Picture Postcard: Public Art in Syracuse

A Postcard from Syracuse

After a few weeks in southern Italy, arriving in Syracuse is nothing less than finding an oasis amidst a desert of chaos and dirt. It is spotlessly clean, with hardly a piece of rubbish in sight – I cannot overemphasise how amazingly unexpected this is after coming to expect to see discarded whitegoods in every stream, as if they are some ubiquitous local aquatic plant – and the streets are dotted with flowerpots. There are no beggars, no African men with cardboard tables of sunglasses. Even the Italian penchant for graffiti seems to have been miraculously restrained.

The town is spacious and light, with the relaxed atmosphere of an exceptionally attractive Australian country town - excepting the Baroque architecture, of course. It’s oddly empty, too, just old men sitting in doorways, a few tourists, and police.

Hundreds of police. For there is method in the lack of madness: the G8 is in town and, as a result, Syracuse is currently the cleanest, safest town in Italy.

As a result of this, the proprietor of our pensione – this is like a bed and breakfast, and is the best kind of accommodation in Italy, especially outside the big cities – must procure for us some special passes for us so that we may walk down our street unassailed by newly vigilant carabinieri.

This is all mildly thrilling, but not as much as what awaits us the following day: with the summit over, townspeople and tourists alike are welcome to look around the Maniace castle where the meetings were held. Needless to say, it is mostly tourists who take up the opportunity, but for better reason than mere nosiness.

The castle is question, spectacularly located at the tip of Ortigia, the peninsula that houses Syracuse’s old town, is not normally open to the public, so the invitation to look inside is not only an opportunity to take a look inside the glamorously dull world of international diplomacy, but also to see inside a magnificently preserved thirteenth century castle.

Needless to say, it’s wonderful, from the incredible views and the beautiful castle, decorated in a kind of Arabic-inspired minimalist style, to the menus left over from last night’s dinner that we are not allowed to touch, and the special bread on the tables, baked to resemble turtles and fish (it was an environmental summit after all). It’s all rather surreal, with the special occasion atmosphere of a wedding reception where everyone’s one their best behaviour – rather like the town itself at the moment.

A Postcard from Mt Etna

It is impossible to come to Catania and ignore the bulk of Mount Etna, namesake of the city’s main boulevard and touted as Europe’s biggest and one of the world’s most active volcanoes. It’s also remarkable for being one of the few volcanoes to have ever erupted smoke rings, like some enormous sleeping dragon.

Seemingly the best – and most spectacular – way to view the volcano up close is to join a guided tour. But our organisational skills and propensity to outlay money on these kinds of things being what they are, this option is ruled out for us and so we resolve to take the Circumetnea train around the mountain. It’s cheap, easy and, the promotional brochure self-assuredly informs us, is ‘not to be missed’.

Before we can catch the train, of course, we must find the station. Catanians seem generally unable to dispense straightforward directions, so when our map proves to be reliably useless, we are referred onwards in small increments ever closer to our destination. Even the people at the tourist bureau and the bloke manning the transport information booth cannot – or will not – be more forthcoming.

Finally, armed with cheerful red Circumetnea hats courtesy of the endlessly patient woman behind the information desk at the station, we board the train. It proceeds to spend over an hour swaying slowly through a series of depressingly bleak suburbs, dropping off schoolchildren dripping with gold chains and headphones along the way.

Eventually, this gives way to similarly bleak, grey countryside. Dark, twisted volcanic rock is studded with prickly pear plants and the occasional yellow flower, seemingly on a valiant – if doomed – mission to enliven the landscape. Abandoned houses stand alongside those obviously inhabited. Both kinds have an air of impermanence. The sense that the people who live here are only just surviving becomes more pronounced as we move around the volcano and the landscape becomes even more forbidding.

We alight at Randazzo. The helpful lady from the station had made it sound rather appealing and quaint, an expectation compounded by our guidebook’s description of the town as ‘dark’, ‘medieval’ and ‘gloomily authentic’. In reality, the romance implied in these statements is lacking and a better descriptor for the empty, cold town would be ‘a dump’.

An hour later, we’re back on the train and things have begun to look up as both the landscape and weather – dreary up to this point – begin to change. As the clouds gradually disperse, the ocean comes into view on our left and the blighted hillside gives way to a verdant, fertile landscape dominated by rows of fruit trees, olives and grape vines. We pass prosperous towns and comfortable homes nestled in stands of tall grass interspersed with the frizzy, soft leaves of wild fennel. The peak of the volcano even makes a fleeting appearance from behind its wreath of cloud.

