ON THE AVENUES: Under the volcano in Catania, Sicily (Part One).

ON THE AVENUES:
Under the volcano in Catania, Sicily (Part One).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

“Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, "The Leopard"

Based on our scant week’s residency in Catania last November, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s reflection about the brevity of Sicilian truth might better describe adherence to traffic laws, which in practice tend more toward vague suggestive recommendations than ironclad do’s and don’ts … and soon vanish altogether.

Consequently, we chose to walk as often as possible. Even so, I experienced an alarming weight gain, attesting to the reality that in Sicily, diets also abruptly vanish.

Catania is a city of 325,000 people, second largest in Sicily behind Palermo. It perches by the Mediterranean Sea on the island’s eastern side. The citizenry resides atop the volcanic detritus of millennia, with suburbs ascending steadily to where the slopes of Mt. Etna begin.

The volcano’s perpetually smoldering 11,000-foot crater looms on one side of Catania, and a vast expanse of salt water on the other. Numerous other settlements, villages, vineyards and farms dot the landscape. So it has been since ancient times.

During our holiday in Catania, the region’s typical autumn weather – high humidity and rain from clouds trapped by Mt. Etna’s height – produced misty, overcast days that almost continuously obscured the volcano from our vantage point on the ground.

Luckily, we were aloft and seated near the aircraft’s windows during both of our clear, sunny days, first on a Wednesday trip to nearby Malta, and then during the first leg of the journey home. Seeing the snow-covered volcano from the air was stunning, and ranks with my greatest ever travel thrills.

As an adult, scientific pursuits have not been a priority for me apart from a rudimentary knowledge of fermentation. However, as a child, I was fascinated by dinosaurs, geology … and volcanoes.

At some point along the way a transition occurred, and my focus shifted to the humanities, history and geography. These have served me well in barroom debates, but when the opportunity came to visit Catania, suddenly I experienced overlapping chronologies. Can old publicans learn new tricks?

Prior to leaving the States, we booked a Mt. Etna van tour with an English-speaking driver/guide. Unfortunately, Monday proved to be the worst weather of the trip, although our man Tomassino was an entertaining and authoritative source of information about the volcano and its surroundings. It was a welcome refresher course, absorbed with wine and occasional nibbles from local farms.

Taken together, volcanoes, earthquakes, fault lines and rifts are interrelated aspects of a planet in constant movement. In fact, Mt. Etna is continuously active. It vents and breathes, and occasionally lava will work its way through a fissure and begin flowing somewhere down the mountainside. The scene was placid in November, but minor eruptions occurred in February, 2017.

If only we'd been there then!

Catanians refer to Mt. Etna as “she,” and to themselves as her children. Residents of the region have learned to live with the volcano because in terms of probability, constant minor rumblings tend to forestall a Mt. St. Helens-style epochal explosion borne of long-term pressure unrelieved.

However, this has not always been the case. A little over 300 years ago, Catania suffered through both a volcanic eruption and an ensuing earthquake, an unfortunate combination resulting in the destruction of much of the 2,000-year-old city.

The urban core was rebuilt in the then-current Baroque style, with ash-gray lava basalt used strikingly as exterior embellishment, only to be damaged yet again when the Allies bombed the port during WWII. Today, Catania’s compact Baroque city center is surrounded by rings of subsequent construction and development.

Catania is a working city, with less of a tourist presence than other more famous Italian locales. It is lived in, well used and frayed around the edges, not at all pristine in a Scandinavian kind of way. There is litter and graffiti in Catania, and the street lights don’t always work. At first glance, the scene is chaotic. Sicily has numerous issues. Perfection doesn’t exist.

But give it a few days, and Catania starts making sense – and a visitor can eat and drink like royalty at reasonable prices.

We arrived at our hotel at around 6:00 p.m., following three flights totaling 22 mind-numbing hours, enlivened by the stereotypical hair-raising taxi ride from the airport, which is located about as far from downtown as Louisville’s.

