I’M SITTING ON a rock in the archeological park at Selinunte, on the southern coast of Sicily, when I hear three shots: "Pop-pop . . . pop!" I was raised on a farm and know the sound of a small-bore weapon, a .22 rifle, say, or a .410 shotgun. But from books and movies, I also know the pattern of a lethal takedown: two shots to stop your man as he runs, one for the coup de grâce.
     A few minutes earlier, Barbara had said she wanted to sketch the ruins of one of the Greek temples that dated to the sixth century B.C.; looking around for something to occupy myself, I see a sign for the "Malophoros" and announce, "I’m going to go take a look at the Malaphoros" and set off in that direction. It’d been a long day — we’d taken the train from Palermo to the airport, picked up a car and driven to Segesta to see the temple and theater there before ending up at Selinunte, whose park is immense. It was almost dark, and after fifteen minutes or so, I hadn’t seen anything looking even vaguely like what I imagined a malophoros to be; the word itself means "apple" or "pomegranate bearer," I learn later, and the site I can’t find is a sanctuary where rites were practiced away from the sight of the profane, including, apparently, me.
     The gunfire woke me from my drowsy musings on the classic order of the temples. Books brim with these kinds of juxtapositions between serenity and chaos, restraint and mayhem: back in Florence, where we’re living for four months, I’m teaching The English Patient at my university’s study center, and the war-ravaged characters of that book reflect on the difference between Lorenzo de Medici’s Renaissance villa, where Politian and Pico della Mirandola and the young Michelangelo argued about Plato all night, and the ruined lives they live there.
     Later, I ask a hotel desk clerk if it’s hunting season, and she says yes, for rabbit and birds, animals calling for the kind of light fire I heard in Selinunte. Yet the town where the Greeks once prayed to Apolla and Hera lies between the great mafia centers of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento. Where I was sitting, the olive groves and vineyards had given way to thickets of wild maquis, evergreen shrubs like sage, juniperand myrtle that provide dense cover for bandits. Under the Sicilian sun, it was as dark as night beneath all that brush, and there was no way to see what had been killed there. It could have been a rabbit that was shot so a family could have dinner that night. It could have been a dog with distemper or maybe one that just happened to cross the path of somebody in a foul mood. It could have been a man.

THE HEART HAS many chambers, and it can be dismaying to realize how quickly, even gleefully, we are able to move from the beautiful to the bloody. The most famous recorded live-concert line ever occurs in "Folsom Prison Blues," when Johnny Cash sings he "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," and his inmate audience responds with a rowdy "Yeahhhh!" that has brought a guilty smile to more than one listener’s face. On the one hand, it’s not nice to shoot people. On the other, most of us have wanted to shoot somebody at some point, so it’s easy to agree with the convicts who are just saying what the rest of us don’t have the nerve to.
     I’ve always wondered about that audience reaction, though. I attended a live performance in a Florida prison once, and the inmates at it were a lot better behaved, at least up to a point. A theater troupe was putting on a performance of Waiting for Godot, and I was supposed to lead a discussion afterward. Before the curtain rose, the warden stated in no uncertain terms that the slightest misbehavior would result in an immediate cancellation of the show; the guards seemed angry already, and the audience was intimidated into a respectful silence for the first part of the play.
     But the roles of Pozzo and Lucky were played by women, and when the two actresses appeared, first one and then half a dozen inmates responded with slurpy kissing noises and the kind of how’s-it-going catcalls you might expect to hear from a passing car on a small-town Saturday night. It wasn’t that bad — I’ve heard worse from traditional playgoers — but the guards came down on the audience like storm troopers, throwing inmates against the wall and kicking chairs across the room. I got on the floor and covered my head; when I looked up a couple of minutes later, the hall was empty. So I’ve always had trouble understanding how the Folsom audience could get away with that anarchic "Yeahhhh!"
     It turns out that they didn’t. In Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, his note-for-note reconstruction of Cash’s historic January 13, 1968 Folsom prison concert, Michael Streissguth reports that the inmates listened silently, enthralled by the look and music of the "black circuit rider" who had appeared before them, yelling clamorously only as the song ended. The version the rest of us hear was pumped up by Columbia Records sound engineers who moved audience noise around to create a moment of musical fiction as thrilling as it is specious.
     Yet this bit of legerdemain is one of those artistic lies that tells more truth than any fact ever could. For no matter when and where you live, if you’ve been starved and beaten all your life, if you’ve been worked past the point of collapse and not paid for your labor, if you’ve watched your wife and kids shiver and sicken and die for lack of firewood and food and medicine while the guy who lives in the big house on the hill strolls by every day in his new suit, then you, too, might let out an animal yelp of joy on hearing that someone else has committed a random murder, regretting only that you hadn’t picked up that gun yourself.

