“Days Gone By” in Sicily

I started reading The Republican Herald soon after I learned to read. Back in those days, it was still The Pottsville Republican and it arrived in the late afternoon, just in time for a quick read before the evening meal. “The Republican” was part of our family and in my mother’s 91 years of life, there was hardly a day she did not hold “the paper” in her hands.

As a young reader, I skipped the long articles on the front page. Instead, I immediately turned to the editorial page, where I found “this day in history,” which provided me with my first lessons in historical chronology.

Next I turned to my favorite column, “Days Gone By,” events that, for the most part, took place in the region 100, 75, 50 or 25 years ago. I was a little girl, not yet ten years old, and I had to make a considerable mental leap to travel so far back in time.

Even 25 years required effort. The entries were about soldiers coming and going from a terrible war, followed by the war’s end and the soldiers’ return home. 1970 marked the 25th anniversary of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. My father was in a boat off the coast of Japan when the first atomic bomb dropped, but that event seemed as distant to me as Noah and the Flood.

Travelling 100 years back in time was harder still. I had to cross from one century to another, to another war, one that took place close to home. My father, a Civil War buff, took us to Gettysburg and Antietam, where I learned the blood flowed ankle-deep.

At Gettysburg, we climbed Little Round Top. I even have a vague memory of laying eyes on the last Civil War veteran alive, a decrepit old man shrunken to the size of a boy, dressed in an over-sized Union uniform, slumped in a wheelchair.

Over fifty thousand soldiers died at the Battle of Gettysburg, yet there was only one civilian death. We visited the modest house where it took place. Reaching out a hand, touching the table where Jennie Wade was kneading bread when a stray bullet found its way to her heart, I could feel her presence and no Civil War death seemed as real to me as hers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, battles and vestiges of the past ever since I returned from a week in Sicily, a trip I took with my nephew Louis Graup of Auburn, about to enter his senior year as a math major at Temple University. We travelled all over the western part of the island, documenting our movements in photos: “We saw you at” Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, among the temples and ruins of cities built over 2,500 years ago.

As when I was a child reading “Days Gone By,” I had to let go of my narrow notions of time to plunge into the past. At Selinunte, in southwestern Sicily, I crossed a vast plateau overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, walking streets first laid out in the 7th century BCE. To the north stretch olive groves and dry fields where sheep graze. To the south, about 220 miles across the sea, lies the city of Tunis in Africa.

About 2,500 years ago, Selinunte was a thriving city with 30,000 Greek citizens and probably just as many slaves. On one plateau lay the market place and the acropolis, the city’s center of power; on another, across a river flowing into the sea, the Greeks built their temples, monumental structures in the Doric style made of the local golden stone.

Starting in the 8th century BCE, the Greeks arrived to colonize Sicily, at the same time as the Phoenicians who set sail from Carthage, near to present-day Tunis.

At Selinunte Greeks and Carthaginians clashed more than once. In 409 BCE, invading troops from Carthage killed over 16,000 inhabitants and conquered the city. It was also a battleground of the First Punic War, which ended in 241 BCE. Towards the war’s end, the Carthaginians, who retained control of Selinunte, destroyed the city when they could no longer defend it.

Louis and I visited the remains of other Greek cities, some more magnificent than Selinunte, but nowhere else did I feel so strongly the destructive forces of man and time. Massive columns, broken or leaning to one side, some still standing tall, rise to the sky, the last defenders of past glory. Everywhere there is rubble, a mixture of stone and terra cotta, fragments of the homes where people once lived and of the utensils they once used.

Time and nature have done their work at Selinunte but there is also the violence of man leaving his destructive mark on history.

Protected from the beating sun by a parasol, Louis and I could contemplate this destruction from our lounge chairs on the beach at Marinella di Selinunte, a small resort a few steps from the ruins. Walking along the shoreline, we could see the remains of Selinunte’s largest temple dedicated to the goddess Hera.

After sunset, we forgot the past for a while. Along the main street of Marinella, a few bars blasted Italian pop music. In the relative cool of the evening, families, couples and groups of young people came out to stroll. Restaurants were crowded and Louis and I enjoyed a delicious pizza on the terrace of our hotel. For dessert, we had juicy slices of “anguria,” watermelon.

Everywhere we travelled in Sicily, we had to juggle with time, bounding back and forth between millenniums, constantly confronted with what happened, 2,500, 2,000, 1,000 or 500 years ago. We also encountered the influence of early Christians from Constantinople, of Iraqi Muslims who arrived via Tunis in the 9th century, of the French, the Spanish and the Germans, and finally of a united Italy, thanks to Garibaldi, the great unifier of the Italian people, who arrived on the island in 1860.

During our trip to Sicily, my childhood practice of time-travel, picked up while reading “The Republican,” was an indispensable skill. Yet, I’ll admit, at times Sicily was too much for me.

We spent our last days in Palermo. This city is at once majestic, breathtakingly beautiful, decadent, dirty and at times downright ugly. Hot, humid, crowded, and enveloped in tantalizing mystery, it is the fitting symbol of an island that, despite thousands of years of outside influences, remains a world, and a law, onto itself.