The Little Saint and the Great Copt

Baroque Moments in Palermo: Part I of V

Palermo, like Sicily itself, is a hybrid, lacking the stylistic purity of those great grid-irons of Baroque symmetry, Noto and Catania. Yet, there is something fixed and disagreeably enlightened about those other vast pre-planned towns, built at the command of princes and prelates in the wake of earthquakes that wiped the slate clean.

Noto was actually relocated several miles away after the disastrous 1693 earthquake; the Moorish tangle of upward-sloping streets of the residential quarter are the work, not of Arabs, but eighteenth-century Italian urbanists. Pumice-black Catania is splendid and blank with its expansive empty piazzas blistering in the noonday heat, all the life is packed into the fish market, a tight, reeking twist of lanes beneath the shadow of the Cathedral. Everywhere else, with the undulating, ironworked churches lined up one beside the other like beached leviathans of golden stone, seems like a warehouse of abandoned architectural experiments. It's too clean, too precise.

Palermo, on the other hand, is anything but embalmed; even the verdigris seems more like a crust of living barnacles than a residue of dead rust. Even the dead aren't dead there, and the baroque that rings round their lively plasterwork sepulchres still breathes freely, however dusty the air. For a saint, a saint of the God of the living, not the dead, this hardly raises eyebrows; but for a sinner, it comes as a far larger surprise to find their memory revered just as greatly. And I have a particular sinner in mind. His name adorns streets and osterias bold as brass, even two hundred years after his demise in the frigid Umbrian prison of San Leo, a world away from the teeming alleys of his birthplace.

The city's patron saint, its true holy protector, is Rosalia, a beautiful young hermitess who, in 1159, went up to live in a cave not far from the home of her father, Lord Sinibald, and then was not heard from until 1624, when she appeared in a vision to a hunter and revealed the location of her hermitage and her relics, which, carried in procession, freed the city from the dread pestilence of the Plague then at its height. She's nicknamed La Santuzza, the little saint.

There is a certain sweetness to this name that fits the technicolor holy-card piety of the cheap images of her they peddle from a desk in one aisle of the Cathedral near the canopied tombs of the Norman Kings. She is clad in rumbled brown robes of a faintly Franciscan look, her disturbingly aquiline eyes raised heavenward, pilgrim's staff at her feet. I bought one of these plaques one afternoon, and it shares distinguished company in my icon corner next to a miniscule reproduction of the Van Eyck Ghent triptych and a Fra Angelico St. Dominic in prayer.

However, the city has another hero who some, of a fanciful and roguish turn of mind, like to claim as a patron of sorts, a secular and irreligious sort of patron saint neither saintly nor particularly patronal. For he fled his hometown at age twenty the law at his back, after staging a feigned exorcism in a bizarre bid to locate a hidden Moorish horde of gold buried in Santa Rosalia's mountain. He never returned, instead spreading confusion and scams everywhere he went, from Catherine the Great's Russia to Louis XVI's France, where he succeeded in becoming the center of a spectacular cause-celebre trial which soured the already-musty air of the ancien regime.

Like his city he was more Arab than Italian, a mystagogical charlatan neither Asiatic, African nor European, but somehow all at once. He was called Giuseppe Balsamo. He was also called Joseph Pellegrini, or the Comte Fenix, a Spanish Colonel and a Freemason of the Strict Observance, a runaway novice of the Fatebenefratelli monks and a respected donat of the Knights of Malta, a Palermo slum boy and the ageless Great Copt of occult legends. He preferred to sign himself, though, with the grandiloquent-sounding moniker of Alessandro, Conte di Cagliostro, and he was probably one of the greatest rascals Europe has ever seen. He was the unthinkable, a magician in the noonday of the supposed Age of Reason, a sorcerer who breathed the same air as Voltaire.

Come back Friday for The Illicit Exorcist and the Lamb of God, Part II of our series on Palermo, in which Matt visits the teeming markets of Palermo and we hear of the young Cagliostro's tumultuous role in the affair of Vincenzo Marrano and the nine dead cockerels.