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Catania is one of those places with a very pervasive effect on all who live there. Cyclops were the first inhabitants of the area, and the province is scattered with place-names beginning with ‘Aci’, from a local shepherd whose rivalry with a Cyclop was sung by Theocritus; at Acireale, beneath Etna, craggy islets just off the coast are called I ciclopi. These legends may refer to a time when a crater of the volcano looked like some glaring eye, linked by mariners with mysterious troglodytes who lived hereabouts, the ancient Siculians. Even now there is something improbable, obsessed, about this part under Etna; slopes twist into grim shapes, houses perch on jagged residues of lava-flows, and against a prevailing colour-tone of dark grey the vegetation is all strident pinks and greens.

     In atmosphere it is far removed from the serenities of Syracuse, a few miles to the south. Yet all these shores face across to the Aegean; and some underlying harmony in contrast, a creative tension emanating from these Greek parts of Sicily has combined to produce hereabouts the island’s best minds, from Archimedes to Pirandello. The birthplaces of nearly every Sicilian writer, ancient and modern, are along the eastern coastline from Messina to Pachino, or at Agrigento and Caltanisetta; in comparison the Phoenician and Arab west has had speculative or scientific minds, an eighteenth-century dialect poet, and now the Prince of Lampedusa. But the last great period of Palermo as a Mediterranean centre of culture dates back to Frederick II, and for a hundred years or so, the literary capital of Sicily has been halfway down the east coast, at Catania. There, towards the end of the last century, appeared a small group of writers who have gone down to Italian literary history as the veristi or ‘Realists’. One, Giovanni Verga, has long been considered a genius. His lifelong friend and pupil, Federico De Roberto, is only being generally appreciated in Italy now, thirty-four years after his death. All were closely linked to their environment.

     Volcanoes, to those who live under them, are symbols of unpredictable or sinister power, and no city in Europe is closer to one than Catania. In certain lights or under rain the place has a brooding quality, its huge buildings, lava-grey chequered with grimy white, ooze as if from bombing in the last war. Here the volcano’s influence is everywhere. A few years before the great earthquake that destroyed the town in 1693, a lava-flow had submerged and reshaped whole districts, cutting off, for instance, Castell ’Ursino from the sea which had been its outlet since medieval days. Thus the architect Vaccarini had a free hand to produce his town-planning scheme on a vast scale. The briefest tour shows how masterly was his grouping. The plan hinges brilliantly on one main artery, Via Etnea, running straight through the entire city towards the volcano. This street is an epitome of Catania’s character and history. It emerges first from under the Uzeda gate, down by the old seashore where even now can be found professional story-tellers, cantastorie, declaiming tales of Roland and Excalibur. Next it passes the great steps of the cathedral, with its image of the local patron-saint, St Agata, winged and hieratic as the goddess Isis whose cult once centred here. On a fountain opposite perches the city’s symbol, an elephant in lava with an obelisk on its back. From there Via Etnea sweeps on past huge churches in ‘exasperated’ baroque with tiled domes glittering in the sun, past endlessly parading throngs (the street is Catania’s open-air club), past gardens and monuments to another presiding genius, the composer Bellini; on up to where new districts spring up almost nightly in the present east-coast boom. Over it all, so near that the Cyclops should have found it easy to fling down either lava or snow, hangs the white cone, vast, aloof, of the volcano.

     Etna is not mentioned much by local writers, perhaps because it is so much part of the texture of their minds. References to it are oblique, as to a deity which needs propitiating. In De Roberto’s novel I vicerè (‘The Vice-roys’) for instance, the slopes are merely referred to as useful boltholes from invasion or cholera. Against setting and period the chronicles of De Roberto’s Uzeda come into focus; with Etna an ever-present monster brooding over landscape, climate and architecture, this family of monsters looks less grotesque. Their name was taken from a Duque de Uceda (a town, in the province of Madrid, the Spanish ‘c’ changing into Sicilian ‘z’), Viceroy of Sicily at the end of the seventeenth century, said to be partly responsible for rebuilding Catania after the earthquake of 1693. To the inhabitants of Catania they are based on recognizable originals, accepted as part of the highly charged pattern of local life. To us they might seem provincial oddities were it not for that quality in Sicily which transforms island peculiarities into reflectons of the universal, and which may be connected with its geographical position in the centre of the Mediterranean. What more universal and corroding than the pride which recurs in variations throughout I vicerè?

