The Winds of Aeolus
Ed Quattrocchi
Paper delivered to the Chicago Literary Club on May 24, 2004, at the Casino Club.
Winds of Aeolus
Last year I read a paper to the Literary Club entitled, “ An Irish Epiphany,” the story of our family pilgrimage to my mother’s birthplace in Ireland. This evening I will tell the other half of that story; about our pilgrimage to visit my father’s birthplace in Sicily. My father, Tomaso Quattrocchi, was born in 1890 in Termini Immerse, a small town on the North Coast of Sicily.
My mother immigrated from Ireland to Chicago in 1904. The centenary of her immigration will occur in September of this year. That was about three months after
“Bloomsday,” the day James Joyce in his novel, Ulysses, fictionalized the wanderings of Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom in the city of Dublin. That day, June 16th is celebrated by Irish festivities in all English speaking countries of the world.
In the 1970s when I was teaching at Ohio University, one of my colleagues showed me a brochure from the Aeolian Islands with a picture of the island of Lipari with a place named “ Quattrocchi” on the top of a mountain.“ Have you ever been there?” he asked. I had never before heard of a place named “Quattrocchi,” and was only vaguely aware of the existence of the Aeolian Islands.
The Aeolian archipelago is a group of seven volcanic islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. They are situated between Italy and the Northeastern coast of Sicily. The Greeks colonized these islands around 580 BC and named them after the mythical figure Aeolus, the god of the winds. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus visits the home of Aeolus, who entertains him and his men nobly for a month. On the last day Aeolus gives Odysseus a bag of winds. He advises him to keep the bag closed . Odysseus might release the winds one by one, if for any reason he needed to alter his course. The small boat sailed for ten days and almost reached Ithaca when Odysseus fell asleep, overcome by exhaustion. His men untied the bag, thinking it contained gold or silver. At once the winds roared homeward in a body, driving the ship before them, and Odysseus soon found himself on Aeolus's island again. With profuse apologies he asked for further help, but Aeolus tells him: “Begone! The world holds no greater sinner than you, and I cannot assist a man detested by the gods”.
The mythical Aeolus recurs as a character throughout the canon of Western literature from Homer to Virgil to Shakespeare up to modern times, perhaps most notably in Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce consciously imitates the structure of the 24 books in Homer’s Odyssey. The sixth chapter evokes Ulysses' visit to the island of Aeolus. The diction, imagery and subject matter reinforce the theme of windy, empty rhetoric and frustrated expectations. The counterpart of Aeolus in Joyce’s novel is Myles Crawford, the hot-tempered editor of a Dublin newspaper called the Evening Telegraph. Leopold Bloom, the modern-day Ulysses, works for the paper as an ad salesman. Amid the bluster in the newspaper office Bloom comes in to ask Crawford's help in securing the renewal of an ad for a pub owner named Christopher Keys. Crawford blows off poor Bloom with the dismissive response. “Begone. The world is before you. You can tell Keys he can kiss my royal Irish arse.” Thus Bloom, like the ancient Odysseus, is blown off course as he is about to reach his goal.
Aeolus, of course, is a mythical character. His home has never been excavated, nor has it ever been precisely located. But legend has it that he lived on the top of a mountain, and he kept the winds locked in a cave. Although no historical evidence establishes that such an island existed, the mythical island has been identified as the island of Lipari in the Aeolian archipelago.
Before 1980 I had always hoped to visit Sicily and Ireland. But as a university English teacher with five children I could not afford it. In 1977 Carolyn and I came to the conclusion that our deficit spending program could not be sustained on our academic budget. Pondering our options one day, I opened Aristotle’s Politics and came upon a passage in which the philosopher gives the simple advice: if you want to accumulate a pile of money, go to a place where money is piled up. And so we left Athens, Ohio and came to Chicago to pile up money at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Unfortunately Aristotle didn’t also warn me of another bit of wisdom that I later learned in the school of hard knocks. That is: “the way to make a small fortune trading commodities is to start with a large fortune.”
In 1980 we had fortune enough to take our four youngest children to visit our oldest daughter in Italy. As a junior at Northwestern she was studying for a year at the University of Florence. With our five children, ages 10 to 20, we met her in Florence and flew from Pisa to Palermo. At the airport we rented a van for the 30-mile drive to Termini, my father’s birthplace.
The first night in Sicily we stayed in a comfortable motel on the ocean in Casteldaccia, a small town mainly identified as the home of the Corvo winery. Entering a nearby restaurante for an early dinner about 7 o’clock, we were bemused by the music of an organ emanating from a stage played by an organist nattily dressed in a tux. Apparently recognizing us as Americans, he surprisingly broke into a spirited rendition of White Christmas. We beamed approval and applauded heartily. Our children thought it neat that he would play White Christmas for us in the middle of March. I was eager to demonstrate that we were not ordinary American tourists and ventured to make a request: “O Solo Mio.” He obliged and rendered the melody with easy familiarity. When we resumed our meal, he seemed intent on demonstrating his cosmopolitan repertoire and snapped into a bouncy arrangement of “Jingle Bells.”
Next morning we drove to Termini. The road entering the city passes over the ruins of arched Roman aqueducts and winds around the edge of a cemetery. As if to greet us and at the same time to remind me of our mortality, we saw looming up at the entrance one of the most prominent mausoleums in the cemetery with the name “Quattrocchi” carved in bold roman letters.
The picturesque town is wedged in between the sea and the steeply-rising slopes of Monte San Calogero. Viewed from the sea, it presents a picture-postcard image of a Sicilian seaside town. Unfortunately our stay was too short to explore much beyond the usual tourist attractions. But we saw enough for me to make a commitment to return another time to explore further my Sicilian roots.
Returning to Palermo we stayed in an old-world hotel that evidently reached its heyday at the end of the 19th century at the height of Verdi’s dominance of Italian opera. From our window I spied a pharmacia with the name “Quattrocchi,” stylishly displayed over the front window.
Having seen my name on the mausoleum in the cemetery the day before and now emblazoned over the entrance of the pharmacia seemed a curious coincidence, or some kind of omen. It prompted me to check the telephone book, which listed two columns named “Quattrocchi.” I surmised that I must have roots in this corner of the old Greek and Carthaginian empires. But at the same time I was uneasily aware that the infamous hometown of the godfather, Corleone, was only 20 miles away, and Palermo’s history of rule by the Mafioso made me a bit uneasy. I put the question aside for investigation on a future visit.
Three years later Carolyn and I returned to Sicily to visit Termini as well as the home of Aeolus in the place called Quattrocchi on the island of Lipari. We planned to take the train from Rome to Sorrento, where we would take a hydrofoil to the island. Boarding the train in Rome with a couple of bottles of wine, salami, Italian bread, olives and hot peppers, we found two seats in a comfortable compartment. Shortly before the train departed, two women entered the compartment and plopped down with exhausted sighs of relief. We shared our salami and wine with them, and they shared their travel adventures with us. They were nearing the end of their journey from Israel and would be taking our train to Sorrento with a change in Naples.
Unluckily the train to Sorrento departed on a track in the Naples station that was about two blocks from the one on which we arrived from Rome. We started to walk hurriedly with our two bags, while our two Israeli companions, tagged along with theirs. But it was apparent that one of the women walking in high heels and trying to carry an over-sized bag would not make the train on time, if she could make it at all. Although I had no urge to be chivalrous I was too cowardly to walk off leaving them behind. Unfortunately I volunteered to carry the bag, which turned out to be heavier than two of ours combined. She must have had all of her worldly possessions packed in it. My back was beginning to feel the strain of the behemoth bag, but we could not afford to miss our connection. Besides she warned me not to put it down, because they had heard awful stories about the thieves in Naples, even the porters.
After a strenuous fifteen-minute walk we caught the train to Sorrento a few minutes before it pulled out. I lifted her bag into the storage rack and bid the women arrivederci. I settled into my seat sweating profusely and panting for breath. When we arrived in Sorrento, I could feel a discomfiting tightening in my lower back. But I managed to shuffle gingerly off the train into our seaside palatial hotel. Our commodious room with marble floors, modern accommodations and genuine Italian art works hanging on the walls had a magnificent panoramic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. A delicious dinner lifted our spirits, and the wine seemed to relax my back. But the next morning I could hardly crawl out of bed. That was the beginning of a backache that lasted all week and continues sporadically to this day. I regretted my gallantry in carrying the woman’s bag and reflected on the old maxim: “ No good deed goes unpunished.”
