Oh, to be a piece of Sicilian pottery

Giorgio Morandi. Bottiglie e Fruttiera. oil on canvas, 1916. collezzione Gianni Mattioli

Many blocks away from the piazza del Duomo,

which severs the industrious vein of Via Etnea, Catania’s most commercial street,

and farther away still from the infamous Fecarotta Brothers shop window,

which occupies one of Via Etnea’s prominent intersections,

I observe the morning overture of Via Umberto from my kitchen balcony.

As the waking hours dissipate and the coolness of dawn

is replaced by midday’s gleaming orange orb of light,

the streets of Via Umberto smolder into being.

Quotidian splendors unfurl beneath my eyes.

Across the street, bitter old men dressed in suits of heavy tweed line the stoops of the bus stop,

poised to resume querulous conversations with the occasional spurt of wind.

Helmeted riders stream by in their motorinos,

unleashing an acrid gurgle of petrol into the sultry morning breezes.

At the Vezzosi soda kiosk a cigarette dangles precariously from the slackened lips

of a man slicing oranges and lemons under a faded parasol.

The smoke disperses into the air.

His work finished, the apathetic attendant exits the scene,

leaving the cutting board populated with fruit.

The prospect of life, the very decision to take to the street, it seems,
is commandeered by the dizzying fragrance of lemons.

As I stir a plump yellow wedge in my black tea
the perfume of citrus splashes the walls of the kitchen parlor,
curling into the atmosphere and coloring it the same tawny serpentine
as the painted fractals that cluster on my signora’s ceramic bowls from Caltagirone.

-- from the Catania notebooks, circa March 2008

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In absentia: Apologies, the Church of Sant Apollonaire, and more musings on the mosaics of Ravenna

Astral light at the mausoleum of Galla Placidia

Ikonoklasm, via Sant'Apollinaire

"What is the force that sees the single parts, or which distinguishes the facts it knows? What is the force that gathers up the parts it has distinguished, that takes its course in order due, now rises to mingle with the things on high, and now sinks down among the things below, and then to itself brings back itself, and, so examining, refutes the false with truth? This is a cause of greater power, of more effective force by far than that which only receives the impressions of material bodies.

Yet does the passive reception come first, rousing and stirring all the strength of the mind in the living body When the eyes are smitten with a light, or the ears are struck with a voice's sound, then is the spirit's energy aroused, and, thus moved, calls upon like forms, such as it holds within itself, fits them to signs without and mingles the forms of its imagination with those which it has stored within....

--Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

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