Sicily wrap-up

Back in Malta now, but that was satisfying. Any day when you get to see a new part of the earth is a memorable one, but especially so if you feel some sort of rapport with the place in question. The sunlight and geography of Sicily are invigorating, and give you a feeling of being more alert and even more daring than usual.

After the previous post, the next stop was a place described as a “village,” though it turned out to be triple the size of my hometown. More importantly, it was a wonderland of almonds, pistachios, and lemons, and I brought back samples of each to enjoy for the next few days.

Then Mt. Aetna. We drove up the side of the mountain through an impressive lava field from the 1983 eruption. There have been a half dozen more eruptions since, but the 1983 lava flow seems to have surpassed them all; a house can be seen nearly buried in the hardened lava, and elsewhere I believe only the very top of a church is sticking out.

You can only drive so far toward the top, and then to go further you need to take a cable car. I did so. It’s not an especially scary one, since it hugs the ground fairly closely and there was really one spot where a falling car would lead to certain death.

Nothing is as quiet as the inside of a cable car. Soon the car was enveloped in evil clouds of mist that belonged in Herzog’s Nosferatu more than in 2010 Italy. Getting out at the top, I was clearly underdressed in a light shirt purchased in Chennai for the India heat a few years ago. So I found myself a nice sweatshirt that said “Etna” on it, with a stylized flame erupting from the “a”. I also bought a container of french cries, which turned out to be soggy. But with that equipment added to my arsenal, I walked as far toward the summit as possible. Unfortunately there was not enough time to reach it, given that the final cable car descends at 5:30, and I had to turn back before reaching the top where Empedocles supposedly jumped into the crater.

Here’s the strange thing about seeing new places… When did I first hear about Sicily? I’m not sure, but I always liked looking at maps as a kid, so it would have been well before age 10. So, until today I had known of the existence of Sicily for somewhere over 30 years, without every seeing it. And I don’t know about you, but whenever someone discusses a place I’ve never been, a constructed image of it comes into my mind. And these images tend to be extremely stable over the years in my case. My imagined Sicily of last week was probably about the same as my imagined Sicily of 1976 or so.

And now, the imagined Sicily has been blown out of the water by the real thing. I can’t even remember anymore what my imagination of Sicily looked like. It was very durable, but very fragile.

The same thing holds for any place. My first brief visit to Paris was in 1991, and my first bona fide visit not until 1997. And of course I grew up with a pretty vivid constructed image of what Paris was like, and probably thought of it much more frequently than I thought of Sicily. And now, it’s long gone. I haven’t the slightest idea what the fabricated Paris in my head looked like, even though it was part of the familiar furniture of my mind for decades.

Egypt, all the more so. I no longer remember what my imaginary Egypt looked like, though most likely it was influenced along the way by “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which was released when I was 13. If you’ve seen the film and never been to Egypt, I need to tell you that Cairo looks nothing like that. They filmed it in Tunisia. It’s a completely unconvincing Cairo, in fact. (And by the way, though it’s pointless to nitpick a popular Hollywood film, it never occurred to me until someone pointed it out recently that the most absurd part of that film are the large numbers of armed Germans present in Cairo. Rommel never got anywhere close.)