The Secrets of Italy Read online

  One of the most compelling tales of madness, which both Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri have written about, involves the Real Casa dei Matti (“Royal Home for the Insane”), an asylum founded in Palermo by baron Pietro Pisani, a man motivated by the loftiest ideals of progress who happened to have a slight streak of madness of his own. A famous example involves his disdain at the locals’ vocal dismissal of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Real Teatro Carolino, Palermo’s main stage at the time. Nearly fifty years later, to make up for the offense committed almost half a century before, Pisani had the company mount a performance of The Magic Flute paid for entirely out of his own pocket, and at which he seems to have been the sole spectator. He also frequently signed his letters by inserting the title “Sicily’s Number-One Madman” before his official title and name. Basically, Camilleri notes: “Baron Pisani is the classic example of a Sicilian who, as Pirandello described in Cap and Bells, has three cords in his head—the serious or intellectual one, the civil one, and the crazy one—and therefore acts according to whichever cord he feels it opportune to pull at any given moment.”12

  As chance would have it, Pisani ended up turning his ties to madness into a veritable profession. Actually, chance had little to do with it, because in 1824 Lieutenant General Marquis Pietro Ugo made Pisani director of the insane asylum then held in the convent of the Discalced Carmelites. At the time, insanity was often considered divine punishment for past sins, even sins supposedly committed by some long-dead ancestor. This superstitious belief partially explains the frightful conditions those unfortunate souls were kept in. But, to be absolutely clear, the conditions in mental institutions under the Kingdom of Italy and, later, the Republic of Italy, were not all that different, and real reform was only instituted by Franco Basaglia, a prominent psychiatrist, in 1978.

  Pisani himself left us this terrifying report:

  Verily, had I heard about it from others instead of seeing it with my own eyes, I would never have believed the state of abandon in which I found this place. It resembled more a menagerie for wild beasts than a residence for human beings. As I looked about inside the narrow edifice a few dark, tiny, squalid cells came into view: one part was for madmen, the other part was for madwomen. Maniacs, demented folk, berserks, and melancholics were all locked up together, thrown in with no distinction. Some of them were filthy, and lay on the floor atop a bit of straw; most were on the bare floor. Many were completely nude, some were covered in tatters, others were wrapped in rags; all of them were chained up like animals, covered in irksome insects, pained by hunger, thirst, cold air, hot air; all suffered mockery, torments, and beatings. These hapless souls were worn out, and nearly destroyed. Their eyes stared at any man who suddenly appeared before them and, consumed by the fear felt when they suspected new sufferings, they suddenly surged with fury and rage. Then, reassured by the compassionate gestures of those who pityingly looked on, they achingly asked for mercy, showing their tight shackles, and the bruises from all the blows that covered their entire bodies.13

  Pisani fought so hard to improve mental patients’ conditions that, just a few months after his appointment as director, one of Palermo’s newspapers, the Giornale d’Intendenza, proclaimed: “The mental hospital … under the care of a specialist full of philanthropic ideas, has greatly improved and, thanks to an increase in resources, is already well on its way to reaching a degree of perfection that will, one day, surely allow it to rank among the best such establishments in all Europe.” The increase in resources primarily meant more money, but it also meant more doctors and clearer instructions aimed at reaching precise goals, set according to a new therapeutic and “cultural” vision. Incredible as it may seem, some of the measures taken by Pisani in 1825 anticipated the steps Dr. Basaglia had to introduce all over again in the 1970s: a ban on beatings, chains, straitjackets and other forced restraints, and the combination of treatments (in truth, rather scant) with an increase in recreation and leisure time.

  Pisani was a meritorious representative of an enlightened nobility dedicated to ideals of secular, civic-minded progress that rejected the fatalistic concept of madness as a form of divine punishment, bringing it back to the realm of mental pathology, where it properly belongs. And Pisani didn’t stop there; his humane instincts extended from the treatment of the insane to other fields—for example, he saved the sculpted metopes of Selinunte from being shipped abroad, thereby triggering a rethinking of the island’s approach to its archaeological heritage, which led to legislative changes during Bourbon rule of the island.

