Sicily, Underground

I was also working on my project in Palermo. My contact, through Katie, was a woman called Eugenia Manzella. We arranged to meet for the first time outside of my hostel on my second day in Palermo. I didn’t know anything about Eugenia except that she had helped with the History Channel shoot. She pulled up on a black scooter. About fifty-five years old, short hair, tan. She wore a black leather jacket, black helmet, jeans and boots. She also wore earrings and makeup. She would have fit in at a biker rally or a wine bar. Tough, but elegant. I would find out that she is sort of a guerilla archeologist in Palermo. Despite never studying archeology formally, she had convinced the city to fund a number of excavations in Capo, the historic neighborhood of the city. She did her work through CAI, Club Alpino Italiano, a group of speleology enthusiasts in Palermo. She handed me a helmet and I got on the back of the scooter. Riding on the back of any other fifty-five-year-old woman’s scooter may have been emasculating. But Eugenia was different. We took off through the narrow trap-like streets of Palermo. This would be the first of a number of excursions with Eugenia. I’ve talked before about my relationship with the people who have access to the places I want to see. The gatekeepers and guides. The Virgils. Eugenia would be ultimate Virgil in Palermo.

First, she took me to the outskirts of the city. Inside a warehouse-type building was a square landscape of rust-colored tuff rock. Dug out of the tuff was a grid of small depressions, each containing a skeleton. It was a necropolis. The excavated graves were about the size and shape of small bathtubs and the skeletons lay inside, legs slightly bent, bones embedded in the dry soil. Some only half preserved, others in perfect condition, every joint intact. You could see the various ceramic pots and talismans and other possessions with which each person had been buried. They were Pheonicians, dating back nearly 3000 years. Some graves had been left in-tact and we climbed down a set of stairs to peer inside the cocoon-like tombs.
Eugenia explained that this site was not one of her own projects, just a place she liked to visit. Walking between the tombs, she started telling me about the Phoenicians, how they lived, how they buried their dead. She spoke in flurries, a mixture of English and Italian; everything she said was accented with a sort of awe. After a certain point, she was no longer explaining for my benefit; she reminded me of a college professor on a blind tangent, forgetting the lecture hall of students taking notes. She finally said, as a sort of conclusion, “isn’t it just beautiful.” If it was a question, she sure didn’t need my affirmation. Seeing how passionate Eugenia was, it was no wonder she had inserted herself into the city’s archeological circle; I pitied the bureaucrat who tried to get in her way. Later, we would be walking down the street in Capo and, in the middle of telling me the history of a particular building, she came to an abrupt stop. When I turned to see what had distracted her, she was staring down at a seam in the pavement, a gap where two layers of concrete had split. I watched her toe at it with her boot, then get down on all fours to peer into the little hole. “This is how we find things,” she looked up with this child-like smile on her face. “We scratch at the ground. Scratch, scratch, always I am scratching.”

She took me further into the outskirts. Along the way,  she pointed out examples of Arab-Norman architecture; remnants of the Spanish rule; a type of palm tree that was infected with some invasive insect; a particularly good panifico. She knew every wrinkle of her city. We headed down a dirt road that bisected a citrus grove. Green mountains, which seem omnipresent in Sicily, rose up in the distance, half obscured in the haze of morning heat. Along one side of the road were ramshackle apartment buildings. We got off the scooter and Eugenia went to pick a few oranges; an old man in a wifebeater leaned out of his second-story window and yelled at her. Holding the oranges in either hand, she yelled back that these weren’t his oranges, she knew it for a fact. He grunted and disappeared from the window. She shrugged and tossed me an organge. I would recognize Eugenia’s toughness as unique among Sicilian women of a certain age, who tended to be their husbands’ wives, their children’s mothers. Ellie talked about the deference of Sicilian women; at dinner parties, women sit quietly or talk amongst themselves in low tones while the men drink and talk loudly. A few years ago, I would learn, Eugenia had divorced her husband, retired from her job at a bank and dedicated all of her time to unearthing the history of Palermo. She led me into a small non-descript bunker-like structure and got off the scooter. It turned out to be a sort of water pump building, but more importantly, it was a portal into the qanats of Palermo.
A qanat is a type of underground aqueduct system carved into the soft tuff beneath Palermo by the Arabs in the 12th century, back when Palermo was called Bal’harm. The qanat I would visit that day channeled water from a natural spring up in the mountains into the city proper of Palermo, underground all the way.
I stepped into the water pump building to find a large rectangular hole in the floor. A ladder led down into the darkness and there was some sort of rope pulley rigged above the hole. Just as Eugenia was explaining to me the structure of the qanat, a young man in bright yellow foul weather gear climbed loudly out of the portal and shook himself dry like a big dog. A few times a year, apparently, CAI gets a permit from the city to lead guided tours through the qanats. This was one of those days. Eugenia handed me a pair of big rubber boots and two other women came into the pump house, one carrying a thick yellow rain jacket, the other a gas torch helmet that I had seen explorers wearing in Paris. These two women both wore Forli Speleo Club t-shirts. The three of them made me hold out my arms as they dressed me in the jacket and helmet, fussing and clucking over clips and buckles. I either felt like a six-year-old boy about to go play in the rain, or some nobleman being attended to by his harem. (Considering the scooter arrangement, I’d probably say it was the former).
When I was properly outfitted, Eugenia started taking pictures of me in my gear, while Silvia, the younger of the two women, clipped me into a rope and caribeaner. Silvia lowered herself down onto the ladder, I came down after her. We descended about ten meters. When I stepped down from the last rung, I was in pitch darkness, straddling a channel of rushing water. Silvia helped me open the gas valve for my torch and a flame spurted from the bill of my helmet. The channel was narrow, the cielings a little more than six feet high, and the sound of the water, which moved quickly in places, reverberated loudly in the hollow space. We went sloshing through the running water, Silvia leading the way. She told me that speleology had been a hobby of hers since she was a little girl, when her father, also a speleo-type, first took her underground. As a girl, she had liked seeing how various cogs of her city’s infrastructure worked together underground – now she was a civil engineer. She had a good sense of humor. I kidded her about her nails, which were pearly pink, apparently freshly manicured. Silvia, manicures don’t belong underground, I told her. She turned around in her hardhat and headlamp. I’m still a lady, she said. The walls were a silty brown, roughhewn, with clunky looking bricks stacked in some places. In parts I could see fossilized sea shells embedded in the walls. We mucked around for about a half hour while I took some pictures, then made our way back to the ladder, where I was greeted by Eugenia.

