Stone upon stone: an Italian sojourn: Remnants of grace and beauty

So much of Sicily had a past far more beautiful than its present. Piazza Armerina, too, has seen better days. If you look beyond the street rubbish and the unpainted, poorly maintained dwellings that huddle together up and downhill, you still see remnants of it.

There was money around once. Baron Marco Trigona, who owned much of this middle section of the island along with prized bits elsewhere, was one of the wealthiest families around in the sixteenth century. He left the Catholic diocese, here, his entire fortune in his will. With it they built a Duomo at the top of town just a few steps away from the Trigona home, the Palazzo Trigona, placing his family eagle emblem high on the church front.

The church fathers could afford the best architects, the best artists at the time, and despite earthquakes, slides and invasions, it still stands solid today: the high point of the piazza. With its beautiful blue and white interior enhanced by a spectacular baptistry, its font prominent at the top of decorative stairs. And a gorgeous feature, somewhat like a theatre box, high up looking over the nave.

From the piazza you look down on the rippled clay-tiled rooftops of the entire community and across to the gently terraced hillsides shabbily clothed in green with clumps of olive trees. It is much as it ever was.

Down the cobbled lanes we explored and came upon an old blocky castle, built in the fourteenth century, in the days of the Aragon rule: military-style, defensive, not at all decorative. But still, in its simplicity, somewhat beautiful. For a time this century it was used as a prison. These days it has no role. It stands empty, unused, surrounded by overflowing trash. We noticed the Castello Piazza on which it stands.

Then noticed an elderly stylish gentleman at what appeared to be the front door of his own palazzo backing his car out of what looked like the bottom floor of the house, then park it in a cleverly engineered space kept vacant overnight by two bollards that appeared to be concreted in, rearing up from the roadway in the piazza. But, he drove straight over them, back first, then forward to park, and as he did so, they flattened like flexible soft hosing, to make him a perfect parking space. I laughed at such enterprise and ingenuity.

He, laughed, too, then in Italian invited us into the faded elegance of his 'garage' which doubled as his majestic palazzo entrance. Today, it has a wooden ramp from the road up to the vast entrance doors to ease his car in and out. The space he parks in might once have been a beautiful ballroom: it still has lovely antique chairs and a piano in one corner as though he might occasionally still use it for a night's entertainment. He shares this with his amour, now. Just the two of them, he told us we think, in this vast space, with its rearing staircase that must take a half a morning to climb. All of it in its dim, elegant and faded beauty filled with green plants in pots striving to reach every speck of sunlight, still.

Just two or three doors down was another palazzo and like the Aragonese Castle, was boarded up, empty except for homeless cats. It, too, was beautiful once. You can see its lovely bones.

Three men were standing on the street corner surrounded by overflowing bins, street trash and animal waste. One called and asked where we were from. Their first question, then, in Italian, but we understood it, was: do you have trash like this all over Australia? They gestured around them. So, even the people are ashamed of their way their community looks. Maybe, then, they need to be angrier: do more than stand on street corners talking about the problem.

We negotiated our way downhill, then, through the one-way system of bumpy cobbled lanes that in any other place would be an enforced pedestrian passage by now, so narrow are most of them; then drove the few kilometres to spend the afternoon at the Villa del Casala, a Roman villa that is now a UNESCO site, extraordinary in its comprehensiveness.

A dwelling has been here since the second century. Things have been added to it since then, as time moved on. In the fourth century it had a new and very important owner: a Roman: most likely a Senator, or the owner may even have been the Governor of Sicily at the time. He was clearly influential in the Roman Empire. For the period of his occupation and beyond, the house became a masterpiece of mosaic stone work. And for 150 years or more it must have been one of the most beautiful in the empire.

Then the Vandals moved in, then the Normans, then a mudslide so severe the remaining inhabitants moved up the mountain to Piazza Armerina and left it covered: it was too hard to dig out. Then people forgot about it over the ensuing centuries and it reverted back to nature. Until huge excavation work was carried out, and the remnants of this once extraordinary building were exposed.

In its day it was called a palace, and the layout was designed to have similar spaces as any palace: public rooms for formal guests and diplomats; hot and cold saunas and spas for guests and family; servants quarters; kitchen spaces, grand entertaining and dining rooms; guest rooms; and separate private quarters for the family, the children separated from the parents by a large baptistry: all the sections built around a very grand pool and porticoed interior courtyard, a public space, accessible by everyone.

Every single floor was covered in tiny tiled mosaic work. Thousands upon thousands of man tiling hours went into creating just the floors of this home. Many walls, too, were fully painted in gorgeous colour. The state of the mosaics, though, is what is truly amazing. So much of it has survived to give a very clear picture of how it all must have looked in its heyday. The square promenade surrounding the pool is covered with medallions of wild and domesticated animals. Some in near perfect condition.

Other rooms are patterned simply with beautiful geometric design: often repeated elsewhere, so likely meaningful overall to the designer. There was a guest room, a hunting room, decorated in various hunting scenes: in the centre, in the outdoors, under a red tent, was a banquet in progress, showing the grand meal taken on completion of a successful hunt. Another room had a fishing theme. All hints to the lifestyle of those who inhabited the house.

There is an extremely long room, like a heavily decorated ambulatory hall in a grand palace today, showing numerous scenes of wild animals being captured from all parts of the world. They were roped to carts pulled by the beasts of burden of the day: oxen. They were taken to close ports, like Carthage, and loaded on to ships for transportation. Probably heading for Rome. Probably intended for display at the Circus Maximus: another appeasement for the populace: to keep their support.

There was a gym for the daughters of the house: decorated with Bikini Girls, practicing for something like the Olympic games, and one, clearly the winner: crowned, and bearing a winner's victory palm. The boy's room caught Miss Bec's attention. She liked the wild rooster biting the kneeling boy's bottom. That made her laugh. The master's bedroom, a luxurious space with a special niche for the bed and an erotic medallion just where you walk, designed to inspire all ye who enter here.

Amazing: these remnants of such wealth: how people once lived; how some people still live. Yet, how utterly tragic and sad, the conditions so very many currently do live in, these days. That contrast between the haves and the have nots is vast and prickly. But such simple things as rubbish collection can be handled, and need to be dealt with.