From pasque flowering to beech leafing

The long, cold winter has so held the gardens back, while the sudden warmth of early May sent everything charging forward, that there's a real sense of how 'the treasure of nature's germens tumble all together' (perhaps I misinterpret Macbeth, but the gist is right). I've delayed so long with the piece I wanted to write about three weeks in spring, and the changes seen over two visits to Kew, that now the purple wisteria, peonies and laburnum are out too. Initially, though, I wanted to observe the onset of easter according to the flowering of the pulsatilla or pasque flower. The rockery specimens above were out at Kew on 14 April, but my own windowbox subspecies finally flowered the following Sunday, and has only just stopped.

As for the crazy profusion of the Botanics, several rarities spotted on the first excursion of the year were over and gone by the next, on the second of three unnaturally perfect days at the start of May. Not surprisingly, many of the Alpine House inhabitants had paid their floral respects and moved on, among them this rare Iris sari manissadjanii from Turkey.

The carpet of Cretan Chinodoxa ('glory of the snow') near Kew Palace was also at its best one week, gone the next.

Mid-April leafing was slow. Only the Acer opalus or Italian maple was in anything like substantial leaf and flower

but various species of magnolia provided the flowering bridge between the April and May visits. Some had been nipped by the frosts, but not the later developers.You don't have to go far from the big gates in May to see a spectacular display.

Behind the pink magnolia, all furry buds several weeks earlier, is a wonder - cornus 'Ormonde' (a dogwood mixture between Cornus florida and Cornus nuttallii, if you really want to know).

There's another on the opposite side of the lake to the Palm House

and the nearby Gunnera are just beginning their monstrous annual adventure.

I headed up to the orchards between Temperate House and Pagoda

where apple tree marvels of all kinds were in full bloom and scent

and though the bluebell woods behind Queen Charlotte's Cottage were not yet in their prime, some patches were flourishing in plain sun.

Then I steered back round to the gate where I started alongside the Thames, via a Northern American red oak (Quercus rubra)

and a couple of magnificent beeches that turned out to be labelled not copper but purple (Fagus sylvatica purpurea - I think). 

Nature's profusion flourished under more sunshine on consecutive weekends. We spent a blissful afternoon in the garden of our friends Daisy, Francois and Garance on the Layer Marney estate in Essex, followed by a high-summery picnic on the beach by the Saxon church at Bradwell Juxta Mare on Bank Holiday Monday. And last Sunday I was down at Glyndebourne to talk at the Ariadne Study Morning, a fine one while it lasted, before zipping back on the 12.20 train to London to spiel again between Denis Kozhukhin's epic afternoon journey through Prokofiev's Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas for the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival.

I mention these only because I'm afraid I'll never get time to write them up - more trips beckon, and I haven't even finished with Sicily yet - and I didn't want the atmosphere to pass unrecorded. Now it's grey, cold and damp, but I leave you with the Glyndebourne gardens on yet another perfect if shorter-lived May morning.

A diva for Europe

It's Europe Day today, and with senses still reeling from Saturday's Don Carlo at the Royal Opera, I propose that as a German Greek, already legendary soprano Anja Harteros (photographed here by Catherine Ashmore for the Royal Opera) should sing a great hymn of reconciliation - probably by that other, self-styled German Greek by temperament rather than by blood Richard Strauss. We'll have four for the price of one to conclude.

This woman is phenomenal. Everything I wrote about her Covent Garden debut in 2008 still holds good: the spinto strength, the Desdemona-perfect floating of Verdi's more ethereal high lines, the grace and focus of the acting. I expressed my anguish then that she wasn't signed up on the spot for the role of Elisabetta di Valois in Verdi's most comprehensive operatic masterpiece. Until last week, we had to endure the very fitful, unsteady technique of Marina Poplavskaya in the role (alas, the first run of Hytner's production, which grows on me, was the one to be filmed*). At last, five years later, Harteros's Elisabetta joined Kaufmann's infante for what turned out to be one night only

as well as the top-notch Philip of Ferruccio Furlanetto and Marius Kwiecien's legato-miraculous Posa (actually looking at the nationalities of the principals - German, German-Greek, French, Polish, Italian, British - aligns well with today). That most attractive baritone seemed happy to put a Brokeback spin on the buddy relationship, and why not? Let's have a solo shot of Kwiecien too, since we can.