MY FIRST IMPRESSION of southern Italy mirrored the image most people get from the movies: this was in Bari, a couple of years before, where we’d driven from Rome and stopped for dinner. As we got out of our car, an older man shouted for me to lock it and then added "La mano nera!" ("The black hand!") as he gestured in a menacing fashion. I’d already figured that southern Italy wasn’t Kansas; earlier that day, we’d taken a side road and, when we tried to get back on the autostrada, had found ourselves at the end of a highway that went nowhere. Literally: the pavement just stopped, with no warning, and, like David Balfour climbing his murderous uncle’s stairs in Kidnapped, we "found nothing but emptiness beyond it." If, like him, I hadn’t stopped in time, the last hundred feet of our southern Italian idyll would have been straight down.
     The more I traveled in the south, the more I went down roads that led nowhere or, at best, to buildings nobody lived in. At another archeological park in Sicily, the stunning Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, I walked to the Temple of Juno at the eastern end and looked south toward an unfinished sports complex, then north toward a gigantic cluster of one ugly building after another, some dozen stories or more. In Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and The Death of the First Italian Republic, Alexander Stille puts at 600 the number of case abusive ("abusive houses") that had been built illegally there, almost certainly as a way of laundering Mafia drug money. The view I had could have been worse: in October 1999, officials began to demolish at least some of Agrigento’s case abusive, though plenty of the eyesores remained.
     From the Temple of Juno, Agrigento looked ratty, but then Sicily has always been poor. Ancient Rome used Sicily as a breadbasket, deforesting much of the island to plant grain. Like Islamic Spain, Sicily enjoyed a period of prosperity under Saracen rule, but as the Renaissance swept across the rest of Europe, the French and Spanish who succeeded the Moors kept the island in a state of feudalism so deeply entrenched that it lasted, in different forms, well into the twentieth century. The Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia recalls how his grandfather labored in the sulphur mines, where boys as young as five were sold to "pickaxe men" to carry extracted material to the surface; the boys worked naked because of the tremendous heat and were sexually abused by their masters. Some of these children were able eventually to buy their freedom, while others remained slaves all their lives. The Franchetti-Sonnino report of 1876 was followed by a law forbidding the use of children under ten in the mines, though the law was often ignored. In his groundbreaking Poverty in Sicily, Danilo Dolci quotes a 1953 government report which says that 47.1% of Sicilians are "completely destitute or semi-destitute persons." Today, the rate of unemployment in all of Italy is around 9%; in the south, including Sicily, it is nearly 25%.

     Where there is poverty, there is brigandry, and where brigandry is rampant, deals with the devil become an everyday way of life. It would be 400 years before crime became organized, but as earlier as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were robber bands referred to as the "mafia." By the nineteenth century, mafiosi were necessary middle men who settled the disputes between absentee landlords who preferred Palermo, Naples, Rome and Paris to the hot and dusty farm country and their hapless tenants.
     The best road map through the complicated web whose main strands are the mafia, the government and the Catholic Church is Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily. Among other things, Robb explains why almost all developed countries are divided into a prosperous industrial north and an impoverished agricultural south. In Renaissance Italy, city-states like Florence, Venice, Bologna, Genoa and Milan were democratic, entrepreneurial and outward-looking; customers had to be sought and contracts signed, so commerce organized life horizontally. But in the Mezzogiorno (the country south of Rome, including Sardinia and Sicily), the wealth came from the land, and agriculture tends to organize life vertically, in a hierarchic and autocratic way with a hundred peasants at the bottom for every rich person at the top. Between these extremes, armed guards controlled estates run by tenant farmers who leased land to sharecroppers who hired day laborers who worked mainly for bread, pasta and beans and led lives little better than those of slaves.
     Robb quotes the protagonist of Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s impressive The Leopard as saying, "For at least twenty-five centuries, we’ve been carrying magnificent . . . civilizations on our backs, all of them coming fully perfected from outside, none sprouted from ourselves, none that we’ve made our own . . . for two thousand five hundred years we’ve been a colony." A character in another novel, Elio Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily, says Sicilians are "always hoping for something else, for something better, and always despairing of being able to attain it." Everything I read about the Sicilian language says that, while you might say, "I have to do this or that," there is no separate tense to express the future, as though there’s no point in breaking your heart by pretending your life is your own.