According to the helpful hotel desk clerk, the perfect spot for our first evening meal in Catania was La Terrazza del Barone, located in the same neighborhood, just around the corner and two short blocks away.

However, we couldn’t eat quite yet, because in the Mediterranean tradition, restaurants close after lunch and don’t reopen until 7:00 p.m. at the absolute earliest. After freshening up, a brief orientation walk revealed our crucial proximity to Via Plebiscito, a lengthy, curving and utterly illogical street hosting numerous neighborhood trattorias, such that the smell of food was never very far away.

Many of Via Plebiscito’s trattorias are renowned for grilled horse, offered by the cut like beef, or ground and made into meatballs and burgers. Measured on a per capita basis, Italians are the European champions of horse meat consumption, and on Sicily, Catania is the acknowledged leader in equine gastronomy.

It happens that 27 long years had elapsed since my previous Italian meal. I’ve never knowingly consumed horse, and neither of us had visited Sicily, so the Baylors were fully prepared to go “all-in” on opening night, and the results were fabulous.

It was necessary to relearn the consummately civilized, enduring principles of Italian dining. Menus in Italy tend to be organized by course, intended sequentially, as constituting a philosophy of relaxed dining and perhaps a guide to living as a whole.

Antipasti (appetizers) are followed by pasta, then a main course and dessert – sweets, perhaps coffee or liqueurs, or a second bottle of wine.

The object is to refrain from one’s evening meal until 7:30 or 8:00 at the very earliest, and devote a large portion of the evening to leisurely working your way through it – unless you’d rather grab a quick drink and a few nibbles before getting into mischief elsewhere. This also is allowed. Sit and linger, or eat and run. Bring the kids and spill out into the street. Enjoy.

La Terrazza del Barone proved to be a classic family institution, staffed with professionally attired servers tending garrulously to business. Despite a language gap, they were unfailingly helpful during our first evening’s meal, as well as two subsequent visits.

My horse meat came unadorned, in the form of a mixed grill. As I’ve always maintained, once we’ve made the decision to eat meat, parts is parts. Horse has a flavor just like beef, pork or chicken, and while describing it isn’t really possible, I found it tender and succulent, tastier than expected.

I’d do it again, and hearty red wine didn’t hurt, either. It was almost 10:00 p.m. when we finished, and the place was still packed. The festive meal compounded our exhaustion, fueling ten hours of much needed sack time, followed by a copious hotel breakfast on Sunday morning prior to the requisite orientation stroll, and an introduction to cannoli.

(to be continued as time permits)

---

Recent columns:

April 27: ON THE AVENUES: Dear Mr. Dizznee: Can you hear me now?

April 20: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad? It was a modest start.

April 13: ON THE AVENUES: Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?

April 6: ON THE AVENUES: On swill and tornadoes, circa '75.

It's more delicious to avoid those "complicated feelings" about eating horse meat.

I'm already saddened that we traveled all the way to Sicily four months ago and Mt. Etna didn't get the "Roger's here" memo and erupt, instead waiting until the past week to toss out some pyrotechnics.

This week's activity wasn't particularly big — "a minor eruption by Etna's standards," said Marco Fulle, an astronomer at the Trieste Astronomical Observatory in Italy, who also tracks volcanoes.

Now comes a reminder that one of the fundamental joys of cuisine in Catania not only remains taboo back here in Trumpicana, but in fact has been banned by papal decree since the year 732.

Except the Pope lives in Rome, and Rome is in Italy, and so is Catania ... so never mind. Italians ignore the Vatican's birth control edicts, too.

I'll always remember my mixed equine grill (above) at La Terrazza del Barone. It was delightful, and I'd like to go back to Catania for horse burgers some day, perhaps with horseradish.

Actually, I'd just like to return to Catania, horse or no horse.

Why We Have Such Complicated Feelings About Eating Horses, by Eric Grundhauser (Atlas Obscura)

Horse meat has rarely gone down easy.