The next day, I met Eugenia in the piazza which served as headquarters for her work. I found her standing near a small fruit stand in front of a church in the corner of the piazza. I noticed five or six guys sitting on plastic chairs nearby. The city, she explained, had given her a crew of workers to assist in the excavations. They were overweight, unshaven, gray scruff; they looked more like barflies than archeological assistants. A few smoked cigarettes in the shade of the canvas slung over the market, one who could’ve been Tony Danza’s older brother sat with his feet up on the bumper of a car, another lay on the hood with his eyes closed, arms crossed, apparently sunbathing. I almost started laughing. Then Eugenia said, Paolo, and I was amazed to see the guy on the hood of the car leap to his feet, ready for his orders. He made me think of John Malkovich as Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Big, sheepishly handsome, obedient. Eugenia would take me to a tunnel dug inside the wall of an old Norman fortress from 1500. Paolo would escort us as he had the keys to the fortress. Eugenia took my arm and we walked slowly through the labyrinthine cobbled streets on the way to  the fortress. She would stop in front of particular buildings and tell me the dates they were built, why they were significant. Below the playground of this primary school is a system of catacombs. The widows of the city were forced to walk back forth on this street because they were a threat to society. Beneath this street is one of the two rivers that once ran through the center of Palermo, until the city expanded and the Arabs built on top of them. These pipes jutting out of the wall were part of an Arab irrigation system. (“The Arabs were ingenius”). This market was the center of Palermo when the city was founded. Pointing down to various manholes: I have been down this one, and this one here many times.

When we got to the fortress, Paolo walked us along the outer battlements until we found a tiny opening cut into the stone. It was covered in a metal grate, which he unlocked. The tunnel was about 50 meters long, narrow, jaggedly cut. There were small slots carved into the rock walls from which the guards who patrolled this tunnel could fire guns. We wandered around for a little, Paolo hit his head once on the ceiling, and eventually we exited through the same door. On the walk back to the piazza, I began to think that it was time for me to leave Palermo. As wonderful as Eugenia was, I wasn’t sure the city was going to contribute any more to my project. The tunnel and the qanat had been interesting, but I was looking for spaces with some kind of narrative attached to them. The qanat and the defense tunnel were interesting feats of engineering, perhaps, but not exactly breeding grounds for legend.

I should have had more faith in Eugenia. Just as I was preparing to bid farewell to my guide, to thank her for showing me around Palermo and ask that she keep in touch, she said she wanted to show me one more thing, as though it had just occurred to her. She made her way toward the front door of the small church in the piazza and motioned for me to follow. She whistled to the bad news bears of archeology and five of them jumped up to assist her.