I'll add no more to what I wrote, trying to keep superlatives to a minimum, on The Arts Desk, except to echo a commenter on the Royal Opera website who declared that the penultimate scene of Kaufmann's Carlo and Harteros's Elisabetta sitting on the monument of Carlo V rather like weary children, cautiously joining hands and almost whispering their final hopes of meeting in a better world, would remain with him forever.

Unfortunately the phenomenon is not to be repeated this run; after that precious evening came the announcement that Harteros had acute tonsillitis and would not be fulfilling her remaining two scheduled performances. She is not, alas, part of the Royal Opera's plans for the next five years.

I've already put the YouTube excerpts from Act V in the much less interesting Bavarian State Opera production up on The Arts Desk, but - this time skipping the aria, which is less perfect than it was on Saturday night - there's no harm in enshrining that great final duet here.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have to note that 'Ma lassù ci vedremo in un mondo migliore' usually makes me weep - even with Poplavskaya and Villazon - because when Mattila and Alagna sang it in the Bondy production, I was there in the company of my dear friend Trude Winik. She used her National Socialist Compensation Fund money from the Austrian government - a long overdue gesture to the loss of her family in Treblinka - to buy two boxes at the opera for her closest friends (the rest of the money went to Save the Children). It was her last outing; she died at the age of 87 some time afterwards.

I'm off this evening to a Hibernian-inspired potpourri celebrating the Irish Presidency of the EU, from Flotow and Wallace to Grainger's Molly on the Shore and Wagner's Liebestod, that last utterance of a wilde Irische magd. The classy visitors are the singers from the European Opera Centre and the European Union Youth Orchestra conducted by Laurent Pillot.

Which makes this a good place to point out that most of  the pleas to sign petitions I get from Avaaz and Greenpeace are to support European laws which the UK government constantly seeks to block - the latest being the move to veto pesticides which are held responsible for the dramatic decline of bee populations. The following is part of what James Sadri of Greenpeace wrote in his victory letter of 'the world's first continent-wide ban on these chemicals'. Text in bold is his doing.

'Someone who has nothing to be proud of is the UK environment minister Owen Paterson, who not only voted against the ban, but lobbied on behalf of chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer to try and stop it going through. Paterson in a private letter even promised Syngenta that his "efforts would intensify" in the run-up to the vote.

'Well, Mr Paterson, you lost. The bees won.

'We know the current UK government has a disastrous track record on protecting our world - from climate change to bees. That's why so much of our work on this campaign has focused on mainland Europe, where we managed to shift big countries like Germany who yesterday gave the ban their critical backing.'

Let's hope it holds good beyond the two-year moratorium. In the meantime, remember Teresa May wants us to be the only country other than BELARUS not to be part of the European Convention on Human Rights (I don't know what's happened to this, but I do know that the Queen's Speech yesterday included May's other proposal to restrict NHS access to migrants. Cameron's much-vaunted bill for same-sex marriage was nowhere to be found, a special pity since it would have been fun to hear the words fall from the old queen's lips).

Remember also that George Osborne stood alone against 26 other EU finance ministers who voted to cap bankers' bonuses. Remember the neo-Nazis and defecting BNP supporters behind the smug grinning face of Nigel Farage, who seems to charm the journos into thinking he's a Good Bloke (though they might recall this. UKIP probably think it shows statesmanship; I find it abusive and bullying).

