The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0738203424
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A remarkable collection of intertwined stories about the unknown hill towns and villages of Sicily, from the acclaimed author of Mattanza.
In this sparkling book, Theresa Maggio takes us on a journey in search of Sicily's most remote and least explored mountain towns. Using her grandparents' ancestral village of Santa Margherita Belice as her base camp, she pores over old maps to plot her adventure, selecting as her targets the smallest dots with the most appealing names. Her travels take her to the small towns surrounding Mount Etna, the volcanic islands of the Aeolian Sea, and the charming villages nestled in the Madonie Mountains. Whether she's writing about the unique pleasures of Sicilian street food, the damage wrought by molten lava, the ancient traditions of Sicilian bagpipers, or the religious processions that consume entire villages for days on end, Maggio succeeds in transporting readers to a wholly unfamiliar world, where almonds grow like weeds and the water tastes of stone. In the stark but evocative prose that is her hallmark, Maggio enters the hearts and heads of Sicilians, unlocking the secrets of a tantalizingly complex culture.
Although she makes frequent forays to villages near and far, she always returns to Santa Margherita, where she researches her family tree in the municipio, goes on adventures with her cousin Nella, and traces the town's past in history and literature. A beautifully wrought meditation on time and place, The Stone Boudoir will be treasured by all who love fine travel writing.
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Lawyer he had aspired to be. Instead he tutored children in his doposcuola, a private “after-school” where he taught them what they couldn’t or wouldn’t learn in public school. Michele’s youngest pupil was a girl of eight and the oldest was sixteen, until I became a student again at thirty-three. I attended the less crowded day session. Three mornings a week I walked the mile and a half from the Piazza Mondello to his school, one long, thin, bare room with no windows. The space felt like the.
The track in spots and looked like rocks until they moved. “And people out for a walk.” Twenty years ago, a mother and her children just back from picking wild greens had been squashed when they followed the tracks through a dark train tunnel. We came to a curve in the tracks, and a black rock. “Here there was a suicide.” He pointed to the rock face. “He was right here.” The man had lain down on the tracks and chosen the engineer for his executioner. Carmelo kept a holy card of Christ crucified.
Cold periwinkle blue. The stucco is made from earth pigments mixed with powdered lava, which is what gives the colors their toasted hue. As time crumbles the plaster and peels away layers, the colors mix and swirl like an impressionist’s palette. White limestone arches cap the wooden doors, all bolted with rusty brown hand-forged padlocks. Etna was in the throes of a damp, cold depression, and the old center’s streets were empty. Two thousand years ago Linguaglossa may well have been a bustling.
Pushcarts sold five-foot yellow candles that people bought and passed up to the men on the wagon who lit them with another candle. The carriage was ablaze. Thousands of men took up positions on the long cords, and the fercolo made a turn of the piazza, then headed toward the sea under the arch of the Porta Uzeda. Giuseppe and I fell in. He grabbed on to a rope and I walked in front of him and behind his buddy, Giacomo. They didn’t seem to mind the rain. Giacomo told me, “The left rope is one.
Sleep a few hours so I could stay awake that night. At night the fercolo looked like a fiery ghost wagon, with hundreds of candles that flickered and flared in the faces of the six men manning it: two to tend candles, two to take flowers, two to collect money. They took turns touching babies to Agatha. People passed bills up to the handsome young priest in his pink stole and white alb. He stuffed the money into one of four gray flannel-covered boxes at the rear of the carriage. Alfio Rao,.