Travels in Sicily "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Even in Sicily, the quest for the perfect chip continued, but with limited enthusiasm on my part. The best I found on the island was, with nothing else even a close second (probably because I only asked for chips twice), “Fonzies,” a Cheeto-like twisty with a powdery parmesan cheese flavor. But there were other quests to occupy me as I traveled through Sicily.

Published in 1958, after the author passed away, The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) is a Sicilian classic. I had read it, and read it slowly in order to savor the elegant language, the vivid pictures it created in my imagination, and to linger over the theme of how families reconcile their traditions to times of intense political and social change, the ideas that most grabbed hold as I read. I was amazed, when at BookExpo 2008, Thomas Friedman, in reading from his then soon-to-be-published Hot, Flat and Crowded, quoted from The Leopard. Set primarily during the early 1860’s during Garibaldi’s time and the creation of a unified Italy, including the annexation of Sicily, the patriarch of the family, the Prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio, known as “The Leopard,” comments, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It was this line that Thomas Friedman quoted.

The idea of a literary pilgrimage to places associated with Lampedusa and to places reminiscent of the book lodged in my imagination, and so I, in good Romantic tradition, wandered through the streets of Palermo with the novel in my hand, reading descriptions of the Palazzo Lampedusa as I looked at the facades of crumbling Baroque palazzos and toured the Palazzo Mitro, open to the public and restored to what was the time of Don Fabrizio, and complete with the feeling of “slightly shabby grandeur.”

In the stables of the palazzo were carriages of all sizes, and so it was easy to choose one, and then imagine the Prince riding in it through the narrow streets of Palermo. The real palace of Lampedusa, himself an aristocrat, was demolished by an Allied bomb on April 5, 1943. Lampedusa is buried in the cemetery, next to, but not in, the catacombs, at the Capuchin Monastery.

There is, of course, a movie based on the novel, starring Burt Lancaster, and the final scene, a grand ball, was filmed in a palazzo on the Piazza Croce dei Vespri, which turned out to be just steps from my hotel on the Via Roma. Even while relishing the fabulously decorated ballroom, Lampedusa communicates Don Fabrizio’s tenderness and longing for a past he knows must end, and there is a sense of foreboding that change must follow this last gasp of a fading Sicilian aristocracy. In the novel, the Prince sees the Sicily of the past, and knows that he is a part of that. But he also knows that change is inevitable, and looks to his nephew, Tancredi, to lead Sicily into the future, which indeed, he does.

It was with a certain excitement that Tancredi wine was served at my last meal in Sicily, and I was able to toast Lampedusa, who really had been my guide and companion and had shown me Sicily through his eyes.

Because I had read The Leopard, I knew Sicily was an island ruled by a succession of civilizations, each building, literally, often tragically, on the previous. (Here they mostly are: Geloans, settlers from Crete and Rhodos, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Swabia/German, Angeline, Aragonese, Bourbon, Italian.) I expected vibrancy, yet nostalgia. I was not surprised to see old buildings in various stages of collapse and, conversely, in various stages of repair. Though I did not go to the interior to the restored town of Santa Margherita di Belice (the model for the town of Donnafugata in The Leopard), Lampedusa’s descriptions of “the real Sicily” jumped readily to mind as I traveled around the island by bus and train. As I took in the high blue skies and deep blue seas, shepherd s minding sheep on steep but green hillsides, towering, distant Etna, and the jagged mountains, I was glad I had Lampedusa’s words to help me describe what I was seeing. As Don Fabrizio comments, the land is “comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp.” Even as I wandered around monuments from Magna Grecia, I felt “the immemorial silence of pastoral Sicily.”

And I marked what Don Fabrizio said. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”