In the afternoon a fierce sirocco wind blowing off the Sahara forced us to change our plan to take a hydrofoil to Lipari. Instead we continued on the train to Milazzo, a seaside town on the North coast of Sicily about 50 miles from our final destination in Termini. There we took the high-speed hydrofoil to the Acropolis on the island of Lipari. Lipari is the oldest and largest of the Aeolian islands, a beautiful and unspoiled Mediterranean island that the mass tourist market has not yet found. The sun shines most of the time, but the day we arrived in October, it was raining and blustery, the kind of day that undoubtedly earned the Aeolian islands the mythical reputation of being the home of Aeolus. As the small, sleek vessel rolled and pitched in the harbor approaching the dock, my romantic imagination conjured up the scene when Odysseus’ greedy sailors released the wind from the bag and were blown back to the island of Aeolus, but we were relatively comfortable in the sheltered high-tech hydrofoil.
Soon after our arrival, the wind subsided, and the sun came out. The bustling ambience and the rich cultural tradition were immediately evident. The picturesque harbor-front is a hive of activity, with hydrofoils coming and going all day, and loungers sipping drinks at the pavement bars. The terracotta masks of Aeolus, on sale in souvenir shops identified the island with the mythical god of the winds.
The 16th century castle and the Archeological Museum in the Acropolis in the center of the city were enough to keep us interested for longer than we had planned to stay. We had come mainly to visit the place named “Quattrocchi.” The bus route up to the belvedere, the highest point on the island, winds around a small mountain with precarious curves. As the myth has it King Aeolus lived on the top of a hill but kept the winds in a dungeon down below. Fortunately the wind was gentle when we reached the summit.
From there we viewed inlets with high slender rocks, reflected in the sea. In the background rises from the sea the smoking island of Vulcano, the home of Hephaestus, the god of fire in Greek mythology. As we looked out beyond the smoking island of Vulcano, we could see the shoreline of Sicily. The travel brochure does not say why this place is named Quattrocchi. Apparently four panoramic vistas afforded the viewer from the Belvedere suggest the name, Quattrocchi, which means "four eyes" in Italian.
View of the harbor on the island of Lipari
The Acropolis on the island of Lipari
The Tyrrhenian Sea from the Quattrocchi Belvedere
[Points of interest on the island of Lipari from the Guide book: Interesting is the excursion to Quattrocchi where one admires, amongst a variety of colours, as in a dream, picturesque inlets with high slender rocks which reflect in the sea. In the background, as though fading away, rises from the sea the smoking Vulcano, which encloses the enchanting spectacle. You can stand amid a blaze of colours and admire the breathtaking view of pictoresque inlets set against high hillsides and isolated crags jutting out of a glossy sea. And in the background, the enchanting spectacle is completed by smoking Vulcano rising like a spectre out of the sea.]
I had no convincing reason to conjecture that my ancestors might have originated on this island, but I could identify with the place. I had always felt a bit sheepish that I could not trace my genealogy back beyond my grandparents. My wife, Carolyn, can trace hers back to a 15th century castle in Scotland. I stood there at the top of the belvedere, with my good wife, who could qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution if she were not now a Yankee liberal. No doubt inflated by the winds of Aeolus I boasted with bravura, “you can trace your family to the American Revolution and to a 15th century castle in Scotland, but my roots go back to Homer.”
Our enjoyment and excitement at finally reaching the place I had first heard about fifteen years before was only attenuated by the pain in my back, which grew worse by the day since my ill-fated good deed of carrying the Israeli woman’s bag in Naples. It became obvious that I had to find some medical relief before trying to ride the bucking hydrofoil back to Milazzo. We caught a taxi to the only ospedale on the island. It was a formidable and forbidding looking clinic. With high ceilings and the whole interior as well as the exterior white washed, it reminded me of a military hospital in an old World War I movie. As we sat in the lobby waiting to be called, the moans and groans emanating from the examining cubicles were not reassuring. Groans in Italian are every bit as unsettling as groans in English.
