Borgese genius loci...
"It's 17 September, the day of the patron saint, San Gandolfo, a Lombard Franciscan who walked all the way to the Madonie Mountains and his staff bloomed with lilies (ed jasmine). It is no longer lily season (ed jasmine); but I still have in my nostrils, and in every pore, the aroma and blue of a September day between those mountains and the sea.
There was the beautiful procession, with the many-coloured wooden saint borne aloft, and the cries (Viva viva San Gannorfu) the bearers and the people at the breaks and passages; and behind the saint, the priests, in gowns - so many, in the municipality of five thousand souls and thirty churches - with candles in their hands - but the flame is almost invisible, such is the light from heaven - and the litanies. There were the masses in churches made beautiful by the sculptures of Gagini, others from Lombardy, or the famous Flemish triptych - by Van Eych according to my father, according to others by Memling – and the bells ringing, incense, firecrackers, tambourines, long meals, the folded hands.
In the afternoon, the main attraction is the fair on the Piazza Grande. There is crockery; a battering ram or bull bedecked with flowers rides through; above all, there are the stalls with a small selection of toys, and the nougats, almonds, hard mint candy, liquorice and even ice cream. But our home is far away; it is on the last spur of the hill".
G.A. Borgese, Nature morte, Melone e gelato, Corriere della Sera, Wednesday 19 March 1952, now in Gandolfo Librizzi, Il viaggio di un cosmopolita. Il percorso umano e culturale di Borgese attraverso le lettere ai familiari, Palermo University Press, 2022, p. 164