Just remember. These are difficult, dangerous times, and it's all too easy to scapegoat the EU for sundry woes (actually, why not just try the bankers?) But I would recommend all protest voters - probably not readers of this blog - to look at the small print of what they might be getting instead.

But enough. Let's have that German Greek hymn of harmony from Harteros and Strauss. I was going to leave it at 'Frühling' from the Four Last Songs,  in consonance with this especially beautiful late spring/early summer we're having, and thought the final sunset might not be appropriate for Europe. Unfortunately the first song's not embeddable by itself, so be compelled by Harteros with Jansons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and stay the course.

*which rules out a DVD this time round. But why not a CD set? Pappano has the clout with EMI, though it would be costly to take it into the studio. But by then Christine Rice might be well enough to have a shot at Eboli, as originally intended. I think, against the odds, she could actually be rather good.

The rest is tonal

As the Southbank Centre works its way through the development of 20th century music along the lines of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, I've been hearing so much to remind me that, loudly though the twelve-tone boys and their disciples may have shouted and slavishly though the acadamic establishment may have followed them, tuneful and direct serious (and, as Prokofiev put it, 'light-serious') music kept going.

My feeling that all these ways of finding new ways to say old things, properly absorbing the past - it's hardly reactionary - are just as valid as the work of the so-called pioneers, was confirmed by an interview Benjamin Britten (pictured above with Pears and Poulenc in Cannes, 1954) gave Donald Mitchell back in 1969. It's reproduced in The Britten Companion (Faber; more on the context, taking the City Lit opera class through Gloriana, anon).

Praising the emerging John Tavener - pity that promise never went further than it did - Britten said 'I think he and many of his generation are swinging far, far away now from what I call the academic avant-garde, who have rejected the past. He and many others like him adore the past and build on the past. After all, language is a matter of experience. When we're talking together, we're using symbols which have been used by the past. If we rejected the past we should be just making funny noises.'

Mitchell asks him if he is conscious of the burden of tradition. 'I'm supported by it, Donald,' comes the reply. 'I couldn't work alone. I can only work really because of the tradition that I am conscious of behind me. And not only the painting, and architecture, and countryside around me, people around me....I feel as close to Dowland, let's say...as I do to my youngest contemporary.'

Steeped in Poulenciana, and happily ploughing my way through the correspondence, I'm always aware of the sheer joy in his tradition-conscious music. He loves what he absorbs. But he also realised his limitations. He writes to a friend in 1942: 'I am well aware that I am not the kind of musician who makes harmonic inventions like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy [always the top names among living composers he tended to cite, along with Richard Strauss and Prokofiev, occasionally Hindemith]. But I do think there is a place for new music that is content with using other people's chords. Was that not the case with Mozart and with Schubert? And in any case, the personality of my harmonic style will become evident.'

It's been a joy to discover the Trio and the Sextet in Pascal Rogé's collaborations with marvellous French colleagues, even to hear the strange Aubade in a vintage recording where Poulenc is the pianist. In his own piano pieces, he's an interesting one: determined to capture a speedy spirit where appropriate without bothering too much about all the right notes.

As for other personal discoveries, after Tippett's Second Symphony, I found to my surprise that the First went just as deep - probably deeper in its knotty slow-movement Passacaglia variations, where there's the sort of selective scoring, in this case for three flutes above the chaconne on muted violas and cellos, which most composers can only dream of hitting on. Indebted to Graham Rickson there for digging out the old Colin Davis recordings for me.

I was heading for the second-cast Mozart Zauberflöte at the Royal Opera on Friday. But the Tuesday before, I listened to Vaughan Williams's Five Tudor Portraits to prepare the class for the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert I thought I was going to miss. I suppose I'd imagined that all five portraits were like the one I knew, the Epitaph for John Jayberd of Diss - three-minute character studies. I hadn't appreciated the brilliance of Tudor poet John Skelton's rapping doggerel and I was stunned to find not only the rollicking variety of 'The Tunning of Elinor Rumming' (a real personage depicted above handing her ale to Skelton and a priest) but above all the 20-minute requiem for Jane Scroop's sparrow Philip, slain by the convent cat Gib.

