I entrust my heart in you -
by Bartolomeo Caffarrella
by Bartolomeo Caffarrella
Salina is a small Sicily. Located at the center of the Aeolian archipelago, it is divided into three municipalities: Santa Marina, Malfa, and Leni. The other six islands, instead, all belong to the municipality of Lipari, as if Salina were detached, different.
Salina is a small Sicily and, like Sicily, it has always been divided. Like Sicily, Salina too has known fortunes and deep defeats. Since antiquity it has experienced periods of great splendor thanks to the trade of obsidian. Later, as the “green island,” it prospered through the cultivation of grapes and the renowned Malvasia wine.
Then the beating heart of this island of fire weakened, giving way to the slow, extended time of vegetal life. And when this happens—from Salina as from Sicily, as from any South—people leave. People must leave. And yet, at times, someone dares to return, chasing the myth of Odysseus. They had to face immense hardships to reach the other side of the world: Australia, the United States, Canada. With an endless nostalgia on shoulders already aching, to be consumed in the interminable hours at sea, in long storms, in uncertainty.
We stop before a fragment of a boat’s side plank, with an Arabic inscription painted on the wood. Next to it, a root suspended in the air. An uprooted root.
To remind us that when a people is torn from its land, it is never by choice, never a pleasure, never truly a decision. “These are remains found from the most recent migrations, to create a parallel,” invites us to observe Elena Basurto, director of the Aeolian Museum of Emigration.
Remains. And this island is made entirely of remains: collapsing houses clinging to the mountainside, abandoned to apocalypse by unknown foreign messengers; ruins from every era; prehistoric settlements and nineteenth-century villas; strongholds of the Great War; Masonic statues; and countless millenary layers of volcanic rock that preserve the remnants of an ancestral past.
The story of how Salina emptied is simple and brief: when phylloxera arrived—and destroyed the vast majority of the vineyards—the islanders were forced to leave. Or rather, this is only part of the story. Showing us the artifacts preserved in the museum, Elena reveals the other side: the propaganda to which our ancestors were subjected, pushed to support a major business—the business of emigration and, ultimately, of colonialism.
We review documents, travel advertisements, insurance policies and how they worked; we discover how shipping companies and insurance companies were, in reality, one and the same thing. We look at the records from the port of Messina, and then at the photographs and stories of the journeys, the large suitcases, how and where arrival usually took place on foreign soil, the dangers faced, and the reasons that led men and women to undertake such long crossings, across the ocean. And finally, the arrival in that land full of dreams. Dreams that soon turned into segregated lives, confined within tight-knit communities, consumed in daily labor, with hands and minds in humble and degrading work. Far from home, across the ocean.
Pittorino, Virgona, Picone, Russo, Cafarella: as we walk through the cemetery, we speak the names of these men and women’s ghosts. They are all related to one another. Giacomo Montecristo, former mayor of Leni, points them out one by one; he knows their stories, their descendants—in Australia, the United States, Argentina—the families that never returned, those who came back after making their fortune “on the continent,” and those who returned only to die in Salina, only to be buried in this small piece of mountain overlooking the blue.
Among the white angels who, in despair, contemplate the tombs in a state of abandonment—the rusted gate always open, fragments of headstones scattered, dispersed without peace, and the wild vegetation completely enveloping the oldest graves.
Human remains, vegetal remains, mineral remains.
We walk toward Punta Megna. The path winds its way to the amphitheater. At the center of the stage, a small Aeolian terrace opens toward the sea. To the right, Filicudi and Alicudi; to the left, Lipari and Vulcano.
This is the place where I scattered my father’s ashes. I had not imagined they would be so heavy, so stony.
Ashes are like gunpowder, incandescent.
Before us: Etna, à muntagna.
Idda, crouched upon her immense roots, stretches across the land of all Sicily, reaching the smaller islands. A desperate mother ready to explode into tears, while trying to hold, in an underground embrace, all her children fleeing or lost at sea.
Dedicated to Maria Vittoria and Giorgio Backhaus