Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - feeling hot, hot, hot

Typical. I started writing this article a couple of days ago, at 5.30am after yet another sticky, close night. In the end I gave up trying to sleep and decided to do something useful instead. It is now Sunday morning and the weather is cool and grey and rainy, making this one of the most poorly timed blog posts ever.

But all is not lost. According to my phone, the heat is coming back. So, for those of you who love a heatwave - and those like me who just want it to be 20 degrees and cloudy LIKE NORMAL FOR JULY IN BRITAIN - here’s a quick overview of a few ways people have kept cool through history. At the end I’ll pick my favourite to go into this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

1. Caves. Ok, so they won’t fit into my cabinet, but many caves are Nice Cool Places. On holiday in Sicily this year, this was brought home to me in two different ways. The first was that my bedroom in our rented villa was one! It was by far the coolest (in both sense of the word) room in the house and despite the temperatures being well into in the 30s during the day, I slept well and long every night (and sometimes for afternoon naps too).

My bedroom in Modica, Sicily, 

always cool and comfortable! 

Photo: C Wightwick

We also visited the Cava d’Ispica, a series of caves which were inhabited from prehistoric times through to the middle ages. Obvious evidence of inhabitation ranged from soot markings, to stone-cut tombs, shelves and niches for lighting or possessions and the remnants of medieval frescos – a really stunning landscape detailing the different ways that people shape and use the natural world around them.

Cava d'Ispica, Sicily. 

Photo: C Wightwick

2. Air-con. Yup, it existed prior to electricity. Wealthy Romans, for example, pumped cold water through the walls of their houses in the summer months to keep things cool. And of course the Romans also had the Frigidarium at the Baths to plunge into…

3. Fans. So this is where the photos get really pretty. Used across different cultures for thousands of years (evidence dates from C4th BC in Greece and C2nd BC in China, for example), fans became a major fashion accessory in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disappointingly though, the so-called ‘language of the fans’ is, apparently, just a myth (or rather a later marketing ploy). While I’m normally one for historical accuracy in my fiction, please don’t let that put you off, romance writers! 

C18th hand fan, showing Hector's 

farewell to Andromache, 

Victoria & Albert Museum London 

4. Back to Sicily. I seem inexplicably not to have taken any photos of the frankly vast quantity of gelato I consumed on holiday earlier this year (I can’t imagine why that would be) so you’ll have to imagine it. Ice cream. Mmm. Again existing in some form (at least for royalty) for thousands of years, it seems to have developed in Europe into what we would recognise as ice-cream in around about the C16th and was gradually popularised as ice houses and then refrigeration became more available.

So – my winner? Well, I can’t fit my bed-cave into even my imaginary Cabinet of Curiosities, so it will have to be a fan. Practical and pretty – it can act as a reminder of this summer’s heat wave long after we’re shivering in our beds and longing for summer again…

Where the Living Meet the Dead: The Capuchin Monastery Catacombs - By Anna Mazzola

Once you’ve had your fill of gelato, cannoli and palazzi, you can descend from the dusty streets of Palermo into the cool of the Capuchin catacombs.

There, hanging from the walls, lying on shelves, sitting on benches and staring out from coffins are, it is said, nearly 8,000 corpses. Those on view are almost all clothed and in various states of decomposition, most mere skeletons, some still with remnants of skin and hair. One sports a fine waxed moustache.

A surprising discovery

The catacombs were created in the late 16th century when the Capuchin Monastery outgrew its cemetery. When the friars exhumed corpses from the overflowing charnel house to transfer them to the new cemetery, they found that something incredible had happened: forty-five friars had been naturally mummified. Their faces were still recognizable.

To the Capuchins this was clearly an act of God. Instead of burying the remains, they decided to display the bodies as relics, propping them in niches along the walls of their new cemetery.

The first body to be housed in the catacombs was that of Fra Silvestro da Gubbio, who is still greeting visitors today, holding up a sign commemorating the date of his burial (16 October 1599).

From monks to celebrities

Although the catacombs were intended to be exclusively for monks, dead priests and nuns were soon muscling their way in. Later, prominent locals paid to be buried in the catacombs and the passageways were expanded to make room for more lay people.  

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, thousands of wealthy citizens paid for the privilege of being on eternal display on the walls of the underground cemetery. Mummification became a status symbol, a way to preserve dignity even in death. What had begun as the Friars’ private cemetery became a sort of museum of death. 

The particularly dry atmosphere allowed for the natural preservation of the bodies. Initially, priests would lay the dead on shelves and allow them to drip until they were depleted of bodily fluids. A year later, they rinsed the dried out corpses with vinegar before re-dressing them in their best attire and allocating them to their designated room.