Such delicacy here, sentiment in the right sense and fresh invention just when it's needed. And this in a rather poor performance conducted by David Willcocks (sadly there's not one on YouTube as yet, though you can catch the BBCSO performance on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer until Friday evening). I gave up my Flute ticket and went to the Barbican instead, writing about it for The Arts Desk. John Wilson and co confirmed my hunch: a masterpiece. I shed a few tears for Philip Sparrow, I can tell you, particularly in that movement's incandescent epilogue. None for York Bowen's Viola Concerto, simply because like so many second-rank works it lacks a personal identity. But that's been an exception among the 20th century surprises, which I hope just keep on coming.

More of the new-to-me now, which in this case is very much the old, or rather timeless. On Ascension Day (illustrated by Rublev, the illuminator of the Très Riches Heures and Perugino),  I found myself spoiled for choice between the four cantatas on John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage instalment. For consistency's sake, I decided to stick with my Leipzig 1725 sequence and plumped for 'Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein', BWV 128. In that context the joyous circumstance has to make a new, at long last major-key beginning with two mellow horns dictating G major as Bach weaves a glistening fantasia around the sopranos' chorale.

Innovation appears in the bass's invocation to 'arise and with a bright sound proclaim...', accordingly replacing horns with trumpet and breaking off into recitative and arioso. Since the last of the sustained lines tell us 'not to fathom the Almighty's power', all we get in the ritornello is a brief return of the trumpet, no voice.

Alto and tenor in the ensuing aria-duet declare 'my mouth falls silent', but they instead keep on going until the lovely oboe d'amore has the final word and - unaccompanied - the last note. Even the final chorale, with its rich turn on 'Herrlichkeit', has added grace, this time in the return of the two horns, the first climbing to the heights to fill out the textures in the final gazing 'on Thy majesty for all eternity'. As Rene Jacobs, in his incarnation as one of the worst countertenors ever, is on the Leonhardt recording, let's try a newcomer, Dutch forces under Leusink.

From sacred to profane, finally, here's a plug from proud godfather for Alexander 'Betty' Lambton's sax tootling in his band Lieutenant Tango. Let's hope the irresistible danciness of  their single 'Charle Brash' brings them the fame they deserve. This old hipster-replacement here is already chanting and doofing the refrain 'Charlie Brash (doof, doof, doof)/Where's your cash? (doof, doof, doof).'

Via Butera 28: leopard spotting

Ebbene, that's a lion head, I know, but I'll try to get to the point soon enough. Behind this great 19th century door is Palermo's Palazzo Lanza Tomasi: now a complex of private flats, apartments for travellers to rent, handsome courtyards on different floors, the residential piano nobile of the present owners Gioacchino and Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi - the Duke and Duchess of Palma* to give them their titles, which I like to suppose they seldom use - and the rooms in which lived Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Gioacchino's adoptive father and author of one of the greatest 20th century novels.

He moved here five years after the bombing of the Palazzo Lampedusa adjoining the Oratory of Santa Zita in 1943 - a major wartime trauma for the deeply sensitive, introspective writer - and Via Butera remained his home until his death in 1957 at the age of 60.

We happened to book an apartment without even knowing the connection to the author of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo; this is not the place to go in to the Italian word's exact meaning), which I packed to re-read along with David Gilmour's biography of Lampedusa. All we knew was that our base was to be in the old town with a sliver of a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Perhaps that situation, above all the street on which we stayed, were why I fell in love with Palermo more or less on first sight, behaviour which a recent pundit on Sicily declares is only for the mentally unhinged. I didn't buy his book.

The palace backs on to a high walkway on top of the 16th century Spanish bastion

which also takes you past the slightly older (17th century) Palazzo Butera of the wealthy Lanza Branciforte family.

