Sandboat Saturday, Cemeteries and Ceramics: double header!!
SAND BOAT SATURDAY
9/25/2004
Summer is officially ended. I know we will have some more really nice weather, and swim in the sea again. But this last week has been extremely changeable, with weather from the sticky 80s to the chilly 60s. That does not seem such a great change, but we have been used to 80s and 90s since June. The storms and changes in the sea have been abrupt and amazing. One minute we were down in the water swimming and the next I looked over the hillside and said, Wed better hurry to get up the stairs, we will just miss this cloudburst. And we did!
We have no tides as such on the Med, but there is definitely a rise and ebb of water. As all things concerning Sicilian weather, the sea is mostly calm and serene, but when it turns bad, it turns extreme really fast. Every year some jerk leaves his boat on the beach and does not come back in time to keep the storm waves from burying it. This is our third year here and we have seen at least one each fall that we have been here. These sand boats become so dragged down with water and sand that they can only be moved by a lot of work. Its sort of like leaving a boat in the water and the water freezes. Anyway, I have seen it done once, but it takes a lot of effort. The usual fate of these boats is that they get hauled away by the big front end loader in the spring when the beach gets cleaned.
The official change in season means that Enzo, the gardener, is done for the year, so Steve gave him a small tip on Friday. He seemed surprised, and then we remembered that he does not usually receive tips, from Sicilians at least. So this morning he showed up here with a dozen eggs, 16 lemons, and 9 pomegranates. Steve had just picked MORE figs at Paolos and now I had more of 3 other things than I needed. Like the squash, sometimes I hate to see people coming with bags of things. We had just received a shipment of books from Wendy, and we felt rich surveying our wonderful fall gifts on the breakfast table. It did not matter that the weather wasnt hot and dry anymore either, it was great to be into a time of change.
CEMETERIES AND CERAMICS
9/26/04
The weather has not improved, so we again missed the cous cous festival in San Vito Lo Capo. There is no swimming either, and we had already spent time with Melito and Giusi next door who were visiting from Palermo for their last summer weekend. But we went out this AM anyway to see what we could see.
The San Calogero road race is this weekend, but we spent the day there last year, and though I got good pictures, it was kind of boring. There were no stores open, which was a shame as our TV died and we could have shopped for a TV. We knew the bigger cities had stores open on Sunday. But we did not want to go that far because of the threatening weather, so decided to visit-the cemetery!
I have been in Sicilian cemeteries before and for those of us born in the north, they are very different, even from the southern US and Mexico. They normally are set up in street fashion, with individual above ground graves in buildings like motels with doors to open to slide caskets in and out of. But here there are more to the row, with ladders to reach up to the higher levels. This cemetery is like a huge miniature city.
Of course, there are marble vaults and mausoleums too, and there was an old and new part. But I was unprepared for the sheer number of family tombs, many with huge amounts of marble, with windows and tile flooring, curtains and altars decorated with flowers and pictures, and some with stained glass and other interior works of art. As befits an ancient city of this size (populated for well over a thousand years, about 50,000 people live here yearly, 200,000 in the summer), some of the family vaults are much bigger than the others, and quite ornate. And I was unprepared for the variety and amount of artistic style that I saw. Most cemeteries that you see are all of one style and quite uniform in size. Not this one. There were truly unique statues, building shapes, and ceramics, natural in a town known for its ceramics. We found Paolos family tomb, as he had brought Steve there before, and I found one with the Lombardo name, like my dads mother Rose Lombardo.
The pictures of the deceased also made the place very interesting. You saw a name you knew, checked out an interesting face, tried to figure out the relationships of everyone buried together. Since women keep their maiden name, that is tough to do so there are lots of people with different names buried in the (for example) Montalbano family vault (I saw 4 Giuseppe Mantalbanos in the space of a 5 minute walk). And being Sunday, there were many, many people around cleaning graves and fussing with flowers. The plant sellers at the graveyard entrance do a good deal of business at this site. Everyone but us came in with bouquets and bunches of flowers or plants.
We left the cemetery to go to the ceramics show in Sciacca. We saw the same one at night last year at this time, only in the big central plaza, not this tiny piazza. This time, we found a Mancuso who was a ceramicist. We watched the painting being done and saw a new feature, a ceramic fashion display. There was a fashion show of this stuff last night.
