In the place where I live – in Messina but not really; let’s say at a certain safe distance from the municipal territory – flows the ghost of a past stream. It is not the only one in these parts: the Messina area is, historically, one of the greenest and richest in aquifers, bodies of water, streams and irrigation areas in Sicily; the city of Messina itself lives perched on the ghosts of the torrents that were, and are today main roads that often don’t even remember them in name.
For some time I believed this torrent of mine to be a simple fossil: the testimony of the passage of something extinctthe footprint of a water dinosaur left on a landscape destined for desertification. In recent days, however, it has resumed its course. And it is not a tiny rivulet, a stream: it is a real watercourse that reaches from mountain to valley without getting lost and digs furrows in the ground, dragging debris, rubbish, roots and wood; strong with a new vital push, it bites the territory to regain its space. Lovecraft, a great imaginary writer who would have really liked Messinahe said that “What can wait forever is not dead.”
After a very long wait and two years of drought, it rained. It rained and gale force winds blew. It has rained almost continuously since the beginning of the year. It rained on the city and the countryside, on the broken asphalt and on the dried hills. There is nothing strange in January and February. It’s raining, and it should be a blessing.
But in enchanted places where everything is distorted, every blessing brings a bevy of small curses with it: it might as well rain forever. And so the water reservoirs fill up, the grip of the drought loosens. But the landscape gives way: the roads collapse, the hills become soaked like biscuits, the rocks crumble and collapse. In enchanted places the landscape is changeable, and as many as two cyclones can rage in a handful of days. Our ancestors would have called them sweetie
The history of dragoon, the whirlwind transfigured by popular imagination into a beautiful angry female dragon and ready for destruction on a whim, we have been told about it for hundreds of years. But the way we tell ourselves about it has changed a lot. Over time the meaning has also extended to the more generic storms, thunderstorms, to the whims – in fact – of the Sicilian territory and sky. Which then are also reflected in the souls of the people, and precisely in those days of thunder and lightning we saw a lot of it; Why it is difficult to find harmony when the sky is stormy and the land is subjected to the wrath of a dragon.
The people of Messina of a time now mythical and lost in the folds of history, faced with the most dangerous and disastrous storms, they armed themselves with knives and faced the dragon. They called him dragunera cutting. The bells were ringing to confuse the monster made of lightning and wind and the officiant – a priest or a sailor started to practice – he recited very specific spells, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist or the mysterious one Holy Liberator to whom I also heard my grandmother turn, when my brother and I were children and played in good and bad weather.
A human, active, community gesture. It seems that it worked, so much so that the tradition of dragunera cutting it has been handed down for centuries, until the unexpectedly advanced times of the 20th century. In general, cutting things that have lasted too long is a good habit which perhaps, in the city, should be reconsidered.
When it comes to sweetie, Today, we are a passive agent. We limit ourselves to filming them, photographing them. We suffer them, we observe them and we are amazed at the asphalt that gives way, the concrete that collapses, the torrents that return to demand space. Once upon a time, storms were faced, even in an imaginative way. Human beings re-established the role they had chosen to occupy in the world. In addition to being storytellers, we were characters in a shared story. Without delegating to others, that is, to anyone but me. Once upon a time the storms cut each other.
When then the sweetie they became particularly violent or insidious, and cutting them was not possible, the people of Messina could count on a secret weapon that – it seems – they envied us all over the island: the bell of the Madonna della Castanea. Pitrè tells us about it, learning about this fact from reading Father Domenico Alberti who in turn wrote, in the 18th century, about miracles that had occurred centuries earlier. The news about this miraculous bell capable of dispersing bad weather is lost in the folds of history. Among the pages of the parish registers from centuries ago it should still be noted, with the words for driving lightning the bell ringer’s compensation for these exceptional services. I asked for confirmation of this story from the Casali della Tramontana association of Castanea, involved in various projects to promote and disseminate the history and traditions of the Messina farmhouses; it seems there is a reminiscence of it that is fading away.
Regardless of the actual existence of this prodigious bell, ring bells against a storm it was a very widespread act in the past, so much so that several bore the engraving I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning.
Maybe we should learn from the past. Perhaps certain enchantments, certain furious outbursts of the elements should be faced with a human, spiritual even if not necessarily rational act; a sound invocation that transcends space and time.
If an enchanted city remains fatally entangled in the coils of a relentless and tenacious dragoness, perhaps it needs someone who is willing to ring the bells.