At the foot of the bastion is the Foro Italico. Before the Second World War the promenade met the sea here; a painting in the palace shows a high-society scene. This, believe it or not, was a bandstand for the leisured classes.

All the wartime rubble pushed the sea back a couple of hundred yards; a visitor in the 1950s remembers the writer and his wife leaning over to watch prostitutes leading clients into the debris. Plans may or may not be realised in 2014 to transform the green beyond into something smarter.

Anyway, it was just before we left for Sicily that we learned through a friend of a friend that Gioacchino, husband of the charming Nicoletta with whom I'd already had a friendly e-mail exchange, happened to be the great man's adopted son as well as a distinguished professor of music and former opera house intendant (see the Teatro Massimo entry). For anyone who knows the film rather than the book, the fact that some of his spirited characteristics went in to the character of Tancredi is of assistance in declaring that Gioacchino IS Alain Delon (Visconti's Tancredi). Here he is in 1955 standing with Lampedusa in the ruined castle of Montechiaro.

Shortly before his death Lampedusa became especially fond, among the acolytes who attended his evidently brilliant courses on English and French literature, of Gioacchino and the girl he was soon to marry, his first wife Mirella. So the chronology, about which I was slightly incredulous to begin with, makes sense.

You can see from this 1893 enamelled silver matchbox crest (image kindly provided by Gioacchino) that the arms of Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe's great-grandfather and the partial model for the fictional leopard-prince Don Fabrizio, feature what looks like a lion rather than a leopard. Here's the famous portrait in the palace with vivacious Nicoletta and Gioacchino, having willingly consented, photographed beneath it.

I wrote 'partial' just now because while the physical build, the essential manliness and quick temper of the novel's astronomer-prince seem to be prerogatives of the original - and indeed are so well conveyed by a weirdly dubbed Burt Lancaster in the curate's-egg film - his incurable pessimism and almost Wotanish willing of 'the end'  as represented in so many splendid speeches would seem to be Lampedusa's own.

He was a wilting scion of a never very productive family. Indeed, it was in danger of dying out as early as the 16th century, when the self-scouring 'saint-duke', the first, of Palma who founded a cathedral in this small south Sicilian town and turned his palace in to a Benedictine convent produced a brood of daughters most of whom became nuns. Chief among them was Isabella who took dictation from the devil and was regularly punished by him in a very Fiery Angelish sort of possession. The painting of these early ascetics, mystics and - dare I say it - hysterics hangs in the large drawing room of the Palazzo Lanza Tomasi.

Lampedusa has been maligned as an aristocratic reactionary. Instead, he had a curious ability to see both, or all, sides; he was as Gioacchino put it last week on a visit for, among other things, a 50th anniversary screening of the Visconti film at the Italian Cultural Institute, 'a disenchanted judge of how the world went around'. The Leopard may sympathise with the eclipse of a noble family by the mafioso-like rise of the middle man, but in one of the two chapters (or part) added later, 'Father Pirrone pays a visit', Lampedusa gives a village perspective on the nobles while hardly portraying local affairs in a flattering light.

History fascinated him. He had curious sympathies with the French Revolution and the development of the English consitution, even if he remained ironic about the Italian predicament, encapsulated in the famous (and still, to me, ambiguous) line in The Leopard 'everything must change so that everything can stay the same'. There were two libraries in the Palazzo, one for literature and this one in which Gioacchino sits, just off the great drawing room, devoted entirely to history books up to Churchill's time (the French section is huge).

While Lampedusa's interior life was absorbed by an astonishing range of literature, English always to the forefront, his outward biography verges on the dull. He travelled a great deal around Europe in his youth, and a recently published volume of 1920s letters from 'The Monster' to his friends back in Sicily shows what a lively correspondent he was; in later years he rarely budged from northern Sicily. His Baltic wedding to his uncle Pietro's stepdaughter, the mannish Alessandra 'Licy' Wolff, who later became Italy's first woman psychoanalyst - a factor, surely, in the novel's handling of love and death -  led to a marriage compromised by his status as figlio di mamma. Licy could not bear to share him with the domineering Beatrice di Lampedusa and the couple spent many years living apart.

