THE Vucciria, in the heart of
Every
day but Sunday, the Vucciria fills with fishermen,
shopkeepers and merchants who have come to peddle their goods. And it's quite a
selection: pasta, grains, sacks of beans, bags of dried herbs, shoes, socks,
cigarette lighters shaped like handguns, grappa, wine, CDs, paintings and
paperweights of the Madonna, salted capers (a local specialty), zucchini the
size of a child's leg, crates of artichokes still attached to their long
stalks, tomatoes (large, small, sun-dried, packed in oil, in a can, on the
vine) and practically anything else you can think of.
Strolling through
the maze are the market regulars: men in coppolas,
the forward-leaning Sicilian caps, like the one Al Pacino
wore in The Godfather; and elderly women in heavy tweed skirts, stiff
pocketbooks hanging from their elbows. The smattering of
curious tourists don't arrive in
The center of the
outdoor market is the Piazza Caracciolo, the fishermen's
square. I arrived as dawn crept over the buildings. Rickety tables were propped
up by plastic milk crates, and men in tall rubber boots and stiff red aprons
laid out the morning's catch on sheets of crushed ice under bright, unforgiving
light bulbs dangling from the tarps overhead. The fishermen, stray cats at
their ankles, chopped swordfish steaks with cleavers and wrapped handfuls of
shrimp in white paper for their early customers. Every so often, the fishermen
poured water over their catches red
mullets, shrimp, squid, sea bass and marlin the excess spilling on to the piazza's
stones.
There's an
expression in
After 700 years,
the Vucciria is fading.
Everything
has changed, said Ignazio D'Alessandro, a 62-year-old
man with white hair and a round face who has been selling fruit in the Vucciria for 57 years. It hasn't been the same since
This is a common
sentiment around these parts. After World War II, when much of
The market
reaches from the heavily trafficked Via Roma down to the water. But what once
covered dozens of city blocks has dwindled to only a few. Mr. D'Alessandro is
one of the Vucciria's oldest tenants. He took over
the fruit stand from his father, who had taken it over from his father before
that.
I've lived
here since I was 5, Mr. D'Alessandro said from his perch behind crates of
apples, oranges and prickly artichokes. I used to employ five people, but
now it's just me. It used to take an hour to get through one block of the Vucciria, but now you can walk it under a minute. The
crowds are leaving. The developers are moving in. I'll have to close in the
next two years.
As I started to
leave, Mr. D'Alessandro clasped my hand, and said he had something for me a gift from the Vucciria.
He gave me a small plastic cup filled with what looked like pink water. It's artichoke wine, he said. I make it myself good for the digestion.
Another Vucciria fixture is the Shanghai Trattoria
(Vicolo Mezzani, 34;
39-091-589-702), a small home-style restaurant full of eclectic furnishings and
the smell of garlic. Perched on a balcony above Piazza Caracciolo,
the trattoria has been in the same family for 41
years. This area and this restaurant have always been popular among
artists and poets, said Maria Concetta, the owner, who said that cast
members from The Godfather ate at her restaurant while filming. And
Renato Guttuso, the Italian artist, anti-Fascist and
recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, painted his 1974 masterpiece, La Vucciria, of the market in full swing, from the trattoria's veranda.
It's different today, Ms. Concetta said. But there
are still days you can find the old Vucciria.
On one such day,
makeshift stalls sprang up around Piazza Caracciolo,
and small lines started to form within minutes. The early afternoon crowd had
poured into the market for its famous street food: salty fried snacks like
calamari, artichokes and pannelle, or fried chickpea
flour patties. Suddenly, it was easy to see the Vucciria
as a living vestige of the past.
It might be the
only market in
The Vucciria may be smaller, weaker and emptier than it has
ever been, but it remains stubbornly impervious to the 21st century.
One who remembers
its heyday well is Enzo, the single-named proprietor of La Vecchia
Trattoria da Tots (Via Coltellieri, 5; 39-333-315-7558). Enzo grew up in the Vucciria and now runs one of the market's most beloved
restaurants, a place where regulars come as much for the pasta con sarde (spaghetti with sardines), as they do to hear Enzo
play his drums.
It was a
full place, an important place, he said, wistfully. This is where
Sicilians came to play, to eat, to work. But the store owners didn't have money
and couldn't stay open. If the city fixes it up, it can survive. If not, it
won't.
LATER that
afternoon, I was walking around one of the side streets, and apparently out of
nowhere I heard a horse neigh. The sound seemed to come from behind a brightly
colored door with the words Teatro Vittorio painted above. It was an old theater. I
pushed the door open and before me in the center of the Vucciria,
just off one of the busiest streets in
It was an
astonishing sight: A pig snorted as her piglets slept next to her, two horses
were munching on piles of hay, a gangly colt wobbled around his mother,
chickens scampered in every direction, and a farmer, sweeping piles of straw,
wordlessly beckoned me in. I felt as though I was walking onto the set of a
Nativity scene.
The farmer handed
me a baby bottle of milk and gently placed a newborn lamb in my arms. Her
mother died three days ago, he said. You need to feed her. She must
finish the whole bottle. When I left an hour later, reeling from my brief
stint as an urban Sicilian sheep farmer, I passed a handsome young man on the
street. He looked at me and winked. You have found the secret of the Vucciria, he said, conspiratorially, before walking
away.
Early evening,
after the fishermen have left Piazza Caracciolo, was
when Tanino, the neighborhood barbecue chef, rolled
in. He unfurled his stand, fired up the grill and meticulously laid out flanks
of liver, kidneys, lungs and intestines; Tanino's
specialty is innards, a Sicilian favorite.
As the smoke of
grilled meat drifted into the evening air, the piazza filled with old men on
their way home, young couples on scooters and merchants who had just closed up
shop for the day. Tanino carefully arranged bowls of
salt, lemon wedges and bread, filling orders as quickly as they were called
out. This was happy hour in the Vucciria: locals,
young and old, munching on hot, greasy sandwiches, talking to friends with
full, smiling mouths.
A short while
later, as it grew dark, I left Tanino and his group
to stroll through the Vucciria once more. The streets
were nearly empty except for a few stray cats picking at the fishermen's
scraps. As I stepped over the empty boxes and discarded fruit rinds, I recalled
my day in the Vucciria drinking homemade artichoke wine,
listening to an eccentric old man play bongos at his restaurant, feeding a
newborn lamb and watching traditions unfold as they've unfolded for centuries.
Places like
this can never go away completely, Ms. Concetta of Shanghai Trattoria said earlier in the day. You just watch the Vucciria
will outlive us all.