Occasionally as the bus rumbles on I notice old train lines half hidden in the dirt, overgrown, broken. Here and there disused rail viaducts are crumbling into the stony gulleys. Perched on hilltops, their houses huddled together in protective isolation, the towns here were clearly not built with railways in mind, or indeed rapid communication of any kind. Tormented by the sun, thirsty, craggy and prickling with cactuses, the landscape does not encourage movement.
Eventually we arrived at Ragusa, a spectacular town toppling over a high ridge, a sort of baroque lava stream tumbling into an arid canyon of dead grass and cactuses towards Modica, then the coast far below. I was puzzled. I knew Ragusa had a railway station connecting with Modica, but how? This territory was just too arduous. I turned to the woman behind me, still amazingly busy with her computer, despite all the bends, not to mention three hours and more of battery time. Had she ever taken the train from Ragusa to Modica? I asked.
‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘As a little girl with my parents.’ But it was too inconvenient, too slow, ran too rarely to use now.
‘And it doesn’t run on Sundays.’
‘No.’
The bus was now zigzagging fiercely again, plunging down the hillside to the plain. To our left the houses of Ragusa seemed to have been built one on top of another, so sharp was the descent.
‘Where does the line run?’ I asked. ‘I love trains. It must be quite a ride.’
She frowned as if remembering and said, ‘Yes, it’s famous. It goes under the hill in a spiral tunnel.’
I didn’t understand.
She closed her laptop; the journey was nearly over. The bus was zipping back and forth down the last hairpins in a sort of bagatelle movement. The driver must be smelling his Sunday lunch.
‘The tunnel spirals up from Modica and climbs over itself before coming out just before Ragusa. There’s a story about it, if I can remember.’
I was looking at the hillside. The rough whitish rock was so uneven and rugged, the facades so higgledy-piggledy, it seemed a miracle they had built the place at all, never mind a train tunnel spiralling up to it. In the nineteenth century.
Zipping away her computer, this busy woman in her forties was evidently someone who had escaped the provinces for a professional life in the city and was paying a visit to family on a Sunday. She gave the impression of making the trip on a regular basis, as a duty.
‘That’s it,’ she said with a smile. ‘The tunnel was dug from both ends simultaneously, from the top in Ragusa and the bottom in Modica. On the day the workers were supposed to break through and meet up, the engineer invited all the local dignitaries to see it. Except the ends didn’t meet and he was so upset he’d got his calculations wrong that he killed himself that night. That’s the story, anyway.’ She seemed puzzled herself as to whether it could be true. ‘Then the next day the tunnels did meet. People like unhappy stories around here.’
What Latin passion, I thought. What pride in expertise, what a foolish sense of personal honour to kill yourself over a mistake. Without even taking the time to check out how big the mistake was.
Another very unhappy story was recalled by the name of the square where the bus reached its terminus on the outskirts of Modica: Piazzale Falcone e Borsellino. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were two investigating magistrates killed by the Mafia in 1992, and any number of squares, streets, buildings and schools in Sicily and indeed on the Italian mainland are now named after them. The intention is to honour their extraordinary courage and dedication, but I sometimes wonder if the effect might not be to discourage others from following in their footsteps.
Unlike the train to Palermo, the bus to Modica had arrived at its destination a full half-hour early. At some risk to our lives. The driver chased us off his vehicle and roared away with his wife. The light was blinding. There was no shade, such as might be provided by the waiting room or ticket hall in even the smallest of stations. I was to be picked up here by a hotel proprietor related to a colleague of mine at the university in Milan. In the meantime, shading my eyes, I was able to gaze at a baroque church facade looking down from a commanding hilltop. All is baroque here because the older towns of Ragusa and Modica were largely destroyed in an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt in the style of the time. Waiting, I tried to throw together a few feelings about this Sicilian baroque: a confusion of the ornamental and the devotional, self-satisfied, sentimental, glorying in the pathos of Christ’s suffering but ostentatiously rich, flamboyantly affluent. Somewhere or other there was a connection between this style – the bleeding hearts, the weeping madonnas, the money – and the complacency of the person who announces, ‘The state has abandoned us, the railways have abandoned us,’ knowing full well that she is returning to a nice home and a husband waiting in a new car.
No sooner was I in my hotel room than I got online and looked for the history of that tunnel. It was completed in 1896. The engineer ‘supposedly’ killed himself, not because he feared he had got his calculations wrong but because he was convinced his Sicilian workers had not carried out his instructions to the letter; in fact, he was English. This put the whole matter in a rather different light.
‘SO, WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Professor Parks?’
That evening, after swimming and sightseeing, I was invited to dinner on a terrace out in the country. Giuseppe, my hotelier, a man my age, and his wife, Concetta, always ate on Sunday, they said, with the same group of four or five friends. It was a routine that couldn’t be broken. Would I join them? ‘So long as
