Sicily: A Land of Love and Strife – The Book

Mark’s story starts in the streets of Kansas City in a neighbourhood populated by immigrant Sicilians and Neapolitans. He was born to a father of Sicilian origin and a mother whose family came from Puglia. Despite the criminality he witnessed in his hometown, Mark’s family guided him down a path that avoided the temptations of easy money, fighting the facile stereotyping faced by many families whose relatives hailed from southern Italy. He admits that he can’t quite pin-down his feeling of being Sicilian. Despite a lifetime of reading about the island, his first visit was delayed until he was sixty, but it was a visit that would have him yearning for Trinacria whenever he put pen to paper or film to camera. The truth of this is to be found within us all; we are all immigrants from somewhere, however far removed, and to deny that is part of the problem we face as humans in the complex global world of the twenty-first century. Mark has chosen to embrace his family’s past and discover more.

The Vucciria market in Palermo is one of Mark’s first ports of call, owing to its connection with his relatives. He experiences an olfactory feeling of past-life regression, as if he has smelt the streets before at some point in distant memory. If you have never experienced the Vucciria, you would be amazed by the various smells that assail the casual wanderer, not all of them entirely pleasant. A look at Renato Guttuso’s famous painting will give you a clue. It is not long before Mark comes to realise that Sicily doesn’t resemble the tales of his grandparents – immigrant stories, tinged as they are with nostalgia and occasional bitterness, seldom resemble the truth, whatever that may be. It is also the case that tourists armed with guidebook preconceptions often have them dispelled if they have an iota of curiosity for the humanity surrounding them.

The author has a filmmaker’s eye for the small vignette or the interesting cameo. His evocation of the basement restaurant you can only enter via the ring of a bell is full of wry observation, especially when his partner, Carlus, is mistaken for a German Boris Becker lookalike. In another sketch from his travels, he is approached by an elderly German couple and bizarrely asked the meaning of the word ‘metrosexual’. It’s at this moment that Mark decides to make a film about Sicily, thinking that the Sicilians surrounding him could answer the question far better than he.

Through the text, Mark uses quotes to reinforce his point or illustrate a principle to great effect, a stylistic device that often segues into more amusing anecdotes, as illustrated by his attempts at finding a certain Mr Enzo from the Sicilian Office of Tourism and Cinema. At one point, he finds himself stuck in a lift with eight people, a Florio era sardine can with a supposed capacity of five. When Mark finally meets his contact, he feels he has qualified as full-blown Sicilian, having navigated the intricacies of disinterested red-tape and the conversation of bored functionaries. Mayor Leoluca Orlando had assured him that all the people arriving in Sicily have become Sicilians, by which we suppose he means the waves of historic in-comers, which is true, but the author drolly feels he can also stake a claim.

To say that Mark writes with humour is not to say that he is incapable of a serious turn, something demonstrated when he debunks some of the Hollywood myths concerning organised crime. You can hear his cri de coeur when he says: ‘But in the discussion of organized crime, I want no myths, no dreams, no heroics. I want only real people, real death, real theft, a genuine highjacking of the economic futures of generations past, present, and those possibly to come.’ – Powerful stuff and said with force because Mark clearly feels much for the native island of his grandparents and his Sicilian background.

It is a heritage he compares and contrasts with his own self-image and his gay identity. He feels that being at the harsh end of a dominant bullying culture has informed both Sicilian and homosexual history, although this could be extended to any culture suppressed and overridden by a controlling, more authoritarian force – Sicily is sadly not alone in feeling the barbs of historical repression, the world is too full of societies struggling for a voice. Sicily’s position with regard to its history is a complex one. The German author, Joachim Fest, postulates the position that he who has too much history, in effect, has none. Although Fest is not entirely convincing, this thought hints at a history created by the dominant and done to the subjected, which you could argue is all history – full stop. Witness the lack of female achievement in the annals written by men.

One of the quotes that most evokes Sicily for us comes from Giovanni Morreale, the founder of Times of Sicily. It must be a quote that also spoke to Mark’s sense of the olfactory. Giovanni conjures the notion of outside living on the island, the smell of the zagara and the gelsi blossom, of the oil on warm bread, of the salt and anchovies. Giovanni says it is not reproducible, becoming an indelible memory and he’s right. Strip away the history books, the power struggles, the stereotype and the image – this is Sicily.

Mark is impressed by the youth of the island, by their vitality and zest for life, sometimes against the odds. It is in the hands of these youngsters he wants to put a better future. Although occasionally viewing them with rose-tinted spectacles, he is well-aware that they have to take a degree of responsibility for their own futures, aided by those in positions of power who have honourable intentions. Some of those in such positions, as the author indicates, have advised the Sicilian young to leave the island and gain experience in the wider world. The difference between these youngsters and those of Mark’s grandfather’s generation is that these days the island is actively encouraging them back – go see the world and bring it back to Sicily with your enthusiasm and dynamism. Only with such an attitude, still nascent, will Sicily reverse the brain-drain spoken of by Veronica Di Grigoli.

Mark finishes with a quote from a repatriated Sicilian American who is always asked the rationale for returning. It is a common question and one we have received in a slightly different form. We are often asked by Sicilians themselves why we write on Sicilian matters, as if they find it incredulous that anyone from beyond their immediate world would be interested. In Sicily: A Land of Love and Strife, Mark Spanò has made a cogent case for why people should be.