Travel and nature books, these days, are often characterized by fanatics and authoritarians. Fire on the mountainHelena Attlee’s well-researched account of the Etna region is refreshingly different. This is travel writing of the classic silent type.
There is no human ambition, no environmental or anti-colonial agenda. Attlee, who has written several books about Italy, is curious about Sicily’s snow-capped volcano – about 3,400 meters high, according to the craters – so he decides to “stay a while” to find out more. He rents a house from other monks, finding a fence covered by a “pelt” of black volcanic mud from last year, and the interior walls covered with pictures of Mary and Jesus – more, in the dining room, the Last Supper in 3D, “that there was the certainty that there was an apostle who looked at me every time I entered the room”.
At first Attlee finds it hard to like his subject. When he arrives at the “hooligan” place of frozen mud, he feels “like a visitor to the scene of a terrible accident”. Glassy shards of ejecta keep getting lodged in his boots. He finds Etna “too big, too dark, too black, and above all, too fierce”.
But the mountain enters his heart. He learns to call Etna “she”. This is not a smile. Sicilians call it a volcano the lady, mother or mother is greatalthough she’s the “grand mother who might take care of you for years and then suddenly dole out some cruel form of punishment” type. An important attitude is respect.
Over time Attlee gets used to looking up at the top “like you would look at a clock on the kitchen wall”. When he ends up having an eruption, you feel a sense of intimacy. As the small lapilli – stones – explode like fireworks in the dark accompanied by “small explosions that were as common as the breathing of Etna”.
What makes a book is history. The volcano has killed an astonishing number of people – a total of 77 in recorded history, including 60 in 1843 when lava reached a stream and erupted. However, there was an eruption. The big one in 1669 made tens of thousands homeless. The region’s largest city, Catania, was saved from the lava only by city walls and men with pickaxes dressed in water-soaked animal skins. The 1991 eruption caused lava to flow for more than a year near the edge of the town of Zafferana Etnea. It too was rescued – this time by one man with a Fiat digger, working at an altitude of 2,000m in the middle of the volcano.
Attlee tells great stories, including snow peopleor “snowmen”, who, before the arrival of refrigeration, harvested snow until the first decades of the 20th century, cutting it into 60kg blocks that they wrapped in straw and protected before sending them by ship. Still unknown is the history of the 50,000 acre Duchy of Bronte estate on the west side of the volcano. It was given to Horatio Nelson by Ferdinand IV of Naples as thanks for rescuing him from Jacobin rebels – Nelson’s men were then forced to surrender before brutally handing themselves over to be executed. This property was run by the Nelson family “as they would have run a banana farm in Rhodesia”, according to an Italian newspaper. The British flag flew on the towers and armed guards protected the residents from the local population whenever they left the fort.
It is food writing, however, that brings you closer to Sicily. Attlee eats – and this is not a complete list – chestnut-blossom honey (smoke), donkey’s milk (the next best thing to breast, apparently), large prickly pears (known as cynicsor criminals), lemon granita (the death of the Arab sherbet drink, which was once owned by Sicily), croissant made of pistachio (“a lot of it will be visible in my hands”) and disturbing sponge-shaped breast-shaped cakes, filled with cherry on its cake, removed from the top of the cherry. hot pincers).
Visiting the shepherd, he eats zabbina – fresh ricotta, warm from the pot. He finds it “sloppy, warm and sheepish”. When he visits a traditional pistachio farm, the farmer cleverly opens the nut for him with his teeth “and it was moist like something new born from a dry place” with a taste “pale and fresh as if eating the essence of the tree”.
This is a fun but honest article. Only a chapter on Sicilian wine can take things too far. Tasting one wine Attlee was “impressed by the intense complexity which reminded me of the light shining on the sea below”. But that’s wine writing for you. That’s Sicily for you, I suspect.
Attlee is too smart to screw up but that’s what he doesn’t say dating comes into. He suddenly admits at one point that the Etna area can become “a hell hole of broken roads, abandoned buildings, and the flight of an airplane that infects the cities and the countryside like death” and he realizes that the waste industry is controlled by the mafia. But this is almost the only place where there is talk of organized crime or environmental destruction. At one point he notices that the men picking the pistachio are Sicilian and Romanian. But that’s the only time the migrant raises his head. However, Sicily has long been, and remains, a controversial and controversial place for migrants. When Attlee points out that Etna is known for its contrasts – white butterflies against black basalt and so on – you feel no deep tension.
This is an account of staying in the sun, but it’s more than just another “my Italian holiday” book. It is full of curiosity, personality and, above all, what wine people call terroir. You can taste the lemon granita and smell the sulfur. You can feel the tephra in your boots.
Fire on the Mountain: Sicily, Etna and Her People by Helena Attlee (Special Books £25 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Standard UK P&P on orders over £25. Special pricing is available for Times+ members
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