The reason for the transformation is straightforward: the inviting northern slopes of the latter part of our journey have not seen an eruption for a relatively long time, while the volcano’s southern and eastern flanks have been regularly assaulted by lava flows for at least the last ten years. For the unlucky residents of the ill-fated sides of the mountain, it’s a tough life indeed, but I guess the prosperity of the favoured northern incline assures them that the risks of their existence will, eventually, pay off.

A Postcard from Catania

With its writhing creatures, pungent smells and rather graphic on-the-street butchery (horses heads being cleaved in the gutter, that sort of thing), the Catania food market is no place for sensitive vegetarians or avowed pescophobes. Somehow though, despite a having previously been the former for a considerable stretch and harbouring as I do a lifelong aversion to seafood, I find it completely enthralling, a daily spectacle of Dickensian colour as the fishermen, farmers, bakers and grocers gather to hawk their wares.

We enter through a stone archway into the seafood section of the market, a sunken sweep of cobbles surrounded by a raised walkway where old men loiter, smoking and watching the show. Everywhere, beanie-clad fishermen with tough faces, lined deeply irrespective of their age, preside over stalls. Some are huge, encompassing vast spreads of whole fishes, swordfishes with the tail removed, still-twitching crayfish and watery trays of shellfish lazily squirting liquid into an unwary eye. Others are more modest: a few buckets filled with whitebait, or a couple of containers of snails and parsley, a kind of one-stop mollusc shop.

I watch one man deftly peeling raw prawns. He notices me and, hoping to make a sale, cries “dieci euro!” before popping one into his mouth to demonstrate its freshness. His voice is throaty and guttural, his Sicilian intonation quite different from what we have heard elsewhere in Italy. I move on, noticing a blue bucket in which an octopus is making a valiant last stand, staging a slow, slithering – and surely doomed – attempt to escape.

Elsewhere, the market sellers offer bread, groceries, meat, fruits and vegetables. There are piles of artichokes spilling from the boot of a tiny Fiat Cinquecento and picture-perfect butchers’ stands selling marbled slabs of meat, chickens with the heads and feet intact, and rabbits halved along the spine. I look away from the gore of a sheep’s head, stripped of skin and hair, its eyes and lashes remaining in a parody of a sweet-faced lamb, just in time to avoid walking into a sheet of tripe suspended from a hook.

We spent the afternoon looking around the rest of the town. It’s attractively run-down and the layers of the city’s particularly rich history are clearly evident, with ancient ruins crumbling alongside medieval castles and faded Baroque palaces. Sometimes this layering is quite literal, with the modern paving having seemingly been peeled back to reveal the corner of an ancient amphitheatre or the foundation of a Roman bathhouse.

Visiting these ruins, however, is an exercise in frustration, with all bar one of those that we’d hoped to see being either closed for restoration or simply, inexplicably, shut, the gates padlocked and the guard’s booth empty. Many are overrun with vegetation, making any attempts to peer through the fence entirely fruitless.

When it starts to drizzle and the canoli we buy turn out to be stale – and I can’t muster the Italian word for ‘stale’ in order to complain – it seems apparent that nothing is going to work out today. But, as we walk along the broad Via Etnea to our pensione, I think of the tenacious little octopus from the market, attempting a hopeless escape over the side of the blue bucket. If my day has been frustrating, it’s got nothing on his.

A Postcard from Amalfi

We are staying in a surprisingly lively village called San Lazzaro, perched on the edge of the Agerola valley on the Amalfi coast. I’m naturally sceptical of our guidebook’s sloganeering description of the view over the coast – ‘between the sky and the sea’ – but as we walk up a gentle incline away from the main square and see the calm, flat ocean blending hazily into the sky, it seems the superlatives are justified.

Further up the hill, in the midst of a large public park, sits an imposing relic of the fascist era, a half-completed structure that Mussolini had intended to be a holiday camp for impoverished children. The single building is totally out of scale with the modest village, both in size and the grandiosity of details such as a towering carving of typically totalitarian images that adorns its side.

Elsewhere in Europe, such a site would be either preserved for history and equipped with informative plaques and helpful staff, or bulldozed entirely, being an unwanted reminder of an unpalatable past, but here it stands alien and eerie, showing signs of gradual reclamation by the surrounding park: vines gripping the rotting grey pillars, branches intruding into the unfinished interior.

