What have the Africans done for Sicily?

Africans are so often portrayed as the underdogs, nowadays, that we sometimes forget they conquered southern Europe twice and ruled it for centuries.

The Sicilians don’t forget, though, for the Africans invented pasta as we know it, shaped their language and gave them the word Mafia, and brought them their citrus fruit trees, taught them to make dazzling coloured ceramics and founded street markets that still flourish like chaotic souks in central Palermo today.

The capo market in Palermo, founded by Africans over 1,100 years ago.

The first wave of Africans were the Carthaginians. Carthage is now Tunis, in Tunisia. They spoke Phoenician, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, and were a cultural and ethnic mix of colonists from Lebanon and indigenous African Berbers. They never ruled Sicily without a fight, but first started founding cities here in the 8th century B.C. and always had a foothold on the island to the 2nd century B.C.

The Romans conquered Sicily eventually, and then later came a second wave of African invaders. By this time they were Muslim and they spoke Arabic, and the Europeans called them Moors. This is a vague term which applies to all the various races of northern Africa, including some sub-Saharan Africans as well. They ruled the Emirate of Sicily from 827 till 1061 A.D.

In Sicily, you see Africa all around you, even if you don’t recognise it.

COUS COUS: Cous cous is a Sicilian staple. In Sicily it is most often eaten with fish. The charming coastal town of San Vito Lo Capo has an annual cous cous festival in June, during which free cous cous is served in the streets for three days. There are also public cous cous making workshops (it’s a very fiddly, iterative process), a cooking tournament, and food markets. Oh yes, the Sicilians do like their food!

FACIAL GESTURES: If you ask a Sicilian a question, he may say nothing, but just tip his head back, look down his nose at you, and make a “tut” noise. English people do this to express disapproval, but when Sicilians do it, it just means “no”. Anyone who has travelled in the Middle East or North Africa will know that the Sicilians learned to do this from Arabic people.

Sicilians are generally the most hand-waving and emotional of all the Italians. A lot of their extremely tactile ways were picked up from the North Africans.

LANGUAGE: The Sicilian language is packed with Arabic words. They are too numerous to list. I’ll give you one, though…

THE WORD MAFIA: The Arabic word mahyas means “aggressive boasting or bragging.” This evolved into the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which means arrogant, with a determination to dominate others through intimidation and bullying. And of course, people who have incorporated this behaviour into their way of life are the Mafia.

PASTA: I bet you didn’t know modern pasta was invented by Africans!

Records of pasta being eaten in Greece and Palestine go back to the 2nd century. It seems to have been widely eaten all around the Mediterranean in ancient times. They made it from flour and water, then boiled and ate it immediately. Italians still occasionally buy fresh pasta like this (pasta fresca) from small, local “pasta laboratories,” as they are amusingly called.

The Carthaginians introduced durum wheat to Sicily in the 8th century BC. It was soon being exported all around the Mediterranean. When the Moors came to Sicily, they realised durum wheat pasta can be dried hard. This makes it highly mould- and insect-resistant for long term storage and transportation. It was ideal for their export business and meant they could charge more for a value-added, ready-to-eat product. It also has the advantage of being ideal for toddlers’ art projects at kindergarten.

They opened large pasta factories in Sicily, particularly in Palermo and Trabia, to mass produce this dried pasta (pasta ascuitta), which is of course pasta as we now know it. In 1154, Mohammad Al-Idrisi wrote: “West of Termini there is a delightful settlement called Trabia. Its ever-flowing streams propel a number of mills. Here there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya [pasta] which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries. Very many shiploads are sent.”

Pasta is still one of Sicily’s major exports. Have you seen Tomasello pasta in your supermarket? That’s made in Sicily, with production in several towns where the Africans first opened pasta factories over 1,000 years ago.

Ahhh! Just like the Africans made it!

I have seen some claims that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, inspired by Chinese noodles. As you now know, this is blatant poppycock. Written records and archaeological evidence prove the Africans were mass-producing it in Sicily centuries before he was born.

CERAMICS: The Africans were experts in multi-coloured ceramic glazing techniques. They brought master craftsmen to establish potteries and train locals in Sicily. They replaced the ancient lead-oxide glazes with tin oxide glazes and added manganese purple and copper green to the color palette.

One of the typical ceramic artifacts they made looked like this, and people in Sicily still make them today:

A “Moor’s Head” vase from Caltagirone; apparently the Africans in those days liked using fruit as hair grips.

Their techniques later spread throughout Italy and the style of pottery was named Maiolica. It is still a major craft in Sicily, especially in Caltagirone, the centre of the Moorish pottery industry in Sicily, and Santo Stefano di Camastra. These two small towns are packed with hundreds of ceramics shops in every street. My husband displays signs of intense panic when I ask him to take me to either of them.

“The kitchen walls are already full,” he protests. “We’ve got no more room.”

ARCHITECTURE: The legacy of the architecture brought over from Africa remains not only in the old buildings that still stand in Sicily, but in the architectural designs and buildings technology that worked their way all through Europe and even up to the medieval cathedral builders of Great Britain.

The baths at Cefala Diana, just south of Palermo, were built by the Moors and look like this:

Ancient baths which still stand in the wild middle of nowhere. You won’t get pestered by rival tourists if you come here.

They were constantly refilled with water from several natural springs. The spring water surged at various different temperatures, a different one for each of the pools.

Palermo Cathedral, which the Africans converted into a mosque, has some Arabic inscriptions on its exterior and examples of Islamic art.

An Arabic plaque which can be seen on the exterior of Palermo cathedral. Can anyone translate it? Answers in the comments box, please!

The Normans who conquered Sicily so greatly admired Moorish architecture that they employed African architects, artists and craftsmen for their buildings. As a result, some of Palermo’s churches look like this:

La Martorana Church in Sicily. Martorana means marzipan, also invented by the Moors, which allegedly the nuns from the neighbouring convent used to sell. The martorana sweet, usually shaped very attractively into fruits, is named after the church, not the other way round, apparently.

And this:

A view of the Arabic garden in the courtyard of Monreale Cathedral.

The Castello di Zisa and La Cuba, also in Palermo, are in pure Fatimid style and surroundeded by Arabic gardens.

PALERMO AND ITS STREET MARKETS: The Carthaginians of Tunisia founded Palermo in 734 B.C. and gave it the catchy name of Zyz. Some of their city walls still survive in the city centre. Then in the 9th century A.D., the North African Moors invaded again, built new neighbourhoods, and filled the town with buzzing street markets that sold local foods and imported products.

