen by Nicolette Jones as Children’s Book of the Week in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine 20th April... 'a magical book about a true story' 

The giraffe that beguiled not just a King but a nation – Dianne Hofmeyr

A giraffe walking through the streets of Paris in 1827 must have been a wondrous sight. What was this strange horned, half horse, half camel creature with impossibly long legs and a black tongue? Not just Paris but the whole of France was agog. 

Giraffes go way back in history. San people recorded them in their rock art and during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC, giraffes were brought back from the Land of Punt and there are paintings of them in her mortuary temple. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, the symbol of a giraffe stands for ‘to predict or foretell’. The actual word giraffe comes from the Arab word ‘xirapha’ which means ‘one that walks swiftly’. But the Paris giraffe was only the second to have ever been seen in Europe. The first had been a gift to the Lorenzo de Medici in 1486.

When Napoleon conquered the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, he brought his corp des savants ­– a group of 154 scientists – to investigate Egypt’s relics and so began France’s fascination with Egypt. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Muhammad Ali, became the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt and the Sudan. He was a ruthless ruler, a slave dealer and a contradictory force – a man who cared nothing for Egypt’s antiquities but continually courted France for her western expertise and learning. 

It was the entrepreneurial talents of the French consul general in Cairo at the time – an Italian by the name of Bernardino Drovetti – that brought the giraffe to Paris. Drovetti was a tomb raider and antiques dealer who helped assemble the collections of Egyptian artefacts that are still on display in museums across Europe. In addition, he dealt in exotic animals ­–Arabian stallions, Nubian sheep as well as shells and fossils from the Libyan desert.

He was an expert at turning royal gratitude to his own advantage and as the confidante of the Pasha Muhammad Ali, when the new French king, Charles X, ascended to the throne in September 1824, he spotted an opportunity. Muhammad Ali had been engaged in an aggressive expansion, attacking Cyprus and threatening Greece. The exotic gift of a giraffe would charm the French public and reassure the King about the Pasha's amicable intentions towards France.

The journey of the giraffe, starting with her capture in the Sudan, the 2000 mile trip down the Nile from Khartoum to Alexandria, the three week sail across the Mediterranean Sea and finally the 550 mile walk from Marseilles to Paris accompanied by two milk cows to provide her with milk, took two and a half years. By the time she arrived in Paris, she stood four metres tall. The year was 1827.

She lived with her keeper, Atir, in a building called la Rotonde in what was then known as Jardin du Roi later renamed the Jardin des Plantes. Atir slept high up on a specially built platform close to her face and never left her side. 

Zeraffa’s fate was very different to that of Marius the giraffe in a Copenhagen zoo – as twelve years later a second young female giraffe was transported down the Nile and sent to Paris to keep her company. And when Zeraffa died of old age on January 12th 1845 after living in Paris for 18 years, Atir was still at her side. After her death she stood on display in the foyer of the museum at the Jardin des Plantes and was then sent to Le Musée Lafaille in La Rochelle. Today if you visit this museum you will find her peering down inquisitively from the landing of some stone stairs. She’s there with a collection of other African animals that might have browsed on the same African plains with her in an earlier life.  

The buildings of La Rotonde still stand in the Jardin des Plantes today. And while I was writing my picture book ZERAFFA GIRAFFA, I went there and tried to imagine the giraffe with the young Atir in their very foreign environment. What was it like for a young boy who had never been further than Khartoum to be so alone in a strange city in Europe in 1827? What would it be like even today? 

If you visit La Rotonde on a quiet day, close your eyes and perhaps you’ll feel the hot wind of Africa and imagine yourself standing there with Zeraffa and her keeper Atir, while he whispers stories to her of a land far away.

 

For a taste of history for young readers, ZERAFFA GIRAFFA published by Frances Lincoln, is out on 3rd April. Jane Ray’s exquisite illustrations capture the long travaille through the Egyptian desert, the voyage across the Mediterranean, the walk through the French countryside… one wonders if Zeraffa nibbled cherries or peeped through the high windows of the ‘silk’ houses as she walked through the Luberon valley and then along the Rhone… until she finally reached the streets of Paris. 

www.diannehofmeyr.com