A DUCHESS’S HERB GARDEN

PALERMO, ITALY

In the months before traveling to Sicily, my mother requested we all read The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s great historical novel set during the twilight of the Sicilian aristocracy, published posthumously in 1958. In Palermo, the Palazzo Lanza Tomasi boasts itself the final home of the author and is still home to the Duke and Duchess of Palma, Gioacchino and Nicoletta. This is where Tomasi penned The Leopard, the Duke himself a spirited inspiration for the enigmatic character of Tancredi. And it is with a heavy dose of magical disbelief that I place myself exactly here, for “Cooking with the Duchess,” during which Nicoletta escorts her guests to the El Capo street market to purchase ingredients for a lunch we all spend the better part of the day preparing. On this particular day in late July, her guests are me, my family, a British writer named Kate and her Irish partner, Paddy. At the market, the Duchess explains that in Sicily, you “belong” to different food stalls, and to buy bread anywhere other than where you’ve always bought bread “would be a terrible offense.” She unwraps a loaf to pass around, “to share with my friends, so we will break bread together and belong to each other forever.” Back at the palazzo, we roam the terrace garden to pluck herbs and jasmine garnishes for our meal, gliding past her family of roaming tortoises. ⁣⁣⁣⁣
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At the end of the day, we stand at the base of the palazzo’s marble staircase. Nicoletta points to a grotesque portrait of a limp-headed ancestor, Sister Maria Crocifissa, a Carmelite nun who had the special ability to speak with the devil. “The reason this portrait is so creepy” she explains, “is because it is a portrait of a dead lady. They put the corpse on the chair and did the portrayal.” This is where we decide to take our picture with the Duchess, all plump from our meal of swordfish rolls and cantaloupe pudding. Our family, Paddy the Irishman, Kate the writer, Nicoletta the Duchess, and Sister Maria Crocifissa, the devil whisperer. And now, we belong to each other forever. Until, as Tomasi himself wrote, we all “f[ind] peace in a heap of livid dust."

1.31.2020