Of these, the Capo and the Ballaro’ are still thriving markets with a real chaotic, souk-like vibe. Stall holders and customers alike wave their hands manically, shout their heads off and throw food and stuff all over the place. Your shoes will get wet gubbins on them. Don’t look too closely! It could be fish guts! I have a ridiculously high pair of pole-dancerish looking sandals which I wear for wading through the slurry when I go there to do my shopping.

Sensible footwear for a Sicilian Housewife to go grocery shopping

You can buy fresh fruit and veg, spices, meat or sea food, and eat local delicacies such as a spleen sandwich or a small intestine kebab, freshly cooked in front of you. (When I say small, I mean it’s the small intestine. The kebab is fairly large. As I have already mentioned, Sicilians DO like their food.)

SURNAMES: Arabic surnames survive in Sicily. Salimbeni, Taibbi, Sacca’, Zappala’, Cuffaro and Micicchè are all derived from North African families. They often have the stress on the last vowel, which of course breaks all the rules of pronunciation in Italian.

There is also the name Fricano, which is extremely common in Bagheria where I live and in a few nearby towns. It is pretty easy to tell that this is derived from “African”, the name the Romans gave to Carthaginian Africans who remained in Sicily after the Romans conquered the island. Strangely, though, the Romans also gave this title to several generals of theirs as an honourary additional surname for conquering the Carthaginians in Africa.

CITRUS FRUIT: The North Africans brought citrus trees with them and planted them all over Sicily and particularly in the bay of Palermo, which came to be called the Bay of Gold because of the glowing fruit that filled it. Once the world discovered the cause of scurvy, selling citrus fruits to sailors from all over Europe made Palermo one of the richest cities in Europe.

The Sicilian word for orange blossom – zagara – derives from the Arabic word zahr. Sicilians make the zagara into a beautiful toilet-water type perfume, also invented by the North Africans.

IRRIGATION: The North Africans were experts in irrigation. They used a technique first employed to reclaim the deserts all over Persia (I’m deliberately not saying Iran, because Persia back in those days was much bigger), digging out gradually tilting tunnels under the whole bay of palermo area and lining them with stone. The depth to which the channels were sunk and the subtle gradient gathered water from a wide area and made the Palermo bay into one of Europe’s most fertile farming areas.

A qanat under the bay of Palermo. Bring your wellies.

These tunnels, called Qanats, are sometimes opened to members of the public who have an abnormally high level of resistance to claustrophobia. Before being turned into Sicily’s number one Terrifying Tourist Attraction, they were sometimes used as escape routes by the Mafia, who violently wrestled into ownership of the citrus industry in the 1980s (ruining its profitability), bought houses above the qanats’ entrances, and took control of the extensive network as a means of escaping the police.

PLACE NAMES: Sicily is full of towns with Arabic names. For example:

Marsala, where the wine comes from, is Mars’Allah meaning God’s Port;

Alcamo was founded by the Muslim General Al-Kamuk;

Mislimeri signifies the resting place of the Emir (Manzil-Al-Emir);

Caltagirone, Caltanisseta, Caltabellotta and Caltavuturo derive from the Arabic calta meaning castle;

Tommaso Natale, a place which means “Tommy Christmas,” has nothing to do with the Arabs; I presume it got its name simply because the Sicilians do sometimes just let their sense of humour get the better of them;

Mongibello, Gibilmanna and Gibellina’ stems are all in the mountainous, expressed in the Arabic word gibil;

Regalbuto, Racalmuto and Regaliali derive from rahl, meaning area or village;

Polizza Generosi is a charming mountain town which means “generous policy,” and also has nothing to do with the Arabic speaking Africans, yet I couldn’t resist including it. (It’s policy as in insurance policy. What happens if you crash your car there? Do they give you a new one plus a free motorbike as well?)

CAKES: The Arabs and North Africans sure do love their sugar! The Africans brought sugar cane to Sicily and cultivated it widely, including for export back to Africa. They built sugar refineries which stayed in business till the 17th century, when global sugar production moved over to the West Indies.

The Moors also incorporated it into a famous Sicilian ricotta cheese cake known as qashatah in Arabic, which means “cheesy” and which is now called cassata in modern Sicilian. It is so sugary and fatty that it contains 2,3456,876 calories per bite and is guaranteed to cause type 2 diabetes in under 24 hours or your money back. But look at it! How could you resist?

40% fat cream cheese mixed with sugar, iced with royal fondant icing and covred in candied fruit, topped with sugar icing. Fully compatible with the Atkins diet.

The other type of desert introduced by the Africans was little cakes made from ground nuts. They have no flour, just almond or pistachio flour, egg white and sugar. I’ve recently signed up to a ten-step programme to try to conquer my addiction to them.

CROPS: The Africans imported plants and established crops of almonds, aniseed, apricots, artichokes, cinnamon, oranges, pistachio, pomegranates, saffron, sesame, spinach, sugarcane, watermelon and rice to Sicily. Today, raisins and pine kernels are fundamental to lots of classic pasta and fish recipes.

They also brought in palm trees of all types: short fat pineapple-looking trees, middle sized bushy ones and gigantic date palms, everywhere, date palms! The dates don’t ripen in Sicily because (can this seriously be possible?) the climate isn’t hot enough. I wonder why they brought so many, given that fact. Was it hotter back then? The Sicilian Housewife swoons and chokes for air at the very thought of it. Maybe they were just trying to stave off homesickness. I am not complaining about the date palms, of course. They are beautiful, elegant and often provide an ideal shady patch just the right size to park your car in.

All in all, the Africans brought a great deal to Sicily. A lot of it worked its way up through Italy and spread out into Renaissance Europe.

I sometimes wonder how the modern world might look if the Carthaginians had won the power struggle in the Mediterranean, instead of the Romans. They started out as well-matched empires, so the struggle dragged on for several centuries and Rome only won by a whisker. If Carthage had won, maybe modern America would be populated by brown-skinned people speaking some modern dialect of Phoenician, that Semitic language similar to Hebrew.

21 Mafia arrests and 2 Mafia murders in my town last week

They arrested 21 Mafiosi in my little backwater of a town last week. All of them had been very high profile players in international organised crime.

Along with the 21 arrests, the police also recovered 30 million Euros in cash, buildings, businesses, supermarkets, and other varied loot. The men had been engaged in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnap, illegal arms dealing and rigging elections.

This place is honestly a one-horse town with a tiny population. The most exciting thing that has ever happened here since the Second World War was when local boy and international movie mogul Salvatore Tornatore, who directed Cinema Paradiso, came back for the premiere of his more recent and much more hilarious film, Baaria.

Oh, that and the time some English friends of mine came to visit in February, and their kids decided to go swimming in the sea. I admit it was rather nippy, but it was honestly no colder than the average English summer; yet the locals still reminisce about that from time to time, in a blend of awestruck astonishment and quiet admiration.

