Sicilian Odyssey Read Online Free Page B

era’s most successful painters, but he had squandered all his money. He was known for his hot temper, his unpredictability, and for the propensity for (and fascination with) violence that underlies so much of his work, including the brutal “Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” which he painted for St. John’s Cathedral of Malta.
    During his stay in Sicily, his behavior became progressively more erratic. He slept with a knife under his pillow and got into frequent squabbles. In Messina (where he went after Syracuse) he allegedly slashed a painting he had just completed because he felt that his patrons’ response was unacceptably tepid, and he left Messina after a fight with a local schoolmaster who insinuated that Caravaggio was hanging around the school yard and casting lecherous glances at the young male students. Working rapidly, under enormous pressure and less than optimum conditions, he nonetheless managed to produce a number of extraordinary paintings—including some of his most important masterpieces.
    He had come to Syracuse partly to see an old friend and fellow painter, Mario Minniti, whom he had known in Rome. Because of Caravaggio’s fame, his arrival caused considerable excitement in the city’s artistic and intellectual community, and it was arranged that the celebrated archaeologist, Mirabella, would personally conduct the painter on a tour of the Greek theater and the nearby quarries.
    Among the quarries, the latomie, that have been dug out of the hillside near the Greek theater, the most inviting and attractively landscaped is the Latomia del Paradiso, which has been turned into a park planted with orange and lemon trees, palms, and magnolias. Within its boundaries are the two most famous of the caves. The first, which has a nearly rectangular entrance, is known as the Grotta dei Cordari, the “cave of the ropemakers,” most likely because its atmosphere, temperature, and humidity were perfectly suited to preserve the flexibility of the cord that the craftsmen twined into rope.
    The other has a taller and more elongated mouth, a narrower, ovoid opening that rises almost toward a point; its shape suggests a cross between the spire of a cathedral and a flower in one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. But what’s most remarkable about this cave is its acoustical properties: When you stand in a certain spot near its entrance, you can hear your voice amplified, echoing back at you, against the choral background provided by the cooing of the pigeons that fly in and out of the cave, seemingly enjoying the music of their own voices.
    The cave spirals inward, turning in on itself; at the very back is a small hole in its ceiling that, on sunny mornings, admits a single column of light, not unlike the laserlike beam that often signals the presence of the Holy Spirit shining through the window to find Mary in a Renaissance portrayal of the Annunciation. On the quiet, overcast afternoon on which we visit the quarries, one of the gardeners working in the groves of citrus trees takes us into the cave, where he whistles a bright Sicilian tune that comes bouncing back off the walls. He shows us where the light comes through and urges us to return on a clear day, when the sun will be doing its magic trick.
    When Caravaggio saw the cave, he remarked that its shape resembled that of an ear, and that it was the perfect prison for a tyrant who could take advantage its acoustical properties to eavesdrop on the conversations of the captives being held there. Word of Caravaggio’s observation spread rapidly through the city. A genius who so brilliantly depicted nature had instantly seen the true form and purpose of a natural wonder! No one seems to have noted the fact that a man who felt persecuted and in imminent danger of being sent to prison might naturally find himself thinking of incarceration, spying, etc. In any case, the cave became known—thanks to Caravaggio—as the Ear of Dionysius, a name it retains to