     This sort of novel seldom has a hero, and the real protagonist is the Year of Unification, dies irae, 186o itself. Stresses of local nature combine here with exasperations of a period tense from social and economic changes centuries overdue. Garibaldi’s sweep that year from Marsala across the island and up through southern Italy to beyond Naples, all in a few summer months, was one of those events with an exhilarating sense of recasting the map of history. It was the fuse-point (retarded as it turned cut) of modern Sicily, politically, economically, socially, even in a way religiously. That summer Garibaldi was not only the bogey-man of the nobles, but a symbol to Sicilians who have never quite absorbed their pagan past and hailed the hero in a red shirt on a white horse as kinsman of the patroness of Palermo, Santa Rosalìa, blood-brother to the knights of the puppet-theatres, paladin in the struggle of Charlemagne and Roland against the Moors, of good against evil. There were even pictures of him wearing a crown of thorns. Surely after this apparition of the ‘Knight of Humanity’ nothing would ever be the same again (though a glimpse into the interior today might make anyone wonder what all the excitement was about). But the Campaign of the Thousand — the very name rings of some antique feat — left a mark all over the south. No disillusion has quite affected it, even when Garibaldi’s deputy stamped out a peasants’ revolt in the (British-owned) Bronte estates, and at Aspromonte two years later he himself was attacked by troops of the Italian State he had helped to create. Whether or not Garibaldi could ever have solved Sicilian problems, there is no doubt about the ‘moment-of-truth’ quality of 186o in the south; this explains why all major Sicilian writers, dramatists and composers have been obsessed with that year ever since: why Verga and Pirandello, De Roberto and now Lampedusa, wrote novels about the impact of change, the technique of accommodation, the effects of opportunism, in the Year of Unification. Vastest picture of them all in size, detail and historical scope was De Roberto’s.

     I vicerè is about the Risorgimento betrayed. Until recent years the aims and results of that movement have been blurred by official rhetoric and a process of falsification which began in the north of Italy and was partly due to the rôle of Piedmont and its dynasty. The piazzas of Italy are still cluttered with some of the less harmful results, those bewhiskered and gesticulating statues of the first King of United Italy, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. Amid the confusion of motives, idealism, dynastic aggrandisement, social aspiration, it was the south that came off worst. Seen from there the posturing and rhetoric looked suspiciously like cover for failed promises; in time this even became linked with Mussolini’s rodomontades about ‘eight million bayonets’, and the age-old distrust of rulers throughout the south spread next to ‘those in Rome’. Resulting waves of immigration from the depressed areas of Sicily and Calabria took with them the Mafia and Camorra to spread all over the Americas; and, less obvious but perhaps more damaging, the diffusion from Soho throughout the world of that most inadequate and adhesive of national images, the Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on a stick.

     A preoccupation of Manzoni when writing the first Italian novel I promessi sposi (‘The Betrothed’) had been ‘the millions whom history ignores’. In the pages of Verga we glimpse for the first time the southern worker, sober, toiling, undemonstrative, bitter sometimes at hopes deferred. Manzoni’s Lombard peasant of fifty years before had been irradiated by Providence; the Furies dog Verga’s fisherfolk at Acitrezza and peasant proprietors in the hinterland. All the Catanian so-called Veristi (‘Verismo, verismo, verità, io dico!’, exclaimed Verga) were haunted by this bitter aftermath of a Risorgimento that in Sicily during the decades after i86o looked almost a mockery. This spirit pervades I vicerè, though its protagonists were nobles and its plot the end of Sicilian feudalism (or, according to a modern historian, ‘the feudalizing of the Sicilian Risorgimento’). Its pages almost vibrate at times with an indignation about cant that must have affected most sensitive inhabitants of the island then, and has left traces today. They show in that very different book with a similar plot, Il gattopardo (‘The Leopard’); but De Roberto was nearer to the facts and less involved than the Prince of Lampedusa, not watching later the ruin of his own class on its way, but noting in detail the moves used by the old order to preserve itself at the time. On a deeper level the oriental fatalism prevalent in western Sicily scarcely touched these writers of the east, who with all their disillusion (a modern critic has even accused Verga of ‘narcissism of defeat’), always kept something of the dynamism of the Risorgimento.