So forgive me for being rather gobsmacked to find out that we had such a lot of Mafia bigshots here.

One of the men arrested was the mayor of a nearby town called Alimena, a man called Giuseppe Scrivano. He was a member of the political party called the Lega Nord, which would never get elected in Sicily unless the elections were rigged, because their main policy is to cut Sicily loose and create a new Italy without the primitive peoples of Italy’s incompetent south. Their politicians are regularly to be seen on Italian TV, railing against the Mafia of the south who are “dragging the whole country down”.

All the men arrested were major bosses, organising illegal international arms trading operations on a massive scale as well as drug trafficking, gambling, loan sharking and contract killing. And they all lived within spitting distance of my own house. Yoinks!

And a right crew they looked too. Check out a small sample of the mugshots, if you dare:

When members of the Japanese Mafia mess up, they are punished by being forced to cut off one of their own fingers. The Sicilian Mafia, on the other hand, apparently punish mistakes with a ferocious eyebrow plucking.

(They don’t really. I’m just kidding about that. At least I think I am.)

Two of the men targeted for arrest were part of the Canadian branch of the Sicilian Mafia. They had been tracked and monitored all the way from Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police…

…were working very closely with the Italian Carabinieri…

It’s a good job the Mounties have their own transport, because the Carabinieri in Italy sometimes suffer setbacks like this:

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The two Canadian crooks, being tracked as part of this massive police sting operation, were called Juan Ramon Paz Fernandez and Fernando Pimentel. These names immediately alert you to the fact that they were not of Italian origin. This would have made their admission to Mafia membership a controversial move, and would place them on a risky footing within the organisation. Non-Italians are very much regarded as second-tier associates within Cosa Nostra…. even as far away as Canada.

One interesting snippet that came out of the whole monitoring and sting operation, codenamed Argo, was the revelation of the Cosa Nostra membership initiation rites. It has long been known that joining the Mafia is rather like joining the Freemasons or the Moonies or maybe a US university frat society: they demand utter loyalty and have wierd joining rituals.

New initiates to the Sicilian Mafia have to do the following:

1. Prick your trigger-pulling finger with a thorn from a bitter orange tree (in case you’ve never foolishly tried to climb an orange tree, you’ll have to take it from me that these thorns are two inches long and can pierce human bones); some clans of the Mafia use a golden thorn instead

2. bleed onto a religious picture

3. set the bloody picture on fire whilst holding it in both hands

4. whilst not screaming like a girl because your fingers are getting barbecued, recite an oath of loyalty until death to the Mafia.

The police also learned, from one bugged conversation, that the new initiates who make mistakes are punished by having their legs thrashed with horsewhips. Well, the next time I see a bloke limping along with blood seeping out of his trouser legs and with savagely plucked eyerows, I shall NOT offer to help him across the road. I shall run away as fast as I can, shouting “Ha! ha! You can’t catch me! Thank goodness!”

The Canadian arm of Cosa Nostra has a massive war going on at the moment. Murders are taking place in blockbuster quantities, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, in the struggle for new leadership. These two Spanish-sounding Canadians had decided to forge strong links with the Bagheria branch of Cosa Nostra and increase the amount of drug trafficking between Canada and Italy, in the hope of getting to the top in the Canadian power struggle.

So, how did that work out for them? Did the police manage to arrest them?

No. The mob got to them first. They were found in the local rubbish dump the day before yesterday, shot 30 times each and burnt to black crisps.

Yeuch.

This news even worked its way up to a UK Guardian reporter in Rome yesterday. Maybe my backwater of a home town is going to be famous for something other than two little English girls shivvering in the sea!

And I wish to convey my thanks for making my town a safer place to live, both to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

and to the courageous ROS (anti-Mafia) division of the Carabinieri of Sicily.

Lyme Disease – The New Global Epidemic

Reblogged from You've Got to be Kidding!:

Would you marry your cousin? All about inbreeding, and very small elephants

A lot of Sicilians would. In fact, a lot of them do.

Of course Albert Einstein is the Poster Boy for cousin marriage. Not only were his parents cousins, but he also went ahead and married his own cousin. His wife was either his first cousin or his second cousin, depending which parent you trace the relationship through.

Albert Eiinstein: Proof that cousin marriage produces perfectly ordinary children.

The first time I was admitted to hospital in Sicily, and the doctor was filling out the cover of the cardboard folder that was to hold my medical notes, he asked me my name, date of birth, blood group and then said,

“Are your parents related to each other?”

I screamed with laughter so raucously that I almost fell off my trolley.

He showed me that there really was a box printed on the form, for him to tick YES or NO, and to write alongside it the specific details of exactly how inbred I was. I guess this is what happens in a society where many people are so pathologically distrustful of outsiders that they only ever get to socialize with their own family.

By way of cultural contrast, when you get admitted to a hospital in England, they fill out that folder by writing your personal details and how many units of alcohol you consume each week (or is it each day?) to the nearest dozen. So you see, whilst Sicilians are a bunch of incestuous teetotalers, we British are genetically diverse beer monsters.

He may be mad on booze but, as you can see, this English gentleman has none of the abnormal genetic characteristics that can result from inbreeding.

Sicilians don’t trust people from the next village. One of their favourite insults is “They’re all inbred in THAT village.” Yet actually, they’re all inbred in ALL the villages.

I have a friend in the village here, who used to work in one of the fish factories, stuffing anchovies into jars and pouring oil over them, and handling various other fishy products. This friend told me her heart’s deepest secret last week: she dated the love of her life when she was 18 years old, and they were engaged, but his mother refused to let them marry. She insisted a girl who worked in a fish factory could not possibly be a virgin. Whilst my friend was broken hearted, her beau’s mother forced him to marry his own cousin.

“She was fat. I mean vast,” my pretty friend told me in distress, at the climax of her story. “She was a great matress of a woman.”

So, what are the consequences of all this Sicilian inbreeding? Apart from a physique that resembles bedding?

I think we all know inbreeding can produce genetic abnormalities. There has been a case of a baby, whose parents were cousins, born with a single Cyclops eye. The parents were not Sicilians actually, but Arabs, among whom cousin marriage is even more common. In some Middle Eastern countries it accounts for over half of all marriages.

[Arabs have even less opportunity to meet members of the opposite sex socially than Sicilians used to. I wonder how I’d feel as an Arab man, deprived of gratifying female encounters my whole life. I'd be so frantically horny I would be willing to marry almost anyone. Those poor guys!!!! And suddenly I am offered my cousin! That’ll do. Yet I’ve only ever seen her dressed like this:

What does she look like? It's a terrible gamble. Maybe she looks like my aunt???