JOHNNY CASH, TOO, had seen the face of hopelessness when he was young, and he never forgot its features. He was raised amidst terrible poverty in Dyess, Arkansas, and as country boys and girls still do, he took the surest route out, choosing the meager pay, prosy if plentiful chow, and free dental care of the U. S. armed forces over a life that offered none of that. Within months, he’d formed his first band: the Landsberg Barbarians, a group of airmen at the base in Germany which gave the group its name. Country boys who all knew the same standards by Ernest Tubb, Jimmy Rodgers and Roy Acuff as well as the gospel songs of their youth, the Barbarians played and sang in their free time. Melville’s Ishmael says that the Pequod became his Yale College and his Harvard; according to Michael Streissguth, the Landsberg base was Cash’s Juilliard School. Before long, the young airman got up enough nerve to write a few songs himself.
     One of these was "Folsom Prison Blues." In 1953, two years into his Air Force hitch, the twenty-year-old Cash saw Crane Wilbur’s film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, one of Hollywood’s "uninspired melodramas," according to The New York Times, though the plot involving conflict between a crusading prisoner and a sadistic warden struck a spark. Lifting the tune and many of the words from Gordon Jenkins’s "Crescent City Blues," Cash also based the song’s most famous line on one from Jimmie Rodgers’s "Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)," in which the singer boasts "I’m going to shoot poor Thelma / Just to see her jump and fall." In doing so, he tapped into a mean streak in blues, folk and country music that is seldom heard in the more genteel airs of the pop chart. From the hellhounds on Robert Johnson’s trail to the adultery and murder of "Long Black Veil" (another Cash arrangement of a traditional favorite), there is a river of blood in American music that usually stays in its channel, though from time to time it even flows into the lyrics of rock songs like "Hey, Joe," the tale of a guy with a gun in his hand who’s going down to shoot his old lady ‘cause he caught her messin’ ‘round.

OUR FIRST NIGHT in Palermo, we stay at a hotel in the Quattro Canti area, which is the heart of the city. Here, sidewalks are so narrow that we have to walk single file, and shady characters abound. Peter Robb reports that 10,000 deaths were attributed to organized crime in southern Italy between 1983 and 1993. In 1981-82, there were 200 murders in Palermo and 300 disappearances; given the choice, I’d rather be killed outright, since the disappeared often were held in underground bunkers for years, tortured, their body parts sent to hysterical family members, then strangled and covered in lime or set in concrete and tossed into the bay. When we go out for dinner, we lock our passports and extra money in the safe in our hotel room, just taking a single credit card and a bit of cash. Of course, nothing happens; we are bumped and jostled, but by passersby hurrying to their own dinners, not cutthroats and thieves. And just north of us, near the Teatro Massimo opera house, the city opens up into wide piazzas where young parents push baby carriages and old timers stroll arm in arm, just as they do in Milan or Verona.
     Where is the mafia? The bad guys may not be gunning each other down on the sidewalks, but it’s hard to pick up a newspaper without seeing an item on an old or new story about a mafia figure. One of the oldest stories still current is that of Giulio Andreotti, whose picture appears in the International Herald Tribune one morning. Andreotti was never a robust figure in the first place, so the image of the seven-time prime minister’s shrunken face sparks an I-didn’t-know-he-was-still-alive reaction. But the news is all good, at least from Andreotti’s perspective: in its final ruling on the matter, Italy’s highest court clears Andreotti of charges that he conspired with the mafia during his several terms of office; even better, the court permits a statute of limitation to exclude any further delvings into his activities prior to 1980.
     The charges against Andreotti were leveled in a five-year trial that began in 1994 after a pentito or repentant mafioso testified he had seen Andreotti exchange a kiss with godfather Totò Riina, the semi-literate head of the world’s largest drug syndicate who kept his accounts in pencil in a child’s notebook; surely, said the journalists, a peasant like Riina couldn’t possibly run a multi-billion dollar business without protection from those in power. Long assumed on the street to be in the mafia’s pocket, Andreotti walked away a free man in 1999. Later, a friend tells me that Italians refer to Andreotti as a sughero or cork, though others speculate that the first court simply didn’t have the nerve to convict an obviously guilty man who nonetheless had been at the heart of the government for years. Now, perhaps, the highest court has agreed that is better to let the old man live out his last days in peace rather than deliver yet another blow to a country whose corruption scandals have, in recent decades, been endless.
     A newer mafia story involves a much younger man, a killer named Giovanni Brusca who boasted once of committing at least 100 murders. Incredibly, Brusca had been given days out with his family because he, too, had become a pentito and had behaved well during his eight years of prison. But during our Sicilian sojourn, Brusca was seen using a cell phone during the course of an outing, a violation of the terms of his temporary release. One of his murders was a revenge killing of the eleven-year-old son of another pentito whom Brusca kept in a bunker for two years before strangling him and dissolving his body in acid. But the crime for which he was imprisoned was the bombing death in 1992 of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone; this, as well as the killing less than two months later of Falcone’s colleague Paolo Borsellino, put an abrupt end to the public’s indifference to the mafia, and the outrage that erupted in every Italian city at the murders ushered in a new era of accountability.
