THE SOUND OF SILENCE

We are coming up to the Ferragosto holiday on Sunday, an occasion taken more seriously than Christmas with regard to time off and, indeed, one cannot begrudge the hardworking Italians their annual break at the sea.  Already Modica is like a ghost town, even during the rush hours of 5 pm when everyone returns to work and 8pm when they leave.  This is an article of mine publishhed in Italy Magazine a few weeks ago:

Sounds of summer

The sound is still faint but it is definitely there and I have heard it, at dusk, for the past week. Yes, the cigali or cicadas are back and their chorus means that it is summer in Sicily. As the summer progresses, their song will become louder and louder, reaching a crescendo in the late evening,when you have to turn the volume on your television up to be able to hear it.

And when you hear the cigali in the day, you know the temperature has soared to forty degrees or more. At the moment, I can only hear them from my bedroom, which looks out onto countryside but soon I will hear them from the living room, the “town” side of the flat and from all my windows. Sometimes I just open my balcony doors and sit, mesmerised, by their song.

The opening of balcony doors is, in itself, quite a ritual during a Sicilian summer. In Britain, unused, as we are, to the sun, we fling open all our doors and windows at the merest sign of sunshine but here you must do the opposite: if you want to keep cool, you have to keep all your doors and windows firmly shut – and that means the shutters as well – between about 9 am and 7 pm. I admit that I don’t quite follow this rule, for I have to have enough light to read and write by, but mostly I have got used to living in a sort of penumbra in the daytime.

I always know when it is seven o’clock for you can hear everyone opening their shutters and doors for the evening. You can almost hear a collective sigh of relief, too, as the cooler air is welcomed.

This is when families sit on their balconies, chat to neighbours opposite sitting on theirs and enjoy watching the world go by. Later, much later, some of them will bring a plastic dining table out and slowly partake of a delicious supper, relaxing in the evening breeze.

Further down my street there is a row of small, municipal houses and each has a little terrace. Here the lady of the house will sit, often hidden by plants and washing so that I am quite surprised when those I know call to me as I pass. They sit there for hours, fanning themselves, not reading, not writing but just looking, at nothing in particular. The Sicilians’ ability to be still with their thoughts is something I have come to admire.

A couple of weeks from now, however, most of the balconies will be empty, for almost everyone has a house at the sea or in the country and if they don’t, they have a relative who does, so that is where they go to escape the heat of the city. Some will return in September but others will stay away until November.

In August, too, most shops and stores and even bars and restaurants will close for the two weeks around the 15th August holiday and the town will become very quiet. Food stores do not close, except for the 15th itself, but many do not reopen in the evening during August. This is a habit that still drives me mad because it is hard for an Anglo-Saxon to understand why a whole enterprise has to close and I am lost without my hairdresser! “Why can’t he just put in a manager?” I wail.

But “When in Sicily you must do as Sicilians do” and I don’t get as fraught about the situation as I used to.

So the sound I most associate with a Sicilian summer is not a sound at all: it is silence. It is quite pleasant in a way.

SPLEEN

Just so that you know that life isn’t all outdoor feasts and happy tomato squashing here, I thought I’d write about the downside today. Now of course you could say, as I might be tempted to say to those who settle in and then grumble about my own country, “If you don’t like it, go home” but I am not trying to change the democratic ethos of the Italian State or the general culture of a country I have loved all my adult life. It is possible to settle in, love and feel very protective about a place yet still find irritations, just as you do in your country of origin. And it is important to point out that , with the exception of the eternal bureaucracy, there are compensations for every one of the following annoyances:

1. Top of the irritations list has to be bureaucracy and I’ve written about it before. Sometimes you can feel as if the government exists simply to make life harder by thinking up new procedures which hinder your day to day business. An example? Back in January we all received, from the utility companies, new forms to fill in giving our dati catastali [land registry details] so that, under Art 1, comma 333 of Law no 311 of 30/12/04 the companies know whom they are supplying. OK, it wasn’t particularly burdensome to fill in the form and fax it back, but you might have thought they already had this information when they agreed to supply you in the first place. Nearly all small stationers and tobacconists offer photocopying and fax services because this sort of requirement rains down upon citizens from on high nearly every day. There is one piece of bureaucracy that I have changed my mind about, however, and that is the fact that you receive a visit from the police in your proposed dwelling before you can be deemed resident in a town: at least, in this way, the Italians have some hope of knowing just who is in their country.

2. Closely linked to no. 1 is my pet hate , the Post Office. Rather than droning on about it again , I refer new readers to this post. You may also like to look at this.

