The Measure of a Day

Though I was born in the town of Messina, right on the waters of the Straits between Sicily and mainland Italy, I never really knew much about the stretch of coast between Capo Peloro and Capo Rasocolmo, where my parents bought a rundown 19th-century villa. I didn’t know, for instance, that one of the favourite pastimes of the city’s rich bourgeoisie back then was quail hunting, and that the countryside was home to several villas like the one purchased by my parents. When the former Villa Arena became our permanent residence in the early 2010s, I made another discovery in the vanedda descending all the way to the beachfront via a vertiginously steep staircase. There, a little putia, a grocery shop, was the kingdom of a lady who baked bread every Saturday in an oven located in a dilapidated storage building behind the shop.

Not much time elapsed before it became a family ritual to wait for Maria’s loaves to come out on Saturday evening and eat pane cunzato while the bread was still hot. I recall vividly entering the shop, teeming with impatient customers, while Maria and her husband wrapped the bread in grey sheets of paper, and just as vividly how much il Signor Puglisi liked to strike up a conversation with every single customer as if he had all the time in the world. Maria ran between the counter, where she kept the cheese, charcuterie and freshly baked loaves, and the cash register to collect the money, as she scolded her husband for being a chatty good-for-nothing. I was beginning, in those years, to look more closely at the Sicily around me: at customs and occupations that had survived almost unnoticed into the present and now seemed to be vanishing just as quietly. Maria drew me in immediately. She was not preserving a tradition. She was simply doing what she had always done.

I began following her behind the shop, into the coop where she kept hens, and into a garden amidst the olive trees, meticulously tilled, where she grew every vegetable in season in continuing rotation, spreading the hens’ droppings. “You have to be careful how you use chicken manure. I melt a small amount in buckets of water before I give it to plants, otherwise it’ll burn them!” I recall a maze of pumpkin plants, planted in circular trenches dug around the olive and citrus trees and always generously irrigated. The building where she baked the bread was semi-submerged in every sort of recycled material she and her husband, a construction worker, had accumulated over the years and which they simply could no longer fit inside. Upon entering, one had to make his way across plastic crates, plastic sheets, jerrycans, stacked timber, blankets, industrial sacks, old chairs and tables, mattresses and, in the far corner, the centrepiece: an old, rusty automobile.

Maria is from one of the thousands of inland communities most people don’t know and one hears less and less about: Fondachelli Fantina. The two words refer to two villages later conflated into a single municipality for administrative purposes. Communities like Fondachelli in the Peloritani mountains lived solely off the land up until a few decades ago. Maria’s father was a shepherd—one of those who would spend much of his time roaming with the flocks, milking the sheep and goats every day, making cheese and ricotta in provisional stone huts. “When I was about eight years old my parents were caught in a storm while tending to the animals and didn’t come home for days. I fed my younger brothers and decided to make bread the way I had seen my mother do so many times. When they came back home they were surprised to find a batch of freshly baked bread.” Maria’s parents didn’t only tend to animals but grew most of what they needed, including maize and wheat. She remembers the threshing and transporting of the berries to the local mill on donkeyback: “I had to stay at the mill to make sure we received the flour from our own wheat and nobody stole any.”

The story contains much of the woman I later came to know: the impatience with helplessness, the faith in observation, the assumption that if something needed doing one ought to learn how to do it. Childhood did not last long in families such as hers. Work was not an occupation entered into later in life; it was the medium through which life was understood. But family expectations can prove suffocating for an independently minded young lady. While her older brother Carmelo was away for military service, she was supposed to remain with the family, helping care for her parents and younger brothers. Instead she fell in love with a young man, il Signor Puglisi, who occasionally visited Fondachelli, and left with him in a fuitina, the elopement by which generations of Sicilian couples once circumvented families that might have opposed their marriage. Carmelo, who later became a butcher and cheesemaker in Novara di Sicilia and whom I came to know well, never entirely forgave her.

Maria began another life in the village of Spartà and set about applying the knowledge necessary to sustain it. She opened a shop, sowed wheat, raised hens and pigs, planted according to the season, pruned and harvested olives and, for years, also ran a trappitu, an olive press. There seemed to be very little required to turn land into food and food into a household that she had not, at some point, learned to do. “I made bread throughout my whole life, and my hands can testify to that! I hand-kneaded batches of over 30 kg of dough by myself for decades.” Eventually she began teaching some of it to me. She showed me which flours to mix, how to add salt gradually, how to keep a piece of dough from one baking to ferment the next, how the temperature of the water had to change with the temperature of the day. She taught me that a traditional oven was something to be interpreted rather than timed. I chiacchiere davanti u furnu sunnu a ruina du pani caudu, she would say: chatting in front of the oven is the ruin of hot bread. No wonder she gets so upset at her husband’s incurable, almost impertinent tendency toward idle chatter.

Her allegiance to received wisdom is fiercely uncompromising. Once, while teaching me to make pidoni and the local focaccia, she specified the quantity of pork fat that belonged in the dough. I told her my mother wanted me to use olive oil instead. Maria considered the problem briefly and supplied the obvious solution: put the pork fat in and tell my mother I had used oil. Whenever we met, after the customary remarks about the weather and how it would affect one crop or another, conversation quickly turned to what we had done: what had been planted, repaired, pruned, harvested, cooked, baked, preserved; how the olives looked that year; which new absurdity of the modern world had made life more expensive, more wasteful or less intelligible. “As if you could eat a banknote!” she would quip in a huff, bent over a wheel of cheese she was rubbing with salt. The world around Maria was meanwhile becoming less capable of sustaining the kind of life she knew. Her children left for northern Italy and Switzerland. Fondachelli-Fantina and Novara emptied. Customers abandoned the village shop for supermarkets, labour became scarce and expensive and skills once distributed almost universally through families became specialised, purchased or simply forgotten. The photographs accompanying this piece were taken in 2017.

Nine years later, Maria closed the shop and retired. What disappears with people like her is not merely a recipe for bread, or the picturesque residue of an older Sicily. It is an entire conception of competence: the belief that a person should know something about the soil beneath one’s feet, the animals one eats, the fire that cooks one’s food, and the work required to keep a household alive. History seldom records such knowledge because, for most of human existence, it was ordinary. Maria is one of those people, those elders who continue to teach me to see how truly extraordinary the ordinary had been. Even now, when I meet her, I can almost anticipate the question by which a life like hers measures the passing of a day: not what have you bought or where have you been—but what have you done?