Sicilian Odyssey Read Online Free PDF Page B

always to be waiting just around the corner, positioned in the exact place where the sun is most likely to strike it and produce the maximum brilliance, the optimum dazzle. Travel up a narrow, dark, cobblestone medieval street in a remote hill town and, suddenly, you’re standing in a spacious, open piazza, where the scale expands to confront you with the scrollwork, the curlicues, the heroic staircase of a church, its stone facade perfectly sited to catch the golden rays and reflect them back at the few elderly worshipers arriving for morning Mass. Pause in the midst of an undistinguished alley and look up, and all at once you’re staring at the underside of a balcony, decorated with gargoyles, chimeras, coiled serpents—architectural elements with no sensible justification, no other purpose than adornment.
    Yet often these optimistic, exuberant buildings and extravagant details are in advanced states of disrepair, propped up by scaffolding, awaiting the influx of money and energy necessary to restore them to their former splendor. Nowhere is this more obvious, more thought provoking—or more heartbreaking—than in the town of Noto, in the southeast corner of Sicily, an hour or so from Syracuse. If Noto is the island’s most famous baroque city, it’s because it represents a sustained and conscious experiment in the baroque, the attempt to construct a designed and planned community (think of the eighteenth-century equivalent of Celebration, Florida) that—like so many such experiments—has, over time, made the sobering discovery that God and nature had entirely different plans for it.
    Originally located a few miles away, at a site now known as Noto Antica, Noto was destroyed completely in the cataclysmic earthquake of January 1693. Sad experience and sustained government pressure persuaded the city fathers (who at first wanted to reconstruct their home on the ruins of the old settlement) that its former location was too vulnerable, and so it was decided to rebuild the town in its current spot.
    Inspired by this opportunity for renewal, and mostly financed by the Spanish government, construction was begun, directed by the Duke of Camastra, who had already demonstrated his urban planning abilities at Santo Stefano di Camastra. Sicily’s greatest architects—among them Vincenzo Sinatra, Paolo Labisi, and Rosario Gagliardi, a disciple of Borromini—were brought in to collaborate on the project that was conceived as an opportunity to apply the essential principles and to realize the aims of the baroque aesthetic: an amalgam of rationality and grotesquerie, order and dynamism, capricious wit and grand theatricality.
    Local craftsmen were employed to decorate the elaborate palazzi and construct the sweeping staircase of the cathedral, as well as the Convento del Santissimo Salvatore and the Chiesa di San Francesco. Plasterers were set to work, layering decorative moldings and squadrons of winged putti on the church interiors. Altars were constructed of multicolored marble, inlaid in intricate patterns. And the city was separated into quarters according to the intended purpose—ecclesiastical, residential, commercial—of each neighborhood and the social class of its inhabitants.

    San Francisco all’Immacolata, Noto
    Everywhere, you can see evidence of the optimism of this project, of the belief that nature could—by employing a precisely calibrated chemistry of scientific engineering, wishful thinking, and sheer defiance—be prevented from repeating the ravages and cruelties of the past. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Palazzo Villadorata, a fanciful confectionery of stonework depicting yearning mermaids, charging horses, griffins, monsters, and clownish faces whose expressions are impossible to read. Are they knowing or foolish, ironic or half-crazed, and whom, exactly, are they mocking?
    Perhaps they are laughing at their creators, whose ambitions for the city have been, more than three centuries later,