South East Sicily

Apart from a post about the Ile de Ré last summer, this blog doesn’t attempt tourism or travel. However there was some interest in that one, so here’s another, this time about South East Sicily. There is so much information readily available about Sicily that I can’t add much here that’s going to be helpful. I was intrigued to discover that the regions of Sicily and South West England are similar in size and population (25,711km2 and 5,043,000 population/ 23,828km2 and 5,289,000, respectively), if not much else, including the absence here of active volcanoes, thankfully. 

The history of Sicily is long and complex, stretching back to antiquity and its colonisation by the Greeks around 750BC. The theatre at Siracusa (below, top) and the temples at Agrigento (below, lower) are Greek in origin:

The statue in front of the Temple of Concordia is Igor Miteraj’s
Ikaro Caduto (Fallen Icarus), 2011

but were altered by the Romans who added Sicily to their republic after 242BC. The Casale Roman villa near Piazza Armerina still contains the “finest mosaics in situ anywhere in the Roman world” (UNESCO) from around 400AD:

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Sicily frequently changed hands, and during the early Middle Ages it was ruled in turn by the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. More than one of these occupying influences can become apparent in the same building. For example, the side of the Duomo (below left) in Ortigia (now part of Siracusa) reveals Doric columns from the Greek temple of Athena and its later use as a mosque:

However, the most significant influence on the architecture of South East Sicily was the powerful earthquake of 1693. At that time Sicily was under Spanish rule but power and resources were controlled by the Sicilian aristocracy and the church. Numerous buildings across the region, including churches and the town houses of the nobility, were reconstructed in the fashionable late Baroque style – eg the front elevation of the Ortigia Duomo (above right).

Probably the largest concentration of Sicilian Baroque is at Noto (Cathedral, above, top) and it can be found in in Scicli (interior of Chiesa di Santa Teresa, above, lower) and elsewhere. The exuberance of Sicilian Baroque makes its English contemporaries (eg the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich and Chatsworth) seem constrained. Nonetheless, the major academic work on Sicilian Baroque is in English published in 1968 and written by Anthony Blunt (last mentioned here in quite another context). The book’s cover shows the Cathedral of San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla, a difficult building to photograph because of its railings and the palm trees nearby (below):

In 2002, Ragusa, Noto, Scicli and five other towns in SW Sicily were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as "representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe" and grouped as the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. The Valle dei Templi at Agregento, Villa Romana del Casale and Siracusa/Ortigia also appear on their list, as well as Mount Etna. The restoration of the historic sites has been financed by the EU funding for projects in Sicily, €8.5 billion from 2000 to 2007, with an exceptional degree of success. As La Stampa tartly observed:

Needless to say, the money was not used to lay a single brick of such great works – waterfronts, motorways, marinas – as those that have face-lifted countries like Spain and Portugal. With the notable exception of the island’s museums and historical monuments, which have in fact been renovated.

And there is much still requiring attention, eg the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Ragusa, below, left. Restoration of a different kind is that of Caravaggio’s The Burial of St Lucy (below, right), painted in 1608 and currently on display in Chiesa Santa Lucia alla Badia in the Piazza Duomo in Ortigia.

Visitors to Siracusa can hardly fail to notice a large modern conical building rising above the otherwise rectangular townscape (eg in the view of the Greek theatre above). This is the Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime (Shrine of Our Lady of Tears), celebrating a local miracle of 1953. The event and the religious significance of the Shrine are discussed on its website. It intrigued me as a large and anomalous piece of 20th century architecture, and there seems to be little about it in guidebooks.

Although the Shrine was completed as recently as 1996, it was designed in 1957 and construction took nearly 30 years. The architects, Michel Andrault and Pierre Parat, were French and their agency, ANPAR, was active from 1957 to 1995. Their last works seem to have been in a rather different style from the Shrine - some of the towers at La Défense in Paris. In February 2014, Jonathan Meades made two programmes for BBC4, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, in which he made the case for for 20th-century concrete Brutalist architecture, “tracing its precursors to the once-hated Victorian edifices described as Modern Gothic and before that to the unapologetic baroque visions created by John Vanbrugh, as well as the martial architecture of World War II”. I suspect that the Shrine is more Expressionist than Brutalist but there is certainly evidence of béton brut (the imprint of the wooden formwork into which concrete is poured), a technique pioneered in France by Auguste Perret, who for a time, was Le Corbusier’s employer. The architectural interpretations of the Shrine seem to include a lighthouse, a tent, tears and “the elevation of humanity towards God”. I couldn’t help noticing that from the south of the Shrine on a clear day the shape of Etna is unmistakeable, although 80km to the north.