Divided in death

The skeletons have been arranged according to gender, occupation and social status. There's a row of religious figures, a row of professionals, a room for women, a room for infants, and a chapel for virgins. Soldiers are preserved in their dress uniforms, priests in their clerical vestments. Families wear the fashions of their era – 19^th century bonnets, 18^th century gowns.

The Sleeping Beauty

The cemetery was officially closed in 1880. However, there are two more recent arrivals. The first, in 1911, was the body of Giovanni Paterniti, Vice-Consul of the United States. The second, in 1920, was Rosalia Lombardo, who died and was embalmed aged two. She is so well preserved that she is known today as the ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ 

All in all, a thoroughly unnerving experience. I recommend it. 

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her first novel, The Unseeing, was published in 2016. Her second, The Story Keeper, will be out in July. 

https://annamazzola.com/about/

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.

Sicily is no longer a five-letter word, by Carol Drinkwater

I have just returned from a brief stay in Palermo and the western coast of Sicily. Autumn at the heart of the Mediterranean can hardly be bettered. The grape harvests have been completed, the olives are soon to picked and the weather is usually absolutely splendid.

I first visited Sicily in 2005. This trip kept me on the island for a month. I hired a car and went wherever the trail took me. I was searching for stories for my books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree. What I was intending was to discover and disclose the secrets roles the Mafia had played in the island’s olive oil history. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, due to exceeding poverty and mob rule, many Sicilians fled their homeland and set sail for America. A few of these immigrants were Mafia members on the run. Once these crooks arrived in the States, they established new Mafia organisations, and these proved to be fabulously remunerative, particularly during the years of Prohibition. These gangsters, Al Capone and his cronies or his gangland enemies, for example, needed a front for their nefarious dealings to keep the law off their backs. So they set up olive oil businesses for money-laundering purposes. The quality of olive oil in Sicily in the early twentieth century was very poor. The oil could be bought for next to nothing, which suited Mafia purposes perfectly. Shiploads of olive oil was exported to the States and sold as ‘Italian Olive Oil’. Who in the United States knew anything about olive oil? Once the oil was there, an international understanding that all olive oil was Italian was born. It is only in very recent decades that both American and other consumers have become aware of a far wider market range. For those who remember, in Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone as a young man started his own olive oil import business, Genco Pura olive oil.

Another little olive oil snippet, Puzo took the name of his leading character from the hilltop town of Corleone inland of Palermo. It was from here that the grandfather of the actor, Al Pacino, emigrated.

Fiction aside, the Mafia’s role in Sicily’s modern agricultural history is not only a complex story, it was a very challenging for me to unearth. I completed The Olive Tree,  but felt that there was far more to be mined than I had succeeded in doing.

Over the course of the following years, I returned to the island regularly because I love it and because I still wanted to get beneath the surface of the place. After the two books were published, UNESCO invited me to work with them to help map a Mediterranean Olive Route and from there several television stations contacted me with interest to turn the inspiration for the books into documentary films. I was thrilled, of course. One of the bonuses was the possibility of getting another crack at Sicily.

When we came to breakdown the storylines for the five documentaries, the very first story I proposed to the television stations was 'Sicily and its olive oil history'. Naturally, the idea grabbed because everybody loves a good Mafia story. I returned to the island to recce the storyline and on this occasion the budget provided me with an Italian journalist whose expertise was in food and modern Italian politics.

Where I had been unable to gain access myself, doors would now open, I thought. Alas, it was not so simple. As soon as I hit on a name, a person who might make an excellent ‘character’ for the film and who was willing and not afraid to talk, to go public, my ‘man on the ground’, Sandro, found out their contact details, rang them and arranged a clandestine meeting. But how many afternoons did we spend sitting at roadsides waiting for the appearance of a lawyer, a land specialist, family members of --- who never showed up? I was beginning to lose heart until Sandro and I hit on a new angle to my story. Libera Terra . The name translates as Free Land. Briefly, Libera Terra  was founded by a Catholic priest, Don Luigi Ciotti, living and working in Turin in northern Italy. Ciotti is a brave and visionary man, a social activist in a country that is being destroyed by greed and corruption. He has quite literally changed the way the Italian government handles lands and assets owned by Mafia members. In the past, when a high-ranking member of the Mafia was imprisoned, their assets just sat about doing nothing. Ciotti and others of like mind raised a petition with over one million signatures requesting of the Italian government (at the time it was Berlusconi, so no mean feat), to offer the lands out to be farmed in a manner that was good for the earth and free of all fear and Mafia influence. What a terrific concept, and it has taken off

A movement of small organic cooperatives springing up all over the island to farm lands confiscated from the Mafia and to bring their produce to global markets.
I had the outline for my story: New Sicily and the unpicking of the Mafia stranglehold within the agricultural sector.

