The cemetery at Montelepre is the first thing you encounter on reaching the town as you enter along SP1 (Provincial Road number 1). The drive from Palermo takes about 40 minutes, first through the suburbs, then up along vertiginous mountain roads, and then over the peaks to the other side where lies the town. Once you leave Palermo there is no traffic at all, so you can concentrate on the hairpin bends without someone hooting their horn behind you. The mountain scenery is dramatic, but hardly beautiful, as the mountains are high and barren, and of the few trees many have been blackened by fire. Along the road are piles of rubbish, all in plastic sacks. You enter Montelepre feeling dispirited, having witnessed two man-made and utterly avoidable natural disasters: forest fires and fly tipping.
The cemetery is one of those which is like a little town, with avenues of mortuary chapels, all bearing the family name, all well cared for. The bigger ones belong to religious confraternities. I noted a confraternity dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and another to the Blessed Sacrament. These mortuary clubs still play a large part in Italian village life, it seems.
Others are family chapels. The first thing one notices is that there are very few surnames in this community: lots of people called Candela, De Noto, Pisciotta and Giuliano. According to Italian Wikipedia, the town had 6,421 inhabitants back in 2011, which means it is quite small, and the preponderance of just a few names might well signify a degree of clannishness. Italian Wikipedia also notes that at several junctures the town has been governed by an extraordinary commission, meaning that local democracy was suspended because of the commune coming under Mafia influence.
I found Salvatore Giuliano’s mortuary chapel without much difficulty: it lies on the main avenue of the cemetery; three doors down, so to speak, in the tomb of his cousin Gaspare Pisciotta, the man who supposedly betrayed him. The cemetery has a custode who kindly opened the Giuliano mausoleum for me, so I could get a closer look, and took my photograph next to the sarcophagus. It seems there are many visitors from all over the world (not locals, he noted) who come to see Giuliano, and they all want their photograph taken.
All the Giuliano relatives are there, including the fallen hero’s mother and sisters, and his nephew who was a priest, who lies just above him. Visitors have brought various holy pictures and objects and placed them on the sarcophagus.
The cemetery is beautifully kept, and the notices exhorting citizens to look after it have clearly been heeded.
Down in the town, the custode advised me, was the Castello di Giuliano, Guiliano’s castle, the property of his nephew, which is a hotel, and which he told me I would be unable to miss. So it proved.
Nearby was the house where Giuliano lived before becoming a bandit, which has been preserved. Usually one can visit, but this day being a Monday, it was not possible.
The house has a plaque, put up by Marianna, his sister. The plaque says nothing controversial, but only this: ‘Forty years after the death of Salvatore Giuliano, this house, mute witness of his birth and pieces of the history of Sicily, by the will of his sister Marianna, is conserved exactly as it was. The nephew put this up. 5th July 1990.’ The house is a fairly simple one, but for the standards of the time, it was quite decent, which shows that Giuliano was not driven to banditry by poverty.
One ought to be grateful to the family for preserving the house, for there are few others like it in Montelepre, where everything has been knocked down and replaced with modern buildings. True, it was overcast and raining when I visited, and the streets are very narrow and dark, but I came away with the impression of an unattractive town.
I have written about Giuliano elsewhere, so I will not repeat myself too much I hope, but I am left with two causes for reflection. This first is that Giuliano died in 1950 at the age of 27. That is not so very long ago, thought there can be few people who knew him well still alive. But Giuliano is now not a real person but a legend, a figure of romance. There was a real Giuliano, but that real person is perhaps forever lost and obscured behind the legend that has arisen bearing his name. Guiliano is like King Arthur, Hereward the Wake and Robin Hood; but whereas our English romantic heroes date from a very long time ago, Giuliano is from the recent past. Why is it that the Sicilians are still creating legends when other people gave this up a long time ago? Part of the answer lies in the substance of the Giuliano legend: he was a man who took up arms against the state. Now, why does that resonate in contemporary Sicily?
The second thing is this. There was a man called Arthurius or Aurelius or something who is the progenitor of the Arthurian legend. The Giuliano legend was started by a real person, and what a person he was! Pisciotta’s relatives are still lamenting the fact that they are being blamed for his death and ostracised. This is a legend, but one that still moves people, and in not very positive ways either.
The kindly custode explained to me that while he often has to open up the Giuliano chapel for visitors, the Pisciotta chapel is closed at the request of Gaspare’s nephews. And there is this notice outside it, explaining why.
Let me translate: ‘To whom it may concern. Today we feel obliged to explain the reason for this change, tired of living always under the infamy of history, having been subjected to social discrimination from our childhood until today, so we have decided not to allow people who come here to look at the photo of our uncle, seeing in it the face of a traitor, convinced as we are that we are doing a favour to his soul and will thus probably give him peace. Therefore, this chapel from now on is simply the tomb of an ordinary citizen. Gaspare and Salvatore Pisciotta.’
In Sicily, history is always present.
I am glad I have been to Montelepre, though the driving was not relaxing, as Giuliano is the inspiration for my books, and one of the projected novels ends in the cemetery of Montelepre. ‘Write about what you know’ has never quite done it for me, but if I am writing about a place, I like to go there. Now I have.