Arrivederci Sicilia!

Binah, your faithful traveling correspondent, recently took a big trip to the Mediterranean. His first stop was Sicily, the Mediterranean's largest island. It sits just west and south of the Italian "boot."

I stayed my week there at the small mountain town in Sicily's northwest called Erice, overlooking the western sea. A group of us attending a scientific conference were whisked from the airport at Palermo (on Sicily's north coast) on an hour-plus drive to the west, the final part being a steep climb into the coastal mountains. The scientific center at Erice, home to conferences, workshops, and summer schools, is named after a young Sicilian science prodigy, Ettore Majorana, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938. (He made a small number of highly important contributions to the then-burgeoning science of elementary particles and forces.)

This southwest-facing coast is not as famous as the Greek-influenced southeast corner and lacks its own Mount Etna. But you've heard of some of this part of Sicily, although perhaps not with that association. It's a part of the island first colonized by the Carthaginians around 800 BCE, itself a North African colony founded in 814 BCE by the Phoenician city of Tyre back in what is today Lebanon. Sicily is three-cornered, with coasts facing north, southwest, and southeast. The northern coast was originally the least developed part, the home of a mysterious people the Romans called the Siculi, for whom the island was named. Over the millennia, Sicily has been ruled by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Greeks again, Arabs from North Africa, the Normans, the Spanish, and finally by the modern Italian republic.

August in Sicily is hot, tending toward the humid, with strong sea breezes. But Sicily is also subject to the powerful north African scirocco wind, headed northward from the Sahara in the late summer and loaded with atmospheric dust, and we had three or four days of it later in the week. Erice boasts a mountain cable car both exciting and useful. It runs up and down the mountain all day and well into the evening, acting as Erice's main public transportation to the port city of Trapani - unless the scirocco shuts it down. It did for part of my stay.

In spite of the heat, I walked all around our mountain town of Erice every day, enjoying the amazing Sicilian food, and took a part of day to hike down to Trapani. Next to Trapani is the better-known city of Marsala, home of the famous wine, salt, and chicken. Salt has been harvested there from the sea for almost three millenia, starting with the Phoenicians. Marsala wine (fortified and aged like port) was invented by English wine merchants in the late 18th century. A later wine merchant, Joseph Whitaker, bought the island of Mozia in Marsala harbor. He started excavations there just before World War One. While the island was donated by the Whitaker family to Sicily about 30 years ago, the excavations continue, and what's been dug up is now preserved in a museum at the site.

For Americans, Sicily brings up a cluster of outdated stereotypes of organ-grinders, heavy tomato-based cooking, and the Mafia. (Most Italian-Americans are of southern Italian extraction - Sicilian and Calabrese - because the south was and is the poorest part of Italy.) The Mafia is a leftover of the days when Sicily was ruled by foreigners. Most of its power has been broken in a campaign that has gone on in fits and starts since the days of Mussolini. I didn't see any organ-grinders, but the cocina Siciliana (like the architecture) shows an interesting mix of Greek, Arab, mainland Italian, and French influences. Couscous with local fish is a regional signature. Tomatoes are still ubiquitous. Erice is famous for its ultrasweet marzipan and mustazzuoli.

Much of the island's infrastructure is new. Sometimes I thought I was in California. The regional and Italian governments, plus the EU, have clearly been at work. Modern industries like wine and food export and tourism have also made a large mark. Sicily is still poor compared to northern Italy, but the gap is much smaller than in centuries past.

Cool books 1

Following the recommendation of Instapundit, just finished Tim Parks' Medici Money, an elegant short history of the rise of the Medici in Renaissance Florence c. 1350-1500. Those were their banking years, before they became "old money" and too respectable and too powerful to be comfortable with their mercantile past. By the mid-1500s, the popes had made them the Grand Dukes of Tuscany and put them beyond all that.

Parks' book is a title in the Atlas Books Enterprise series, published by Norton, all in the vein of economics and business. He has a lengthy and provocative discussion of the long-standing suspicion against trade and especially against lending-at-interest as a powerful prejudice touching on our primitive need for something that is beyond comparison and exchange with something else -- absolute "things-in-themselves" that cannot be bought, sold, or weighed against ordinary stuff. Today this prejudice largely masquerades as "progressive" and even "liberal" -- it isn't. The irony is that the Medici, like all "old money," eventually sought to use their money, not to make more money, but to buy into the distinctive and cultured -- to buy what really can't be bought. That's one of the paradoxes of money and social climbing.

Having visited Italy, I can say the Medici did a never-less-than-creditable, and often brilliant, job of running Florence. The family petered out in the 18th century, but they married respectably into the Lorraine (Lorena) family, related to the Hapsburgs -- so much of northern Italy passed into Austrian control in the 19th century, before Italian unification in 1870. To the Medici-Lorena family, we owe modern public health and the career of Galileo, as well as much of the art you see in Tuscany and elsewhere in Italy. Not bad. And it reminds us that family-based paternalism and philanthropy are often as good as, if not better, than the modern bureaucratic state in securing the public good.

Historians of the Renaissance can end up sounding like propagandists for the Medici (it's hard to escape their spell, especially if you live in Florence for a while), so I don't want to rave on about them too much. But they were remarkable nonetheless -- the ultimate merchant princes.

While you're at it, read up on the Renaissance through classic and contemporary works - Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) -- as well as the usual suspects: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Vasari, and (later) Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Galileo. Along with its next-door cousin in southern France, northern Italy is the home of the modern West, and these guys more or less invented modernity. Intertwined with the Reformation, it later spread to the rest of Europe and to Europe's overseas colonies, defining the world we inhabit today.