9/25/2004
Summer is officially ended. I know we will have some more really nice weather, and swim in the sea again. But this last week has been extremely changeable, with weather from the sticky 80s to the chilly 60s. That does not seem such a great change, but we have been used to 80s and 90s since June. The storms and changes in the sea have been abrupt and amazing. One minute we were down in the water swimming and the next I looked over the hillside and said, Wed better hurry to get up the stairs, we will just miss this cloudburst. And we did!
We have no tides as such on the Med, but there is definitely a rise and ebb of water. As all things concerning Sicilian weather, the sea is mostly calm and serene, but when it turns bad, it turns extreme really fast. Every year some jerk leaves his boat on the beach and does not come back in time to keep the storm waves from burying it. This is our third year here and we have seen at least one each fall that we have been here. These sand boats become so dragged down with water and sand that they can only be moved by a lot of work. Its sort of like leaving a boat in the water and the water freezes. Anyway, I have seen it done once, but it takes a lot of effort. The usual fate of these boats is that they get hauled away by the big front end loader in the spring when the beach gets cleaned.
The official change in season means that Enzo, the gardener, is done for the year, so Steve gave him a small tip on Friday. He seemed surprised, and then we remembered that he does not usually receive tips, from Sicilians at least. So this morning he showed up here with a dozen eggs, 16 lemons, and 9 pomegranates. Steve had just picked MORE figs at Paolos and now I had more of 3 other things than I needed. Like the squash, sometimes I hate to see people coming with bags of things. We had just received a shipment of books from Wendy, and we felt rich surveying our wonderful fall gifts on the breakfast table. It did not matter that the weather wasnt hot and dry anymore either, it was great to be into a time of change.
CEMETERIES AND CERAMICS
9/26/04
The weather has not improved, so we again missed the cous cous festival in San Vito Lo Capo. There is no swimming either, and we had already spent time with Melito and Giusi next door who were visiting from Palermo for their last summer weekend. But we went out this AM anyway to see what we could see.
The San Calogero road race is this weekend, but we spent the day there last year, and though I got good pictures, it was kind of boring. There were no stores open, which was a shame as our TV died and we could have shopped for a TV. We knew the bigger cities had stores open on Sunday. But we did not want to go that far because of the threatening weather, so decided to visit-the cemetery!
I have been in Sicilian cemeteries before and for those of us born in the north, they are very different, even from the southern US and Mexico. They normally are set up in street fashion, with individual above ground graves in buildings like motels with doors to open to slide caskets in and out of. But here there are more to the row, with ladders to reach up to the higher levels. This cemetery is like a huge miniature city.
Of course, there are marble vaults and mausoleums too, and there was an old and new part. But I was unprepared for the sheer number of family tombs, many with huge amounts of marble, with windows and tile flooring, curtains and altars decorated with flowers and pictures, and some with stained glass and other interior works of art. As befits an ancient city of this size (populated for well over a thousand years, about 50,000 people live here yearly, 200,000 in the summer), some of the family vaults are much bigger than the others, and quite ornate. And I was unprepared for the variety and amount of artistic style that I saw. Most cemeteries that you see are all of one style and quite uniform in size. Not this one. There were truly unique statues, building shapes, and ceramics, natural in a town known for its ceramics. We found Paolos family tomb, as he had brought Steve there before, and I found one with the Lombardo name, like my dads mother Rose Lombardo.
The pictures of the deceased also made the place very interesting. You saw a name you knew, checked out an interesting face, tried to figure out the relationships of everyone buried together. Since women keep their maiden name, that is tough to do so there are lots of people with different names buried in the (for example) Montalbano family vault (I saw 4 Giuseppe Mantalbanos in the space of a 5 minute walk). And being Sunday, there were many, many people around cleaning graves and fussing with flowers. The plant sellers at the graveyard entrance do a good deal of business at this site. Everyone but us came in with bouquets and bunches of flowers or plants.
We left the cemetery to go to the ceramics show in Sciacca. We saw the same one at night last year at this time, only in the big central plaza, not this tiny piazza. This time, we found a Mancuso who was a ceramicist. We watched the painting being done and saw a new feature, a ceramic fashion display. There was a fashion show of this stuff last night.
posted by Sicilian Mama at 3:16 PM
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