Classically white

When we use the adjective ‘classical’, we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it’s a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It’s hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked “jewelled” and “busy”. Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn’t prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.

The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.

The Sicily I never knew…

A little self indulgence, if you please. My friends Pauline and Tim are travelling in Sicily as I write this and like millions of travellers everywhere, they’ve taken the opportunity to set up a little blog of their experiences. It’s also handy that they are decent writers.

I’m insanely jealous. I intended but never got the opportunity to get to Sicily on my Italian trip in early 2006, so I’m living vicariously through them.

Barbarian invasions on New Year’s Eve

Beside the Piazza della Repubblica, the Emperor Diocletian built his immense baths for the people of Rome. Centuries later, the Church and Michelangelo appropriated the ruins and washed the pagan stain away by constructing the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli out of it. This New Year’s Eve seemed to be an effort by the young people of Rome to return it to its rightful pagan owners.

Earlier that day I overheard a woman asking a handsome young chap behind the information desk about the New Year’s Eve events in Rome. He’s excited. He smiles. “We have cover bands! You know, Elvis, The Police, Sex Pistols… You like SEX PISTOLS?”. She left.

Everywhere, explosions like percussion grenades. People light fireworks and throw them down where they explode around your feet. They’re throwing them from balconies. Clouds of cordite, cigarette smoke and dope waft over the crowds. It’s like the Tet Offensive. I’m having ‘Apocalyse Now’ flashbacks.

The musicians are pumping it out on a stage constructed at one end of the circular piazza that wouldn’t have embarrassed U2. Only the band is not U2, but a succession of dodgy reception centre dwellers who wouldn’t be out of place at a 21st birthday in Balwyn.

What is impressive is the video projection all over the surrounding buildings encircling the crowds. The idea seems to be a tour of popular music over the last fifty years, with all the icons you’d expect, and I did see Elvis, The Police and the Sex Pistols. Only it seems to be stale and commodified, wrapped up into a neat collection of visual cliches. I’m expecting to see ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ or something any minute now, and then sure enough, there’s a logo and it turns out the whole thing is sponsored by a Lotto company.

Kids get sick of this and start tossing empty champagne bottles in the air. It’s pouring rain as the laser light show continues out from behind the Fountain of the Naiads. It’s like the invasion of the barbarians all over again. I see a couple of flares held aloft in the downpour; like a soccer riot, only without the soccer.

We decide to get out before the human sacrifices start, just as the band is cranking into the late 60s and the pseudo-Hendrix guitar solos start to clock up the minutes. There’s a bottleneck up at the top of the Piazza dei Cinquecento and people are filing through the gap, pressed up against each other, trying to avoid having their eyes gouged out by umbrellas. The rain is pelting down, with silhouettes of falling bottles against the glow of street lights. I’m grasping hold of my partner’s hand, I’m wet and it’s freezing cold and I’m enjoying myself immensely.

What I did on my holidays

Still jetlagged several days after arriving home, I’m beginning to suspect the symptoms might be more than just physical. The impact of a trip like that has hit me hard and I just hope I haven’t kicked off some early mid-life crisis, with ordinary life appearing very uninspiring now that I’m back at work.

To explain, I’ve just had a month of concentrated sensation, travelling through most of Italy, some of Switzerland, and a little bit of the United Kingdom, inhaling art and a good deal of second hand smoke.

I’m not even going to begin to put down a comprehensive report of what I saw, what I did and what I thought of it all. The very idea makes me tired. Except to say that my belief that art is a noble calling, and needless to say, a worthy and meaningful way to spend one’s short life, was confirmed with interest.

Rita Borsellino stands up in Sicily

The sister of the heroic anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino will stand as a centre-left candidate in next year’s elections for governor of Sicily. Rita Borsellino is running against Salvatore Cuffaro, who is standing trial on charges of collusion with Cosa Nostra.

Paolo Borsellino was assasinated in a car bomb attack in 1992. The sweeping prosecutions he and his colleague Giovane Falcone managed to bring against Italian and Sicilian underworld bosses before being themselves snuffed out, broke the back of the mafia’s influence on the economy and on politics. At least until the current lot of Christian Democrats, headed by the current Prime Minister, started back-peddling for reasons best known to themselves.

Rita Borsellino said she was fighting not just the incumbent but a whole system.

The aim of the mafia is not so much to kill magistrates as to make money. Money buys power and power buys money. It is not strange that the mafia looks for support from those in power. What is strange is that they find it.

Quite.

‘Midnight in Sicily’

One evening several years ago I was driving home from Bendigo down empty country roads, and a voice on the radio began describing in the most voluptuous detail a market day in the city of Palermo; the colour, noise and smells of a city on the other side of the world that filled my ears, nose and eyes. The smell of the day’s catch, the overpowering heat and colour of filtered Sicilian sunlight beneath awnings, hanging meat still dripping from the recent kill, the shock of colour in new-picked vegetables; and all the time, in my guts, I could feel a certain insistent menace tugging like a fish-hook.