  Follies, extravagances, and eccentricities abound in Sicily and its capital. Sometimes they act for good, other times not. Perhaps the most riveting example of the latter is the infamous case of Giuseppe Giovanni Battista Vincenzo Pietro Antonio Matteo Balsamo, better known as Alessandro, Count of Cagliostro, or simply Cagliostro. I won’t even try to sum up his dramatic life as a sharp-witted scoundrel, forger, huckster, miracle worker, and thief. He pursued far too many activities and lived in too many places to name—all this after fleeing from Palermo, where he had been born to poor parents in 1743 and partially orphaned when his father died soon thereafter. He made up for his humble beginnings by turning a bunch of tall tales into an autobiography he lived out to the fullest, weaving together Near-Eastern legends with his presumed magical powers and quasi-miraculous abilities. He spoke of having spent his childhood in Mecca and of having learned the secrets of ancient Egyptian priests, as well as the art of transforming metals and the alchemical principles that allowed him to turn lead into gold.

  We mustn’t forget that in the mid-eighteenth century ancient Egypt was still considered more of a mythical place than an actual geographic location. It was only after Napoleon’s expedition (1798–1801) that Europeans began to get a clearer picture of the area and its ancient civilizations. For Cagliostro, Egypt must have seemed like a lucrative mirage of a place, an easy, low-risk ruse. He went so far as to invent an ancient Egyptian Masonic Lodge and made himself its “Gran Cofto,” something like a high priest. The goal of his so-called Egyptian Rite was no less than the regeneration of humankind so it might be brought back to its pure state predating “original sin.” He honed the idea in Lyon, where he founded the Mother Lodge called “La Sagesse Triomphante” (in keeping with the enlightenment zeitgeist, which he’d quickly intuited). The initiation rites and mysterious ritual practices, which he also dreamed up, combined with the magnetism he must certainly have exuded to enthrall intellectuals and leaders across Europe. He traveled absolutely everywhere, from faraway Russia to Malta, Lisbon, and London, sometimes sharing a table with kings at court, other times locked away in prison.

  In Rome in 1768, when he was twenty-five, he married seventeen-year-old Lorenza Serafina Feliciani, who also had humble roots, and was illiterate to boot. But she was shrewd and up for anything, even prostitution when necessary, and she was a perfect honey trap that drew in countless suckers. In London, for example, in cahoots with her husband, she seduced a naive Quaker, and Cagliostro burst in on them in the heat of passion. Feigning indignation at his wife’s betrayal, Cagliostro called for the man’s life to repay her lost honor, but then happily accepted the man’s offer of monetary compensation instead. The crafty young woman seconded her husband in much more complicated schemes as well. After changing her name to Princess Serafina and then Queen of Sheba, she proclaimed herself Grand Mistress of the Initiation Rite, which was a special Masonic Lodge reserved for women, who—back then, as today—were not allowed to join the Freemasons.

  Cagliostro met a terrible end. After a close, albeit marginal, brush with the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which some consider one of the key causes of the 1789 French Revolution, and after having dodged the law countless times all over Europe, he fell into a snare set by the pope’s secret service. One day in Rome two papal spies strolled up to him and requested permission to join his Masonic Lodge. Cagliostro began the usual initiation ceremony without paying much attention to the fa
ct that it was in violation of local law, which in the papal territories forbade any association with freemasonry, punishable by death. The two spies promptly took off without paying the agreed-upon membership fee, giving Cagliostro a dose of his own medicine. This was back in 1789, a fateful year. His wife Serafina, who had been his accomplice on so many adventures, realized the tough spot they were in and quickly denounced him to a parish priest, who then sent notice to the Santo Uffizio, which in turn got the papal higher-ups involved. Pope Pius VI immediately summoned his secretary of state and several other cardinals. On the night of December 27 Cagliostro was arrested and locked up in Castel Sant’Angelo; his wife was confined in the convent of Sant’Apollonia; and a poor Capuchin friar Cagliostro had recruited into his lodge was detained in the convent of Ara Coeli, on the Capitoline Hill.