In many cuisines — Chinese, French, French Canadian, Kazakh — eating horse is no big deal, and sometimes even considered a delicacy. But in the U.S., the U.K., and much of the modern English-speaking world, the idea of horses as food is considered a big no-no, even among avid meat eaters.

The practice of eating horses goes back to the time of early man, with evidence of horse consumption dating back to the Paleolithic era. But using horses as food has long presented both practical and emotional quandaries. Almost universally, horses have long been seen as companions and beasts of burden. “It’s an animal we anthropomorphize, but it also comes from this tradition of herbivores that we feel more comfortable eating,” says Amy Bentley, a Food Studies professor at New York University, who has never tried horse meat herself. “So, I’m sure that makes it more flexible in that way.”

However, there's this little matter of logic.

The cultural development surrounding the production and eating of horse meat differs from country to country, but for the most part, it has been eaten out of necessity. “Here’s this huge animal with hundreds of pounds of meat on it,” says Bentley. “If you’re going to eat animals, it’s a pretty logical animal to eat.”

Shame on the farm in Sicily: "We are talking about potentially thousands of Romanian women as victims of serious abuse."

We visited Sicily for the first time last November, spending a week of contentment in the city of Catania on the island's eastern shore, with Mt. Etna a constant, fascinating presence.

While an active volcano poses a certain threat to human civilization, the rich volcanic soil it produces is an unqualified boon. There is a lot of growing going on.

As part of a volcano tour, we visited a vineyard and a honey vendor; moreover, much of our time in Catania was spent dining. We ate one fantastic meal after another, with an alarming weight gain mirroring time spent at the table.

In short, while we traveled nowhere near Ragusa province, Sicily's agricultural bounty was ever-present during our stay. If I'm to praise it, I'm also obliged to participate in shining a light on its dark underbelly.

Hence this article. The exploitation is sickening, and beyond the plain fact of it being inexcusable under any circumstances, that EU policies apparently promote one member nation importing members from another in this fashion is inexplicable.

Like slavery in America. We should know by now that the cost of our food supply often far exceeds the price we pay at the supermarket. Even so, the situation in Ragusa province is profoundly disturbing.

Raped, beaten, exploited: the 21st-century slavery propping up Sicilian farming, by Lorenzo Tondo and Annie Kelly (The Guardian)

Thousands of female Romanian farm workers are suffering horrendous abuse


 ... “When I came here I thought I was coming to a hard but decent job in another European country, but we ended up as slaves,” she says.

Hidden among fields of flapping white plastic tents across Ragusa province, 5,000 Romanian women like Bolos are working as seasonal agricultural workers. Their treatment is a growing human rights scandal, being perpetrated with almost complete impunity.

Our Sicilian interlude in Catania was a back-to-the-future experience.

From the conclusion of last year's pirate-for-mayor campaign to this foggy post-election Sunday in late November, 2016, I've been a bum.

Not a lazy bum, mind you, because my strange pro-bono life has been active, if unremunerated. After 25 years of trench warfare in business, there has been a sabbatical of sorts, with time to reflect. It must come to an end soon, and the process of grieving already has started.

Temporarily freed from the necessity of analyzing spread sheets to amuse villainous bankers (among other distasteful self-abnegating human tricks one must perform in the service of capitalism), those sectors of my mind as yet operating functionally after all these years of high living seem intent on disgorging a steady stream of personal interests and fascinations submerged during the NABC era.

Among these are volcanoes, which led directly to our decision to skip American-style Thanksgiving for an Italian respite in Catania, Sicily, and proximity to Mt. Etna. We've returned from the journey, and I find myself contemplating vexing questions:

• Why has it taken me 27 years to return to Italy?
• In 31 years of European travel, how could I have ignored Sicily?
• Now that Italy possesses as many as 1,000 craft breweries, does any other European country honor cultural hedonism to such a wonderful extent?