     Well, sort of: Andreotti is still free, and Brusca, a pudgy man with a scruffy beard, merely looks annoyed in the photo in La Repubblica which shows him being taken back to prison by policemen wearing stocking masks over their faces to conceal their identities. Outside Palermo, planes now land at what is now known as the Falcone-Borsellino Airport. Can you think of any other airport in the world that has been named for two slain judges? Most visitors to Sicily pass through Falcone-Borsellino, and should any of them think the mafia is, as even many government figures maintain, mythical or insignificant or no longer active, they have only to brush up on recent history to realize that La Mano Nera still has a deadly grip on Sicilian life.
     Not my life, though. Exhausted from travel and a bad if almost certainly unnecessary case of the jitters, I check the contents of the wall safe after we get back to the hotel and slide into bed to read another chapter of Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily before sleeping. An hour later, the phone rings. Somehow Barbara’s sister has gotten hold of our number, and the two women chat excitedly as I groan and burrow into the pillows: midnight in Sicily, indeed. Silence and darkness return, and then — I must be making this up, I think — from the heart of the hotel I hear a note-for-note rendition of Gene Vincent’s "Be-Bop-a-Lula."
     Vincent died years ago, but his band reunited in the ’90s for a successful tour — in Europe, musical trends having long since bypassed them in the States. Could they still be on the road? Somewhere under my rumpled sheets, could the real gangsters of Palermo be bopping and twisting to the music of the faux gangsters of my youth, the black-leather-jacketed and ducktailed rockers who stood for the harmless threats our parents dreaded: hotrods, switchblades, bottle blondes in tight sweaters? Robb writes that the Ucciardone prison, which looms above the bay of Palermo, is ruled by mafiosi who order in meals from the city’s finest restaurants. Having ratted out their comrades like Giovanni Brusca, could these killers have been granted an evening in town? Can they have made their way to the ballroom of the Centrale Palace Hotel, and were they even now plotting their next outrages as they shimmied to "Blue Jean Bop" and "Woman Love"?

WHETHER IT’S ROCKABILLY or Rigoletto, art makes us shiver with delight and horror when it describes what really happens to people — other people, that is. Lancelot falls in love with the king’s wife, and a kingdom crumbles, but we didn’t do it. Macbeth slays his rivals and is himself cut down bloodily, but not us. And a thick substratum of American music tells the true stories of the millions of men and women in prison, people most of us don’t even think about unless we get off the highway and take the side road that goes past the big gray buildings surrounded by wire and guard towers. But Johnny Cash was aware of the convict’s lot and backed up his concern by playing some 30 prison concerts during his career. He was convinced that, far from reforming its unwilling guests, the prison system only made them more criminal. In the ’60s and ’70s, a time when the legitimacy of every institution was being called into question, Johnny Cash spoke through his music for the hardened, bitter men inside, rather than their jailers.
     In Michael Streissguth’s account, the entrance of Cash, June Carter, Carl Perkins and the Statler Brothers into the Folsom Prison early on that January morning resembles a visit of epic heroes to the underworld. Cash himself comes across as wily Odysseus, slow to fear and more than a little willing to take a chance if the result might be glory or at least a good tale. It would have thrilled him if he had been taken hostage, said Don Reid, another performer that day. ("If they held him for about five days. He wouldn’t have had anything to eat. He would have loved that.") In the winter-lit photos outside the prison gates, the entertainers look grim in their severe black clothes, Cash’s face gaunt from drug use.
     Producer Bob Johnston recalls an encounter on their way in with a character who might easily have been one of the shape-shifters in The Odyssey: "I think his name was Chester," recalled Johnston, "little bitty guy, bad teeth, hundred and forty, eye glasses, and I said, ‘What are you in here for?’ And there were three guards standing there, and he said, ‘I beat three men to death with a baseball bat. By God, I’d do it again if I had the chance. Fucking people.’ And the guard said, ‘Calm down, calm down.’ And I said, ‘Wow.’ And he didn’t even look like he could win a fight, much less beat three people to death with a baseball bat."
     Once musicians and crew were inside, though, the dark mood lifted as the band loosened up and rehearsed. By the time the first of the two shows kicked off at 9:40 a.m. and tape rolled, Cash was singing and playing like "an out-of-control train that never seemed to wreck." The so-called "insurance policy" show at 12:40 couldn’t measure up to the excitement of the first; Cash himself was sagging at that point. Only one track from the second show, a song called "Give My Love to Rose," made it onto the Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album, though Columbia technicians did move announcements and crowd sounds to the other recording to sex up an already high-energy show. At one point on the album, Cash can be heard referring to the guards as he chortles, "‘Them mean bastards, ain’t they?’"