  The charges against him were numerous and weighty: he was accused of being a freemason, a warlock, a heretic, a blasphemer—against God, the Virgin Mary, the saints, and all Catholicism—in addition to accusations of forgery, crookery, slander, and sedition. It was more than enough to send him to the gallows. So how did the brilliant swindler defend himself? He pled insanity, so to speak, acting crazy enough that his case went from being one against a nobleman and innovative genius to one against a mere charlatan. His lawyer, Carlo Costantini, presented him as a poor, low-level con artist, a fraudster who eked out a living by selling illusions, just as any con man would. Sure, he was an undeniable cheat, but on a small scale, nothing that the Church should worry about, and he certainly was no heretic (the gravest charge), since he displayed a clear lack of even minimal theological knowledge. As for his wife, well, she was just a two-bit whore whose accusations held no water whatsoever.

  On April 7, 1791, the Santo Uffizio issued its sentence, which included the stipulation: “Granting extraordinary grace, his sentence is to be commuted from the [death] penalty to a secular authority overseeing a life term in prison, to be served in a fortress jail, where he is to be closely watched, with no possibility of pardon. And, having abjured his status as formal heretic upon entering detention [in Castel Sant’Angelo], the [papal] censors are to absolve him, enjoining due penitence.” The chosen fortress was one of the most terrifying prisons of the time, the Rocca di San Leo, in the Apennine foothills southeast of San Marino. The cell he was sent to was like a tomb. Referred to as il pozzetto, “the little well,” it was a tiny oubliette with a minuscule window, its sole furnishing a bare table. The walls had no doors, just a hatch in the ceiling, opened solely to lower the prisoner down by rope and then promptly sealed shut again. Cagliostro tried one last trick: he began acting highly devout so that his guards, who peeked through the hatch every now and then, would find him deep in prayer, beating his chest, drawing sacred imagery on the walls, or ecstatically staring at a crucifix they had allowed him to keep. He ultimately refused food as a final act of penance. In that grim place, passing day after day with no hope of release, what started out as fakery probably turned into real madness, from which death finally freed him in August 1795, at the age of fifty-two.

  His wife, whose testimony had been a deciding factor, was absolved in her own trial, but she never again left the convent. The hapless Capuchin was sentenced to ten years’ detention in the aforementioned convent of Ara Coeli.

  When Cagliostro’s body was found dead, after three days of agony, the chaplain of San Leo wrote:

  He remained in that apoplectic state for three days, during which time he seemed obstinate about his errors, and would hear nothing of repentance nor of confession. At the end of those three days the blessed Lord, justly disdainful of such an ungodly blasphemer who had so arrogantly violated holy law, abandoned him to his sin and left him to die in that miserable state, setting a terrifying example for anyone tempted to intemperately indulge in worldly pleasures and the delirium of modern philosophy.14

  In 2003 a brilliantly unhinged semimockumentary film titled Il ritorno di Cagliostro (“Cagliostro’s Return”), by Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, was released. Its plot centers on a failed director, Pino Grisanti, who casts an alcoholic old Hollywood star, Erroll Douglas, as the legendary Cagliostro. At one point the elderly actor unexpectedly jumps out a window and dives headfirst onto the ground. Although he doesn’t die, he does go crazy, and spends the rest of his days in a mental institution. Grisanti’s made-up filmography includes an earlier film titled Gli invincibili Beati Paoli (“The Invincible Beati Paoli”). It is no accident that Ciprì and Maresco brought these two legends—Cagliostro and his lunacy, and the secret medieval sect of the Beati Paoli—together in the same film. Both are mighty, long-lived myths that almost invariably surface in discussions of Palermo and Sicily.

