The black jasmine of Sicily

Even the grates in Sicily have a scent. It's as if the iron, forged by fire over centuries of craftsmanship, holds the soul of the island. Centuries of oxymorons, languor, and cruelty.

The scent, it goes without saying, is that of jasmine . A dizzying fragrance. Intoxicating and stunning when it blooms at night, in the moonlight. Perhaps this is why it has always been grown near windows: in houses, in courtyards, on balconies. It climbs tenaciously and greenly all year round. It foams with white flowers in summer.

For those born in the South and living far away, jasmine is like the madeleine for Proust: it is an olfactory memory, a return home . Perhaps this is why it is considered a flower of love and bonds, the most feminine of creation. "A soft and secret urn," Giovanni Pascoli defined it in his song "Il gelsomino notturno," composed in 1901 for a friend's wedding. For him, "the twilight butterflies," from whose "open calyxes exude the scent of red strawberries," are a symbol of Eros and Thanatos, sensuality and death.

Here it is. The dark side of jasmine . The semblance of innocence that conceals secret seductions and carnal pleasures. It is around this "dark" side that the saga of the jasmine farmers unfolds, the pickers of buds in the intensive cultivations established in the late 1920s in Sicily and southern Italy. Their aim was to supply the essence, a waxy mass called "concrete," to perfume and cosmetics factories, including the House of Chanel with its iconic, now century-old Chanel No. 5. Of course, it's already a contradiction in terms that the labor of poor peasant women from the South was aimed at the sensorial pleasure of a transnational elite of wealthy women.

Thus, until the 1970s, the domestic practice of jasmine cultivation was accompanied by what was known as "industrial" production depending on the place and time . For it was a story of torment and redemption, of exploitation and emancipation , the harvesting of jasmine for industrial purposes in Sicily, especially in the Milazzo plain, in Ispica and Avola, and also on the Ionian coast of Calabria. Santì La Rosa and Venera Tomarchio have recounted it with a wealth of testimonies, documents, photographs, fragments of art and poetry, details of every kind, even lists of jasmine growers, in an essay published by Lombardo Edizioni of Milazzo entitled, appropriately, " Gelsominaie. Stories of women, struggles, flowers and perfumes ."

Only women could be jasmine collectors. Skilled young women, sometimes recruited with their children in tow. Sometimes they were so small that their mothers had to carry them, tied to their shoulders with cloth bands or kept in baskets placed next to the rows. Try to imagine these infants still with the "jasmine-colored complexion" extolled by Lope de Vega in the Spanish Golden Age. Children dozing among clouds of insects next to green vines that bore white, fleshy, star-shaped flowers. A scene that repeated itself every day for six months of the year, from the warm nights of June to the bitter ones of November. Mothers and sons. Or rather, especially daughters. Girls as young as five helped by picking handfuls of flowers.

Women's hands were needed, small and agile, capable of identifying by touch the flowers picked just before blooming. They were needed, indeed, in lands of hardship like those of southern Italy. Lands that, then as now, offered an abundance of labor compared to employment opportunities. They needed flexible and unpretentious backs, willing to bend for hours between the rows irrigated the previous evening at dusk, so that the wet jasmine would release its maximum fragrance when harvested.

In his book " The Olive Tree and the Wild Olive, " the writer Vincenzo Consolo, born in Sant'Agata di Militello, near Milazzo, perfectly describes the work in the jasmine fields: "Then, in the morning twilight, when the grass and leaves were heavy with dew, ranks of women advanced between the rows of bushes, bent over, their aprons like sacks, to pluck the delicate buds. The little girls followed, like gleaners, picking the remaining buds here and there, sleepy, with red hands."

The harvest began after midnight in plots far from the villages. It continued until early morning, when the baskets filled with flowers were weighed by foremen accustomed to harassing the women. And perhaps doing so with gusto. The workers' wages were starvation. A kilo of jasmine flowers, cleaned of petioles and remaining leaves, meant hours and hours of work and was worth much less than a kilo of bread in the war and postwar years .

The pickers worked on a piecework basis . They sank, sometimes knee-deep, into the marshy earth. The mud weighed down their bare feet, coating them with clay. The clods were full of hookworms that penetrated the skin, eventually reaching the intestines or lungs. Hookworm disease, a parasitic infection that could have very serious health consequences, was widespread among the jasmine workers. It was the same occupational disease suffered from among the rice weeders in the Po Valley .

The rice weeders, however, managed to break through the glass ceiling of visibility with a neorealist film like Bitter Rice from 1949, starring a stunning Silvana Mangano, bare thighs and feet in the water in the rice paddy.

The history of the jasmine groves, however, is still little known . "That's why Venera Tomarchio and I wrote this book. I regret not having done it earlier," says Santì La Rosa, 71, son of Tindaro and Eliana Giorli, a Tuscan who had participated in the Resistance as a partisan courier and, after the war, moved to Sicily and married. She was active in politics and trade unions there until the age of 92, when she was elected by popular vote to the city council of Monforte San Giorgio, a medieval village on the slopes of the Peloritani mountains.