The church was modest inside: drafty, with a floor of cheap checkered marble and gray walls outlined in a strange peach color. She said something to her crew and pointed to the metal chairs arranged in rows in the middle of the floor. They moved the chairs and rolled back the red rug, revealing a metal door in the floor. Paolo and another guy lifed the door open and we stood looking at a set of stairs leading down into darkness. It was the church’s crpyt. Eugenia went down first and I followed. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself in some sort of mausoleum with an arched, low-slung ceiling supported by white pillars. Carved into the walls were large shelves. At the front of the room was some variation of an altar. Eugenia explained that this was one of the sites she had been studying. She led me into one of the back corners and showed me a plastic bin full of indistinct mud-caked objects. Bones, said Eugenia. The cavities lining the walls had once been used to hold corpses. She pointed out small holes in the corner of each cavity: a drainage point for the corpses’ internal fluids.
Apparently, she said, this crypt was one of the headquarters for the Beati Paoli.
She said it as though I should have recognized the phrase. I asked her what she meant.
She did not respond directly, but headed back up the stairs and into the church, motioning for me to follow. While Paolo and the rest of her workers closed the grate behind us, she led me to the purple marble altar at the front of the church and told me to look behind it. There was another excavation: a large hole in the floor behind the altar, dropping down about six feet. I turned to Eugenia.
Eugenia smiled and proceeded to tell me the story of the Beati Paoli.

The 15th and 16th centuries were a time of injustice and unrest in Palermo. The city was at the mercy of the fuedal aristocracy, a small group of extremely wealthy and corrupt men who held incorrigible political reign over the common people. Because the noblemen controlled the justice system, anyone who spoke out against the current regime would be convicted of treason and promptly jailed or executed. The common people of Palermo needed someone to step forward and protect them from this tyranny, to retaliate against the noblemen. This call was answered by an order of men known as the Beati Paoli.

The Beati Paoli – “Blessed Paulists” – were a Sicilian hybrid of Knights,  Freemasons and Japanese Ninjas. Wearing black hooded cloaks and masks to obscure their faces, and working under the cover of night, the Beati Paoli would meet in caverns or vaults under the streets of Palermo. They would discuss the plight of the city and orchestrate riots and coups against the regime. The group was spritual as well as political: they would perform occult rituals and conjurations in these caves. They acted as a vigilante ministry of justice, kidnapping evil noblemen, bringing them to trial in front of secret tribunals and torturing or executing them in underground grottoes. They traveled through the city via secret tunnels carved into the soft stone beneath the streets of Capo. When the police arrived at a Beati Paoli-orchestrated scene, the hooded men would slip into the nearest church. Beneath certain churches around the city were crypts in which the Beati Paoli would hide. Behind the altars of other churches were mouths of tunnels that ran for great distances underground. These tunnels, crypts, grottoes, underground tribunals were all linked in a massive underground honeycomb network. The Beati Paoli would flee from the police, vanish behind the altar of one church and reappear behind the altar of another church, halfway across the city.

No knows exactly where truth and myth intersect in the story of the Beati Paoli. The legend came into the popular consciousness with a historical novel by Luigi Natoli called I Beati Paoli. It was published serially in the Giornale di Sicilia in 1909, collected as a novel in 1921, then reprinted in 1949 (the subject matter was a little too subversive for the fascist regime, hence the gap). While Natoli fictionalized the story of the secret revolutionaries, he didn’t invent it. While no mainstream historian has verified anything about the Beati Paoli specifically, there is a great deal of evidence in favor of their existence. There were definitely covert sects who operated during the 16th-18th centuries; these groups incited riots and orchestrated kidnappings. In the early 1800s, writers were referencing the Beati Paoli in their work. Whether they actually executed noblemen or simply held secret meetings (which would have been quite dangerous in itself) is conjecture. What could not be denied were the concrete spaces that Palermitani now associate with the Beati Paoli.

I looked down into the hole behind the altar. It was not necessarily the mouth of a tunnel, though the color of the soil seemed to change near the bottom. There was no telling what was down there. They were just beginning this excavation, Eugenia told me. Then Eugenia told me of a man who had approached her about the excavation. He was older, more than eighty, she said. He had found it very interesting that she was working in this church and he proceeded to tell her a story. When he was a kid, maybe 10 years old, he worked as an altar boy in that church. One day, he and a friend were horsing around near the front of the church. Somehow, one of them knocked loose a piece of the wall behind the altar and they stood looking at a void behind the wall. They saw a passage of stairways leading down into the dark. But before they could enter more than a few feet, they heard someone enter the church and ran away before they were blamed for the damaged wall. However, the man told Eugenia one thing very specifically: he had felt a draft of air on his face coming from within the tunnel. For there to be any kind of air movement, this tunnel must have had multiple branches leading out to multiple openings. When I asked why they hadn’t found any sign of the steps, she explained that the church was keeping a close eye on the excavation; it was a delicate, slow-going process.
This story could be the invention of a senile imagination (though Eugenia insisted that he was reliable). It was certainly colored with the type of romance bred in underground legend. But once a story has been told, I suppose, it exists and can’t be ignored.