ALMOST EVERYONE IN prison is poor, but that’s all right, because we don’t really like to look at or think about poor people anyway. It’s the rich we admire; they’re prettier to look at, in general, and certainly they are who we aspire to be. Like rich people at every point in history, the well-to-do have always done all right by themselves in Sicily. Of the ancient Sicilians, the most enviable was Roger II (c. 1105-1154). His father was one of the original Norman rulers, but young Roger was born in Sicily and spoke several Mediterranean languages, including Greek and Arabic; moreover, he wore Arabic and Byzantine robes and even kept a harem. His court was known for its splendors, though it wasn’t all fancy costumes and multiple bed partners for Roger. Described by one commentator as a man who accomplished more while asleep than most men did while awake, Roger patronized the arts generously, introduced the first written legal code to Sicily, and enlarged his kingdom to include Malta and parts of southern Italy and North Africa.
     Even before Roger’s day, high-living invaders worked hard and played hard, always on the backs of the nameless drudges who never quite make it into the history books. At the Villa Romana di Casale near the present-day town of Piazza Armerina, I rent an audio guide that leads me not only around the remains of the complex of buildings with its stunning floor mosaics (including those of the bikini-clad beauties in the Room of the Ten Girls) but also through the daily lives of the dominus and domina and their children and their many guests, all of whom reveled in the "magnificent lifestyles enjoyed by wealthy Romans." But you have to go to the Lonely Planet guide to Sicily to read of the "extensive slave quarters" where the wretches dwelled who made those magnificent lifestyles possible.
     The hard-luck cases who poured wine for the villa’s high rollers and gave them rubdowns in the thermae (complete with gym and massage room as well as baths of cold, tepid and hot water ) may not have left much of a legacy, but their colleagues in the wood-cutting trade left a visible mark on today’s Sicily. The deforestation may have taken place centuries ago, but the empty fields we passed are still a testament to Roman efficiency and ruthlessness. The road from Caltanisetta to Piazza Armerina crosses a huge dust bowl where cactus becomes the dominant plant, and signs everywhere warn about the fango or "mud." Before, hillside fields rich with greenery swooped down to the road from such vertiginous heights that you wondered how they could possibly be tilled; now, the decline from peak to roadside is just as steep, yet the low stone walls in which every field ends seem like dams holding back acres and acres of dust — not clay but metric tons of fine powder that sift in the occasional breeze like desert sand. If ever there were a source for fango, this is it; just add water.
     Yet it’s fango that saved the Roman villa at Casale; the Lonely Planet guide says that the buildings were covered by a mudslide in the twelfth century and weren’t excavated until 1950, thus saving them from the fate of so many other ancient monuments that were looted by Sicilian rednecks: the mean, the venal (sold to a rich Palermitano, those Ten Girls would have turned a nice profit), or the merely thrifty who might make a sturdy pig pen, say, from the old house’s frigidarium.
     Because everything is used and re-used in Sicily; once I saw a gap in a fence that was filled with a set of rusty bedsprings. All parts of every animal seem to find their way into the food chain, and while that’s true everywhere in Italy, this omnivorousness attains the level of art form on the island. In Palermo, I stop for a sandwich of panelle, or fried strips of chickpea flour, a cheap, savory, poor man’s breakfast. An hour later, I get a pane co’ la meusa, which is a sandwich of sliced beef spleen.
     A mound of purplish flesh, the spleen itself sits on a block behind the counter, looking much as one might expect a cow spleen to look though certainly larger than I would have guessed. The sandwich maker is chipping slices of it into a cauldron that bubbles gently. When I place my order, he slices a roll in half, pitchforks through his slices as though custom-selecting the right ones in exactly the right order, adds a sprinkle of rock salt and a squeeze from a huge green lemon to the towering stack of meat, and then, with a grin at me, holds the whole affair at arm’s length over his cauldron and squeezes it like a sponge, though it’s still chin-dripping juicy when he hands it to me. 
     In Piazza Armerina, I have a meat dish that is unarguably delicious on every count, a castrato or castrated kid — goat, I should say. (No matter how poor, every culture draws the line at children.) It tastes like the best lamb I’ve ever had: a little gamey yet in a complex way, moist but crisp around the edges, a delight to the eye, nose and taste buds. Since it was a castrato, I didn’t get all the parts of this particular animal, though I assume the thrifty cook put the unused portions into a stew or gave them to a deserving dog.
     Most of the dogs we saw in the countryside deserved a big meal. Whereas the piazzas in every town appeared to be run by cats, dogs were everywhere in the country, and I’ve seldom seen a scruffier bunch of curs. There are two main types: a blondish dingo-like creature and its dark twin. The two breeds band together and compete for food as well as opportunities to make mischief; looking down at that unused sports complex in Agrigento, I see three dingoes in pursuit of three black dogs in pursuit of . . . a rabbit? Whether the dingoes intend to wrest the prize from their foes or simply settle their hash in brutal noisy doggy fashion is unclear. In fact, when the rivals come together around a bend where I can’t see them, there is a startling silence, as though the two warring families have made peace the way their human counterparts do, agreeing that life will be better for everyone if enemies live together like the fingers of a single hand, each separate yet all acting together so as to seize more.
     At Segesta, an especially mangy dingo makes sorrowful dog eyes at Barbara as we eat our salads at a picnic table, so she nips back into the snack bar and returns with a ham sandwich for him. The dog takes that sandwich apart with impressive economy of gesture: flipping it once so that it falls into its constituent parts, he scarfs the ham in a single gulp, bites both chunks of bread in half and swallows them, eyes the lettuce suspiciously, and looks up at Barbara as if to say, "Got another?"
     The dog was emaciated, as all dogs on the island are and as the people used to be; now the people are fat, as the poor are everywhere. A few miles down the road, we stop so Barbara can take pictures of a wrought-iron gate outside a decaying villa that looks as though it might belong to either a mildewed aristocrat or a middle-rank mafioso, and within seconds four black dogs roar up and create a fuss that would wake the dead, leaping against the gate and thrusting their snarling muzzles through the bars. But when Barbara hits her zoom-lens button, the mutts begin to howl like demons sprinkled with holy water and all but do back flips as they clamber over each other in their haste to get away. Obviously they’ve taken the zoom lens for a gun barrel; these are dogs that have witnessed shooting and have either been shot at themselves or seen a comrade dispatched by an ill-tempered marksman. In the first photo Barbara takes, the dogs are rushing the gate, seething with valor and righteous fury, and in the next you see their rears as they hightail it for the safety of the villa’s crumbling portico. In the photos, the dogs are indistinguishable; inbreeding has made them imbeciles as well as cowards.
     One night we stay at an agriturismo or working farm that takes in tourists, and there we meet two dogs, Leo and Tina, who, the owner assures me with a chuckle, are due grandi rufiani. But since they’re not chasing our chickens or tracking mud all over our carpets, they don’t seem like ruffians to us, and Barbara and I find them pleasant companions indeed. Neither belongs to one of the two prominent breeds: Leo, as befits his name, is a sort of oversized fluffy collie-Lab mix, whereas Tina, with her brindled coat, seems a little bit of everything; clearly there is no inbreeding here but a healthy influx of new blood from old races. Both are affectionate and good-natured, greeting us enthusiastically every time we return from an outing in the car and willing to walk with us as far as we like in any direction.
     By contrast, the dog across the road, who is behind a fence, loses his mind every time we go past. Like the fenced dogs at the villa, he’s brave and ferocious as long as there are bars between him and us but runs when I pretend to throw a stick at him. At intervals, he barks throughout the night, leading me to ponder one of the central paradoxes of Canine Ownership, Bad Dog Division: if the barking dog who is a hundred yards away is waking me, how can he not disturb the dominus and domina under whose window he makes his hullabaloo? Somehow, the warden is deaf to the cries of the inmate. At one point I gaze out into our courtyard, and there, under a full moon, Leo and Tina sleep dreamlessly.

IN THE TURBULENT ’60s and ’70s, Cash stood up for the caged men in Folsom and their denim-clad brothers in other prisons, yet he disappointed the left when he failed to check all the necessary boxes on the job application to become a political icon like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. He may have fit the rebel mold, but Cash was a Christian and, for a time, a Nixon supporter. Jack Newfield of The Village Voice wrote that "A lot of us — Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff and myself among others — have been guilty, I think, of glibly trying to force too close an alliance between radical politics and rock music, to view the music as a surrogate for a political movement. We have tried to leech support and significance from groups, musicians, and lyrics when none exists." Part of the confusion stems from the fact that, along with protest singers and counterculture rock bands, Cash was played widely on the so-called underground stations that rebelled against Top-40 AM radio.
     The difference between more political singer-songwriters and Cash can be seen in the bewilderment Cash expressed when Columbia executives sought his permission to edit "Folsom Prison Blues" following the June 5, 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Deejays were refusing to play the song with its shot-a-man-in-Reno line and its gleeful if dubbed-in audience response, yet Cash couldn’t understand why Columbia wanted to "mess with" his song. No political correctness for the Man in Black: he knew that the doctored version of the song was more true to life than the raw tape. But eventually he relented, and thousands of fresh copies of the record were shipped to radio stations across the country.

ONE DECISION WE made early in the trip was not to go to Corleone. It just seemed like bad manners: thousands of American tourists have surely passed through it, and one thing I’ve learned over here is that my countrymen and -women will, in the certain knowledge that they’ll never return, say the most outrageous things to people they probably regard as just "a bunch of Italians." As Barbara and I are a head taller and several shades pinker than most Sicilians, it’d be obvious that we’ve come to Corleone to check out the godfather vibes rather than sample il vino della zona or buy local handicrafts. Even though my Italian seems to be stuck permanently in what I’d call High Basic mode, I don’t mind talking to people and trying to find out what’s going on. But just about every book you read says that Sicilians don’t like questions; in a town like Corleone, my guess is that you can multiply that reluctance several times.
     Besides, Sicily isn’t one big mafia theme park filled with brooding dons and murderous foot soldiers. It’s a beautiful island with stunning vistas, yet its cities are pocked with unsightly slums; it’s a cornucopia of rich food and complex wines which many of its own people can’t afford. It’s a land of contrasts, as are all lands, though Sicily is so small and the topography so varied that you can see all those contrasts in the course of a morning’s drive.
     You can see Africa, it says in our guidebook, and we are certain we do from the archeological park at Selinunte; though there is fog on the water, clearly there is a land mass on the horizon that stretches east and west as far as we can see. At our hotel, the signora who registers us (or me, since Barbara stays with the car) is young and pretty and has an unwashed ripeness that wouldn’t work for the aged and charmless yet somehow comes across as an asset in the young and pretty. Her hair is pulled back in a way that says, If you think I look good now, wait till I pull the pins out. She has the classic Snow White color scheme: creamy skin, black eyes, red mouth. She has a Mona Lisa smile and a Mona Lisa way of speaking, which is to say she listens but does not speak at all, and when she does, it’s only to say something like "You speak Italian beautifully" or "I’m sorry I’m not getting to meet your wife." Since the first statement is patently untrue, I have my doubts about the second. Still, there is an intensity to her gaze that I’d mistake for something else if I were younger.
     The next morning, there is no fog on the water. There is no Africa, either; the evening before, we had talked ourselves into a fictitious view of the Dark Continent. Then again, as Lampedusa says in The Leopard, "Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily,".
     On our first day of driving, I wave at a guy on a tractor who just scowls at me, probably practicing his own version of omertà, which, contrary to popular usage, doesn’t mean "silence" so much as something like Yiddish Menschkeit. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in Italian linguistics to guess that there’s a connection between omertà and uomo or man; omertà is what a man does, which means taking care of business in an efficient and decisive manner, and that means no whining or complaint or unnecessary chatter.
     The farther we get from Palermo, though, the friendlier the people are. Not initially: whereas northern Italian towns often seem empty during the day, people are out and about in the Sicilian heartland, and they’ll stop, put both hands in their pockets and look at you as though you’re a new TV channel that’s just been added to their basic cable package. But when you talk to them, the spell is broken, and they come to life, often in surprisingly warm ways. In the north, the people you try to get directions from give answers on the fly, like New Yorkers, but in Ragusa, when I asked an older fellow how to get to a restaurant, he not only told me the way but walked there with me, keeping up a one-sided conversation in Sicilian, which is similar to Italian but is softer and more sing-songy (il gatto or "the cat" becomes lu ‘attu, for example).
     In the same city, I park in a tiny courtyard, and a woman with a broom watches me suspiciously as I back and fill, and when I ask her if it’s okay to leave the car there, she scolds me for not leaving enough room for the others. When I move the car, I get out and apologize and ask again if it’s okay, softening my request even more by telling her that I wouldn’t want to take her son’s place. Leaning on her broom, she eyes me for a minute more before breaking into a grin that suggests I’m either crazy or a genius, and then she, too, begins to walk with me and says, Yes, sure, it’s fine, where are you from, where are you staying, and did you know there’s a shortcut to the hotel just down here on the left?
     It doesn’t take long to figure out that relations between men and women are more rigid and conservative in Sicily than elsewhere in Italy, though this is probably attributable less to Roger II’s pro-Islamic legacy than to the usual reasons, poverty and religion. One morning in Piazza Umberto I in Caltagirone, I count 40 men and two women. The latter are there strictly temporarily: one has her purchases at her feet and is clearly waiting to be picked up, even though she isn’t standing at a bus stop, and the other is stopping briefly to chat with a man on a bench, someone more likely to be a father than a husband, as he, like most of the others, is gray-headed and thick in the middle. Where are all the women? Being dutiful, I suppose: making dinner or caring for little ones or just staying out of sight.
     There’s a certain ceramic store Barbara wants to find that’s supposed to be just off the piazza, so she goes in one direction and I in another. When I get back, the two women who were there before are gone, and Barbara, the only female there, is obviously a subject of speculation. From where I stand, she looks like a shore bird who has mistakenly lighted in a forest full of quizzical, aging bears.