During the worst years of Mafia control of the island, people were employed for a pittance because there was basically only one employer: the Mafia. They called the shots (in every sense!). There was no social care, merely a pitiable wage. If someone else offered employment with more decent terms, the labourers refused because they were far too scared to quit and move on. They feared the threats of physical violence being meted out against them or members of their families. Tourism was almost non-existent because foreigners feared the bombings and shootings and the horror stories they saw on the news or in the movies. Who wants a horse’s head in their bed?! In any case, building permits for all construction including hotels were in the hands of who? The Mafia, of course.

In a sense, the island was becoming isolated and the young were leaving in droves in the hope of building a new, Mafia-free life elsewhere. This is an old agricultural story. When the villages and fields are emptied and only the older generation remain to tend them, the sector begins to die out. Knowledge and competence is lost.

Sicily has one of the richest histories of the Mediterranean. It has been conquered by everyone from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs, Spanish and onwards until 1860 when Garibaldi landed and integrated it into the new state of Italy. Because of its colonizers, particularly the Romans, Sicily (also other parts of southern Italy) has been at the mercy of the feudal land system for two thousand years. One of the upsides of having been invaded by so many conquering powers is that it has a multi-layered tapestry of cuisines and agricultural expertise. But if there are no young left to grow the produce, to tend the lands and livestock, to learn the ways of the land?

In 1992, tragedy struck but it brought about a new seed of hope. In 1992, two shocking Mafia murders took place. Two leading Sicilian magistrates, colleagues and friends, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borselino who had vowed publicly to rid the island of its Mafia poison, were both murdered, one after the other within the space of a matter of months. The island reeled. It was grief-stricken. These men had been heroes, now they were martyrs. No one could now deny that the Mafia would not go to any lengths to protect its own system. For our film, we bought newsreel and archival footage of these assassinations and their two public funerals. It is very moving material. Sheets were hung from balconies offering prayers, promises to remember, the streets were flooded with waves of flowers. Thousands and thousands followed the funeral corteges.

Out of these grotesque deaths, came the seed of hope. Father Ciotti in Turin and others elsewhere on the mainland but most importantly the young of Sicily cried, ENOUGH, BASTA. It was the seed of regeneration. In 1995, Libera Terra  was founded along with one or two other organisations such as Addiopizzo, meaning ‘goodbye to extortion monies’.

Several godfathers were arrested in quick succession and their assets were handed over to be used for organic farming and agroturismo. During one of my visits, I stayed in a Mafia hideout. It was very well concealed, sitting off a goat track high in the mountains, as one might expect for a hideout. Today it is rented out as a chalet to tourists. The monies earned from the rentals and sale of the organic food produced, particularly wine and olive oil, help to pay the working people decent wages. 

There were setbacks. An entire, newly-planted olive grove was set alight one night as a ‘warning’. But Ciotti retaliated, and loudly. He organised a massive campaign all across across Italy. Pop stars, young people, celebrities flew to the island and replanted the groves on camera for the various news channels. We have a clip of this also in our film. It is very uplifting to see such courage and hope.

By the time we had finished our film, I believed that the island had broken free of its chains. There are indeed many signs of growth and there are many young who have returned to work where they were born and where they can today expect to be paid a living wage and feel secure that health care will be available and that their lives are not at risk. Tourism is on the ascent. Sicily is, in my opinion, producing some of the finest olive oil in the world. And it is not just oil from one or two isolated farms. Consistently, it wins awards internationally and the farmers, the producers, are setting themselves high standards. The quantity is not enormous but it is very fine.

But history is a slow mover, and the grip of an organisation as powerful and as invasive as the Mafia does not let go easily. It takes fearlessness and tenacity to push against a system that has snaked itself in and around every sector, to build reform, to take back what has been stolen. Italy’s financial crisis (in part due to corruption) is critical. Sicilian unemployment is running at twenty per cent. This last week in and around Palermo showed me that there is still an on-going struggle to be fought. Still, I like to think that this page – one hundred and fifty years old, at least – might be turning and that before too long these islanders might be able to hold their heads high and celebrate the land wealth that is theirs and very hard won.

PS: The five films in The Olive Route series are available on DVD (US and international formats) at olivefarmbooks@gmail.com