Trying to be helpful: the weather in late March seems similar to that in southern England on a good day in late May, sunny, but not hot or rainy, almost ideal for sightseeing, although continuous sunshine is not guaranteed. In full summer and when crowded, visiting, for example, the Roman Villa (essentially sheds with walkways to look down on the magnificent floors) could be trying. The state of the roads and the topography means that journeys in Sicily seem to take longer than maps might suggest and could be expected to take even longer in summer traffic. But, as Martin Amis attributes to his father: “Italy, nice people, nice food”. Buona fortuna!

Bill Condon's ‘The Fifth Estate’

Being no admirer of Julian Assange, I didn't rush to see Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate when it first came out but recently took the opportunity to do so at the Barn Cinema at Dartington. The film is a docudrama about the emergence of WikiLeaks from the time of Assange's partnering with the German IT expert Daniel Berg in 2007 up to the release of classified US information sourced from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and their association ending. Assange's seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 forms a postscript.

The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale. No location seemed to be used more than twice, usually once, and the numerous sets ranged from Berlin squats to Air Force One (or maybe Two or Three), the action not staying in any of them for long. Benedict Cumberbatch turned in a convincing Assange, and, although the film is a male-dominated nerd and journo fest, it provided a couple of strong supporting roles for Alicia Vikander (Queen Caroline in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair) as Berg’s long-suffering girlfriend and Laura Linney as a senior level State Department staffer having to pick up the pieces after the Manning disclosures. Peter Capaldi, who is irrevocably the foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It for UK TV audiences (the ones who will see this film anyway) until he becomes Dr Who, is cast as Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Unfortunately, in terms of allowing comparisons to be made, the real Rusbridger has been on UK TV recently defending his paper's role in handling the material removed from NSA by Edward Snowden. Snowden and the journalist Glen Greenwald have followed the model Assange pioneered with the initial release of the Manning material by cooperating with mainstream media outlets in the form of the Washington Post (vice the New York Times), the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Snowden and Co have put material into the public domain of much higher classification than Manning was able to access. The US designation for this stuff is TS/SCI - Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information. Years ago such items might be confined to just a few documents, knowledge of whose existence, let alone accessibility, would be confined to select individuals. But now that kind of data is held on globalised IT systems and system administrators set access permissions for individual users. However, an old question arises: who administers the administrators?

When I last wrote about Snowden, on the basis of the information which had been released at that time (July), I affected what now seems too blasé a view. Earlier this month the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) took evidence from Sir Iain Lobban, Director, Government Communication Headquarters, Mr Andrew Parker, Director General, Security Service and Sir John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service. (Interestingly the second and third of these men had studied science at university level, but not the first, whose responsibilities, one imagines, are the most technological). A transcript of their uncorrected evidence is available, and the impact of the Snowden release is discussed on pages 16 to 18. Sawers mentions Snowden specifically:

… What I can tell you is that the leaks from Snowden have been very damaging. They have put our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaeda is lapping it up ... and our own security has suffered as a consequence.

Further material appearing in Der Spiegel later in the month underlines his point.

In October, one of Lobban’s predecessors, Sir David Omand, had told The Times that the Snowden leaks “eclipse[s] the Cambridge spy ring as the most catastrophic loss suffered by British intelligence”.

“You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents which is seriously, seriously damaging,” Sir David said. “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and MacLean in the 1950s.”

Omand chose two names from what are often referred to as the Cambridge Five and didn’t mention Kim Philby, although it was these three who finished up as Russian house guests. Whether there was a Fifth Man, and who he was, has been the subject of speculation, the most-fingered suspect being John Cairncross. If so, he was in some ways the most Snowden-like having worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. But in those days, although primitive computers were in use they certainly weren’t networked, and the only media he could remove was paperwork taken from only one “compartment”, in the form of one of the famous Bletchley Huts.

And who was the Fourth Man? Sir Anthony Blunt made his confession in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, though the truth (or some of it) would emerge in public in 1979. The Security Service interrogated Blunt because in 1963 an American, Michael Whitney Straight, had told the FBI that he had been a recruiter for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight was the son of Willard Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Willard died in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War 1. Dorothy remarried and with her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, came to SW England and in 1925 purchased Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) where Michael Straight would finish his schooling. Which means this post ends geographically back where it started.


UPDATE 4 DECEMBER 

“The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale.” 

But nonetheless it seems to have been the biggest cinematic turkey of 2013, according to Forbes’ Dorothy Pomerantz. The Fifth Estate has earned only $6 million at the box office globally on its $28 million budget, on top of which there will have been marketing costs of as much as $25 million. On average studios receive about 50% of the box office takings, so Dreamworks would be about $25 million down.