     One result of the sweeping away of ancient state barriers was a sudden awareness of local cultural roots. In Sicily, with its unimaginable riches of untapped image and legend, there was no danger of artificial ‘folklore’, and a dialect breakaway was avoided by Verga’s insistence on using an Italian modified by local speech rhythms; ‘By listening, listening, one learns to write,’ he would say. Another major influence was literary theory from France, then prevalent in northern Europe. Since Attic days, Sicily has been a forcing-house for ideas from outside. The French ‘realists’ advocacy of close ‘objective’ study of physical and psychological detail, in effect usually turned into fixation on the drabber aspects of middle-class life around them; the Catanian veristi, working directly on the Sicilian themes they found around them, brought off a grafting process which made them more vital, and eventually more influential, than their French teachers.

     Verga was born at Vizzini, one of those remote places in the interior whose roofs lie like leaves around a church, and whose male inhabitants appear to spend their days in the streets, cloaked and silent, staring into space. Capuana’s birthplace, Mineo, is a primeval hill-town behind Catania. But De Roberto was only half-Sicilian by blood, and born in Naples, in 1861, over twenty years after either of his masters. His father was a Neapolitan who, on service in Catania as a regular officer in the Bourbon army during the last years of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, married the daughter of a local family, the Asmundo. Colonel De Roberto, according to family tradition, was the officer who personally consigned Naples to Garibaldi on the latter’s historic entry in Setember 186o. On the colonel’s death his only son, aged ten, was sent for education down to his mother’s family at Catania. There Federico De Roberto made his home, never to return to Naples except for an occasional visit to such family property as was there.

     The Asmundo were a vast involuted tribe, of Spanish origin as the name implies (so was Verga), ruled by an aged and autocratic grandparent, chief charity commissioner for the city. Systems of life centuries behind the times have a way of being preserved in Sicily; the Asmundo were more patriarchal than feudal, and memories of the family set-up must have been at the back of De Roberto’s mind when he started I vicerè. Not that the Asmundo, though of ancient Spanish stock, were grandees on any such scale as the book’s Uzeda. One catches a glimpse, in De Roberto’s background, of something far rarer, particularly in the south; the old professional upper middle-cum-minor-land-owing class whose standards have helped to give fibre to the south since the Renaissance; the class to which, in Naples, belonged many of the promoters of the Parthenopean Republic and later the opposition to King ‘Bomba’, and in more recent days De Sanctis, founder of Italian literary criticism, and the late Benedetto Croce. Rare on Sicily’s east coast, it is almost non-existent in the west; at Palermo, even today, such standards as there are (outside the Church, the Communists, and the followers of Danilo Dolci) have devolved, for the arts at least, on to sprigs of the nobility, who take a serious part in the Regional Government’s various ‘Assessorates’ for the encouragement of opera, music, even tourism. Catanians have always prided themselves on energy and thrust, and life there, however provincial and enclosed, has less social rigidity. Verga, for instance, in spite of his radical views, spent most of the last twenty afternoons of his life dozing away beneath the springing arches of Palazzo Càrcaci, the Nobles’ Club in Via Etnea. For De Roberto this place was merely a waste of his maestro’s time. He himself had an early ‘salon period’ (there is a glimpse in an early story of a duchess on her venitiènne in a remote darkened boudoir toying with a tortoiseshell paper-cutter over the pages of Bourget); but he kept away from most Catania society, which was far more flourishing at the time than it is now. No volumes of his inscribed to local great ladies survive, as they do of Verga, Capuana, and even of the ‘anarchist’ poet Rapisardi. Detachment from his characters’ lives gives an oddly transposable air to I vicerè, as if it might be in another medium, music or even dance, heard or seen through a door. Perhaps it was this quality that made the Prince of Lampedusa consider I vicerè as a ‘picture of the Sicilian aristocracy seen from the servants’ hall’. The introspective poetry of Il gattopardo which gives that book its effulgence was a sign of its author’s lingering involvement, while De Roberto changes key and presses almost obsessively on.

     Whatever De Roberto’s preferences in the way of company, he was anything but a recluse most of his life, and must have taken an active part in literary life in Florence and then in Milan, where he was established by the late eighties. For he followed a pattern common to Sicilians of all classes, who long to escape from their island, sometimes do, then always yearn to return. In northern Italy De Roberto had no difficulty in finding his feet as critic and literary journalist; Milan had been an intellectual centre since the first Italian Encyclopedists and the ‘Società del Café’ at the end of the eighteenth century. In the ferment of those years after the Unification it was the liveliest place in the peninsula, with writers and aspirants from all over Italy, Giacosa, the two Boitos, young D’Annunzio, young Fogazzaro, congregating in the cafés around the Scala. There De Roberto first met his fellow-townsman Verga, already an established writer and just plunging into the great creative period of his life. Capuana joined them, and it is pleasant to think that the meeting of these three Sicilians amid Lombard mists helped to bring about a renovation of Italian letters.