But I was surprised and relieved when shortly after we arrived a friendly young doctor called me into the examining room. After a cursory examination he asked his assistant for a needle and prepared to give me a shot in the buttocks. He could tell by the way I walked that my back was out of joint. I had not expected such a swift decision and was a bit apprehensive about the sanitary condition of the needle. That was about the time I began to read about the transmission of the AIDS virus by unclean needles, and I had an irrational fear of being infected. My pain was so acute, however, that I probably would have agreed to an operation at that point. The “doctore” was reassuring. He predicted that my pain would subside in a couple of hours, and he wrote a prescription to last for the remainder of our vacation. We were in and out of the ospedale in about an hour and courteously treated without a charge.
On our way to the hydrofoil dock we asked the taxi driver to stop at a pharmacia. He took us to what appeared to be an apothecary, or more ominously, an alchemist shop. Canisters and strange looking vials of potent multicolored fluids stood on the shelves in back of the counter. I wondered if the ingredients were as aged as the containers, but I reasoned that the bright young doctor would not write a prescription for a medicine that I would have to carry on the hydrofoil in a bottle. I handed the small slip with the cryptic prescription to an old woman who looked like a gypsy, with braided hair and multiple strands of beads hanging around her neck. She nodded with an enigmatic Sicilian frown and disappeared into the back room through a portal of hanging beads that resembled those hanging around her neck. Much to our surprise and relief she emerged in a few minutes with the pain pills packaged in a modern plastic container. We made our exit from the Medieval enclave wondering how, when and why the potent looking potions in the antique jars on the shelves were dispensed.
We arrived back in Milazzo in time for lunch in plenty of time to catch the next train, which was scheduled to leave at 3 o’clock and would arrive in Termini at 5. A couple with two small children waited with us in the diminutive station. It had only a few plastic chairs and none of the usual amenities that are common in European train stations. Although my back pain had subsided somewhat since leaving the pharmacia, the discomfort of the primitive train station, and the plastic chairs did not hasten my recovery. The afternoon was uncomfortably hot; giant black flies buzzed and bit with ferocity.
Observing the charming nonchalance of the Sicilian family apparently going to Palermo for a holiday invited our curiosity. We tried to make small talk with our limited command of the Berlitz traveler’s Italian handbook. But without much success. Three o’clock came and went with no train in sight. About 3:15 a rapid-fire announcement boomed out of a loudspeaker. I could catch only a few random words in the long communiqué. I turned helplessly and hopefully to our fellow travelers and asked: “Che cosa ha detto?” “What did he say?” The father answered: “Treno ritardo.”
“ The train is late.”
This piece of intelligence, of course, was of little use since it was obviously already 15 minutes late. But my Italian was not good enough to inquire for more details of what might have been communicated in the message. Our pidgin Italian is even more rudimentary when trying to communicate in the Sicilian dialect. About fifteen minutes later another announcement came over the speaker, which cast an expression of resignation over the faces of our traveling companions. I asked again for an interpretation, and the answer was a bit disconcerting: “Binario rotto.” “The track is broken.” He had no idea how long we would have to wait. His seeming lack of concern made us a trifle less anxious. Because Carolyn had pre-paid our bill at the Albergo Grande in Termini before leaving Evanston, we weren’t worried about having a place to stay. But we did not look forward to the prospect of arriving after dark in an unfamiliar small town, with my aching back and our halting Italian.
For about another two hours several more announcements boomed out of the speaker box. Each time I would look quizzically at our interpreter and ask, “Quanto più lungo?” “ How much longer?” He would roll his eyes, shrug his shoulders, stretch out his hand with the palm down, rotating it like a swivel with the age-old signal of perplexity: “È incerto.” “It’s hard to say.” Finally after a two-hour wait he heard the good word and told us the train would arrive at 5:30.
Fortunately the train had not rolled over any more “binario rotto.” We struggled to lift our bags on board with Carolyn doing the heavy lifting. I gingerly shuffled up the aisle of the lurching train looking for two empty seats. I found a compartment occupied by a young fellow in an immaculate, silk suit. He appeared to be fresh and alert, as though he had boarded the train at the last stop after a good night’s sleep and a shower. He was friendly and communicative and spoke in an impeccable but unidentifiable English accent. He seemed to welcome someone to talk to and told his story. He had boarded the train in Milan, after flying there from Argentina and was headed for Palermo. I was bemused by the coincidence that on each leg of our train trip we landed in a compartment with English speaking foreigners who had traveled half-way around the world to Sicily.
