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When I tell my Sicilian friends the houses in Vermont are built of wood, they ask me, aghast, "What happens when the wind blows?"
You can have a friend for years and never see the inside of his house because Sicilians meet each other in piazzas or caf6s. The casa is sacrosanct, the seraglio where the women stay, so men don't easily bring other men there.
One time a friend invited me to spend an August night in the ultimate stone house--a cave in Sperlinga, an ancient town in the Nebrodi Mountains in the center of Sicily. No one knows when Sperlinga was founded, but people have been living in its cliff caves since the Bronze Age. In the last three decades, most of the townspeople have moved into new cinderblock apartment houses below the cliff, like my friend, Rita, but she had inherited one third of her grandfather's cave home. The cave was in Via Panetteria, a walled ledge carved into the cliff, and had been divided into three sections as the result of an inheritance dispute. The dividing wall was fresh sheet rock. Rita made my bed at the back of the twenty-foot-long tunnel, where it was coolest, and handed me the keys.
My neighbors were the diehards who still lived full-time in their caves. It was a hot summer night and I was company. They pulled their beach chairs out onto the ledge so we could sit and talk. In this odd, absolutely vertical neighborhood cut from the rock face, we watched the moon rise behind the mountains and light the fields below our feet. Living in a cliff has its problems. One young woman complained there was no place for a girl to walk arm in arm with her boyfriend because the cliff paths were too narrow. One lady said she wanted to add a room but was not allowed because the Sperlinga caves are listed on the Italian equivalent of the National Historic Register and she was not allowed to dig farther into the cliff. But one man said that when the 1968 earthquake shook all of' Sicily, he moved back into his cave home, which was safer. "The mountain won't fall around your ears," he said. At midnight they folded their chairs and we all slept inside the mountain.
Next morning I was dressed and out early. Signora Placenti of the cave next door was scrubbing the ledge in front of her house with a broom and soapy water. Sicilian women clean their homes furiously in the mornings. On ladders, they attack walls, windows, and ceiling lamps. Every day, sometimes twice, they dust, mop floors and stairs, wipe down the walls, degrease the stove, and polish their expensive wooden front doors. They shake mops from their balconies, snap rags out of windows, and disappear again quickly as the fluff floats down slowly onto the laundry on other people's lines. They clean with such gusto that I wonder whether they are thinking of the years when they had nothing to dust.
Signora Placenti, my cave neighbor, was a short red-haired woman in her sixties. She invited me in for coffee and a look at her rare two-story cave.
It was dark inside, normal for a house whose only windows are holes punched in the rock. She turned on a light. Except for the tile floor, she had covered every inch of rock surface.....
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