From the church, Eugenia lead me up a narrow cobbled street about a block away. At the back of a small courtyard were stairs leading down to a doorway that looked like it had just been excavated. The stairs led down to a small, circular, dome-shaped room of roughewn surfaces. Along the perimeter was a stone shelf, evidently some sort of bench. This space, Eugenia told me, was the setting of the secret tribunal in Natoli’s novel. At a number of points along the wall, Eugenia and her crew had begun excavations. A number of holes similar to the one behind the altar. No sign of tunnel mouths, but Eugenia explained that they were just beginning. The space could very well have been the setting for some sort of ritual. Perhaps a tribunal.

Later, Ellie, Daniella and I would visit another church in Capo which was apparently part of the tunnel network. In a dark corner of this church was a portrait of San Francesco di Paola, the man who was purportedly the patron saint of the Beati Paoli. He was a bearded man wearing a dark robe and in this  painting, he was surrounded by children who seemed to be caught in his orbit. Perhaps it was just the dark lighting of the church, but there was something depraved or sinister about him. Daniella – as only Daniella can do – befriended a man with somber eyes who was apparently the director of the church. She asked if we might be able to see the spaces behind the altar. I do not know exactly what was said, only that I heard the word ‘tunnel’ a number of times. He was reluctant at first, but finally caved. He took us through a door to the left of the altar, down a corridor lined with candles and into a dark room. He pointed to a heavy wooden door with a padlock on it. Behind this heavy door, he said to Daniella, is the tunnel. He said that he was not allowed to open it up. We asked again, but he was firm. As a consolation, he offered to show us the crypt. It was a space similar to the one Eugenia had shown me, but much larger, with more shelves for draining and embalming corpses. The space was cluttered and dusty: it looked as though no one had been down there for years. There were small nooks and crannies, half boarded-up. As with the tribunal, it was not difficult to imagine this space as a setting for any number of clandestine meetings. I frantically scribbled notes and snapped pictures with Daniella’s camera phone, as though I were uncovering some great secret. But the space could very well have been a derelict church crypt and nothing more. There was a strange reticence in the man as he showed us these things. He evaded any questions about the Beati Paoli. No straight answers.

Eugenia and her crew may be chasing myths in the underground of Palermo, or maybe they will eventually uncover these tunnels. But finding the intersection of folklore and history in the case of the Beati Paoli almost seems irrelevant. The Beati Paoli have become as tangible a part of Palermo’s history as the city’s very streets. Palermitani have wholly embraced the story of these revolutionaries. In Capo, you will find a square, a kiosk and a church, all named after the Beati Paoli. The story speaks to today’s generation as well: for three years in the early 2000s, the Giornale di Sicilia ran an updated Beati Paoli comic serial. In fact, to say that the story ‘speaks to’ the people of Palermo, may be the most apt articulation of the Beati Paoli’s relationship to the city. These men fight against the  for the justice of the dispossessed. Given the city’s history, it is not difficult to see why Palermitani – if not now, then 200 years ago – would embrace the story of these vigilantes. The Beati Paoli are superhero figures. They are Sicily’s Robin Hood.

One group detected public’s sympathy with this idea and used it to become the most powerful institution in Sicily: the mafia. Umberto Eco (who wrote the introduction to a 1984 reprinting of Natoli’s novel) describes the story of the  Beati Paoli as a charter myth for the mafia. The mafia established itself (one might say justified itself) on the ideology of the Beati Paoli. They presented themselves as ‘Men of Honor’ who could resolve the problems of the powerless within their own structure of justice. This seemed attractive to many Sicilian people at the time. The Cosa Nostra portray themselves as the descendants of Beati Paoli. When a mafioso called Antonio Calderone testified in court he explained that when he was initiated in Cosa Nostra, he was told that a mafioso should “follow the example of the Beati Paoli.” There are also stories about a confrontation in court between the Cosa Nostra godfather, Totò Riina, and Gaspare Mutolo, who had just snitched on him. In this first interaction, they addressed each other by the names of characters in Natoli’s novel. Even today, the Cosa Nostra and the Beati Paoli occupy a similar place in the Sicilian imagination. Both are semi-mythical secret societies; in a documentary I watched about the Beati Paoli, one man says it explicitly, “they’re mythical just like the mafia. I never met a mafioso.” The presence of both clans of men is implicit: constantly alluded to, but assumed rather than tangible. They vibrate below the surface, under cloaks. Beati Paoli meet in underground tribunals, while mafiosi meeting in smoky backrooms of restaurants. All of this is to say that the story of the Beati Paoli, be it truth or legend, is embedded in the Palermitan consciousness.

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~ by Will on February 20, 2009.