3. I have received an enormous energy bill for the winter months. Admittedly, I have Raynaud’s disease, feel the cold and do not have the Italian and particularly Sicilian attitude of “Wear an extra jumper and put up with it”. But even so I don’t see how my bill can be twice what it was for the same period last year – unless there is a punishment for high consumption that has not been made public? This has really got me down over the past week.

4. This time of the year is the most difficult for me and I have come to call it the “silly season”: shops often do not re-open in the afternoon during July and August and many close completely for at least a couple of weeks, as do bars and restaurants. There is a notice in the chemist’s around the corner stating that they will be closed from 6th – 30th August. How can you have a business and abandon your clinetèle for the best part of a month? It wouldn’t be so bad if pharmacy products were sold in supermarkets as in Britain and “Roll on, liberalizzazione” [the freeing up of the market so that they will be] I say. The small traders deserve to lose some of their customers. They would claim, of course, that it is their clientèle who abandon them during July and August, leaving for their houses in the countryside or at the sea; and I say, “Yes, and the tourists come and what do they find? A closed down city.” Many blog readers have commented that it must be a joy to still have these small shops and in many ways it is; you are known, greeted, exchange pleasantries, receive advice and generally feel that your custom is valued. But there is also an inconvenience factor which it is hard for British people, and I guess Americans, to remember; we’ve been able to find everything at the supermarket for so long!

5. While I am having a moan about shops, I still sometimes want to be left alone to browse in one rather than having the assistant on my heels. The assistants would be horrified if they thought their behaviour was off-putting as they think they are providing good service. But particularly if I am looking for clothes or underwear I want to be free to look first. The same goes for CDs, actually – I’ve yet to find a browsable CD store in Modica. A friend who came to stay with me a while back picked a handbag up from a display in one of the stores on Sacro Cuore - as you would in Britain – and was shouted at by the assistant. I pointed out that my friend was British and asked how she was supposed to know that this is not done in Italian stores, at which the assistant calmed down. This illustrates a cultural difference but the fact that the girl reacted thus also points to poor staff training.

6. There are no heel bars and no nail bars! And Modica needs a good department store – please!

7. There is still a lack of foreign ingredients in supermarkets. This area does not have anything like the immigration that Britain has but there is a Chinese and a small Muslim population. You can now find some Chinese and North African ingredients but they are very few. I don’t think it is totally to do with not catering for the immigrant population; it is also to do with Italians not being very adventurous about food. As Victoria Granof points out in Sweet Sicily, “Something to bear in mind is that unlike Americans, who are always trying new recipes, Sicilian cooks may make a handful of recipes in their lifetime – over and over and over.” This does mean, of course, that they keep their culinary traditons and this is one of the things that is so attractive about the island. But it still seems strange to a British person not to be able to find spices that we now take for granted. Even herbs [apart from the ubiquitous oregano] are, surprisingly, more difficult to obtain here, especially basil in winter. No just throwing several pots of supermarket “growing herbs” into my trolley each week, all year round, as I did in Britain! [Yes, I do grow them on the balcony but the trouble is I use them!] Sicilians would counter that, with their own food being so fresh and so good, why should they want to try anyone else’s? And I have to admit I find that one hard to argue with.

Right: that’s another few matters off my chest. I think it’s time to stroll down the road for a freshly made evening granita and to buy, on the way back, some nectarines whose heavenly scent pervaded the street when they were freshly delivered at the greengrocer's this morning. Then I’ll come back, throw my shutters open and enjoy the “song of the south “ – the cicadas’ mating calls. [Gosh, they are at it a lot today and good luck to them!]

OPENING UP TIME

No, not of a pub as in Britain but at 7.30 pm at last I can open the shutters! I love this time of evening in summer here: the general relief is palpable as you hear all the neighbours' shutters go up, too. This is quite a change in "life rhythm" for a Brit., as we usually see so little hot sunshine that we strip off at the first sign of it and throw all our windows open all day! Here, in the heat, you must keep your shutters closed in the daytime - otherwise the hot air gets in and you find yourself living in a furnace - but at around 7-8pm you open them all, till at least midnight. The cool breeze is such a relief and its coming heralds, for me, another "opening up" - that of the gin and its companion, the tonic! Then Simi and I sit here and, if we are not watching TV or listening to music [tonight I have got the new Aznavour CD, which the Sacro Cuore CD/video store ordered for me as soon as I read that it was out in Italy - you may be 83, Charles, but you'll always be sexy to me!] there is always the song of the cigales [ cicadas]. This starts early in the morning and continues for a couple of hours, and begins again from around 8.30 pm. On all but the very hottest days [when the temperature rises above 40 C] they can also be heard at lunchtime. I gather that their song is a male mating call so can only suppose that the extreme heat cools even the ardour of these insects!