The Illicit Exorcist and the Lamb of God
Baroque Moments in Palermo: Part II of V

The morning of our first full day in Palermo, we ran the gauntlet through a maddening market that seemed more like an African suq than anything Italic. Tables, stalls, counters pressed claustrophobically close in an exhilarating and mind-bogglingly tight crush of people. All around us crowded squat antique grandmothers, squalling children, grubbily sweating fishmongers and even one idiot adolescent squeezing his way through this perilous human straight of Messina on a miniscule motorino. Professor Duarte, the point man for our group, was going excitedly insane at the local color that was being rammed down his throat.

Everything was for sale. There was bizarre marine life that could have crawled out of the marginalia of a bestiary, all clammy and ghostly white with coal-black eyes like an archaic Greek gorgon. There was the usual panoply of random shopworn junk, cheap plastic-coated toys and yellowing magazines full of beautiful nineteen-thirties women in skiing gear. Excepting these odd intrusions, if you had strained the scene through a sepia-tinted lens, watched the stooped old men beneath the vast tent-like canopies suspended over the stalls, it could have been a snapshot of a century ago.

Alessandro, Conte di Cagliostro, the occult Loki of Sicily’s profane mythology, would have been familiar with such a world. Then named Giuseppe Balsamo, he was born in 1743 in a grimy alleyway in the tough Albergheria market district, a haunt of Jewish immigrants, Arabs and Turks; in fact, with his mahogany-dark skin and mish-mash dialect of Italian and Arabic he probably was just as much of an exotic mongrel as the rest of Palermo. The street, now Via Conte di Cagliostro, was nicknamed Via de Pisciata in his time because of its popularity as an open public urinal. It still stinks strongly of human waste, but so does every other back-alley in Sicily.

Cagliostro was a talented scoundrel, who, as a fifteen-year-old novice friar with the Fatebenefratelli, forged documents and theater tickets and finally got himself expelled after making bawdy jokes from the refectory pulpit. Shortly afterward, at age 20, he reinvented himself as a freelance exorcist in a borrowed black cassock and conned a local merchant, Vincenzo Marrano with an elaborate plot to find a spurious Saracen treasure, guarded by wicked djinni, naturally, and buried in Santa Rosalia’s mountain.

To propitiate the wicked Islamic demons, he concocted a superstitious ritual hash of consecrated oils and magical invocations which culminated in the sacrifice of nine live cockerels, plumed in black, white and red. Before the gorgeously bejeweled treasure could be unearthed, Marrano discovered his young demon-tamer had skipped down with his assistant, the unscrupulous Father Atanasio, and was heading in the general direction of Malta. It wasn’t the last time he would depart unexpectedly, and it wasn’t the last time he would make a name for himself mingling mysticism and chicanery in the pursuit of some unholy con.

I felt like I was sinking into his world as I roamed amid the butchers’ stalls of the market, with all its mixture of superstition and hard, hot, dusty life.

Duarte, meanwhile, was making some snapshots of his own as we gazed around. Racks of gutted lamb carcasses swung from butcher’s gibbets. No cockerels, but something just as sacrificial. Some had been cleaved clean down the middle like an obscure martyrdom, their overlapping wings of ribs ranked like the rocaille of baroque escutcheons. Others were still furred, tight and wooly as your carpet at home, a dark, bloodstained maw where their stomachs ought to have been.

Like the whole scene, pressing in on you and still somehow, inexplicably, standing at mental arm’s-length from your perception, I viewed these sacrifices on sale with an odd detachment. I saw beauty, the bounty of rippled roseate meat, marbled gorgeously with pale, glossy white fat. It was serene, unbloody carnage, an unconscious sacramental of Holy Week's coming.

Calvary was looming on the horizon, and the hour of the powers of darkness hovered uneasily amid the grimy lanes. No sacrificial chickens or sham magic would untangle humanity from the interlinked thorns of the Passion, no matter how much stolen holy oil was poured on Cagliostro’s illicit magic circle.

Come back on Sunday for The Virgin’s Crown, Part III of our series on Palermo, when Matt visits the constellation of Baroque churches that dot Palermo in all their hybrid, idiosyncratic glory, paints a watercolor one hot, dry afternoon and we continue to follow the misadventures of Cagliostro as he transforms himself from lean Sicilian street thug to a tubby Masonic messiah, wreaking occult havoc on the way.