Return of the Plague Rat

 

A side street in Cinisi

After doing a fair amount of traveling in Italy, I took a while getting around to visit the one ancestral place I'm sure about. That, according to my paternal grandmother Mary Rutland (nee Palazzolo), is Cinisi, a Sicilian town about twenty miles west of Palermo. 

She visited it for the first time circa 1960, after crossing the Atlantic by ship. By that time she was a widow with three children, having lost my grandfather to complications due to rheumatic fever. Single parenthood in pre-Mad Men days was challenging enough for a male, and doubly so for a woman in her forties who'd never worked a formal job before. Yet she found the time and the resources to make her way to the old country, at a time when females rarely traveled alone. 

As told at a dozen Thanksgivings and 4th of July BBQs in later years, my grandmother was welcomed in Cinisi with something close to rapture. She was guided around, feted, treated like a miraculous survivor of some Odyssean trial. Her maiden  name, Palazzolo, was the ticket to instant affinity in a place where family ties were everything. She was even introduced to the local don---though he was presented as just another old guy because "there is no such thing as the Mafia". She told this story with her usual elan, her humor and passion for the details. What she never explained (and I was either too young or too self-absorbed to ask) was what she was looking for by returning there. Was it simple curiosity? Or was it something deeper, a sense of connection for someone who had lost the most significant one in her life? These are questions I'll never have answered, as she passed away in 2000.

Cinisi is right beside Palermo's modern airport at Punto Raisi. The place-name teased me when I landed in Sicily last week, a decade older than my grandmother when she first visited. I had other priorities from the menu of Sicilian wonders-- ruined Greek cities, Arab-Norman mosaics that sparkle like sunlit surf, rococo churches like the wedding cakes of titans. Yet the opportunity to see Cinisi, a place with no touristic appeal, ate at me. Perhaps it was simple curiosity. Or maybe the desire to share something with my grandmother, now that she's gone.

The main street of Cinisi, the Corso Umberto, is surprisingly scenic. At the north end lies the inky meniscus of the Tyrrhenian Sea; to the southeast, the sheer cliffs of Mt. Scardilla, looming over the town in a way that would intimidate the skyline of Manhattan. It would be impossible to imagine a town more literally sandwiched between mountains and sea. 

Along the Corso that afternoon were the usual tableaux of old men idling over coffees, kids on stoops with smart-phones. As I strolled toward the Commune hall with my mini-entourage of family and friends, the natives looked up at us, puzzled. Were these obvious Americans lost on the way to Palermo? Were they dumb enough to think this was Palermo?

Alas, the arrival of the latest Palazzolo descendant triggered no stir. Where my childhood impressions of my grandmother's experience might have led me to imagine being recognized in the street, no crowd gathered. Wandering into a gelato place, I casually mentioned my pedigree. The cashier's reaction could be translated as: "Those Palazzolos-- we have a lot of them around here." Then she shrugged the way someone might if a plague rat had swum to shore after a load of them had been dumped at sea.

Perhaps I exaggerate her blasé. Perhaps I erroneously imagine that Sicily never changes, that family is just as overriding a factor today as it once was. Fact is, though I arrived with more people that afternoon, I cut a smaller figure than my grandmother. A solitary woman, bilingual and landing after a long trip from America, would inspire a stronger reaction anyplace than some guy in a rental car, mangling the few words in Italian he does know. That she came a mere half-century or so after her ancestors emigrated, when her people still existed in the living memories of those left behind, must have been a factor too.

I can't say I came away from Cinisi with any sense of connection to my heritage. There was one guy in the street whom I thought resembled me-- he had the same honking schnoz, the same short skull on thick peasant neck. But that resemblance may be as faulty as my self-perception. I found no connection, but I did close a circle. Even for a plague rat, that's something.

Text and photos © 2013 Nicholas Nicastro