Word: agrigento
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...awaiting trial on charges of Mafia association, which he denies. Good intelligence - and the fear the Mob evokes across Sicily through its code of silence, omertà - keeps Provenzano out of prison. There were reports that he checked into a clinic three years ago in the southern city of Agrigento for what some believe is a prostate illness. Aldo Piscopo, the medical director of the clinic, Clinica Sant'Anna, doesn't deny the possibility, but says: "How could we have known? We are busy here, and he obviously wouldn't walk in with an identity card with his name...
...painting that is perhaps the star of this show is Agrigento, 1954. It is based on a Sicilian archaeological site De Stael visited, now defiled by condos and hotels but in those days a bare array of hills crowned with the vestiges of Greek temples. The picture might have degenerated into an orgy of color, with its tomato-red sky and purple patches. Instead the balance is so finely held between the colored cuts and triangles -- two orange, four lemon- yellow, three purple and so on -- that one sees how strong De Stael's formal constraints were, even when...
...travel books arrive like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend- the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves. One evening in Sicily, he could look from his hotel balcony and "see the distant moth-soft dazzle of the temples'" at Agrigento. In a little Sicilian town called Chaos, the birthplace of Pirandello, Durrell watched sunlight "worthy of a nervous breakdown by Turner." When a local doctor was summoned to treat a tourist in Durrell's party, "he had a singular sort of expression, a sort of holy expression which one suddenly realised came...
...stone rumbling down the middle of the bed." Thus two Americans awake to the "normal havoc" of a Sicilian morning. Howard is a huge, blond, earnest young graduate student; Sarah, his wife, is a humorous, easygoing girl with honey-colored hair and long shapely legs. They have come to Agrigento to inspect the Grecian ruins and enjoy the local color; but they stay, as Author Tom Cole relates in the superb novella that dominates his first book of stories, because Sicily seizes them in its primordial field of force...
...primordial is personified in Polifemo, the gigantic demon who heaves up hairily out of millennial memory once every year and incites all Agrigento to resume the prehistoric and obscene religion of carnival. As carnival impends, an imminence like electricity waits in the air, an itching in the mind invites convulsion. Convulsion begins: a Bacchic ecstasy of vino nero, roaring scooters, rock 'n' roll. Howard, a tidy Nordic, draws back in distaste. Sarah, a subliminal Mediterranean, is drawn toward delirium. One morning, imagining her intentions innocent, she lets a young bull of a Sicilian kiss...