This was the Vucciria, in the mid-70s, the marketplace in Palermo that gave Peter Robb his most powerful sensual charge on arrival in the ancient city. The voice I heard was a Radio National broadcast of the first chapter of this astonishing book.

That menace, which invisibly fills the pages like a secret translation, is made painfully concrete in the details of Italy’s recent history which are laid out here. But this is much more than a history of the mafia and its collaborations with Italy’s political class, a history recounted with more detail elsewhere. It is a kind of thesis, which is never stated outright, but which is the implication of the book as a whole. The thesis is that it is impossible to separate the political, culinary, artistic, criminal, architectural, literary, geographic, social and historical aspects of Italian culture without doing violence to one or all of them. Mafia, just as much as gelati or the paintings of Renato Guttuso, is a product of the Italian character; and one can’t come to a complete understanding of one without at least a partial understanding of the others.

This is where the book’s quality and its strangeness lies. Reading the reviews on the Amazon.com website, you can see how challenging and even unsatisfactory many people find this. What kind of book is this anyway? they seem to ask, unable to accommodate the fact that it can be historical nonfiction, memoir, art criticism and food writing all at once, often within a single page.

I was reminded of this when I came across this statement by Giulio Andreotti, the former Prime Minister and associate of some very dangerous people, about Sicily:

“I found myself with my stomach full of marvelous but terrible food, the pasta con le sarde, the cassata; and not only did I not understand a thing there but I was ill too. I wonder whether there’s a connection between food like this and the growth of the mafia.”

I read this book a few years ago, prompted into finding it by that radio broadcast, and bought it for friends. The main effect it had on me was to awaken a burning desire to see Italy, in particular the mezzogiorno, to study the language and read anything I could get my hands on about Italy’s recent history and particularly the mafia. I’m finally getting to satisfy that desire later this year.

If I have a criticism, it’s with the final quarter of the book, which deals mostly with the painful last months and death of the Sicilian expressionist Renato Guttuso, who recorded the Vucciria in all its glory. By this time, the weight of all the corpses recorded in the previous chapters starts to burden the reader, and the blood and the corruption becomes tedious and depressing. Right when the book really should be gathering to its climax, it begins to fall away and ends with a whimper.

The book has no reproductions, even though a great deal of time is taken describing pictures, like the painting by Guttuso of the Vucciria. And the lack of an index is a serious flaw, especially given that this the sort of book you end up picking up and rereading as certain things come back into focus every time you hear those names again on the news. Because this is a very recent history indeed. More information is coming to light all the time about the events recounted here.

I notice that since this book was published, Sicily’s main airport was re-named after the heroic antimafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino. This is a good sign in a country which officially didn’t even admit the existence of the mafia until the 1980s, years after the word had become a cliché in Hollywood movies.

The world looks to Italy with the same fondness it reserves for very few others, like Ireland maybe; countries we all recognise have given us something important. We hope the spirit of the nation wins out, despite the spivs and chancers like Andreotti and the repellant Berlusconi.

The quality of Peter Robb’s writing which stays in the mouth after you’ve read it is its overpowering sensuality, tinged with blood. It has the quality of a testimonial, given with generosity but also with truth. After reading it again, I felt that these are the sorts of things that need to be said, the history that certain countries have got to live with if they’ve got any chance at all.

To those who stand up

The other night I heard of the death of Rosa Parks, the woman who famously would not give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. She was 92.

“It’s a cliché to say she was the mother of the civil rights movement, but she really was,” said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the NAACP. “She set in motion a movement that hasn’t ended.”

She was a 42-year-old seamstress and a member of the NAACP when she was jailed for her act of defiance and fined $14. She said in 1992, “The real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long.”

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by Martin Luther King. It led to a Supreme Court decision that discrimination on public transport was unconstitutional. The movement culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

All day I had the Neville Brothers song going through my head:

Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
Thank you Miss Rosa you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.

This feeling persisted with me all day, and then I stayed up to watch the documentary ‘Excellent Cadavers’ on SBS.

Through the eyes of journalist Alexander Stille, it investigated the ongoing power of the mafia and the relationship between Cosa Nostra and the Italian politicians of the 70s, 80s and 90s. This is a bit of an obsession with me at the moment, as I’m re-reading Peter Robb’s ‘Midnight in Sicily’, a book I treasure, and I will be travelling in Italy soon and will visit as much of Sicily as I can.

I was deeply moved by the story of the heroic anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two others who stood up against genuine evil despite the fact that they were both certain they would not survive the experience.

After his friend Falcone’s sensational death when the Corleonese blew up 400 METRES of freeway in order to make sure he was dead, a colleague of Borsellino’s begged him to slow down and take a break from his relentless workload. The magistrate explained that he had to work like this, as he had so little time left. He was right. He was killed by a car bomb in 1992 on the orders of this piece of filth:

I was depressed to hear that the current Prime Minister, the billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, is busy dismantling much of the anti-mafia legislation that Falcone, Borsellino and so many others, like the police captain Carlo Dalla Chiesa, literally gave their lives to enact.

But here’s to those who stand up.