The tragedy was that, as Gilmour puts it, 'death came to him later than he had once hoped but sooner than he then wanted, destroying him not after he had succumbed to despair, not at the final stage of his disillusion with life, but, tragically, at the most vital and active period of his existence.'  In 1955, only two years before his death, he began work on The Leopard and continued to add to it; he did not live to see its publication. I, for one, wish there were more, but as it stands the novel is a perfect miniature War and Peace, one of the few books to show human nature in the round as sympathetically as Tolstoy. The pessimism is hard going but gives the work its special flavour.

Visconti's film has shortcomings where the novel, as far as I can see, has none. The acting strikes many false notes: Claudia Cardinale is coquettishly courtesan rather than naturally sensuous as Angelica, the magnificent daughter of the 'upstart' new man Don Calogero - how Chekhovian that is - who captures the heart of the prince's attractive nephew Tancredi (the gorgeous Alain Delon) as well as that of painfully ageing Don Fabrizio himself. Her cackling at Tancredi's outspoken table conversation is awful; blame the dubbing, as one must for the princess's hysterics and for the totally inappropriate, tenorish voice given to Lancaster's prince**.

The pace is uncertain and, in the ball scene, crippling, perhaps deliberately so if Visconti wants us to get a sense of how boring and endless these society occasions could be (though Rota could have written a few more waltzes and ecossaises rather than recycling a handful). It was a cop-out to the conventions of epic film to show Tancredi engaged in Risorgimento fighting, a scene which does not exist in the novel and is of more interest in showing left-wing Visconti's sympathies (he stands, of course, at the other end of the political scale from Lampedusa).

Yet it all looks ravishing in the latest brushed-up print; Visconti takes painstaking care to try and recapture Lampedusa's delight in the details of vanished splendour. And at least, in league with the author of the screenplay Suso Ceccho D'Amico, he tries to give us a sense of the various dialogues' richness. The prince's point of view comes across in the conversations with Don Ciccio, the organist and fellow-hunter on the country estate of Donnafugata, and above all with Chevalley, the Piedmontese Secretary to the Prefecture who wants him to take up a place on the Senate. Don Fabrizio's reasons for refusal form the heart of the novel, or at least its attitude to Sicilian life. I can't quote it all here, but I'll try to extract the pith in Archibald Colquhoun's enduring translation. The lines in bold are more or less those uttered in the short clip I found of Lancaster in this scene on YouTube, clearly posted by a Sicilian who had the sense of 'plus ça change'.

'Just listen to me, Chevalley, will you? If it were merely a question of some honorific, of a simple title to put on a visiting card, no more, I should be pleased to accept; I feel that at this decisive moment for the future of the Italian state it is the duty of us all to support it, and to avoid any impression of disunity in the eyes of these foreign States which are watching us with alarm or hope, both of them unjustified, but that do at the moment exist.'

'Well then, Prince, why not accept?'

'Be patient now, Chevalley, I'll explain in a moment; we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so, we'd never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we're made like that. I said "support", I did not say "participate". In these last six months, since your Garibaldi set foot at Marsala, too many things have been started without our being consulted for you now to ask a member of the old governing class to help develop them and carry them through. I do not wish to discuss now if what was done was good or bad; for my part I believe much of it to have been bad; but I'd like to tell you at once what you'll only understand after spending a year among us.

'In Sicily it doesn't matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of "doing" at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For over 25 centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own...we're worn out and exhausted.'

Chevalley was disturbed now. 'But that is all over, isn't it? Now Sicily is no longer a conquered land, but a free part of a free State.'

