The last two prompts for #menchMarch on Instagram were Circle & Life. They spurred me to do something I've wanted to do for a long time:
copy the stitchery on my Sicilian grandmother's dress.
I was mending a holey cashmere sweater of mine at the time, so I stitched the pattern (but wandery) on the sleeve, below, inset:
ABOVE: Photo of my paternal grandmother, Rosaria DeNicola, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, c. 1922. She was born into a family of seamstresses, in Monreale, Sicily.
Sashiko, visible mending from Japan, is all the rage now among menders. I love it too–but it's become boring to see it copied in mend after mend.
To mix it up, we who are not Japanese could also look to patterns of our ancestors for inspiration. They probably won't be mending patterns--most people in the past tried to make mends invisible--but there are tons of surface patterns we could incorporate.
Sicilian Tumbrel
Penny Cooper does not have human ancestors; she always says she is "dinosaur and fern juice".
(Manufactured of plastic in China, the girlettes were based on a story by an Austrian-American about a little girl in Paris--Madeline.)
Hey, I should look at fern patterns! I just thought of that.
But for Penny's school project making a papier-mache mask in Santa Fe, and again for her Easter tumbrel, I looked at Sicilian cart art.
This is the cart that inspired the tumbrel's pattern. (I didn't like the pictures on the outside of this cart. I don't much like the flowery swirls either.)
Sicilian Art
When I was in Sicily, I liked best the strictly geometric (not botanical) mosaic patterns.
Like this [via], from the Cappella Palatina/Palatine Chapel in Palermo.
Art & Genes & Disease
Sitting like a landing pad in the Mediterranean, Sicily was (is) a mish-mash of cultures.
Its medieval art is a mix of
North African Islamic (Fatimid Egypt and Islamic Spain);
Byzantine (Greek Christian, from the Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople/Istanbul);
and Norman ("Norsemen" Viking settlers in France) who conquered Sicily in the 1100s.
More info: "A Unique Fusion: The Medieval Artwork of Norman Sicily".
Jewish influence, too.
Also influences from Central and East Asia via the Silk Road. Pasta!
My father had his DNA tested in 2016, the year before he died, and all of this turns up in his (our) genes. His genetic ancestry was Italian, of course, and lots of Mediterranean, also Norman, a splash of North African & Jewish, and––this surprised me–– 25% Central Asian. Looking at trade routes, that makes sense.
Everyone stopped in Sicily.
(Also, Genghis Khan.)
Plague traveled the Silk Road too:
"The first reported instance of the Black Death in Europe dates from 1347 when Genoese traders arrived in Sicily after having returned from the Black Sea." [via "Silk Road"]
I didn't know that.
In juicier language, the History Channel reports:
"The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina.
People gathered on the docks were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus."
Here's a map of plague routes from the Map Archive:
