CALTAGIRONE
The etymon is different and varied: Calacta or Calta, or kalà, as Michele Amari prefers it, gives the sound of bark, sweet paper, knotty roundness, down to Qual'at a-ghiron, of evident Arabic origin. Yet it maintains analogous meanings: rock, castle, high hill. And indeed the anonymous author of the "Teatro della Città really in Sicilia" (Sellerio, Palermo, 1973) describes Caltagirone as "situated on a high hill, like an eagle with outspread wings, which looks at noon, all around girt with walls thick towers crowning it"; and also calling it "remarkable for the breadth of its streets and the magnificence of its public and private buildings. The town continues to soar up over the surrounding valleys and, perhaps because of the fact that it disappears from sight, on account of the different levels of the bends, after the climbing bends end, one enters a road without houses and with dense trees, it is as if one arrived in secret. As soon as you enter, at once you are seized by a silent torpor overcoming noises and sounds, as if the town had long been awake in night. Its season seems to be spring, with its very clear light blue sky contrasting with the fog which the town has come out of, fog which in winter weighs on buildings and people, lasts a long time, thick and tangled. "A paisana", the people of Caltagirone call it, almost expressing a sense of fraternal solidarity, of intrinsic link. This torpor initially is only a physical impression, in which there interferes the singsong but rough dialectal accent which smacks of both Arabic and French; and the dense weight of women's gazes; and the sense of a formalising adherence to devout traditional practices, though these coexist with a lay (Arabic) taste for life; and in the streets, over the sometimes shouting groups of people, there seems to hover a dazed indolence, in the sun. The first impression, afterwards, seems to mineralise itself, as one stands contemplating the decomposed elegance of some building, the precise traces of a late and measured Baroque already mingling with rigid eighteenth-century melancholy, the decorative plasticity of ceramic bequests, down to the careful cleanliness of the streets and alley. The alleys, carruggi (a term of Ligurian origin), are the heritage of a trade society founded on the division of labour; ever now, when the town centre is tending to shift and multiply, the carruggi remain like a weft of tunnels, a stretch of muscle interweaving with the traditional areas of power: the Town Hall, the Cathedral, the same cleanliness as one sees in "bourgeois" streets, the sign of a decorum which in Caltagirone is permanent and characteristic. Maria Attanasio, a fine poetess, reminded me about a particular institution, perhaps dating from the seventeenth century, the" master of garbage", a nobleman entrusted with the task of keeping the town clean. Hence this is a historical fact probably to be attributed to the customs of a Caltagirone nobility always respectful of princes and sovereigns, so much so that writers, including the anonymous one mentioned, remind us that the title that the town most appreciated was that of "very grateful town". However, recourse to tradition is not sufficient: decorum, which is, above all, respect for oneself, discovers underground some characteristics which go beyond its strict meaning. And decorum may also constitute the external aspect of that torpor which I mentioned: recondite ideology, on the one hand; on the other, a form of immobility concerning the structures of Caltagirone society. It is as if in Caltagirone life were twisted around itself. The lukewarm air of the day fades into a sense of sadness. There are moments in time which in themselves hold out the prospect of immobility, that sad immobility that one perceives in looking at an old print on the wall of a period salon. The old patrician mansions with their patient and corrupted sandstone, the Baroque railings of windows and balconies, carruggi themselves, render the meaning of old conceptions of life which have not been dialectically overcome; a remote melancholy making itself the distant backcloth for men's actions. For this reason, the town maintains its own plastic beauty, but like the apparent movement of an Eleatic being: closed off, a little mysterious, high up among the mountains shutting it off, with its winter fogs and palaces and monuments which however mark ancient splendour, buried in time. Caltagirone appears like a genteel and decorous town, in the Baroque content of its mansions. The most eminent artistic expression is that of ceramics. The latter was initially oriented towards the production of saucepans and vases for domestic use, but gradually in the course of time it took on autonomous and distinctive forms, in which there survive Catalan and Hohenstaufen influences. While from the Catalans (and Muslims) there came freedom of the sign, from the Hohenstaufens there came a sort of intellectual and chromatic severity giving rise, as Antonino Ragona observed (in his essay L'artigianato della ceramica, delle origini fino al terremoto del 1693) "to graphic eclecticism which preserved numerous connections with the original mould, but was then to mingle with the decorative mode deriving from the Renaissance" _(Caltagirone, Sellerio, 1977). Of course, the environment too has its own effect: first of all, there is the fact that the raw material, clay, was abundant in the northern area of the town, in the peculiar vaddanche, as the clay formations in the terrain are called. In my opinion, fog too has a role, as it helps to explain not only the colours of ceramics but also its type: on the one hand, it calls for a contrast with the grey curtain covering the town during the winter months; on the other, the products seen to be knocked up with fog, as the colours appear misty: the blue, yellow and green which prove dominant, forming something of a net, appear soft and delicate, without the noisiness of the Catalan majolica. FOLKLORE EVENTS Some of the anthropological connotations previously described can be found in the analysis of the folklore events accompanying the life of the people of Caltagirone. Folklore is nothing but a conception of the world and life in the lower classes, sometimes in opposition to official culture but often in harmony with it; this is the case of Caltagirone, where devotion concerns all strata of the population, taking on ritual and official persistence. Among such events, there are some which are common to many Sicilian towns and villages, like for example the Dressing of the Child. It consists in providing new garments, prepared at their own expense by the inhabitants of the district, for three poor children representing the Madonna, St. Joseph and Baby Jesus. This is a symbolic function celebrated between Christmas and Epiphany. Other events are peculiar to the people of Caltagirone, and in a way derive from the sense of decorum characterising the population. These are the Giunta and the Spartenza. They are held outdoors amid a great crowd of people, on Easter Sunday. The Giunta begins with the procession of a grandiose statue of St. Peter, three metres high. Moving its head all the time, it looks for the Madonna. It meets her near the Town Hall, at the foot of the staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, wrapped up in a black cloak, a sing of mourning. St. Peter bows to her three times, to tell her that Christ has risen. Immediately afterwards, St. Peter rushes back to meet the simulacrum of Resurrected Christ, standing between two frightened Jews, called Cicchìttu and Nancìttu. The saint's red cloak, swollen up by the wind, falls off. The saint bows three times to Resurrected Christ, and the crowd shouts out "Viva Maria!" There occurs the meeting between Jesus and Maria, who bows three times to the Son; she opens her arms as a sing of devotion, while her black cloak falls off. The people shout out again, this is the Giunta, that is to say the meeting. The simulacra are carried in procession along the streets of the town. There are other meetings and other bows; the last is in Piazza Marconi. Mary bows three times to the Son, who has overcome death. Thus there takes place the Spartenza, that is to say the farewell.