  In 1909 the Palermitan author and journalist Luigi Natoli began publishing work in the newspaper Giornale di Sicilia under the pseudonym William Galt. What began as a feuilleton grew into 239 episodes published between 1909 and January 1910, a serial novel titled I beati Paoli (“The Beati Paoli”). It was an enormous success and its publisher, Flaccovio, kept it in print for many years, through countless editions. In the preface to one of the later editions, Umberto Eco draws a few distinctions between historic versus popular fiction. He sets Natoli’s text squarely in the latter category, seeing Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, and Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail as his forerunners. The jumble of interconnected events is complex enough that I won’t even try to sum it up here, but the same edition also includes a noteworthy essay by Rosario La Duca on the history of the sect and its attendant legends.15

  The Beati Paoli were members of a secret sect that has inspired countless imaginations and been extensively written about. Some believe the sect was founded as far back as the twelfth century, and its aim was to right the wrongs committed against the poor. Basically, it is believed that the sect was a private response, outside all extant laws, to the afflictions caused by the nobles whose feudal rule included, among other things, the power of administering justice—which, of course, they did in whatever way they saw fit. According to Natoli/Galt, the cloaked and hooded Beati Paoli convened in an underground tribunal beneath the streets of Palermo’s Del Capo neighborhood. Its labyrinthine tunnels were part of a fourth-century early Christian necropolis dug between the church of Santa Maruzza and a street now known as Vicolo degli Orfani (“Orphan Lane”). And there actually is a spacious chamber twelve feet underground, complete with seating carved into the stone walls. This dark, mysterious place easily lends itself to vivid imagination, and it is not hard to picture a secret tribunal passing down sentences amid flickering torchlight.

  No one has been able to prove whether the stories surrounding the Beati Paoli have any basis in historic truth or were simply born of popular legend and handed down through the generations as part of a rich oral tradition. The only thing we know for sure is that, from the late nineteenth century onward, a conviction that the sect and its avengers really existed spread throughout Sicily.

  But in cases like this, historic factuality bears very little importance. As with all religious matters, what really counts is people’s need to believe, the consolation they get from having faith that somewhere, be it some underground crypt or ancient palazzo, there are men who take action in order to reestablish a semblance of justice capable of making up for the many wrongs they have suffered. The reader of popular fiction, as Eco writes in his preface, “looks to the pages of fantasy for consolation, for portrayals of a justice carried out by others, capable of making him forget how little justice he enjoys in his own life.” Similarly, a few years before Eco, Antonio Gramsci had written that serial novels stir the imagination of the everyday man, thereby helping to compensate for his “(social) inferiority complex.”16

  According to another popular hypothesis, the Beati Paoli were actually predecessors of the mafia, to such a degree that they not only acted as protectors of the weak, but were also hit men who murdered for money. La Duca denies any such connection, asserting instead that the mafia sprang from agrarian root
s in the early nineteenth century, just as the feudal system began to crumble, and that the Beati Paoli had already been long defunct by then. But ties between the myth of the Beati Paoli and the historic reality of the mafia can nevertheless be found. As early as 1876 two enlightened politicians, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, had noticed the phenomenon. They coauthored a major report on Sicily’s political and administrative conditions that for the first time gave a full picture of how the island actually functioned.17 According to their description, the mafia stemmed from “a medieval sentiment among those who believed they could provide for the safety of themselves and their possessions through the use of their own wealth and personal influence, independent of any system of authority or law,” a sentiment taken to its extreme in the tradition of omertà, the code of silence that says a man’s primary duty is to regain justice by his own hand for the wrongs done him.

  A mistrust of government no matter who runs it, an eternal sense of resignation counterbalanced by rapid vendetta, and the need to adapt to any circumstance are all key components of the mafia’s modus operandi. Indeed, such descriptions appear not only in countless essays on the topic, but in the incredibly rich Sicilian literary tradition as well.

  The most obvious example is The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece published posthumously in 1958, whose plot centers on its characters’ sense of resignation during the transition from the Bourbon reign to the unification of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. But, many years before the publication of The Leopard, another novel dealt with the same subject matter—Federico De Roberto’s The Viceroys,18 published in 1894. Its powerfully realist prose recounts the history of the Uzeda family. Giving a friend of his a preview of the work, the author described it as follows: “It is the story of a great family composed of 14 or 15 people, men and women, each stronger and more extravagant than the next. My first working title was Vecchia razza (“Ancient Pedigree”), which captures my ultimate goal of chronicling the physical and moral decay of an exhausted bloodline.”19