The next day, we catch the bus down to the ocean, sledding along narrow roads, around sharp corners and alongside precipitously sheer cliffs. Amalfi itself is frantic, the presence of a hulking cruise ship offshore ensuring a high density of tourists despite the fact it’s still two weeks out of season. Germans wearing shorts and Velcro sandals stand outside gift shops, eating cornetti and taking photographs of a man shifting piles of dirt with the help of two overburdened donkeys.

A few hours later, further down the coast in Positano, amongst the luxury hotels and expensive restaurants, we see the entrance to Sophia Loren's villa. The house itself is hidden from view and can be reached only by a private funicular railway. It's all a far cry from Mussolini's disadvantaged holidaying kids, but, to be honest, movie stars and cruise liners are rather more suited to the drama of the landscape than utilitarian fascist architecture.

A Postcard from Pompeii

Few cities are at their best from the train line, and the drab streets either side of the suburban Neopolitan train to Pompei – the modern commuter town has one ‘i’, the ancient ruins two – are no exception. We slide along the seafront, passing a series of crumbling buildings in shades of grey and beige, from which washing hangs limply in the warm air. It all has a certain down-at-heel attractiveness, although certainly not enough to tempt me from the relative comfort and safety of the train.

And, if nothing else, their cluttered facades, ridden with satellite dishes and air conditioning units, serves as an illustration as to why the strata company at my block of flats at home is justified in forbidding exterior ‘improvements’.

Seeing these dilapidated blocks of housing, I wonder why the Italians, so concerned with their personal appearances and fare la bella figura - and renowed for their style - are seemingly blind to the state of their environment. Graffiti is endemic, even the most prestigious areas are blighted by litter to some extent, and constructing buildings to about the half-way point before leaving them unfinished and rotting seems to be a national sport. Coming from the land of Clean Up Australia Day and Tidy Town awards, all of this neglect seems strangely lacking in civic-mindedness.

We eventually arrive in Pompei and find our way to the archaeological site. It’s spectacular, and I almost find myself envying the ancients their orderly town with its public baths and airy villas until I remember the horrific way most of their lives ended.

And besides, the faded Latin graffiti adorning the walls and the well-organised brothel, with its exterior sign warning against public urination, are all reminders that the ancient Romans were probably just as fond of littering and spitting in the street and flouting building codes as their modern counterparts.

A Postcard from Naples

Naples’ reputation precedes it, and despite my vaguely positive memories of a previous visit to the city, conducted within the controlled confines of a high school trip, the damning stories almost succeed in putting us off before we even arrive. We manage to avoid the worst of it by staying in a rather wealthy beach-side suburb where the streets are lined with citrus trees and beggars are relatively scarce, but there’s no avoiding the dirt and sleaze entirely.

Following a day of exploring the claustrophobic streets of the old town, filled with shops selling elaborate nativity figurines and pizza restaurants all claiming to be the oldest in Naples, we ride the Metro home. It’s an uncomfortable ride; like every piece of public property south of Rome, the train is dirty and covered with graffiti, and very hot. It’s also absurdly slow, stopping and starting every few minutes, even though – or perhaps because – the train has four drivers.

Then, as we pull into a grubby station, an unkempt man carrying a large sack steps aboard. This immediately causes alarm: while Italians have a high level of tolerance for dirtiness in their surroundings, they are obsessive about personal appearance. Here, only mad people go about unwashed and sloppily dressed.

The train lumbers into the subway ahead, thus sealing all potential routes of escape, and the man begins his spiel. With little flourish but considerable clamour, he upends his sack, tipping its contents into a pile at his feet. Then, in rambling but rapid Italian, he endeavours to sell items from the pile for one euro apiece: a pair of scissors, or a cheese grater, perhaps? Maybe a football, or a spatula?

We all ignore him, of course, staring into space with a stoicism that would impress even Londoners on the tube, trying to pretend that this person is not standing here, bothering us, his spit landing on our arms and clothes as he attempts to catch our attention. One brave soul tries to halt the entrepreneurial frenzy by offering to pay the man one euro if he will shut up. No such luck, and our would-be saviour is forced to select an item from the pile (an umbrella) in exchange for his coin and affect a hasty withdrawal.

Finally, after much dithering, the party of train drivers decides to deposit us at a station. The man gathers his merchandise in the sack and leaves the train, presumably to harass another set of unsuspecting and uncomfortable commuters, and we all settle in, willing the journey to end quickly so we might escape back to our retreat amongst the lemon-scented avenues and wash off the grime – and spit – of the city.