     Cosmopolitan though Milanese literary life may have seemed then, with its pervading influences from Zola, Flaubert and Bourget, most Italian writers of the time were as provincial in habits and interests as they often are today. De Roberto cast one of the widest nets among literati of his time; he translated Baudelaire, wrote essays on Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, and through the pages of the new Corriere della Sera of Milan (while Capuana did the same through La Nazione of Florence), became a major diffuser of French, English, German and Russian literature in the peninsula. Through forty years and in thirty volumes he ranged from psychological stories, tales of peasant life (early efforts, in imitation of Verga, though one may have been the original plot of Cavalleria Rusticana), realist studies, the earliest psychological thriller in the language, to works on art and antiquities, and a series of volumes on a hybrid science, very popular at the time and fitting somewhere between Lombroso and Havelock Ellis, ‘the psychology of love’. At times he had hardly finished a book in one style before he was busy on something totally different, and the very breadth of his interests has tended to defy docketing and to confuse his reputation. Restless, searching, diffusing throughout his life a kind of intimate disquiet, he was an example of that strange island malaise which Sicilians are apt to illude themselves preoccupies us all, la tensione siciliana.

     He began writing early, first published some scientific papers at the age of nineteen, and in spite of the tacking of his talent remained a dedicated writer all his life. A cool eye for the vagaries of human conduct and of daily reality combined with technical control to avoid literary attitudes. According to Brancati and Pirandello he was already at his best in his very first book of stories of Catana life, Processi verbali. Soon, in his first novel, Ermanno Raeli (1889), came influences from France, particularly of Bourget; this is an uneven book about a young Sicilian of half-German extraction and his troubles in integrating a double nature into Sicilian life. ‘Happiness is a chimera’ is the opening line, and one might dismiss this book as full of woozy adolescent self-pity were there not glimpses of an adult and original mind, some good talk on a local baroque painter who is still too little known, Pietro Novelli il Monrealese, and well-observed details of a Palermo winter season in the eighties, when for the locals all foreigners were English. Tension and disquiet show again, more clearly, in his second novel, L’illusione (1891), whose theme was a bold one for the period, a woman’s search for true love from one affair to another. Poor Donna Teresa may have some affiliations with that other self-destroying charmer, La Pisana of Nievo’s Confessions; but she is more obviously a victim; her provenance is from Flaubert and she is a Sicilian Bovary. L’illusione also turns out to be a crab-like approach to I vicerè, for the heroine is an Uzeda, daughter of two main characters in the later novel, the selfish charmer Don Raimondo and his hapless first wife. De Roberto’s correspondence has not yet been properly sifted and we do not know if he already had the vast novel in view when he wrote L’illusione. Or did an attempt to explain Donna Teresa in terms of heredity draw him into an ever-spreading family chronicle, hoping to find somewhere an answer to the nag of his life, the meaning of love?

     I vicerè, published in 1894, seems to have been written very fast, though it may have been partly in his head already, for its structure suggests careful planning. The manuscript, unlike the tortured pages of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, shows few erasions for a first draft. The idea of the book must have been with him ever since the time when, a youth just out of school, he had spent a period as librarian in the new civic reading-rooms, once the great library of the monastery of San Nicolò I’Arena in Catania. No one could work there now without being affected by past splendours, for the monastery, according to De Roberto’s own later computation, was the biggest in Europe except for Mafra; it now houses not only the huge municipal library, but four day schools, an art school, a gymnasium, a barracks and an observatory, the whole with its orchards and outhouses covering in its day a district of the town. In this improbable building were set some of the most fascinating scenes in the book. The vast luxurious monastery becomes a twin pivot, with the palace of the Uzeda in the town below, for pride, corruption and greed. The facts may be coloured, but there is no doubt about their accuracy. At the time of the sequestration in 1862, when church property was sold off at what turned out to have been mainly rigged auctions, the monastery drew an income from fifty-two estates, for the benefit of some fifty choir-monks and their dependants, of about the modern equivalent of £100,000, or $280,000 a year (untaxed). The Sicilian Church, until 186o, had become progressively more prosperous ever since the allocation to it by the Norman Kings of a third of the island’s land and many privileges. Both at San Nicolò and at their other great house, Monreale outside Palermo, the Benedictines in Sicily had become powerful and lax. Though their Order’s ancient tradition of distinction in science and letters was still very important to island life, and their vast rentals were so extensively used for the relief of the needy that no one has yet filled the gap (facts never mentioned by De Roberto), yet their discipline was loose; power and riches had brought pride, and there was an insistence on noble blood which is certainly not to be found anywhere in the Rule of St Benedict. (1) Annals show how tense their relations often were with the local archdiocese, and even with the Papacy itself, while their public contribution to the religious life of Catania was limited to one sumptuous procession on Corpus Christi Day. Like most Italian writers during the last hundred years, De Roberto was anti-clerical. The local combination of paternalism, outward splendour, squalor, insistence on the letter to the detriment of the spirit, must have driven hard such faith as he had. San Nicole, to him, represented the worst side of religion in Sicily, and although generally scrupulous about documentation his prejudices were apt to run away with him. The weak Abbot who makes an occasional semi-imbecile appearance in I vicerè can only be based on a very different figure, who tried to reform both Monreale and then San Nicolò at this time: the saintly and shrewd Cardinal Dusmet, revered in Catania as ‘friend of the poor’ and now under process for sanctificalion. But the relations of love-hate, attraction and repulsion between modern Sicilian writers and their Church would make a fascinating though rather grim study in itself.

