The Burial of Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia is the patron saint of Siracusa. For those who don't know her story, she gave all her money to the poor after her mother was healed at Santa Agatha's tomb. The money had been intended for her dowry, but she broke the engagement and offered her chastity to God, which of course didn't sit well with her pagan groom. He denounced her as a Christian, and the Governor of Siracusa, the local ruler during the Emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians, sentenced her to be deflowered in a brothel. But no one could move her. They tried oxen, witchcraft, and a thousand men, but still she stood immobile. They even tried burning her, which failed. So they pried her eyes out with a fork and finally killed her with a knife in the throat. This happened in Siracusa in 304 A.D.

When Caravaggio arrived in town, his first major commission was for the church that had been built on the site of her death. The most common theme of paintings of Santa Lucia was to depict her martyrdom, but Caravaggio decided to paint her burial. The figures are huddled into the bottom half of the canvas, leaving a vast, dark, empty weight above them, and most of that lower portion is given to the hulking gravediggers and the armored soldier, each seemingly twice the size of the mourners. Caravaggio's tragic religious paintings often featured the workmen, the laborers.

Near the Ear of Dionysius in the hills of Siracusa are the Crypt of San Marciano and the 10,000-square-meter catacombs of San Giovanni. Caravaggio would have visited these places while working on the painting. You can see from my photos below that his setting for the Burial of Santa Lucia was not only influenced by the crypt and catacombs, but perhaps he even set up his studio there.

Libyan Refugees

Several people have written to ask if I've encountered any evidence here of the situation in Lybia. The other day in Siracusa, I came upon a fascinating scene. Early in the morning I was walking from the old section of the city into the modern section to do laundry, and as I passed the port, a police escort came by and momentarily stopped traffic. I watched from the sidewalk as they shepherded two giant tour buses through town. When the buses rolled by, I first noticed armed police onboard wearing surgical masks. Then I made eye-contact with some of the seated passengers, most of whom were smiling young Libyan men, staring with excitement at Siracusa, Sicily, a place that might become their new home. Most likely the refugees had already been on the overrun island of Lampedusa and were being brought to the mainland for processing. Or perhaps Siracusa was their first port-of-entry after fleeing Lybia.

The whole situation here is a complicated and difficult one with no easy answers, but I will say it was strangely heartening to see these young men grinning from the windows of tour buses, even with the masked guards watching over them. They might not find the glorious life they've dreamed about here in Europe, but then again they might.

Trapped in Pozzallo

I left my hostel in Siracusa this morning at 5:30, only to find that the daily 6-o'clock train wasn't running. (Although the Trenitalia website said it would be.) No buses, either. So I was stuck catching a taxi for the hour-long drive to the ferry port at Pozzallo. It was a great hour to work on my Italian with Giovanni, the driver, although the fare cost what a semester-long course in a language school would cost.

When I arrived in Pozzallo, the winds were so strong that it was difficult to walk outside. I waited an hour huddled against the shuttered ticket office, then someone came by and pointed out a sign that said the ferry had been canceled due to inclement weather. The seas were high, frothing in the wind.

I stood behind a coast guard building for protection as I considered what to do. I was a couple miles from town with no way off the island. Pretty limited options. Finally I hitchhiked into the village and found a bed and breakfast with an available room. It appears that the next boat to Malta isn't until Wednesday morning, so I'm trapped here for a couple nights. That's a bad blow to my Maltese research, but maybe I can make it a good time for writing. There doesn't seem to be much else to do here, at least not in this weather.

Good Friday Street Party

Buona Pasqua, my friends.  Happy Easter.  I spent this morning at Siracusa's beautiful Duomo, attending the Pontificale di Pasqua, followed by a typical Easter meal of braised goat and plenty of seafood.  It was a nice way to leave Sicily.  Tomorrow I'll wake up before dawn to catch a train to the southern village of Pozzallo, where I'll board a boat for Malta. By lunchtime, I'll be settled in the tiny capital of Valletta.

On Friday night I stepped out for a bottle of wine to bring back to the hotel and assist me in my evening labors. I unwittingly ran into a Good Friday Procession in which hundreds of people were marching with statues of Jesus and Mary through the streets, backed up by a pretty solid band. I shot some impromptu video with my small digital camera. (Apologies for the quality.) The first video gives a general view of the scene coming through the Piazza del Duomo. The second video focuses on the band, as I marched with them down a narrow alley.

And a couple photos...

The Ear of Dionysius

In Siracusa today I visited an ancient archeological site that Caravaggio himself toured while in Sicily. He arrived in Siracusa by boat, the morning after escaping from prison in Malta. And even though he was a hunted man and living on the edge of madness, his fame was so great that his appearance in this Spanish-ruled city was celebrated, and he could live in public somewhat safely.

The archeologist and architect Vincenzo Mirabella was beginning a project in which he would map the Ancient Greek caves and catacombs around Siracusa, and he invited Caravaggio to the hills above town to see these caverns carved into the limestone. Caravaggio was shown a man-made grotto that was used as a prison by the tyrant Dionysius in about 400 B.C. The acoustics in the cave are incredible. A person can speak at a normal volume inside the cave and the sound will carry well enough to be heard outside through small openings cut high in the cliffs at each end of the grotto.

Legend has it that Dionysius was a paranoid ruler who used the acoustics to eavesdrop on his prisoners. Caravaggio heard this story, and he noticed that the shape of the cave -- with its strangely curved walls tapering into a kind of funnel at the pinnacle of the 75-foot-high ceiling -- resemble the human ear. He pointed this out to Mirabella, naming it the Ear of Dionysius, which it is still called today.