But crikey!! She might look like my uncle!

(In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, the real reason I am making fun of Arab women is because I have met enough of them to know they are stunningly beautiful, and I’m really quite jealous.) Anyway, now that I’ve finished fooling about with Arabs, let me go back to ridiculing Sicilians.]

Actually no, first let me mock sharks.

This is a real living critter, a cyclops shark found off the coast of California. Click on the photo for the full story.

By the way, the article about the human cyclops baby contains a photo which I have chosen not to reproduce at it is distressing. However I can happily provide a mock-up of the glasses this child may need, should her eye turn out to be short-sighted:

Well, does marrying your cousin, generation after generation, produce cyclopes? In Homeric times, rumour had it that Sicily was inhabited by a whole tribe of cyclopes; one-eyed giants with very low intellects and fairly persistent BO. People routinely discovered cyclops skulls in Sicily right up to recent times.

In 1371, explorer and writer Giovanni Boccaccio reported that he had been present when peasants in Sicily discovered a mighty Cyclops skeleton inside a cave. They dared each other to touch it and, when one eventually plucked up the courage to do so, most of it turned to dust, leaving only three huge teeth, parts of the skull, and a vast thigh bone.

Click on the photo for the original source of this image, which has a hilarious explanation.

Bocaccio, by the way, wrote the rather racy poem “The Decameron,” the Italian answer to the Thousand and One Nights. He had three illegitimate children and one legitimate one, by his first wife, to whom he was married when he was one year old. Poor fellow, perhaps that was the cause of all his lasciviousness? Gradually realizing you’ve been married to some ugly fat “mattress” of a girl since before you could walk or talk. Crikey, maybe she was his cousin too!

An ancient Greek sculpture of Polyphemus, discovered lying about somewhere. In a museum, probably.

Anyway, in the Odyssey of Homer, when Odysseus reaches Sicily, he is caught by a Cyclops named Polyphemus who lives in a cave. Polyphemus likes human flesh, sparkling wine, and sheep. He does not like housework, bathing, or Greeks. He can often be seen dashing men’s brains out “as if they were mere dogs”. By a stroke of sheer jammy good luck, Osysseus happens to have a few good skins of sparkling wine in his ship. So when this one-eyed giant seals off his cave and starts eating Odysseus’ men one by one, Odysseus manages to ply him with champers (Chateau Goat Bladder vintage) and, in his drunken state, blind him and so escape.

A Greek pot showing Odysseus jabbing an inbred Sicilian – not from MY village, from the next one – in the eye.

But the point is, were the cyclopes produced by cousin marriage? I don’t think so! Actually my darling hubby’s parents are cousins. Oh yes, they really are! But hubby is very handsome and I can assure you he has two eyes. They’re not even particularly close together. And although he may not have invented some new theory of physics, he’s jolly good at electrical wiring and plumbing.

What ever would Charles Darwin say about all this exaggeratedly selective breeding? Actions speak louder than words; he married his own cousin too. Other famous dudes who married their cousins include Franklin D. Roosevenlt, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Robin (Winnie the Pooh’s friend from the A.A. Milne books), Samuel Morse (who invented Morse code), H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe and Saddam Hussein. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, some biblical scholars even think that Mary and Joseph were cousins.

As far as I know, all of their offspring had two eyes. So I think the inbred cousin theory of cyclopes doesn’t hold. I think there’s a different explanation.

Six million years ago, the Mediterranean sea did not exist. It had evaporated and turned into a massive salt bed, as the continent of Africa drifted upwards until it crashed into Europe at the West, which is now Spain, and the east, where the Middle East links Egypt with Russia. Sealed off at both ends, the sea became a huge salt lake, which gradually evaporated.

Then suddenly, five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic broke down a huge mass of land and formed the largest waterfall the planet has ever seen. It was not a river, but the ocean itself, pouring over a land mass between Spain and Morocco, and gradually carving out the sea channel that now separates the two continents of Europe and Africa. Eventually, the map of the Mediterranean basin that we know today was laid out. The Islands were formed, including Sicily, and the animals on them were isolated from the mainland. So they started to evolve differently.

What has all this got to do with cyclopes? I really am going somewhere with this, I promise.

In Europe, back then, there were elephants. Elephants eat a LOT of leaves to reach the enormous size which makes them unassailable to pretty much all predators. The Sicilian elephants did not have such a lot of vegetation, and they did not have any predators on the island anyway. So they gradually shrank, till eventually the Sicilian elephant was no larger than a pony. They must have been so cute! I wish I could have one as a pet.

I still don’t know why the old men in Sicily are so titchy, but I suppose that’s a research project for another post…

This is from a photography website with lots of other brilliant size-effects, including a man spreadeagled on an ice-cream cone. Click on this image to visit the site.

The fossils of these dwarf elephants have been found on most of the main Mediterranean islands. They are nearly always found in caves. There are several caves in Sicily where they can be found in great numbers. When you look at their skulls head on, with the tusks fallen off, the hole for their trunk looks rather like a single eye hole. Rather like a Cyclops skull. In a cave called the Grotta dell’Addaura on Monte Pellegrino, in Palermo, a complete little elephant skeleton was found. They have also found cave engravings from the paleolithic and mesolithic eras.

A cyclops skull? Not quite – a mini Sicilian elephant skull instead.

Palaeolithic cave paintings from the Grotta dell’Addaura on Monte Pellegrino, in Palermo, Sicily. Close by, the skeletons of tiny elephants were found.

Well, I think that’s how the legend of the cyclops arose in Sicily. From the skulls of dear little elephants. As to the question of whether the elephants married their own cousins, your guess is as good as mine.

My Sicilian friend’s ex-fiance and his cousin, Materassina, at their wedding

Fabulous elephant wedding cake, which can be ordered in the UK. Click on the image to go to the supplier’s website.

How did YOU find this blog?

I have been rummaging through the statistics for my blog today. When I was new to this blogging lark, I did it obsessively. Nowadays I just take an occasional look at the search engine terms which have brought new visitors to my blog.

One of the strings typed into Google that immediately jumped out at me was:

How to get rid of large deep bumps in pubic area

Before you go frantically looking, I can assure you there is no relevant advice whatsoever on my blog. I am at a loss to explain why on earth Google thought the owner of this distressing pubic phenomenon would get help from this Sicilian Housewife.

