Happy St. Josephs Day (Father's Day in Italy)

On October 13th, 2010, Giovanni Callea posted an article in the blog Rosalio describing the immense and mostly unused open area in front of his apartment. He writes:

I see this green lung every morning from my balcony. Behind it the city unfolds, in the background you can make out the sea. Lots of cement in valleys and mountains. This morning I went for a walk with my daughter, it was just us, in a green space, immense, silent, just a few meters from one of the principal arteries of the city drowning in cement: surreal!

I met Giovanni on the way to a convention where he and Manlio were giving a talk. Flora was around 6 months old, so it must have been about a year after his post. He was there to present the Parco Uditore, that "green lung" that he described in his post. He talked about it in the car excitedly and I half listened. But I must admit that, at the time, I felt too tired, strung out, sucked dry by an infant that nursed every 20 minutes, resentful of my husband for not being able to carry some of the load, disappointed with Palermo and most of all wrapped up in too much self-pity to really listen or care. Sometimes I really am a solipsistic piece of scum. I spent most of the convention in the back rooms nursing to keep Flora quite, and never heard his presentation.

Piazza Einstein, Via Leonardo da Vinci, Via Uditore, the Viale Regione Siciliana Nord Ovest...caught up in my little life in via Lincoln where my consciousness of the city was confined by the University, the Sea and Piazza Politeama, these names meant nothing to me. That is, until we moved. Only after Manfredi Leone, the Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Palermo, and the graduate students who had formed the association Parco Uditore came to our new apartment in via Sciuti to have a pow-wow with Manlio on the plant species in their project did I remember Giovanni and his vision.

In the almost two-years that I had just been struggling with being a mother, the project had exploded.

6,500 signatures had been collected, mostly through Facebook. Both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Architecture had become involved. Professors had mobilized there students to write theses on the park, and thus a huge amount of information had been created and applied to the park's design (under Prof. Leone). The Urban Planning Commission had approved the project, the Region had provided funding, and now construction has begun and the park is scheduled to open to the public at the end of this month...in short, it worked.

I met Giovanni again for the first time since that car-ride while taking a walk through the park on a blustery February morning. We were with Professor Leone (another dedicated father who has really put his heart into this project), Peiro D'Angelo and Gerlando 'Jerry' Presti (two of the grad-students that created the Association Parco Uditore and are doing a large part of the grunt work - clearing out trash and plant matter, mapping out trees, marking pathways with flags and chalks, overseeing their construction...etc.). With it's rolling grass, gentle topography and vestiges of agriculture (prickly pears, loquat trees, olives, carob trees, and almonds in bloom) the park is already quite beautiful. The Region's 100,000 euro will add a playground, a fitness circuit, a fenced-in dog area, a bocce court along with all of the necessary pathways, benches, water-fountains, irrigation, etc. rendering it a usable open space unequaled in this city of giardini storici and direly needed in the high-density, concrete "New Palermo" (see last post).

Giovanni's daughter is about the same age as Flora. The two got to playing right away, picking dandelions, holding hands and trying to get a scooter to move on the not-yet-paved muddy pathways. I admire Giovanni so much. At the end of his fateful post he writes:

I'm tired of complaining about what others don't do!If there is anyone that wants to invest themselves in a project that won't repay anything other than the sensation of being a free man in a city that simply aspires to normalcy, knock once. And lets search together to understand how it can be done.

Happy St. Joseph's Day, Giovanni and Manfredi. You did it. You gave your daughters a park, when its a triumph for any parent of a toddler to just get dinner on the table.

New Year, New Palermo

A 1960's Postcard of Via Sciuti

I moved in with my now-partner and father-of-my-child 5 years ago this Valentine's day, sealing my fate as an "Americana a Palermo." While with each passing new year along with the usual meditations and resolutions I think about my place here in this strange metamorphic city, this year is especially poignant because we have, rather violently, moved out of our love-nest to the "other" Palermo outside the historic center.

