Seductive melancholy

On the death of his mother, Joachim Sartorius – a Berlin-based poet, diplomat, lawyer and translator – used some of his inheritance to buy an apartment on the tiny island of Ortigia, the old centre of Syracuse, on Sicily’s east coast. Sensory delights were a key part of its attraction, and Syracuse is replete with scenes of delectation: the sea shifts from dove grey to “brutish blue” and “arsenic green”; the food market is “the most magnificent, colourful, and richly fragranced place” in all of Sicily; with the passage of the sun, the stone walls of the old town ripen from white, through yellow, to the cinnamon of evening. The townscape of Ortigia is so stony that Sartorius can easily count the palm trees that grow there: the total is a mere thirty.

He occasionally ventures onto the mainland, where he finds a few villas that give a hint of the elegance of Syracuse c.1900, and a blight of “gyms, cheap Asian supermarkets, tyre fitters [and] stonemasons selling ghastly sculptures”. Ortigia is where he spends most of his time: it’s there that the city’s seductive melancholy is strongest. Syracuse was once magnificent – “the greatest and most beautiful of all Greek cities”, said Cicero. Its theatre – still standing – was attended by Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Pindar. The Syracusia, one of the largest ships of the classical world, was designed by the Syracuse-born Archimedes and built in a local dockyard. Nowadays the port traffic is negligible and the associated businesses – “the agents, financiers, warehousers, surveyors, chandlers, ship repairers, and insurers” – have gone. Tourism is almost everything.

The past is as strong a presence as the present. Sartorius’s barber runs a shop that’s “the purest Sicilian Art Deco, unchanged since 1928”. A local artist, Gaetano Tranchino, creates paintings that are drenched in reminiscences of a distant Syracusan childhood – Sartorius buys “a pure dream picture” from him. He goes in search of the resting place of the poet and dramatist Count August von Platen, who died in Syracuse in 1835; the grave is in the former gardens of the villa of Count Landolina, who nursed von Platen in his final hours, but is celebrated more for his discovery of the “Venus Landolina”, a figure of Aphrodite that Guy de Maupassant travelled from Paris to admire.

Well served by Stephen Brown’s smooth translation, Sartorius is a deeply cultured and urbane guide. The ordinary folk of Syracuse are not wholly absent from his book: he observes a group of swimmers “evidently from the poorer classes”, who remind him, in a characteristic moment of aestheticization, of the “lonely women in Cesare Pavese”. Some quotidian scenes put him in mind of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini. But Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo, and the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa from which it was derived, are the closest analogues: Sartorius is closely attuned to the milieu of Syracuse’s ailing aristocracy.

Baron Pietro Beneventano del Bosco invites the author to a private concert at his palace, arranged primarily for certain “wealthy British lords and ladies”, plus an assortment of “local nobility and businesspeople”. When the music is over the baron takes him to his archive to inspect documents that will supposedly “cast a new light on Caravaggio”, who spent time in the city after fleeing Malta. More central to Syracuse, however, is another baron, Lucio Tasca di Lignari, who reminds Joachim Sartorius of the hero of Lampedusa’s masterpiece. A keen hunter and marine archaeologist in his younger days, he maintains a studiolo in his palace where he stores his archaeological finds, and has a second such room at his wine estate for his collection of ancient coins. The baron speaks for the author when he declares: “The truly great cities are distinguished by the taint of their decline.”

Jonathan Buckley’s Tell was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths prize. His new novel will be published in March

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