I also wonder exactly what kind of Sicilian Housewife google thinks I am, since the following phrase also brought a new visitor to my site:

italian housewives cleveges

Upon checking this phrase for myself, I discovered it turns up my article on Sicilian builders and their bottoms, with the following image:

Plumber’s bum

Though I cannot speak with the authority of a randy man with a fetish for Italian housewives, I seriously doubt that the Internet surfer in question found this image satisfying. Indeed, I wonder if this poor horny fool ever found any cleavages, since he doesn’t know how to spell them? He may have been the same desperado who went on to search using the phrases

Sex between plumber and homemaker

and

Women in Sicily with big tits

And I imagine his desperation mounted by the second as he realised he just kept finding his way to my blog over and over again, and all it has on it is heartless mockery of women who care about washing their linens whiter, and ironic explanations of why you should never clean snotty dog nose-prints off your patio doors.

Was he the same desperate and rather kinky fellow who typed:

Bimbo feet smelly

… and if so, which of my blog posts did that take him to?

Moving from the smutty to the ridiculous, a few other searches that reached my site were these:

i am a surgical tech can i still scrub in if i have stitches in my hand

Which native American tribe had a pug nose as a strong feature

Discipline itch collar priest food bowl

Why Sicilians don’t look black

a vivaldi is when you are stuck in the queue of a call center and they play four seasons, only to be answered when you finally reach autumn

Village housewife armpit images

Slim women dangling tits

And finally:

Housewife like to work naked at home

They made a TV show about “desperate housewives”; I never knew till now that, actually, the world is packed with men desperate for housewives!

So, do you write a blog? What’s the freakiest search term that has ever brought a visitor to your blog?

International Joke Day

My little boy had a fantastic idea yesterday: We should institute an International Joke Day. This is a day when everyone tells every one else a great joke, to cheer up the whole world.

I think he is a genius, and so I officially declare that tomorrow, Monday 22 April, is International Joke Day.

IF YOU HAVE A JOKE YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE, PLEASE WRITE IT IN THE COMMENTS BOX BELOW.

I’ve been out of the blogosphere for a long time because of my son’s illness, but my brave little lad is getting better now. He has stopped vomiting and is able to go back to school, even though he doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with all his work. Thank you to everyone who has sent us kind words of sympathy and encouragement.

Well, without further ado, here are our jokes to kick off Joke Day. First, a couple from the late, great Tommy Cooper:

A dog bit a chunk out of my leg the other day.
A  friend of mine said: ‘Did you put anything on it?’
I said: ‘No, he liked it as  it was.

The police arrested two delinquent youths yesterday. One was drinking battery acid, and the other was eating fireworks.
They charged one, and let the other one off.

And here’s an old favourite of mine from Les dawson:

I went to my doctor and asked for something for persistent wind. He gave me a kite.

And here’s one from my son:

What do you call a psychic midget who has escaped from prison?
A SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE!

And finally:

The very latest in social networking:
Did you hear that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have merged into a single social networking website?
It’s called YouTwitFace

Are YOU aware of Lyme Disease?

Sorry I haven’t written any posts for so long. I’ve been too busy mopping up puke.

My little boy has vomited almost every day for the last three months. The house smells like a bleach factory, and I am buying new mops from the local hardware store so often that the cashier there thinks I fancy him, and am just buying the mops as an excuse to hang out. Lately, he has started hiding behind the screwdriver display when I show up, and making his mum serve me.

Is a housewife stalking you? Try using these…

Why has my son been chundering so much? Well, he’s got Lyme disease. I already had it when I got pregnant, without knowing it – since hardly any doctors know how to recognise it. They usually misdiagnose you with hypochondria instead. And so my son was born with congenital Lyme.

My son has been taking combined antibiotics for the last 3 years, non stop, but Lyme disease is one of the most antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world. It’s worse than syphilis and tuberculosis, both of which often need over a year of antibiotics to eradicate. One person in three with Lyme disease never gets cured.

While I’m quoting statistics, I’d also like to mention that Lyme disease worldwide is now spreading four times faster than AIDS. Where is the government research? Where are the sequinned, star-spangled Hollywood fundraising events?

Nobody even knows about Lyme disease. Once you get diagnosed with it, it’s like entering a secret society of the knowing, like the Freemasons or the Illuminati or maybe Mossad. Only we, the Diseased Ones, know how widespread it is. Only we know that research has proven 80% of cases of autism are caused by Lyme disease. Only we know that once you get Lyme disease, your life will never be the same again.

Forget eyeballs on pyramids – this is the top secret symbol of The Diseased Ones; a Lyme-disease awareness ribbon

So, well, apart from the endless retching, what else is Lyme disease doing to my son? He cannot hold a pen and write properly because his hands are too weak. He’s lost physical co-ordination and often drops things, or falls over for no reason. He has headaches nearly every day. When he is tired, he cannot see properly. His knee joints are arthritic and sometimes he limps. He cannot run, he just shuffles along in slow motion when trying to play with his friends. He’s seven years old, by the way. He forgets things that he knows perfectly well, like how to tell the time. I’m currently teaching him that for the third time in two years.

Borrelia Burgdorferi – the bacteria that cause lyme disease (or hypochondria, depending on your personal beliefs)

Do you know what the worst thing is?

The worst thing is when other people moan and fuss about trivial ailments. I don’t mind offering sympathy to anyone, I really don’t. But when they lack any awareness of proportion, it sometimes makes me want to strangle them.

My neighbour (Mrs. Sterile, in case anyone’s keeping track of the locals in this blog) made more fuss when her son banged his head and got a bruise on it than any cardiac patient I saw in the hospital in England when I was there having heart surgery.

Her son had been riding his tricycle, which tipped over sideways and made him bump his head on the ground. She fainted immediately, then came round and hyperventilated. Her son cried loudly, largely because he was scared by what his mother was doing, which meant he MUST be taken to hospital. The amount of hand-waving and Sicilian cries of desperation exceeded anything I had ever witnessed before. She was even slapping her hands against her forehead the way Arabs do at funerals. All over a bruise about one inch in diameter.

My husband and I were recruited as chauffeurs, since she and her husband were both too hysterical to drive. She did actually coerce my husband to drive up the hard shoulder of the motorway for about a quarter of a mile when we encountered a bit of a traffic jam, by throttling him from behind and pulling out some handfuls of his hair. I think he could have taken the throttling but it was the hair-pulling that convinced him, as he really doesn’t have any surplus to spare.

At the hospital, she fainted again. Once she had been administered to, she screamed and grabbed several doctors by the lapels of their white coats, getting dragged along the corridor since she refused to let go of them, asking them in floods of tears if there was any hope her son would pull through without major brain damage. Then she insisted they put him on a drip for 2 hours – which they did purely because she was disrupting the whole ER department and it was the only way to shut her up. Whilst this was happening, she got out some rosary beads and her husband and she prayed together, except that she couldn’t pray effectively because she was weeping so much. Eventually the hospital found a couple of strong porters to kick her whole family out.

