The Historian

I return to Sicily with the taste of earth in my mouth, in wrinkled clothes that seem to have outgrown me over the last semester. In Palermo the jet must be moored far from the terminal on a sea of asphalt, like a ship too large for harbor. We stand in the trembling, thundering heat with our baggage around us, the other passengers and I, the air smelling powerfully of timothy and combustion. Long-tailed sheep graze the weedy verges of the tarmac; farther out, beyond the limits of the airport's activity, derelict baggage trucks stand on their bare axles in the sun.

Nothing but Valparuta’s extraordinary archives could have brought me back here after all these years . . .

 

Deepest thanks to Letizia Battaglia for permission to reproduce three of her photographs of Sicily here: Serena, An Actress; New Year’s at the Villa Airoldi; and The Killers Shoot in Broad Daylight. © Letizia Battaglia, Passion, Justice, Freedom (Aperture, 1999).