There can be a “sickness for Sicily” equal to the “sickness for Africa”. An equal vertigo of estrangement can strike anyone, the Sicilian as well as the foreigner, with that magnetic effect that centuries ago inexorably attracted and captured the emaciated traveller, incapable of recovering from the beautiful, the immense, the timeless. Sicily, as Francesco Terracina explains in his latest book (“Mal di Sicilia”, Laterza editore) can then be considered a continent and there have been people who have lost themselves there. «Attraction and aversion», he writes. «Between these two feelings the “sick of Sicily” grows. It affects islanders and foreigners, those who flee out of necessity and those who land by chance on the triangle between Capo Lilibeo, Capo Peloro and Capo Passero. On this triangle floating like a leaf in the Mediterranean everything can be said and reality is careful not to measure itself with the chaos that governs it.”
There are many who have fallen into the disease, from Elio Vittorini to Goliarda Sapienza, from Pio La Torre to Mauro Rostagno. And then many foreigners who allowed themselves to be enchanted and swallowed up by the island in recent centuries. Let’s take one story above all: Alexander Hardcastle was a captain of the British Navy, born in London on 25 October 1872. When he saw the temples of Agrigento for the first time, returning from the terrible Boer War, his life changed. For years after that, Commander Hardcastle lived alone among his “his” temples. He spent a fortune to finance major excavations in the archaeological area; Indeed, he invested the entire assets he had at his disposal and paid for his passion with complete ruin. He was pointed out by the people of Agrigento who thought he was crazy from the first moment. And instead he was “a romantic, or perhaps just an Englishman lost among the temples”.
The Englishman enhanced the archaeological area, was the first to live there, brought the Temple of Demeter to light at his own expense, began searching for the theatre, and had a water pipeline built to bring water to the archaeological area «after a tug of war with the Municipality – Terracina reconstructs – which initially had not authorized the project, showing skepticism in the face of such disinterested generosity”.
The innovations brought by the foreigner were viewed with concern and derision by the local population: the toilet bowl, for example, contemptuously called the “English toilet”, made its debut in the first public toilet built in Agrigento at Hardcastle’s own expense. It was considered a superfluous armchair, something unsuitable for the task it had to perform.
The patron who came from afar led a solitary life in his home, the Villa Aurea, now home to the archaeological park. He chased his beautiful obsession. He went around monuments, met a few people and corresponded with archaeologists and ministerial officials to obtain authorization for the research.
It ended as it was inevitable: with an admission to a mental hospital. He died in the psychiatric hospital of Agrigento at midday on 27 June 1933. Even today, Terracina writes in a style halfway between the dry breaking latest news of a journalist and the stripped-down depth of a poet, «the people of Agrigento have their certainties, starting precisely from experience of Hardcastle: even today, if someone undertakes an undertaking greater than himself, it is said that he is “like the Englishman who got lost among the temples”. They looked with distrust at that man who had studied at the Harrow School in London, the same one attended by Lord Byron and Winston Churchill, and who had an inexplicable interest in the pile of ruins where the goats usually went to graze.”
The last wish of the lost Englishman was to be buried in the city cemetery, in a space that looked towards the Temple of Demeter. He still stands there, ignored by most, overlooking his beloved Greek marbles.