In Catania last week, we lived like it was 1987, when I was fortunate to spend two weeks of early summer enchantment in the hill towns of central Italy, managing to eat, drink and sleep on a budget while absorbing art, architecture and ambiance ... and sacrificing very little of what passes for modernity. It was glorious.

My last previous visit to Italy came in 1989, in Rome and Pisa. Precisely because it was a more hurried itinerary, the impression of timelessness wasn't as vivid. Later, owing primarily to beer geography, the focus shifted northward. I haven't gotten close to the Mediterranean in 16 years. It's a regrettable omission.

At the moment, I must confess to being overwhelmed by the Catania experience. Honestly, there was at least one moment each day when a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness gripped me, and I was on the verge of falling to my knees and shedding a few joyful tears.

Being a good disciple of Northern European restraint, I kept it together and refrained, but maybe next time, the flood gates will be breached, because plate tectonics might explain more than Mt. Etna's looming volcanic presence. Shift happens in one's own consciousness, and it's happening right now with me. I've no idea where it leads, and that's the best part.

Following are two books that explain the whys and wherefores of Italy. The links are an introduction, not a conclusion, rather like the swirling inside of my noggin. First, published in 1964, and previously read prior to my first Italian visit in 1985, Luigi Barzini's book remains a go-to.

The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals, by Luigi Barzini

In this consummate portrait of the Italian people, bestselling author, publisher, journalist, and politician Luigi Barzini delves deeply into the Italian national character, discovering both its great qualities and its imperfections. Barzini is startlingly frank as he examines "the two Italies": the one that created and nurtured such luminaries as Dante Alighieri, St. Thomas of Aquino, and Leonardo da Vinci; the other, feeble and prone to catastrophe, backward in political action if not in thought, "invaded, ravaged, sacked, and humiliated in every century." Deeply ambivalent, Barzini approaches his task with a combination of love, hate, disillusion, and affectionate paternalism, resulting in a completely original, thoughtful, and probing picture of his countrymen.

More recently, in his book The Italians, John Hooper supplies an update, perhaps striking a more topical note with Americans.

All the more reason for taking a second look, which is exactly what John Hooper, a veteran British journalist who covers Italy for The Economist, has done. It is fitting that the dust jacket on his version of “The Italians” features a graphic depiction of a cup of espresso; like the beverage, his book is brisk, bracing and to the point. While it stands up well enough as an independent work, it is even more useful as a kind of updated appendix to the Barzini original, taking in subsequent economic, social and political developments such as the collapse of traditional Italian communism, integration into the euro bloc and the rise of the flamboyant right-wing demagogue Silvio Berlusconi, which Luigi did not live to see.

There'll be more photos as I sort through three cameras, and a bit of writing once thoughts are organized. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

In Sicily, too: Put down your device and pay attention to driving.

The Sicilian debriefing might take a while, but in the interim, I'll simply note that our Mt. Etna excursion driver/guide offered scathing comments about the encroachment of distracted drivers in his neck of the woods. Given that driving in a place like Sicily involves a good deal more negotiation than we're accustomed to indulging in L'America, my hunch is that enforcement there eventually will be as draconian as the drunk driving laws, which typically involve zero tolerance.

Biggest Spike in Traffic Deaths in 50 Years? Blame Apps, by Neal E. Boudette (New York Times)

The messaging app Snapchat allows motorists to post photos that record the speed of the vehicle. The navigation app Waze rewards drivers with points when they report traffic jams and accidents. Even the game Pokémon Go has drivers searching for virtual creatures on the nation’s highways.

When distracted driving entered the national consciousness a decade ago, the problem was mainly people who made calls or sent texts from their cellphones. The solution then was to introduce new technologies to keep drivers’ hands on the wheel. Innovations since then — car Wi-Fi and a host of new apps — have led to a boom in internet use in vehicles that safety experts say is contributing to a surge in highway deaths.

After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. And the numbers so far this year are even worse. In the first six months of 2016, highway deaths jumped 10.4 percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, said in an interview ...