Tindaro and Eliana La Rosa fought their entire lives for the trampled dignity of the jasmine farmers and other farmworkers of Milazzo and the valley watered by the Mela River. "Communists from the suburbs," Santì la Rosa fondly recalls. He then proudly reels off the names of those who, alongside his parents, were involved in the peasant struggles in Sicily and in agrarian reform. Landowners considered this reform a "focu ranni," a fire that burns the land. It's a shame that when it became law in 1950, it was already out of date. Because the escape, with cardboard suitcases, toward the north had already begun. To the factories of Turin, the industries of Milan, the mines of Belgium. "My sister Elisa and I spent a lot of time at party branches with our parents. There or at our home, as children, we met figures like Pancrazio De Pasquale, Simona Mafai, Emanuele Macaluso, Giuliana Saladino, Pippo Oddo, and Emanuele Tuccari. It was truly a different era," concludes Santì La Rosa.

Of course, it was the season Giuliana Saladino, a journalist with a civic commitment in Sicily, writes about in her beautiful and intense book, Terra di Rapiera (Land of Rapture). It was when "war seemed like a celebration, and celebration seemed like war."

For the jasmine growers of the Milazzo plain, the request for a fairer wage, a waterproof apron so they wouldn't constantly have wet bellies, and a pair of boots each to keep parasites from eating their bodies was a feat.

It ended up that on a sultry day in the summer of 1946, in August, a large number of jasmine workers, led by Grazia Saporita, known as "the sharpshooter," occupied the police station. Many were arrested. It's clear: the state apparatus was undoubtedly on the side of the landowners. The unrest, however, spread and lasted for nine days. The jasmine, scorched by the sun, fell to the ground, black. The plants, unpruned, suffered throughout the season. The jasmine workers—"seven hundred or more women" according to Giuliana Saladino, who wrote a long, detailed article for the "politics and culture" magazine Comunità, conceived and edited by Adriano Olivetti—were considered mad. No one in Sicily had ever dared so much. But they had the satisfaction of being considered trailblazers by other communities of laborers, both on the island and abroad. Following their lead, the olive pickers of Puglia also fought in 1959 to improve their working conditions. The jasmine workers of Milazzo doubled their pay and received the coveted rubber boots as early as 1946. Unfortunately, the little girls continued to trot around at night following their mothers for a handful of jasmine. Naturally, they continued to get sick.

The testimony of Sarina Puliafito, daughter of the "bersagliera" (a soldier) is touching. Sarina began picking jasmine at the age of six with her brothers, "all soaked, without aprons or anything, but what were we supposed to do?" The children knew their father was a prisoner in Germany and understood their mother had no other way to feed them. When the harvest lasted until Christmas, their mother would light a log beside the rows to warm her chilly children in turns. Sarina remembers her mother, a "bersagliera" (a soldier), as someone capable of facing everything and everyone. "She faced the cold and the bosses. She faced the farmers. And even the women who picked flowers with us. Because my mother wanted to go on strike with the others, and there were those who didn't want to and called the police."

The history of jasmine fields ends with the development of the chemical industry after World War II. "The Americans introduced laboratory-synthesized essences, which made jasmine production in Sicily and Calabria less profitable," says Venera Tomarchio, the thoughtful co-author of "Gels of Women: Stories of Women, Struggles, Flowers, and Perfumes." She adds that other factors were also at play: changing living conditions in southern Italy and international competition. "There are over 200 varieties of jasmine. The one used to extract its essence is indiscriminately called Arabian, Sicilian, or Spanish jasmine. Its olfactory traces are lost in antiquity, reaching as far as ancient Babylon and beyond. But even today, it is the symbolic flower of the Mediterranean. A flower that unites the shores. It does not separate."

Meanwhile, the jasmine lands of the Milazzo plain gave way to a refinery inaugurated in the early 1960s and its associated industries. The industry was supposed to bring prosperity to the local population, at least according to political intentions. However, there were accidents, some serious, with consequences for people and the environment. On June 4, 1993, seven workers died in an explosion that hurled shards of steel hundreds of meters, followed by a subsequent fire. Another disaster, seemingly foretold, occurred in September 2014. A giant tank caught fire. The population was evacuated. The flames died out after a week when the tank ran out of fuel.

Nothing remains of the industrial jasmine cultivations in Sicily. Of course, the plant remains. Alive and well, one might say. For centuries, it has found its natural habitat on the island. Not only is it an integral part of the landscape, it is a symbol, a tradition, even a food.

What would a Sicilian summer be without jasmine water? It's an essential ingredient in any self-respecting "melon ice cream." Or without "scorzonera and cinnamon" granita, which has virtually disappeared from ice cream parlors because it requires so much preparation. If you want it, you can make it at home. You need to pick a good number of jasmine flowers one by one before dawn. Rinse them with great respect, given their fragility, and refrigerate them in a container with water for a whole day before using them. It's easier to find the expensive, recently produced jasmine chocolate.

Who knows if jasmine grower Iachina, who claims to hate the scent of jasmine because, when she picked it, "it stuck to her skin," managed to avoid tasting such culinary delicacies. Certainly, she couldn't have escaped the sight of jasmine. Its ability to cling to anything: to suburban railings and the baroque scrolls of the iron bars that screen the entrances of buildings, convents, and cloisters. The grates that absorb its scent.

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