I have happy memories of this area and I think the smell of the sea that comes from Fontane Bianche, led by a hot Scirocco, the shape of houses, low, small, piled one upon the other, the color of earth, red, brown, sometimes white, but always smile on and dry.
memories are linked mostly to the summer, when the family retraced Ambrose Italy on the other hand, the cold and back down to the Valle d'Aosta hot Sicily.
Cassibile I've always seen as a particular land, certainly special, where there are no citizens cassibilesi but friends, relatives, acquaintances, comrades, neighbors, colleagues and friends.
The country is not at all big, nearly six thousand inhabitants, many of whom work in the farmland surrounding the city home. The land is poor but suitable for growing potatoes, citrus fruits, tomatoes and vegetables. In my childhood memories
Cassibile is inhabited by nice people, friendly, from the ways farmers certainly but never vulgar.
Life is always passed slow Cassibile. The main road through the village cut in two, marks the time of the day. In the morning the traffic is deafening, there are those who returned from Syracuse, there are those who are directly in the city, there are truck loads of potatoes, there are the trucks that pass through Cassibile must take the highway, or at least, that in a bit 'will become the Siracusa-Gela motorway.
the afternoon, especially in summer, the street is deserted. Very few machines defy the afternoon heat, and then, it is difficult to give up the nap, already misembra to see an entire country sbraiato cool, maybe in the bedroom or kitchen, on the couch with a Delonghi Pinguino shot in the face.
The road back to the busy only sixteen. Even trucks, cars yet, even scooters.
Throughout this everyday prose, monochrome and monotonous, never fail to foreigners, certainly never fail in my memory. Arriving by road Avola is hard not to notice them. Do you see them bent in the fields, sometimes you see them walking in single file along the road, sometimes you see them lying in some bench, sometimes they are talking to each other in the street corners.
Immigration has never left these lands. Before the Sicilians were to leave, to embark to new places imagined, exotic, unknown.
In the early twentieth century, many cassibilesi chose the path of the Americas, decided to embark on huge ocean liners and fearful. Few certainties and high hopes. This was the luggage, this was what was needed and nothing more. Some of them returned to their families or relatives, many others do not, have preferred to rebuild their lives elsewhere, have preferred another reality, they have chosen other occasions1.
cassibilesi Then it happened that have stopped migrating, chose to stay, certainly not since it was cheaper. The work was, the level of living was high, or at least, it would become, there were new opportunities. So we decided to stay and build. Building homes, more and more. Until you have not created another Cassibile Cassibile a modern, or at least, how could he be so in the years of economic boom and construction. So many cassibilesi moved into the new country, which stood just yards from the old village. Other immigrants arriving in the same period. Moroccans arrive. First families that settled in, now, abandoned and decaying houses in the village. It comes more and more. They come to work the land, to earn, especially. The old Mustapha has spent half his life working to support his family left Morocco.
this is also the Cassibile of my memories. It is also the Cassibile of Moroccans in the bar or in the streets, the Ethiopians in the potato fields, Senegalese selling necklaces on the beach. I can not imagine a Cassibile without immigrants, there are since I have memory. Exist in reality as they exist in the popular imagination of all of us Italians.
The immigrant is being proposed as an "other" than "us", a different no doubt, a "far" and especially a stranger, and perhaps this is what makes us more afraid.
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