The Viceroys

In the late nineteenth century, the European novel discovered a new protagonist: the family. Unified yet proliferating, fictional families allowed writers to explore large social and geographical expanses (France in Zola's Rougon-Maquart cycle, remote reaches of the Hapsburg empire in Roth's
Radetzky March
), and to follow the course of history across several generations—from the bourgeois stability of Mann's Lübeck, to the hundred tumultuous years of Garcia Marquéz's Buendía saga.

Federico De Roberto's Uzeda are part of this constellation: a microcosm of Sicily—its Viceroys', no less—in the decades of the
Risorgimento
and the Italian unification. Seldom, however, has a crowded novelistic family so thoroughly coincided with a single social class—and one sliding irreparably towards its ruin. The result is a unique combination of naturalistic lucidity over the fate of impoverished aristocracies, and a Goya-like inventiveness in extracting from social disintegration a whole gallery of grotesques and monstrosities, culminating in the desperate scurrility of the sadistic and promiscuous monk Don Blasco.

Readers who have encountered nineteenth-century Sicily through Lampedusa's
Leopard
(and, possibly, Visconti's silky reworking for the big screen) will find
The Viceroys
familiar, yet strangely uncanny. Though the overall arc of the story is roughly the same, Tancredi's seductive liveliness, or the Prince's civilized intelligence, are nowhere in sight; all the Uzeda have to show is sickness onto death, impotent greed, and outright imbecility.
The Viceroys
is a superb lesson in how coarse and rancid the collapse of a ruling class actually is.

C
ATANIA
is one of those places that have a pervasive effect on all who live there. Cyclops were the first inhabitants of the area, and the province is scattered with place-names beginning with ‘Aci', from a local shepherd whose rivalry with a Cyclop was sung by Theocritus; at Acireale, beneath Etna, craggy islets just off the coast are called
I Ciclopi
. These legends may refer to a time when a crater of the volcano looked like some glaring eye, linked by mariners with mysterious troglodytes who lived hereabouts, the ancient Siculians. Even now there is something improbable, obsessed, about this part under Etna; slopes twist into grim shapes, houses perch on jagged residues of lava-flows, and against a prevailing colour-tone of dark grey the vegetation is all strident pinks and greens.

In atmosphere it is far removed from the serenities of Syracuse, a few miles to the south. Yet all these shores face across to the Aegean; and some underlying harmony in contrast, a creative tension emanating from these Greek parts of Sicily has combined to produce hereabouts the island's best minds, from Archimedes to Pirandello. The birthplaces of nearly every Sicilian writer, ancient and modern, are along the eastern coastline from Messina to Pachino, or at Agrigento and Caltanisetta; in comparison the Phoenician and Arab west has had speculative or scientific minds, an eighteenth-century dialect poet, and now the Prince of Lampedusa. The last great period of Palermo as a Mediterranean centre of culture dates back to Frederick II. For the last hundred years or so, the literary capital of Sicily has been halfway down the east coast, at Catania. There, towards the end of the last century, appeared a small group of writers who have gone down to Italian literary history as the
Veristi
or ‘Realists'. One, Giovanni Verga, has long been considered a genius. His life-long friend and pupil, Federico De Roberto, is only being generally appreciated in Italy now, thirty-four years after his death. All were closely linked to their environment.

Volcanoes, to those who live under them, are symbols of unpredictable or sinister power, and no city in Europe is closer to one than Catania. In certain lights or under rain, the place has a brooding quality; its huge buildings, lava-grey chequered with grimy white, ooze as if from bombing in the last war. Here the Volcano's influence is everywhere. A few years before the great earthquake that destroyed the town in 1693, a lava-flow had submerged and reshaped whole districts, cutting off, for instance, Castell ‘Ursino from the sea which had been its outlet since medieval days. Thus the architect Vaccarini had a free hand to produce his town-planning scheme on a vast scale. The briefest tour shows how masterly was his grouping. The plan hinges brilliantly on one main artery, Via Etnea, running straight through the entire city towards the volcano. This street is an epitome of Catania's character and history. It emerges first from under the Uzeda gate, down by the old seashore where even now can be found professional story-tellers,
cantastorie
, declaiming tales of Roland and Excalibur. Next it passes the great steps of the cathedral, with its image of the local patron-saint, St Agata, winged and hieratic as the goddess Isis whose cult once centred here. On a fountain opposite perches the city's symbol, an elephant in lava with an obelisk on its back. From there Via Etnea sweeps on past huge churches in ‘exasperated' baroque with tiled domes glittering in the sun, past endlessly parading throngs (the street is Catania's open-air club), past gardens and monuments to another presiding genius, the composer Bellini; on up to where new districts spring up almost nightly in the present east-coast boom. Over it all, so near that the Cyclops should have found it easy to fling down either lava or snow, hangs the white cone, vast, aloof, of the volcano.

Etna is not mentioned much by local writers, perhaps because it is so much part of the texture of their minds. References to the volcano are oblique, as to a deity which needs propitiating. In
I vicerè
, for instance, the slopes of the volcano are merely referred to as useful boltholes from invasion or cholera. The name Uzeda is taken from a Duque de Uceda (a town, in the province of Madrid, the Spanish ‘c' changing into Sicilian ‘z'), a Vice-roy of Sicily at the end of the seventeenth century, said to be partly responsible for rebuilding Catania after the earthquake of
1693. Against their setting and period the chronicles of De Roberto's Uzeda come into focus; with Etna an ever-present monster brooding over landscape, climate and architecture, this family of monsters looks less grotesque. To the inhabitants of Catania they are based on recognisable originals, accepted as part of the highly charged pattern of local life. To us they might seem provincial oddities were it not for that quality in Sicily which transforms island peculiarities into reflections of the universal, and which may be connected with its geographical position in the centre of the Mediterranean. What more universal and corroding than the pride which recurs in variations throughout
I vicerè
?

This sort of novel seldom has a hero, and the real protagonist is the Year of Unification,
dies irae
, 1860 itself. Stresses of local nature combine here with exasperations of a period tense from social and economic changes centuries overdue. Garibaldi's sweep that year from Marsala across the island and up through southern Italy to beyond Naples, all in a few summer months, was one of those events with an exhilarating sense of recasting the map of history. It was the fuse-point (retarded as it turned out) of modern Sicily, politically, economically, socially, even in a way religiously. That summer Garibaldi was not only the bogey-man of the nobles, but a symbol to Sicilians who have never quite absorbed their pagan past and hailed the hero in a red shirt on a white horse as kinsman of the patroness of Palermo, Santa Rosalìa, blood-brother to the knights of the puppet-theatres, paladin in the struggle of Charlemagne and Roland against the Moors, of good against evil. There were even pictures of him wearing a crown of thorns. Surely after this apparition of the ‘Knight of Humanity' nothing would ever be the same again (though a glimpse into the interior today might make anyone wonder what all the excitement was about). But the Campaign of the Thousand—the very name rings of some antique feat—left a mark all over the south. No disillusion has quite affected it, even when Garibaldi's deputy stamped out a peasant's revolt in the (British-owned) Bronte estates, and at Aspromonte two years later he himself was attacked by troops of the Italian state he had helped to create. Whether or not Garibaldi could ever have solved Sicilian dearth, there is no
doubt about the ‘moment-of-truth' quality of 1860 in the south; this explains why all major Sicilian writers, dramatists and composers have been obsessed with that year ever since, why Verga and Pirandello, De Roberto and now Lampedusa, wrote novels about the impact of change, the technique of accommodation, the effects of opportunism, in the Year of Unification. Of them all the vastest picture in size, detail and historical scope was De Roberto's.