Before we could learn more from our silk suited Argentinian, the conductor announced our arrival in Termini. Because my aching back would not allow me to carry the bags to the exit door, Carolyn had to follow me, pulling and pushing our two bags while I tried to keep my balance. Although I was in no condition to notice or care about who was observing us, she later maintained that all the Sicilian old men on the train were beaming and smirking in approval that I was an American who knew how to handle a good wife.
We alighted the train in the dark and antiquated station in Termini. About 12 taxis drivers stood in a circle talking and smoking as we approached. We could speak only enough to ask for a ride to the Grande Albergo. A few looked puzzled, one laughed and the others were simply dour. One who comprehended the situation said: “Albergo Grande. Chiuso!” How could the best hotel in Termini be closed at 7:30 PM? The spokesman stepped forward; he put out his right index finger, moved it to the left side of his throat and pulled it swiftly to the right in imitation of a stiletto’s moving sharply across his Adam’s apple. Then with an emphatic grimace repeated “ Chiuso.” All the other drivers nodded in confirmation and repeated, “ Chiuso.”
After minutes of painful debriefing one driver said he knew of a small bed and breakfast Inn in a village about twenty miles away. It was late. We were hungry and tired, but it was our only choice. He drove up a steep winding mountain to the village of Caccamo. We lucked out. The clerk was courteous, accommodating and spoke passable English. We partook of a delicious Sicilian dinner with a fine bottle of Corvo wine. The animated conversation and laughter of a group at a table in an adjoining room buoyed our spirits.
We finished eating about 10 o’clock. Before retiring to our room we asked the clerk how we could make it back to Termini in the morning. Luckily one of the diners in the next room overheard our conversation. He came over to talk confidentially to the clerk. Then they returned to the desk, and the clerk confided that Michele had volunteered to take us to Termini in the morning. Michele was obviously a regular customer. We shook hands and thanked him profusely. I wanted to ascertain as diplomatically as possible how much the fare would be. He didn’t seem to be interested in the money, gave an ambiguous shrug and agreed to stop by at 9 in the morning.
True to his word he drove up at the appointed hour. He was friendly and ebullient, but we had a communication problem. He spoke English about as well as we spoke Italian. He asked if we could understand French. As a student in Brussels, Belgium, about twenty-five years earlier, Carolyn had learned French. She retained enough of the basic vocabulary and grammar to communicate with Michele better than we could in either Italian or English.
He pulled out of the driveway, turned down a narrow street and stopped in front of a house, which he rented for his wife to stay in town where their two children could attend school. He was building a home on the outskirts of the village. He stopped to pick up something and to inform his wife of his changed plans.
He then assumed a serious demeanor and confided that he would like our advice about the item he had gone back to his house to fetch. With a furtive expression on his face he dug out of his pocket a wad of bills and handed them to me. As far as I could tell they were neither American dollars nor Italian lire. Upon closer inspection, however, we were amazed to discern that they were $100 bills in mint condition issued by the Confederate States of America in addition to a few bills issued by the state of New York during the American Revolution. He asked us to inspect them and tell him what we thought they were worth. They were worthless as legal tender, but at face value the wad would be worth several thousand dollars. We could not be sure, however, that they might not be worth something as collector’s items. He asked if we could check it out when we returned to the United States.
This brief episode was the first of several others that created an aura of mystery and intrigue around Michele. When Carolyn asked him how he came upon the Confederate dollars he told a cockamamie story that they had been buried by a relative of a friend of his a long time ago. He said he would like to use the money to take a trip to the United Sates but could not obtain a passport. He explained with an enigmatic smile: the police are “stupido.” He didn’t enlarge on that opinion, and we didn’t think it prudent to cross-examine him.
As we departed the village, we were relieved finally to be on our way to Termini. But Michele had other ideas. He offered to show us the surrounding countryside. We said okay if it would not take us too far out of our way. Little did we expect at that point that our tour would take us six hours out of our way. Michele was a charming guide with an obvious familiarity not only with the geography but also with the inhabitants of the area.
He drove first to the site where he was building his new home. Ostensibly stopping to give his workmen instructions, he obviously wanted to show off his new villa. Carolyn, as a southern belle, is a good conversationalist and a champion gusher. We walked around the ground floor of the villa, and she effused as best she could in French, while I simply shouted at regular intervals, “ magnifico.”