     Identifying characters in such a local novel can be a stimulating entry into Catanian life, and so an effective if roundabout help to appreciation. Though the family of Uzeda have as much basis in reality as Proust’s Guermantes, only the Paternò Castello clan in its various branches held an analogous position at the lime. Don Blasco, for instance, to us an improbable figure outside the pages of some biased account of monastic life before the French Revolution, turns out to be una cosa naturalissima in Catania, possibly based in part on a Father Paternò Castello who was famous in the town fifty years ago and is still remembered for his private life and public bluster. There, opposite the great monastery façade (for the Italian State Monopoly rarely changes sites) is still the tobacconist’s where reigned his mistress, the ‘Cigar-woman’. To create these macabre grandees, near-brigands or near-saints De Roberto had to combine traits of feudal families all over Sicily, and his Uzeda stand out like Goyas, exceptional beings demanding exceptional treatment. For such a conception gentler sides have to be played down. The Princes of Bìscari, Paternò Castello, have been Maecenases of the arts with a liberal tradition since their ancestor corresponded with Voltaire and befriended Goethe; the Dukes of Càrcaci, Paternò Castello, still have the most civilized manners in town (‘Wherever there is a Càrcaci one can breathe!’ says a young American resident). A more obvious model was the late nineteenth-century Marchese di San Giuliano, Paternò Castello, who became Foreign Minister of Italy under Giolitti, and whose character and career are freely sketched into the young Prince Consalvo. Palazzo San Giuliano may well be the original of the Francalanza mansion of the book, for it fills a whole side of its own square on Via Etnea and is so vast and imposing that, with its entrance covered in commemorative plaques of royal visits, it is often mistaken for the town hail opposite. Although now housing a bank, numerous shops and businesses and a large hotel, high on its main façade can still be seen two shuttered windows on rooms which are never opened, due to some tragedy, rumour has it, or perhaps some monster. . . . In Catania the monstrous and grotesque are never very far away, particularly among the established classes. Even poor old Don Eugenio in I vicerè, the only Uzeda who was perhaps an artist manqué, had a prototype, an old beggar often seen within living memory around the smarter cafés and who would take alms only from nobles of rank equal to himself.

     Later, between the two war, Vitaliano Brancati extended this panorama to the middle classes in Catania, whose predicament is brilliantly and terrifyingly caught by his best novels, Il Bell’ Antonio and Don Giovanni in Sicilia.

     Since the late nineties De Roberto had spent part of each year at Catania, and eventually ill-health decided him to settle definitely in his beloved city. This returns to origins did not have the mental effect on him that it did on Verga, whose displacement home from cosy Milan brought about one of those mysterious crises of Sicilian inertia, so that he never wrote more than another odd chapter or so of his great planned cycle about I vinti (‘The Defeated’). De Roberto, as well as directing the city’s museums and antiquities, kept up a flow of varied productions; studies, short stories, plays, essays, they appeared regularly; uneven, original, all stamped somewhere with a directness, at times an acrid immediacy, that was becoming increasingly rare in Italian letters as D’Annunzio’s influence grew. Occasionally he produced something outstanding, such as his tales of military life during the first world war; one short story La paura, about a soldier’s panic, treated battle so frankly that it alarmed the Fascists and was not published until after his death. Such writing has only been appreciated in Italy during the last few years, partly through the influence of Hemingway, who might have written these stories himself.