The best part was that, a couple of weeks later, she arranged a special thanksgiving mass to honour Saint Rosalia of Palermo for rescuing her son from the jaws of death. She invited 350 of her closest relatives.

Well, last week she spotted be fetching my son home from school early. I have done that every day he’s been to school, since Christmas. I leave him there and then, sooner or later, the school phones me saying he has vomited, and will I come and get him please? So what did Mrs. Sterile say?

“Oh there’s nothing wrong with him! Look at how big and tall he is. He’s just fooled you into believing he’s ill, because he doesn’t want to go to school.”

His history teacher said roughly the same thing two weeks ago. She thinks he’s mastered the art of hurling at will, just so he can go home early when he’s bored with lessons.

No doubt my seven-year-old ordered himself some of this online…

Should I show them all the results measuring the high level of Lyme bacteria in his blood? Should I show them the blood test results which demonstrate his immunodeficiency? Yes, Lyme disease damages your immune system. Or should I just run them over next time I get the chance? I know I should be grown up about it and take no notice of them, but take it from me, there’s only so much patience any individual can muster.

Another neighbour even topped this. I had confided in her that I was terrified for my son’s future. He was three years old back then, and had just been diagnosed with autism. We didn’t know he had Lyme disease back then. Lyme disease enters into your brain, and whilst it has horrible effects upon adults, the damage it does to children’s developing brains is particularly devastating. The doctors had told me he was mentally retarded, and may never learn to talk at all.

“Oh, I know just how you feel,” said my neighbour. She then went on to tell me about when her daughter had a “lazy eye”, and had to do eye exercises for a year to correct it.

“It was awful. They told me she might have to wear glasses for the rest of her life,” my devastated neighbour concluded.

“That must have been terrible for you I said,” pushing my spectacles back up my nose. “You must be such a strong person to have got through it.”

If your child or pet suffers from squinting, you can order vision-correcting glasses for them online or in all good joke shops.

Anyway, I’m signing off now as I have to go down to the hardware store and take a really good look at the screwdriver display.

Stop Giving Children Homework NOW!

This is not something I am writing on a whim.

Fair enough, yesterday I went through the trauma of supervising my seven-year-old son while he did his Italian Grammar homework. This was not only traumatic because I didn’t know the right answers. It was also traumatic because he was tired, bored, and doing all he could to get me to play with him, and genuinely distressed that I refused.

Once he’s done his day’s work at school, he wants to use his imagination. He wants me to tell him what clouds are made of, where more oxygen comes from since humans keep using it up, and why grown-ups have hairy armpits. (If anyone knows the answer to that last one, please submit your anwer below: my son is waiting.)

He also wants time to invent stories and tell them to me. He wants to use his soft toys and action figures to act out tales about making friends with people, about people being mean and how to deal with that, and about what it would really be like if we all turned into bacteria and lived inside somebody’s intestine.

He also wants time to be downright silly, for us to tickle each other till we can hardly breathe, to make ridiculous jokes and talk in silly voices, to have cushion fights. He wants to jump up and down on his bed, when I am in the other room, and he thinks I cannot hear the hideous twanging sound of semi-rusted bedsprings being stretched to hell and back so that his bum nearly touches the floor when he goes to sleep at night. Above all, he wants to hang out with his friends, running around among the trees pretending to be aliens and robots and superheroes, or playing football with some squidgy oranges they found lying about.

Yet, the government has decided that, instead, he should spend his afternoons the same way he spends his mornings: doing maths and grammar exercises, perfecting his twiddly Italianate handwriting that he’ll never use because we all write with computers when we grow up, and working on elaborating his nervous tic over the whole wretched thing.

Here’s a sample of my son’s handwriting homework. On average, it takes him seven hours of threats, two packs of encouraging frooty sweets, and nine outbursts of tears and snot to complete a page of this.

Although I’ve already made it clear that my son is being deprived of the time he needs to grow up in varied ways, there is an even more important reason why I am against homework for primary school children. Let me tell you about my father.

His parents were teenagers when he was born, and they were both semi-illiterate. His father started work as a coal miner full time at the age of fourteen and his mother seemed to spend her life doing laundry and making pastry. When Grandpa read things, he would run his finger under the writing and mouth the words out under his breath, generally looking very perplexed. I remember getting birthday cards from them each year, written in a strange jumble of capital and lower case letters and all spelled wrongly.

Well, my father was a dental surgeon. He had the largest vocabulary of almost anyone I have ever known. There was almost nothing he didn’t know in the field of all the sciences, and world history, and geography. He was such a voracious reader that our house looked a bit like the public library. Primary school children were taught everything at school by the teacher when he was a child, and sent home when the day’s learning was done. Do you think my Dad would have ended up achieving what he did, if he had depended on his parents as his teachers for half of what he learned at primary school?

Please don’t get me wrong. I am fully in support of homework at secondary school. By the time people are in their teens they should be able to study independently, manage their time and workload, and be self-motivating.

What I am against is giving homework to primary school children. There is no such thing as a primary school child who can study without adult help. Giving homework to little kids simply means teachers are abrogating part of their teaching job to the parents.

For the children with educated parents, with a stay-at-home mother, that’s fine. No doubt this private tuition works out great for those children whose mother books them piano tuition when they’re five and fills their toybox with those real wood, aesthetically pleasing hand carved crashingly boring toys from The Early Learning Centre. It may be fantastic for the kids whose mothers bought giant earphones to play Mozart to their uterus while they were pregnant, thus optimising the development of their foetus’s mathematical capabilities during gestation. For kids from families like my Dad’s – why shouldn’t they get the same chances? Don’t they deserve the same start in life as everyone else? How many really clever children are going to waste?

We’ve gone back to the old days, when people were born into a certain socio-economic class, and could never rise out of it.

I get a lot of correspondence from my old university, which comes under criticism for the fact that very few of its students are from state schools, from working class families, and from poor neighbourhoods. Somehow, talking heads in the government think it is the university’s job to fix this. Instead, may I humbly suggest that we go back the primary schools? That’s where the problem is being caused.

Do you agree with me about this? I’d really like to know what you’d think.

Sicilian Women Are Scrubbers

Honestly. They spend more time scrubbing, washing and generally sanitising things than they do in any other activity, save possibly ironing.

This year, I am joining in the spirit of things by spring cleaning early. I didn’t want to, but my Mother-in-law made me. I admit the place has become a little grimy but, frankly, I thought the fact we no longer have running water was a more than adequate excuse. In fact I don’t even know how one cleans a house without using water. But my Mother-in-law does! Of course she does. She’s Sicilian.