'The intention is good, Chevalley, but it comes too late, and I've already said that it is mainly our fault...

'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana. From that comes the power among us of certain people, of those who are half awake...

'...Anyway, I've explained myself badly. I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed as should be a country made for rational beings to live in; this country of ours in which the infernal round Randazzo is a few miles from the beauty of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of 104...this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success...

'This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent and yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from all directions, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood; their sole means of expression works of art we found enigmatic and taxes we found only too intelligible, and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.'

Maybe things are changing, or my superficial traveller's mind would like to think so. But then I've never lived through the worst Cosa Nostra years or endured the 'cruelty' of the Sicilian summer.  Yet even in Lampedusa's pessimism there's that fascination which, it seems, can never wrest a Sicilian away from his - and her, especially since Letizia Battaglia says much the same in a different context - homeland. If the island obsesses me after two visits totalling three weeks, what can it do to a native?

*I questioned that too, at first: Parma, surely? No, Palma is a town in the south of Sicily, as I explain later on.

**I learn there's an English language version for the American market, where Lancaster speaks in his own voice.

Photos of the palazzo and the Lanza Tomasis are mine; thanks to Gioacchino for the reproduction of the 1950s images and the silver matchbox crest; others are mostly wiki-web drawn (any credits gladly given on request)

Sophie Sarin, screen goddess

Of course she takes to the camera like a duck to water; how could she not, after her early years as a model in Paris? But our dearest Sophie achieves a crowning glory as the Australian Broadcasting Company gives her over ten minutes' worth of guiding in its excellent Foreign Correspondent two-part documentary Mali - The Road to Timbuktu.

As readers of this blog will know - and, I repeat myself, Sophie's djennedjenno was the prompt - the latest and perhaps the most enduring of her multiple incarnations has been as hostess of her own specially mud-built hotel in the central Malian town of Djenné, a place of culture and history which as she points out in the film is a hundred times more beautiful than Timbuktu. There she is above with husband Keita snapped by the consummate - and ever-modest - Malick Sidibé when he came to Djenné.

The route taken by the film crew is the one formerly travelled by many visitors like ourselves, including the toughest leg by four-wheel drive across the Sahel and ferry across the river Niger to Timbuktu.

But circumstances are now, of course, very different. The French have essentially driven out the Islamic extremists but incursions remain; the night after this film crew left Timbuktu 11 people were killed in an attack on the hotel where the ABC folk had been staying. It hardly needs adding that the Al-Qaida affiliated insurgents' extreme brand of Islam is one nearly all Malian Muslims reject.

Ridicule is one answer: the film shows walls of Timbuktu shops in which the faces not only of humans but also of camels have been painted out. Malians, moderate and tolerant in their religious practices, simply can't understand it. The peaceful scene below was prayer time at Djenné Mosque during the religious festival of Tabaski, with which we happened to coincide on our Christmas visit.

I like documentary presenter Eric Campbell's good humour as well as his instinct for getting the right facts and talking to the right people. His cameraman, David Martin, captures much of the indestructible treasure of Mali as well as the horrible legacy of the recent past (some of that also featuring on surprising wartime footage). And let's not forget they were travelling at considerable risk, despite the armed guards. Anyway, they arrived safely back in Bamako, where the film ends with coverage of Sophie's 'surreal', once-postponed fashion show. Her chunk of Part One, which can be seen - I link once again - here, runs from 11'56 to 19'27.

You'll surely agree she comes over very well indeed, and  the range of what she's done for Djenné is well represented, from the weaving to the invaluable work in the British Library-funded manuscript library. The upshot is good business for malimali.org from Australia, and certain proposals, she says, from several Sydney businessmen (Keita can see them off).

In the meantime I withdraw again from the Malian scene with a memory of one of the best stretches - a moment of post-dawn bliss on our two-day pinasse journey down the Niger from Timbuktu to Mopti. That's not an experience anyone will be repeating again in the foreseeable future.