Back in the car, Michele said he wanted to show us a famous tourist attraction in a small village up in the hills. We could not gauge how far out of the way the detour would take us, but he was confident that it would not take long and assured us we would marvel at the “miracoloso.”
As he wheeled the car up the narrow, winding road to the village, I felt transported back in time as well as in space. We saw farmers with donkeys and hand carts filled with produce, and an occasional herd of sheep, or gaggle of geese. Clusters of small communities with people going about their chores dotted the road. Every few miles he would stop the car and jump out to hug and kiss a friend or relative. He would invariably pull aside one or two males in the group and talk in confidential tones. While he conveyed his message to the men, we smiled, nodded and uttered pidgin Italian greetings to the women and children.
We were frustrated by the delay in getting back to Termini but resigned ourselves to the care of our host and reasoned that we could not have gotten such a genuine glimpse of the countryside of Sicily on our own, or even with a professional guide. Arriving on the main thoroughfare approaching the village piazza, we saw a throng of people milling around a church. Some were kneeling in prayer; others were standing looking up at the wall; and others were simply socializing in clusters. As we approached Michele directed our eyes to the “ miracoloso.” It was a blurred image of a face on the white washed wall, which was reputed to be the head of Christ crowned with thorns.
Michele explained that the image suddenly appeared a couple of months before, and that it was unquestionably a “ miracoloso.” Already reports were widespread of cures and other prayers being answered for those who had come to venerate the image. Prayer kneelers with votive candles and religious items on sale were conspicuous in front of the wall. Michele spotted a prosperously dressed man in the crowd and introduced him as the mayor. The mayor was obviously basking in the glory that the “ miracoloso” brought to his town. No question in his mind that the vision on the wall was indeed a “miracoloso.” As proof he took us down the street to meet an old woman who could vouch for it.
She was pleased to have a visit from Michele and the mayor. Michele explained that we had come all the way from America to Sicily especially to see the“ miracoloso.” The mayor gently asked for her testimony. She explained in animated Italian how she had been laid up for several years with a crippled back, and now she could move without pain. She beamed a toothless smile, stood up and strutted around the room gesticulating with her arms, proudly demonstrating her flexible movement. With my back still aching I envied her.
We praised her faith in the goodness of the lord and the mysterious ways of his workings. I asked her to pray for the repose of the soul of my father, Tomaso, and for all the Quattrocchis, as well as for the mending of my aching back. She assured us she would. I asked her to keep a candle lit in front of the “ miracoloso” for a few days and slipped her a $10 bill.
It was now almost noon. Michele asked if we would like to stop for lunch. We were anxious to be on the road to Termini, but we felt obliged to treat Michele to a good meal. We agreed to a quick bite if we could find a convenient restaurante nearby. He had the ideal place in mind and drove back in the direction we had come. But he took a different route from the one he had taken on our approach.
Suddenly with no sign of a restaurante, he pulled off the road and drove up a frontage ramp onto a driveway of another villa even more opulent than Michele’s new villa in Caccamo. Several people sat at a dinner table with a tablecloth heaped with enticing ante-pasta dishes. They were four generations of the Bonano family, Michele’s mother, and his sister with a small bambino. At the head of the table sat Giovanni, the grandfather, a wizened old man with fierce penetrating eyes dressed in a fashionable suit, (circa 1950) with a tie and fedora to match. Everyone else at the table wore summer clothing, for the sun beamed, and the weather was glorious.
But Giovanni seemed comfortable in his business attire. I wondered if this was a routine day in their lives, or could Michele have notified them that we were coming for lunch! I thought to myself that this old guy could have been a stand-in for one of Marlin Brando’s Corleone lieutenants in the Godfather. Learning later that the Bonano family originated in Corleone, reinforced this impression. Corleone is reputed to be a nexus of Mafioso activities and is situated at one corner of a triangle about 50 miles southwest of Termini, and 50 miles south of Palermo.
