Palermo and the Nebrodi Mountains

Palermo and the Nebrodi Mountains Friday 12 May to Sunday 14 May 2017

Friday was a fascinating day. We decided to visit one of the major art galleries we had not yet visited, and to check out a museum dedicated to the history of the Spanish inquisition in Sicily.

The Inquisition museum was in an old palace fronting the Piazza Marina (the site of autos de fe and public executions), the Palazzo Steri o Chiaramonte. It had previously been used as a prison for those targeted by the Inquisition in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and recent archeological work has revealed the extensive graffiti left by those imprisoned. Our tour guide was extremely informative, and explained that the inquisition operated as the most powerful arm of the state in Sicily at that time, with the power to veto decisions of the Spanish viceroy; that it targeted mainly educated and commercial individuals as one of the consequences of being convicted of heresy or the like was the appropriation of all lands and property owned by the individual.

The museum had no torture machines, nor any exhibits apart from a  bell which was rung when the inquisition were present and undertaking their inquiries, and when executions were to be carried out, as the machines and virtually all records of the inquisition had all been destroyed when the inquisition was ceased in 1734, but focussed solely on the graffiti on the walls. A small archive has survived from records in the Sicilian courts. The drawings and texts were quite diverse, some of the art naïve, but some quite skilled. The very existence of written texts confirmed the social status of those imprisoned, as most Sicilians in that time would have not been literate. While most texts were in Italian or Sicilian, a number were in Latin, and one was in English. While most were not overtly critical of their oppressors, and indeed were often overtly religious, a number were subtly critical of the ‘justice’ being administered in the prison, and some graffiti in the latrine spaces in each cell were overtly critical. The researchers concluded that the state of the latrines was such that no prison officials would ever enter them. A small number of graffiti had been signed which has enabled researchers to establish the details of the offences, and the punishments inflicted. Apart from execution and terms of imprisonment of three to seven years, victims were stripped of most civil rights upon release (eg not able to sign legal documents, thus preventing ownership of property), and often these punishments were inflicted on the descendants of the victims sometimes for up to four generations.

Our guide also recounted the story of one of the only two prisoners of the inquisition who ever killed an inquisitor, a prisoner who was a priest who was alleged to have taken the lord’s name in vain, and was imprisoned for a number of years, and who during an interview with an inquisitor, managed to pick up an iron bar on the table and kill the inquisitor. He was manacled in a chair for a couple of years while advice was sought from Spain. He was eventually burned at the stake.

After lunch in a nearby trattoria, we headed into the Galleria de la Palazzo Abatellis, which houses an extraordinary collection of renaissance art sourced from nearby churches. While mainly painted by local artists, the quality was superb, particularly the earlier byzantine styles. The visit to this gallery was certainly a highlight.

Of course, the paradox is that at the very same time that the church was sponsoring the creation of world class art to reinforce the precepts of Christianity and Roman Catholicism, the inquisition was exercising an extreme form of authoritarian power and state sponsored terror over its own citizens.

On Saturday, our friends departed for Milan, and we headed east to a B&B in the Modoni mountains near the town of Reitano, taking a rather roundabout route which took us south and then north so as to wend our way through the countryside. The roads were quite rough, and there were extensive roadworks, including massive tunnels, over sections of tens of kilometres, which appeared to have been started, but not completed. Clearly limited budgets for road and infrastructure construction is not just an Australian problem. As our B&B is comfortable and quite isolated, we ate in ( a simple meal of delicious Sicilian antipasto), and had an early night.

Today (Sunday), we drove further east to the Nebrodi mountains. After driving into the mountains, we went on a delightful two and half hour walk through the beech forest to a small lake near the summit of Mt Sono, Sicily’s second highest mountain. At various points, there were terrific views north to the Aeolian Islands (Alicudi, Filicudi, and some others) and east to Mount Etna.

Replacing lunch with morning and afternoon tea in the town of San Stafano di Camestro, we returned to our base to find the restaurant full of people celebrating someone’s birthday (we think).

Tomorrow we depart Sicily for the Basilicata region in southern Italy where we hope to do some more walking.