The Godmother brought a small selection of her own scrubbing brushes, in case my own hoard was inaequate

Well, I am far too busy dry-cleaning my home to write a blog post this week. I think the best way to keep you in the picture is by re-posting my report on My first ever spring-cleaning activities directed by my Mother-in-law.

So, here it is.

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My mother-in-law is a fairly typical Sicilian woman of the older generation. She has a big nose, big hands and a big bottom. When her mansize hands are not busy flaying and massacring vegetables or scrubbing household objects to the brink of oblivion, they fiddle with rosary beads. She goes to church twice on Sundays and is godmother to seven children. The Godmother. She likes to feed children portions of food which weigh more than they do, indoctrinate them in the ways of the Lord and scrub their faces by a method plastic surgeons call ‘dermabrasion. You would not want to be naughty in her presence. Her hands could probably spank even a decent-sized adult man into low-earth orbit.

When I worked in a bank in London, I thought that being able to sew would stand me in good stead when I became a housewife. I thought it meant I had potential. Then I met The Godmother, who is the very walking definition of uxoriousness in flesh and blood, and I realised how much more difficult it was all going to be than I had ever imagined.

For example, I had always thought – foolishly, as it now turns out – that there were certain objects in this world which it is simply never necessary to clean. Ever.

The pavement, for example, was something I had never once looked at in my life and thought, ‘Well now, I think I’ll give that a good scrub.’ Yet, apparently, to be a decent housewife, a decent Sicilian one at any rate, it is essential to wash the pavement outside one’s house quite regularly, on one’s hands and knees, using a scrubbing brush that could flay an elephant and the kind of cleaning products that you probably need a special license to purchase in England.

Similarly, I had never once been tempted to lather up a set of iron railings and then rinse them down, dry them and buff them up with a soft cloth. I just figured that the rain took care of removing clumps of dirt… slattern that I was!

Another item I imagined could be left unwashed throughout its whole existence was my wardrobe. I had spent years in England squirting it with Mr. Sheen and giving it a quick buff-up with a cloth to get the visible deposits of dust off it. Once I moved to Sicily, however, I was made to realise I had been leaving it to accumulate filth and that the only way a respectable housewife would treat such an item of furniture would be to wash it thoroughly with ammonia and water and then dry it with a series of special cloths, first a cotton one and then a woollen one and then one in microfibre.

One day, The Godmother came round to my house when I had just swept and mopped all the floors. She was wearing her black skirt and black blouse, which is what Sicilian housewives put on when they really mean business. She gave me a pitying, or perhaps critical, look and said,

“Oh, you poor thing! You must be so worn out with all this unpacking and organising that you haven’t had time to clean the floor.”

“Erm, yes,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her nose already in the cleaning products cupboard she had given me as a house warming present. “I’ll take care of it.”

She extracted a thing which looked like a broom with no bristles and then wrapped it in a cloth which she dipped in something that smelled pungent enough to make my nose run, and proceeded to rub it all over the floor with so much verve I thought she might actually erode the glaze off the tiles. “That’s just given it a quick removal of the main dirt,” she said, as she got on her knees and proceeded to pull the plinth away from the fitted cupboards under and around the kitchen sink.

She put the steel strips on the balcony and then proceeded to remove the entire underside of the island unit as well. Not satisfied with this, she then prised all the knobs off the hob, did something that looked downright painful to remove the oven door and then turned the extractor fan over the cooker into no less than eighteen separate, yet almost identical-looking, pieces of plastic grille.

Whilst I was profoundly shocked to see her calmly pull my kitchen to pieces, I was also flabbergasted that she was actually able to. For my whole life, up to that point, I had believed you needed men with exposed bum cleavages to do that type of thing.

While I was still searching for appropriate words, she filled the sink with several potent products, which foamed and gave off a greenish hallucinogenic vapour, and put all the small components of my ex-kitchen in it. While I sat down to regain some breath, she filled a bucket with whatever the Mafia use to dissolve dead bodies away to nothing except a few gold fillings, and started rubbing it into the pieces of stainless steel plinth she had yanked off the cupboards. I had chosen a matt finish but she kept working away at each piece of metal until she had made it look like a mirror.

The Godmother’s shopping list

I felt exhausted simply from watching all this manual labour, but I also began to realise I was suffering some kind of acute respiratory crisis. I was wheezing loudly and my vision was clouding over as if there were some type of jelly stuck to the front of my eyeballs. Apparently my eyes were turning maroon and I sounded like a Fiat that had accidentally been filled with diesel. I was having a severe allergic reaction to The Godmother’s cleaning products.

I dashed into the bathroom and begged her to identify the pack of antihistamine I knew I had
stashed away somewhere. She rummaged about and asked how many tablets I wanted. I told her to give me all of them. As I was shovelling them into my mouth, I realised she was buffing up the mirror with a dry cloth between popping the pills out of the foil blisters. She is the kind of woman who, if one of her children got his head stuck in a saucepan, would give it a jolly good polish before taking him to the hospital. If someone broke into her house by throwing a brick through the window she would wash the brick before calling the police. If she ever drank tea she would iron the teabags before using them.

I made my way out of the house, out of the chemical inferno which had once been my kitchen, sneaked into the lemon orchard behind the house, and sat on a patch of scratchy grass under a tree. It was still swelteringly hot but at least there was some shade which protected my watering eyes from the full power of the sunlight. I would like to say, especially if any minors are reading this, that overdosing on oral antihistamines and snorting kitchen de-scaler is a stupid and dangerous thing to do.

Always read the label

I felt as if I were drifting out of my body and wafting around among the leaves of the lemon trees in the form of a curly green waft of vaporised ammonia, carbolic acid and hydrogen peroxide. I think I hallucinated the bit where the lemons were talking to me about how they liked me wiping them clean with my eyeballs. I think the bit where I slumped against the trunk of a tree and slowly keeled over through lack of oxygen may have been real. The bit where The Godmother shouted ‘Veronica, Veronica, wake up!’ was definitely right here on planet earth, and it worked.

Eventually I recoved from this experience and came to an important realisation: I may be a Sicilian housewife now, but I shall continue housewifing in a very English way. I’ll never manage to do it the way Sicilian women do. I salute them, and I give up.

So please excuse me while I step over a thick smear of ketchup on my way to the kettle, because I need a cup of tea.

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I am excited by the international nature of my blog followers. I would like to take advantage of this cosmopolitan company I am now keeping, by conducting a cultural survey.

Please remember to state your nationality when responding!

1. Do people wash the pavement outside their house in your country?

2. Do the builders have exposed bum cracks where you come from?

3. Have you ever had a hazardous/frightening/life-threatening experience with a domestic disinfection product?

A prime example of Plumber’s Bum, taken from a blog dedicated entirely to documenting the phenomenon of ill-fitting trousers on manually skilled professionals. If you want a good laugh, the blog is well worth a visit!

http://bumsandcracks.blogspot.it/

Urgent! I need some Ancient Romans to build me an Aqueduct

We have no running water to our house any more.