Michele introduced us as Eduardo and Carolina Quattrocchi from America. The old man stood up, shook hands and motioned us to take seats at the table. The women immediately set the china and silverware and began to serve us the first of seven courses. No plastic or paper plates at this weekday lunch. Neither Giovanni nor anyone else spoke English. We carried on the conversation with hand gestures, Michele translating in two and a half languages. He told his grandfather that my father and his family were born in Termini. With that piece of information the old man, as well as the whole family smiled approval, but Giovanni looked at me with a quizzical expression and asked Michele why I could not speak Italian. I made the ineffectual excuse that my father had died when I was eight years old. We dropped that subject and continued our pidgin Italian conversation. Carolyn gushed approval of the lavish spread of succulent food and of each individual course as it was set on the table, as I gushed about the home made wine. “Magnifico,” I lied.
Two hours later we were back on the road to Termini. When Michele stopped at a station for petro, I tried to pay for the gas, but he waved me off with the assurance that we would settle up at the train station. On the outskirts of Termini, he stopped in the driveway of another villa, more opulent than Michele’s or his grandfather’s. He explained that he did not want to invite us in, because he was visiting a woman relative, whose husband, a local magistrate, had recently passed away. In about 15 minutes he emerged and hinted at a story that added to Michele’s aura of mystery. The husband apparently passed away by a bullet shot the night before. Again our language barrier thwarted our attempt to unravel the cryptic facts surrounding the murder of a judge in a small Sicilian town. Michele only commented that the deceased judge and his wife were good people and “had respect”.
Late in the afternoon we finally entered Termini over the road adjacent to the cemetery. Michele said he knew the cemetery well, for he had slept in it for several weeks when the “ stupido” police were looking for him. But currently he apparently was on the right side of the powers that be. Whether the powers that be were the legally elected authorities, or the Mafioso, we could only wonder. Our curiosity was not abated when he parked the car on the belvedere in Termini Alta. We got out to take in the magnificent vista of the sea, the Sicilian coast and of the city of Termini Basso below. Carolyn reminded him that the key to the car was in the ignition, and the door was open. Michele shrugged, smiled and enigmatically remarked, “ Don’t worry. No one will touch my car. My family has respect.”
Before our plans were altered by Michele’s tour of the countryside, we had intended to spend the day in Termini looking for traces of my family’s heritage. With only about an hour remaining to catch our train, Michele said he would take us to the mayor’s office for advice. He knew the mayor, of course, but he was out of his office when we stopped by.
Waiting in line to buy tickets in the train station, we thanked Michele for all his kindnesses. We insisted on settling our account for all his help. But he would have none of it. Instead when we moved to the front of the line, he stepped up to the window and paid for our tickets. Making ineffectual protestations, we exchanged addresses and promised to send him a report on the Confederate money. He hugged and kissed us in the Sicilian style and said he would be in touch.
The physical beauty of the Sicilian countryside, its historic art and monuments and its friendly people motivated us to try again to find some traces of my father or other Quattrocchi relatives. Fourteen years later we went back to the Municipal Hall in Termini where we met Emilia Indricchio, the supervisor of the archive office. A slight middle-aged woman, her close-set eyes behind oversized horned rimmed glasses gave her a fierce appearance. But her forbidding demeanor betrayed a friendly and accommodating personality. She supervised three clerks in the office. The other clerks, like Emilia, appeared dour and bureaucratic, but when we communicated why we were there they became friendly and cheerful. (Carolyn claims that all Sicilians look that way, including me.) None of them spoke English, but they expressed a willingness to help in rapid-fire Italian. Using gestures, our Berlitz traveler’s guide and our Italian dictionary, we managed to explain our mission. That was to find birth certificates or other records of my grandparents, my father, his two sisters and three brothers.
The small dingy office had a large worktable in the center. Shelves filled with dated record books stacked in cases lined the walls. The male clerk located several folio sized record books with dates from1880 to 1900. He spread them out on the worktable, and the women began their search. For over an hour they gave the task their undivided attention. They talked and laughed the whole time, and seemed to be pleased to be doing something useful that deviated from their normal routine.
We hovered over the record books by their side providing names of my family as they ran their fingers down the ledger book from top to bottom and from one page to the next. Each book contained the recorded dates of the licenses issued in a given year, and each book had several double-columned pages of records for Quattrocchi. The first record they found was the marriage certificate of my grandfather, Antonio Quattrocchi, age 27, married to Agostino Cosentino, age 23, on January 12, 1884. The next record was a birth certificate for Giuseppi, born December 14, 1884.