The Caravaggio Mafia Heist

I'm in Palermo, where the presence and influence of La Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia, literally translated as "Our Thing") is still considered impressive.  There once was a great Caravaggio painting to see here, "Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence," but it has now been undergroud for 41 years.

Some claim the painting was burned in the 1980s after being stored in a barn and badly eaten by rats and pigs.  But here's a 2005 article by Peter Robb that ran in the Telegraph, which tells a different story:

[On] a rainy autumn night 35 years ago, there was a stunning Nativity by Caravaggio hanging in a Palermo church. Some time between October 17 and 18 1969, it was cut with razor blades from its frame over the altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo and was never seen again.

In the capital of Cosa Nostra, people knew what to think about this, or thought they did, but nobody talked. The silence lasted until November 1996, 27 years after the theft, when the former Mafia heroin refiner Francesco Marino Mannoia was giving evidence in the trial of Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister who was accused of association with the Mafia. Andreotti was acquitted late last year.

Mannoia mentioned, quite parenthetically, that as a young man he had been one of those who stole the Caravaggio Nativity. It was, he said, a theft on commission, carried out so clumsily that the painting on the huge and crudely folded canvas – more than five square metres – was irreparably damaged. The person it was stolen for had burst into tears when he saw the ruined work and refused to take it.

A lot of other people felt like crying when they heard this. Earlier intimations from an undercover agent and a British journalist had suggested that the painting was intact, at least until the 1980s. Forget about it, Mannoia said he had told the murdered anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone.

This was the first account of the Caravaggio theft from inside Cosa Nostra and it seemed to end the story.

Three years after this, I was in Rome at the headquarters of the carabinieri's Art Work Protection Unit. I was looking into several matters and not getting much satisfaction.

A young officer with gleaming eyes and enormous carabinieri moustaches noticed my discontent. He drew me into his office and closed the door. He had overheard me mention Caravaggio and wanted to talk about the stolen Nativity.

"We know where it is," he said. "We're close to getting it back."

No recording, no note-taking allowed. What about Marino Mannoia? I asked. Mannoia was a serious and credible witness. Why would he lie about its destruction?

"He didn't lie. He just remembered wrongly. Another painting was stolen in Palermo around the same time. That's the one he took, the one that was ruined."

The young officer got excited and a colleague looked in to see why he was shouting. The Nativity was about to be recovered - I would see, the carabiniere said, and then I could tell the story.

The painting never was recovered, but a couple of years later the details of what the young officer had told me started filtering out. It was not, it turned out, a Cosa Nostra crime at all. The Nativity was stolen that wet Palermo night by local amateurs equipped with a blade and a three-wheeled delivery van. They had seen the painting on TV a few weeks before, in a programme on Italy's hidden treasures. They were amazed at its value and knew it was guarded only by an elderly janitor.

One of the thieves had a guest when they brought the canvas home. The visitor was on the run from the police and his brother was a mafioso. It was he who interceded the next day to save the fools who were now in bad trouble for operating on Mafia turf without Cosa Nostra's knowledge or consent, and to deliver the unexpected prize to Cosa Nostra. Years later, the visitor remembered that the painting was damaged in a lower corner - torn when caught in the door of a lift - and he recalled how they had all walked over the canvas when it was unrolled on the floor of the room he slept in. The Nativity passed from one Palermo boss to another to a third, Gerlando "The Rug" Alberti, commander of the Porta Nuova district in Palermo.

Alberti ran a heroin refinery outside Palermo, and for the next 12 years, until his arrest in 1981, he also tried to sell the Caravaggio Nativity. The unsaleable prize became a burden. He tried and failed to sell it in Switzerland, Italy and the US. Then Alberti was convicted of killing the owner of a seaside bathing establishment and sentenced to life in prison.

Earlier, he had buried an iron chest containing – apparently – five kilos of heroin, several million dollars in cash, and the Nativity rolled in a carpet. His nephew, Vincenzo La Piana, who dug the trench the chest was buried in, was arrested some years later and collaborated with the prosecutors. He took them to the place where the chest had been buried, warning them first that it was "unlikely my uncle would have left it there". The Rug hadn't.

The Rug's arrest had coincided with the beginning of the extermination phase of the Corleone Mafia's bid for control of Cosa Nostra. This lasted for most of the 1980s and Gerlando Alberti was a lucky one. The Nativity's previous owner, the Palermo boss Rosario Riccobono, was throttled in 1982 at a barbecue lunch organised for that purpose by the Corleonesi. The physical elimination of Palermo's old Mafia families has blocked the Nativity's recovery. The dead can't speak, the survivors, in jail or on witness protection, are no longer on top of things. The Rug knows, but as one of the losers, he has reason for silence.

The years pass and the number of people alive who have seen the painting diminishes. When Caravaggio's Nativity is recovered – and it will be – something may have survived. So what, from photographs, are we still missing?

Caravaggio's last big complex painting is a thrilling and scary revisitation of the central Christian myth. An exhausted and blankly post-partum Mary clutches her belly and stares at the thing on the ground just issued from her. A gymnastic boy angel plunges overhead. The scene is usurped by a lithe and wiry youth in silver hose and a green jacket, with spiky blond hair. With his back to the viewer, his foot touching the Christ child, he twists to face the aged Joseph with a vigorous gesture of disbelief.

Hunger Was Good Discipline

One book I'm lugging around is Hemingway's memoir of his early years writing in Paris, A Moveable Feast.  Here is a passage that's been stuck in my head for several years now:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go were the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.