The reason is that some of the other people in our street haven’t paid their water bills for over eight years. So the water board cut off the water to the whole street.

One thing I’d first like to say is, thank the Lord this didn’t happen in summer because the street-wide level of B.O. could potentially have reached life-threatening ponginess.

As it is, we are eating off plastic plates most of the time. Laundry is strictly rationed. Bathing is “By popular request” only, basically decided on a scratch’n’sniff basis. We are having to apply the “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down” rule. My husband likes his S-bends dazzling white and has developed a nervous tic over this, my son is terrified he’ll get carrots and cabbages growing behind his ears (we brainwashed him) and, personally, I am losing sleep as I keep waking up from wracking nightmares about what happens to people who dare walk round Italy in public with greasy hair. I mean, I know the Fashion Police arrest them, but then what?

The Pont du Gard, Nimes, France: This was built by Italians 2,000 years ago and brought water to an entire city and surrounding farms. On its lower level it carries cars and other motorised vehicles, which the Ancient Romans who designed it could not even have imagined.

I popped into a neighbour’s house the other day and noticed that her kitchen floor, usually so clean I wouldn’t mind having open abdominal surgery on it, actually had grimy smears. Personally I’m the kind of housewife who will happily step over a squashed slice of cake on my way to the kettle. If I want a cup of tea, I never lose focus.

Women like Mrs. Sterile, however, probably need psychiatric therapy to live like this. I did notice her eyes had a wild, staring quality to them and she was repetitively wringing a bone-dry duster in her hands as if it were the neck of Mrs. Manicure across the road, one of the most persistent and shameless non-payers.

Like most Sicilian women, Mrs. Sterile regards the sudden appearance of a domestic floor blemish as an emergency. She will cancel all social engagements for the next week, put on a pinny with hideous frills round the armholes, and then get out a series of mops and scrubbing brushes in graded sizes plus several bottles of ammonia, bleach and pure hydrochloric acid (I bet you think I’m making this up, don’t you?) all of which she uses repeatedly and cyclically on the offending contaminated area until she has eroded the glaze off the floor tiles and dissolved the grouting into froth.

Not any more. Now, she just tries to wipe it off with a dry tissue, and then sanitise her hands with antibacterial gel (“No Water Required!”).

The Ancient Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, still functioning after 2,000 years. I’ve bathed in water that came along this aqueduct. Yeah, I didn’t have greasy hair when I was on holiday in Spain.

Now I’ve got all that off my chest, let me reflect for a moment. A utility company has decided to lose about 35 paying customers, because about 12 other customers who happen to live near them chose to have their nails varnished professionally every month, and to dress their fat toddlers in Versace trousers, instead of paying their water bills.

The logic of the non-paying neighbours like Mrs. Manicure is easy to understand: They decided to have free water, because they could.

The logic of the water company is something that I reckon you have to be a Sicilian, born and bred, to stand a snowflake’s chance in hell of fathoming. The main problem is, we cannot defect to another water company, because there isn’t another one. We can’t get our water reconnected by paying the bill, because we’ve already paid it.

How are we coping? Well, we already happen to have a row of water tanks in our garage with a combined capacity of 4000 litres. We also have an electric pump that pushes the water up the pipes to the rest of the house. So we get a man with a lorry called an Autobot to fill the tanks from time to time. He swears the water is clean, but it looks like pee. My son is happy when the Autobot comes because, as anyone with a little boy will know, Autobots are the friendly kind of Transformers, which are not really lorries, they’re robots in disguise. If that made no sense to you, you obviously don’t have a little boy. Don’t worry about it.

Are you wondering why we just happened to have massive water tanks connected to a motor in our garage? In Italy, they don’t have water towers, they haven’t heard of water pressure, and they don’t care. “Mains water pressure” is a phrase you can’t actually translate into Italian. What you can easily translate, though, is “burst water pipe”, “flood” and “damn.” (Yes I meant damn not dam).

Here’s how water works in Sicily. (Except for periods when it doesn’t, of course):

1. Water comes from the water purifying plant, where a small amount of the bacteria, piddle and female hormones has been filtered out, and the remainder has been disguised with enough chlorine to sting your eyes when you lean over a filled bath tub.
2. A Humungous Motor pushes it down the pipe to your street.
3. Then a Biggish Motor pushes it from the end of your street to your house, and all the way into a big tank inside your house.
4. It sits there stagnating for half the week. When you turn the taps on, a Diddy Motor sucks some water out of the tanks, then pushes it up the pipes and feebly into your tap, bath or domestic appliance. It comes out smelling a bit like the water from a fish tank. Oh, did I mention you can’t drink the tap water in Italy?

All this means that, if you have a little boy who always wants to do a poo when there’s a power cut (I think he finds the candle light relaxing), you cannot flush the damn thing away till the electric power comes back on, because, without electricity, the water doesn’t come out of the taps.

When I reflect on anything to do with water in Italy, I want to cry out

“Oh! How the mighty have fallen!”

Italians are the descendants of the folks who invented aqueducts. The Romans built aqueducts and underground water pipes that supplied constant running water – fresh mineral water, no less – to 200 cities in Europe, two millennia ago. Their hydraulic constructions still supply some European towns with water.

The Trevi Fountain, Rome. The water in this fountain comes entirely via an ancient Roman aqueduct, no electrical motors required. I wonder if it’s allowed to shampoo or wash behind one’s ears in it…

Those Ancient Romans had running water, indoor plumbing and city-wide sewage systems. The aqueducts they built all over Europe carried fresh water across hundreds of miles, using nothing but gravity as a source of power. They bored underground tunnels as water mains through mountains and out the other side. Each citizen of Rome had 1,000 litres of drinkable water a day. That’s more than most people in the world get even now. If I’d lived here in Sicily 2,000 years ago, I certainly wouldn’t have had greasy hair, ever.

The thing that makes my current drought-like situation doubly painful for me is that the Italian word for water works, meaning the water supply company, is acquedotto. This is the very same word they use for those magnificent aqueducts the Ancient Romans built. It’s sacriledge.

Oh! How the mighty have fallen!

When the water reached Rome it was stored in huge cisterns on the highest ground, so it would reach private houses at high pressure though the force of its own weight. The Romans knew their water system prevented the spread of disease, stopped epidemics developing and saved thousands of lives. Maintenance of the entire water system was entrusted to the Curator Aquarum and if he messed up, he was subject to the death penalty. I really would like to reinstate this original system. Sicily needs it.