From the record book Emilia wrote out a certificate in long hand and handed it to us. We were delighted to have made our first discovery, but it brought an unexpected wink and a titter from the younger clerk. She pointed to the dates on the page and made a gesture with her hand rounding it in an arc over her stomach with the implication that my grandmother was pregnant before her wedding. The young woman was apparently eager to find some titillating tidbit in the records to spice up her day. She mistook or miscalculated the number of months in 1884 that transpired between the marriage of Antonio and Agostino and the birth of Giussipi. But my sharp-eyed wife, corrected her. She pointed out that there were 11 months between January 12th and December 14th. We all laughed at the recognition of the correction, and I breathed a sigh of relief to know that my grandparents had not been engaging in pre-marital sex. We found the birth certificates of my two aunts and another uncle but no record of my father, Tomaso, or his two other brothers.
When they exhausted their search we thanked them effusively and asked to pay for the documents and for all their effort. Emilia absolutely refused explaining that they were honored to help an Americano find his relatives in Termini. Their treatment of us caused me to reflect on the frustrating several hours I once spent in the Chicago city hall trying to acquire my own birth certificate from a surly clerk who charged me a usurious fee.
Before leaving Termini, we stopped in Himera on the eastern edge of the city to see the ruins of the ancient Greek temple dedicated to Athena. Other cities in Sicily, namely Agrigento and Taromena, have some of the best preserved and beautiful Greek temples in the world. The temple at Himera once equaled those awesome structures, but it is now only a remnant of its former glory. The moss and ivy-covered foundation of the temple, covering perhaps a square block, gives an indication of the impressive dimensions of the edifice.
We thought that the historic significance of Himera and Termini would make the temple ruins a tourist attraction. But we were dismayed to be only two of a handful of tourists at the site. The name Termini Imerese is derived from the Latin meaning the "Hot Springs of Himera." Greek Syracusan political exiles founded the city of Himera in 678 BC.
Himera produced the earliest coins in the west, and Stesichoros, the west's first famous poet. But Himera is better known as the place of two famous battles between the Greeks and the Carthaginians. The Greeks threatened the Carthaginians, who had colonized the western area of Sicily and founded Palermo. It was the furthest westward penetration of the Greeks on the North Coast of Sicily. In 480 BC the Carthaginian general Hamilcar assembled an army of 30,000 men to invade Himera. The Greeks of Himera sought and received help from their fellow Greeks of Agrigento and Syracuse. The three combined Greek armies literally massacred the Carthaginians.
The Greeks killed Hamilcar and most of his army. Only a few survivors in one small boat reached home to give the brief news that all who had crossed over to Sicily had perished. In celebration of his triumph Gelon, the tyrant of Syarcuse, issued commemorative ten-drachma pieces, minted from a gift made by Carthage to Gelon's wife. The temple at Himera was built from the spoils of the war.
The coins issued by Gelon are collector’s items. Our son, Michael, and his wife, Angela, visited Himera a couple of years ago, and became interested in its history and in the coins minted there. Back in the United States, Angela bought one of the coins as a birthday present for Michael, which I have it here for your perusal. I also have a slide here of the coin.
The first battle of Himera is said to have taken place on the same day as the Greeks’ most famous victory over the Persians at Thermopylae. But within 100 years the wheel of fortune turned against the Greeks. In 409 BC, Hannibal, grandson of Hamilcar, led a large Carthaginian army against Himera. This time, the Carthaginians defeated the Greeks and destroyed Himera. The survivors of the battle fled to either Termini or Caccamo. So it is not improbable that the forbears of some of the Sicilian inhabitants of Termini and Caccamo are of Greek descent.
Hannibal’s decisive victory at Himera in 409 BC changed the culture as well as the landscape of the area. If Hannibal had not decimated Himera, the magnificent temple in Himera might still be standing to rival those splendid monuments to Greek culture in Agrigento and Taromena. My father would not have immigrated to the United States, and I would not be reading this paper tonight.
My original title for this paper was “Whither Hannibal.” I gave the title to Stanley Allen last year with only an outline of the paper in my head. But as I started writing it and worked my way to the story of Hannibal’s destruction of Himera, I was continually blown back to the place called Quattrocchi by the “Winds of Aeolus.”
Paper delivered at a meeting of the Chicago Literary Club on May 24, 2004, at the Casino Club in Chicago by Ed Quattrocchi..