WELL DONE, LE MAMME!

 

Foto: "La coperta delle mamme di Modica"
Facebook page.

In 2019 Arianna Salemi came up with the idea of "clothing" the steps of the San Giovanni Evangelista Church in Modica Alta with knitted or crocheted 20 cm x 20 cm "tiles", worked by the mamme di Modica, to create a beautiful sight and then to give the "tiles" to those who will be in need of them in the cold weather to come. And the mamme did it! The "tiles" were on view on from midnight Saturday - Sunday to midnight Sunday - Monday and people were invited to go and look, and bring along a book to read on the steps if they wanted to. How I wish I could have gone!

I was also delighted to read that Liliana Segre, the 90-year-old Life Senator, writer and Auschwitz survivor, had not only sent some wool to the mamme when she heard of the project, but sent them a beautiful message yesterday:

"L’eguaglianza è un sentimento che fa rima con tolleranza ed accoglienza. Ecco il punto. Quando ci si apre a l’altro, ci si prende cura , si arricchisce il proprio patrimonio sentimentale, sociale, culturale e si diventa biodiversi dunque più umani. Le vostre mattonelle sono un patchwork di tolleranza, pietre d’inciampo dell’accoglienza, fili intrecciati come i destini che si incrociano nel mare nostrum. Grazie infinite care donne di Modica, siete preziose.”

"Equality is a sentiment that rhymes* with tolerance and welcome. The point is this: when we are open to the other, we take care of ourselves, we enrich our own emotional, social and cultural heritage and we become multicultural and therefore more human. Your tiles are a patchwork of tolerance, Stolpersteine** of  welcome, intertwining threads like the destinies which cross each other in the Mediterranean. Thank you, dearest women of Modica - you are treasures."

*in Italian, obviously

** Stolpersteine are memorials to Holocaust victims and I think it is to these that Liliana Segre is referring.

Liliana Segre is a heroine of mine and I recently read her book Ho scelto la vita.

TOLERANCE

This little plot outside a shop near my home is carefully tended by the ladies of the shop, so they were, unsurprisingly, angry when someone started to dig up the flowers at night. A week or so ago this notice appeared. I'm sorry the writing, which has weathered a few storms over the past few days, isn't clear in the photo. It reads,

Don't steal the flowers - thief!

And then, in a typically Sicilian gesture of tolerance, the ladies have added,

If you ask us for some, we'll give them to you.

In another nearby shop, a recently vacated furniture store, one bed, with bedclothes, has been left in the middle of the ground floor. And there someone sleeps every night, very cosily tucked in so that you can only see his woollen hat on the pillow, clothes neatly folded over the one chair that has also been left behind, in full view of anyone who cares to glance at the shop's window. [He is still there at 10 am.] How he gets in, I don't know, for there is no sign of any forcing of the door. The owner, who has not moved far away, must know about his nocturnal visitor by now, for news travels fast in small towns and I can only suppose that, in another gesture of tolerance, he has decided to turn a blind eye. I have neither the heart nor the wish to invade the sleeping man's privacy by taking a photo for he probably gets little of it. He is doing no one any harm and "There but for the grace of God go I...."