Via Sciuti is the realm of the bourgeoisie, who, according to Roberto Alajmo, noted local journalist, historian and the writer of Palermo è un Cipolla, abandoned Palermo's center in the 50's because they wished for rolling shutters instead of blinds. All I had known about this side of Palermo was that it was where the so-called "sack of Palermo" took place in the 50's. If you look at Wikipedia's (if not reliable for its factual accuracy, a perfect gauge of what is widely believed to be true) explanation of the event, it is decidedly negative:

Between 1951 and 1961 the population of Palermo had risen by 100,000, caused by a rapid urbanisation of Sicily after World War II as land reform and mechanisation of agriculture created a massive peasant exodus and rural landlords moved their investment into urban real estate. This led to an unregulated and undercapitalised construction boom from the 1950s through the mid 1980s that was characterised by an aggressive involvement of mafiosi in real estate speculation and construction. The years 1957 to 1963 were the high point in private construction, followed in the 1970s and 1980s by a greater emphasis on public works. From a citizenry of 503,000 in 1951, Palermo grew to 709,000 in 1981, an increase of 41 percent.

More serious than the wartime destruction of the old city was the political decision to turn away from its restoration in favour of building a “new Palermo”, at first concentrated at the northern end, beyond the Art Nouveau neighbourhood of 19th century expansion. Subsequently in other zones to the west and the south spreading over, and obliterating, the Conca d'Oro orchards, villas, and hamlets, accelerating the cementification of what formerly was green.

Real estate developers ran wild, pushing the centre of the city out along Viale della Liberta toward the new airport at Punta Raisi. With hastily drafted zoning variances or in wanton violation of the law, builders tore down countless Art Deco palaces and asphalted many of the city's finest parks, transforming one of the most beautiful cities in Europe into a thick, unsightly forest of cement condominia. One of the most important buildings of the great Sicilian architect, Enesto Basile, was razed to the ground in the middle of the night, hours before it would have come under protection of the historic preservation laws.

In fact, there is a distinct divide between the two sides of town, with each one turning up there nose at the other. Some of our more "alternative" friends were shocked and dismayed to here of our move, and took it as a sign of moral corruption. According to them, this side of Palermo is populated by icy-hearted consumerists that prefer drab concrete condos to history in the form of the 18th and 19th century villas that were torn down, people that would turn and look away if you were hurt or even if you asked for the time. But really, I feel like more people smile and wave to me here while I was routinely the victim of catcalls, scams, and shoving pedestrians in the city center. I guess "friendliness" is really a difference of opinion.

The prejudice goes both ways, however. My partner was nearly dispossessed by his family when he moved to the "wrong side of the tracks" and they took it as a given that if he had not already started shooting heroin or joined a gypsy band, he would soon.

Although the historic center is beautiful in a spectral way, with its ornate baroque palaces still showing blast holes and blackened facades from World War II, nobody can deny that life here is more comfortable and convenient. This is a part of the city built at the height of the automobile, as my husband said, built to glorify it. The streets are wide, with ample parking spaces and appropriate space is given to cars and pedestrians alike. Viale Lazio is always backed up with an unreasonable traffic, even in mid-siesta when all other streets are barren. And the one-way streets are maddening. To go and pick up Flora in the car we need to literally drive a spiral, zeroing in on the nursery-school as if we were creeping up on a prey.

But, coming from Los Angeles, I am quite used to this kind of madness, as long as the space it is played out in is dilated. I wonder if this is another one of the reasons why I find myself quite at home here...the 50's architecture, Mediterranean climate and rampant traffic all remind me of my birthplace. This piece of via Sciuti could really be a segment of Colorado Blvd. I swore that I would never live in Los Angeles again or any other city that reminded me of it but everybody knows that even the most rampant atheist will suddenly return to the church (if they were raised religious) once they have children. Something happens to us when we reproduce, we transform into our parents.