     Sometimes De Roberto’s choice of plots make an unconscious pattern; an old lady gambles away her last cent with her chaplain; a confessor is tempted by his penitent; an anarchist prince murders his mistress; love natural and supernatural is found and lost and twisted. Among his most impressive stories are Il rosario, about an old woman reciting her rosary as she refuses to pardon a dying daughter; Il sogno, a successful piece of experimental writing, on a man thoughts to the rhythm of the train in which he is escaping from wife to mistress; La messa di nozze (1911), a short novel whose plot turns on a moving and elaborately treated crisis of conscience by a woman during her marriage service. Fascination with the Church, horror of unctuousness, terror of love ‘soif de l’absolu’ perhaps unacknowledged ... no wonder his fiction and his ‘scientific’ and even his historic studies, emanate a tense, almost brusque disquiet, when even at the Feast of the Assumption at Randazzo the decorated float reminded him of the chariot of Vishnu or Moloch.

     Neither Verga nor De Roberto ever married, both having theories about a writer being wedded to his work. This did not prevent Verga from keeping secret mistresses with whom he would vanish for long jaunts in northern Europe, unknown to all till after his death. De Roberto stayed at home with his mother, locked in one of those relationships which are inexplicably both closer and less neurotic in the south. Love betrayed recurs so often in his writing that he must have set up some embittering pattern of his own, driven perhaps too by that sexual rhetoric of Catania for which Brancati found a new word, gallismo, based on the image of a strutting cock. With all De Roberto’s clarity and energy his writing is full of the strange Sicilian character, its subdued fervour and sadness, its solitude beyond the smiles. Is its only cause, as some historians insist, a social structure too ill-balanced to release local energies? Or is there some deeper anguish in Pirandello’s comment ‘Intelligence is a terrible thing because it destroys the beauty of life’, or in the title of his last ‘Notes on my involuntary sojourn on earth’? A remark which De Roberto put into the mouth of Mme de Maintenon, ‘Nothing is more able than irreproachable conduct’, evokes one of those silently screaming cardinals by Francis Bacon. Sicily now is one of the few places where Stendhal would still find his ‘sombre Italie’.

     De Roberto’s last years were spent either tending at his mother’s bedside or looking after Verga’s literary interests, and at his death in 1927 he left behind a mass of unfinished manuscripts; a history of Malta, a biography of Verga, the complete first part of a novel, L’imperio, which continued the story of the last Uzeda, Prince Consalvo, in Rome. Such fame as he had outside Sicily dated back to the nineties, his writing was not the kind to appeal to Fascism, his books were allowed to fall out of print while in public demand, and within a few years he was almost forgotten except by specialists; though it is pleasant to record that Edith Wharton was an enthusiast about I vicerè, and, through her, Bernard Berenson. Now Italians are probably closer to its spirit than ever before. There is a growing realization of the odd and important place that Sicily occupies in their modern literature, of, for instance, De Roberto’s influence on the narrative style of Moravia, of the veristi’s direct perception as part of that chain in Italian art which links Giotto to neo-realist films. De Roberto’s work is being reassessed against a wider background. ‘God concedes to every artist one hour that is truly great,’ he once told an admirer, but never added which he thought his.

     We catch a glimpse of him through contemporary eyes, out on his stroll at l’ora del gelato (‘ice-cream-time’) in Via Etnea; Cavaliere Roberto, he was known as, one of the city’s major personalities; a spry figure, with a quizzical look behind his eye-glass and above a high stiff collar and white waistcoat. He passes among the parading carriages, the jostling carts, the barrel-organs playing Casta diva, under the all-seeing eye of Etna. If it were the Feast of St Agata there would be tall constructions of gilt and baroque quivering down Via Etnea among squibs and shouts and fervour, as they still do every year. Even now, feudalism has its trappings and descendants of the old Spanish viceroys flourish, for during the feast the image is still greeted by a flow of splendid liveries in the palace on Via Etnea of the Prince of Roccaromana (Paternò Castello). As the afternoon light fades great balloon figures, spread floating against the sky, diffuse an odd sense of timelessness, so that De Roberto and the carriages might still be there. On one such afternoon he must have scribbled the lines found on his desk after his death: ‘Among all human constructions the only ones that avoid the dissolving hands of time are castles in the air.’