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It's another stunning sunset in the western edge of the Sicilian coast, and I'm right in front of the Real Duomo in Erice, the pluri-millenary "Mount", sung by Virgil in the Aeneid as "close to the stars", and founded by the mythical homonymous son of Venus and Bute who became King of the Elimi, an ancient tribe that settled in these lands.
Welcome to a realm of gods and demi-gods, heroes and nymphs, saints and hermits, Faith and Art, who still survives as a practically intact, magnificent medieval village.
Following century after century of splendor, misery and wars, it's enlightening to remember how Thucydides recalled "Trojans in flight" arriving with their ships in Sicily and then interacting with the Sicani and the Elimi, "while their cities carried the names of Erice and Segesta".
And then, much later, Thucydides tells us, the Segestans took ambassadors from Athens to the temple of Aphrodite in Erice: that's where all the cool cats of the time used to hang out.
From the apartment of Roger II, King of Normandy in Cefalu in the late 11th century, to creeks and coves scratching the shores of the deep blue Mar Tirreno; from Venus worshipped in Erice to Venus worshipped in Segesta, it was in these realms drenched in History and Mythology that I happened to follow, from a safe distance, a rather prosaic, provincial manifestation of post-modernity:
a clown show in Vilnius advertised as the NATO summit.Imagine an epigone of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian from the early 1st century tracking the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans to Sicily and pointing that the Venus altar at the Erice heights was erected by Aeneas himself to honor his mother, reacting to the "ceremonial" staged by a bunch of North Atlantic upstarts, led by a declining superpower which qualifies crossroads-of-the-world Sicily as a mere AMGOT: "American Government Occupied Territory".
Well, you don't need to be Seneca, in first century Rome, to observe that Sicily, like nowhere else in the world, embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman.
So it was impossible not to see the NATO clown show for what it was: a tawdry, trashy crypto-Aristophanes rip-off - and deprived from the slightest trace of self-deprecating humor.
Comment: He was discharged the next day. From CNN: