As in “The Game of Mirrors”, the intriguing story by Andrea Camilleri, even for the drought in Sicily, someone wants to confuse something with deceptive reflections and half-truths. Reality and illusion, not only in Sicily, when it comes to water, often overlap and become confused. As also in the stories narrated by Leonardo Sciascia, and in his precious document-commentary on the black and white film-reportage made in 1968 with the provocative title: «The great thirst in Sicily will end in 2015».
They are 34 minutes of Sicilian and Italian history through water and between wells, dams, aqueducts, desalination plants and networks that brought out “hands on the water”, a business system in balance between politics and crime, which took into account murders such as that of the journalist Mario Francese, killed in 1979 after articles denouncing the strange affairs around the dams. The water business also contributed to increasing the power of the Liggio, Riina and Provenzano families. Even through water they mortgaged the development of the island, leaving it on the margins of efficiency.
But Sicily was the island of water. It would be enough to remember when once upon a time there was the Conca d’Oro, the most beautiful coastal plain between the Palermo mountains and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the glance that dazzled travelers and writers such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe who, having arrived in Palermo in 1787, enchanted he wrote: «Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the spirit. Here is the key to everything.” Palermo was also spectacular for its waters. On either side he saw two navigable rivers flowing. One was the Kemonia, which the Arabs called the “river of bad weather” because it flooded with the rains, now completely buried under the city. The other, the Papireto, was the “river of the West”, fed by copious mountain springs, and all around the stupendous vegetation of papyrus, today relegated to an open sewer and also buried since the Bourbon period.
The island was the first Italian area to be colonized. From the Sicani, the ancient people who called it Sicania, then from Cretans, Elymians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Punics, then Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, French and Spanish. Palermo stored abundant volumes of rainwater under its groundwater, with the addition of water supplies from the surrounding mountains bounded by the Eleuterio and Jato rivers. There was never a shortage of water, taken from wells and then distributed by the complex and surprising cunicular systems that cross the Middle Eastern-style city of the qanat. Medieval scholars and travelers left us enraptured descriptions of sources, springs, pools, fountains, fish ponds and gushing pools that abounded inside and outside the walls. The Baghdad merchant Ibn Hawqal, struck by so much water, wrote in 943: «… the inhabitants of the old city like those of the Halisah (the fortified citadel seat of the emir, ed.) and the rest of the neighborhoods, quench their thirst with the ‘water from the wells of their own homes… and the abundant waters that flow around Palermo and flow from west to east with force enough to turn two millstones each». The Arab-Andalusian traveler Ibn-Ubayr who visited it in 1185 in the middle of the Norman period, tells of gardens, watchtowers and canals on the Palermo countryside, royal residences immersed in lush paradise gardens that colored the city and which King Roger defined as «solazzi », and large fountains from which water gushed. Descriptions that today seem invented, but it was all true. The park of the Zisa castle from a thousand and one nights was surrounded by avenues, water channels and basins connected with networks of terracotta pipes, the catusi, with running water under pressure or gravity. And the agricultural plain was crossed by surface reticular irrigation channels called saje.
From the second half of the twentieth century, the fertile plain disappeared under one of the most impressive European urban deregulations: the “sack” of Palermo. It was a convulsive, irrational and speculative expansionism that buried the “gold” of Palermo, its water sources, wells, aquifers, many qanats and blue veins under streets and buildings, also burying the two rivers Papireto and Kemonia . Farewell to the legendary city of water and 100 fountains and with such abundant springs that the Arabs called “wid”, river, translated by the people into “Guilla” which indicated the fountain of the spring today under Piazza Beati Paoli, fed by the crystalline spring of the ‘Averinga.
The Normans had embellished it with the beautiful garden of the «Cuncuma», incorporated into the Church of San Giovanni alla Guilla where in the sacristy there is the couplet by the poet of Monreale Antonio Veneziano: «Origin from the Nile and name from the Papyrus; and I, who was a wave of the sea, am now a stream of terrestrial water.” They made the people of Palermo believe that the stuffed crocodile displayed on the vaulted entrance to the garden since 1612 had arrived in Palermo by water from the Nile and then ended up surprising the customers of a grocery store.
The water to be saved was at the center of civil battles by Danilo Dolci, sociologist, poet and “Gandhi of Sicily” who, with fasts and marches, since the 1960s, called for essential water infrastructures to change the thirsty face of Sicily against «the well mafia».
But on the island on the frontier of the desert climate, the endemic emergency condition remained. Which still in the year 2024, on March 12th saw yet another declaration of the «State of crisis and emergency for drinking water until December 31st», then we will see. The Region listed the provinces that were dry even in the middle of winter: Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Enna, Messina, Palermo and Trapani, with states of alert in those of Catania, Ragusa and Syracuse it started rationing.
It is true that in Sicily everything is destined to get complicated, and water is one of those issues that are part of mythology and habituation to the conditions of a century ago. But even today, in the Agrigento area and surrounding areas, the norm is always the “rotation” of the water which arrives every three or four days if all goes well, and the most common furniture on terraces and balconies is made up of containers and bins of plastic to accumulate it, if investments are zero; if national laws have remained unapplied for 28 years, like the Galli law, and as if nothing had happened; if the municipalities or farmers still have to buy water from “wholesalers” as in the Middle Ages; if many obsolete plants were and remain obsolete with networks that lose even 100% of resources and companies and authorities of the area and tariff plans and investment plans are unknown in much of the island; if we can’t even spend the billions allocated for aqueducts and purifiers; if we mourn the 5 deaths asphyxiated in Casteldaccia while cleaning sewer pipes completely lacking in training and protection systems because there is a lack of water companies, then the problem is not drought but other causes. Starting from the absence of integrated water service companies. 68% of the municipalities, with 47% of the regional population, still entrust the water service to some employee of the municipal technical offices in the total lack of technical skills, personnel, means and financial resources. To nothing. And they continue to appoint new “extraordinary commissioners”. The island, all in all remaining on the edge of the 2022-23 drought, is in its fifth consecutive year of rainfall below the long-term average, with almost 5 months without rain between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024.
The two largest reservoirs, the lake dams of Lentini in the Syracuse area and of Ogliastro between the provinces of Enna and Catania, with a capacity of 127 and 110 million m2 of water respectively, in mid-winter contained 49 and 22 million m2 . In the Rosamarina dam of Caccamo instead of 100 million m2 the bar indicated just 12, in the Palermo area the 72.5 million m2 Poma dam was at 22. But on average on the island volumes of water capable of to satisfy every need, if only the reservoirs were in full efficiency and capacity, and if there were no such patched-up systems and distribution networks. Of the 26 large dams controlled by the Region, 3 are out of operation, 5 with limitations for safety reasons, 10 awaiting testing14. There is no regional plan worthy of the name for primary infrastructure, and every attempt to reorganize water management has failed miserably.
A case for everyone? The Trinità dam which15 should provide water to 8,000 hectares of crops in the Trapani area between Castelvetrano, Campobello di Mazara and Mazara del Vallo, one of the symbols of inaction and waste. Built between 1954 and 1959, it has never been tested with its lake, 69 meters above sea level with a liquid surface of 2.13 km2 corresponding to a maximum volume of 20.3 million m3. Subject to limitations, by order of the Region’s dam office, the manager Consortium of Reclamation of Western Sicily must empty it. And for half a century now, “seismic stability checks have always been underway”. And so, in dry years the water slides away.
Also analyzing the average regional rainfall, we have 2023 which ended with 588 mm of rainfall height – one millimeter of rain is equivalent in quantity to 1 liter of water falling on a surface of 1 m2 -, 22% less than the average of the last twenty years, reports the regional agro-meteorological service. It rains a little less and it rains “badly”, with accumulations of now subtropical storms which, for example in the Ragusa area, on 9 and 10 February 2023 dropped 228.8 mm of rain, 54% of the entire year. The progressive tropicalization of the climate meant that May recorded 42% of the rainfall in the whole of 2023, in the month in which on average just 3% fell. If the Region indicates an average requirement of 1,750 billion m3 of water per year for the whole of Sicily, we must be aware that those 588 mm of rain that fell in 2023 on the 25,711 km2 of the island, despite differences in cumulative amounts between geographical areas, they are equivalent to a total of approximately 15.2 billion cubic meters of water per year. A sensational endowment! Also calculating the amount that evaporates before reaching the ground, the amount that infiltrates the ground, and the amount of unretained surface runoff, there would be plenty of water on the island. It would be enough to simply organize yourself to take advantage of it.
Data from
-Database General Directorate for Dams and Water Infrastructures, Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport.
-Nino Amadore, «Sole 24 Ore» 03.22.2024, Diga Trinità, the great unfinished Sicilian one;
-Pietro Todaro, The qanats of Palermo, Agorà Edizioni 2002; The water of the qanats of Palermo in «Archeologia viva», Florence, 1986; Islamic gardens. Water collection and management systems in the Palermo Plain, University of Palermo, 2006.