     At the farmhouse where we stay, we are given two steaks at dinner, and Barbara puts the bigger one on my plate. But when the signora brings dessert and slides the larger slice of cassata alla siciliana in front of Barbara, she keeps her slice, even though it’s twice the size of mine. As I glare, she grabs her fork and wades in, so I start to pick at mine. Five minutes later, I’m done with my slice, and she’s only halfway through hers; the time it takes her to finish seems endless. Pouting, I agree to go on a moonlit walk. As Tina bounds ahead and the older Leo ambles after her, Barbara says, "I know you wanted me to give you that big piece of cake, but I’d already given you the bigger steak, so I figured, do I have to give him the bigger everything?"

WHEN JUNE CARTER came on stage in Folsom, the prisoners were restrained. There was no hooting and cat-calling the way there had been at the production of Waiting for Godot I had seen. Cash had won the inmates over by that point; it was obvious that day that Johnny Cash was the man and she his woman. He proposed to her in February of that same year, and they married within a month.
     June Carter Cash would have been a remarkable woman even if she had never met Johnny. Born into the legendary Carter family, she performed as a child on their radio broadcasts; later she studied acting in New York with Sandy Meisner, who trained Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall, and she was an accomplished writer as well. When she married Johnny Cash, though, she abandoned her career for decades to devote herself to him and their family. The choice was voluntary, according to her: "I chose to be Mrs. Johnny Cash in my life. I decided I’d allow him to be Moses, and I’d be Moses’s brother Aaron, picking his arms up and padding along behind him. . . . I stayed in submission to my husband, and he allowed me to do anything I wanted to. I felt like I was lucky to have that kind of romance." Lucky or not, it would be more than 30 years before she came out with an album on her own, the Grammy-winning Press On, though she and Cash recorded duets together, including "If I Were a Carpenter," a catchy tune I have always found creepy; in one verse, the male voice asks the female to imagine if he were a tinker and then wants to know if she would mind him, carrying the pots he made and following behind him.
     Okay, so Johnny Cash was no feminist, either. But if he wasn’t a cafeteria-style leftist, what was he? He must have known that most of the prisoners he appeared to romanticize were really like the baseball-bat killer recalled by producer Bob Johnston. The answer may lie in his hardscrabble childhood. In briefly reconstructing the years Cash spent in Dyess, Arkansas before joining the Air Force, Streissguth relies on the singer’s comments to biographer Christopher Wren, and his memories of his boyhood put an American face on Peter Robb’s critique of the vertical organization of agricultural life in every country. As a boy in Dyess, Cash knew the lowest stratum best: "Across the road on the Stuckey plantation," he recalls, "was a three-room shotgun shack. Every year, a different family would move in and ask us if they could farm part of the crops. They were in dire poverty. They’d come with rags on their backs and maybe a skillet tied on their wagon. Mostly they just walked in."
     Cash also told Wren stories that seem to come out of the dark forests of European folk tales: of the father who buried his child in a ditch bank, the six year-old who poisoned his father. As an adult, says Streissguth, Cash "carried these scenes with him as if they were sacred beads, invoking Christ’s golden rule as he walked with Indians, com-mon people, and prisoners." Here Cash sounds less like Bob Dylan than an earlier American original, Walt Whitman, who, in "Song of Myself," walks with priests and politicians but also with bastards, amputees, opium eaters and runaway slaves.

IN THE END, we decide to go to Corleone anyway. Our Palermo jitters have dissolved in the countryside, and besides, we’ve seen all but one or two of the Greek temples and Roman amphitheaters which were our real reason for visiting Sicily. On our last day, then, we decide to finish up with a Mob Tour, beginning with Lercara Friddi, the town where Lucky Luciano was born. His family, too, was one of the countless that emigrated to New York, where Luciano lived out his own version of the American Dream: he became a crime boss, went to jail, was freed during the war to help Allied forces take Sicily and died peacefully in Naples in 1962.
     Today Lercara Friddi is much like any of the other little towns we’ve seen: a piazza or two, a duomo, lots of people in the streets, mostly men. Maybe I’m imagining it, but as the men on the sidewalk fall silent and even stoop slightly to peer into our car, it seems to me that The New People From Elsewhere are getting a more intense once-over than they got earlier. The interior of the duomo is lit not by floodlights hidden in high wall sconces but by a dozen chandeliers in need of a vigorous dusting. There is a Figli Sinatra garage; a sign promises that the Sinatra Sons will tackle any problem on any type of car. For a moment, I think about asking a barman for the guida telefonica so I can see if there are still any Lucianos in town, but anyone looking over my shoulder is liable to figure out why I’ve got my nose in the Ls. We’ll only be in Sicily one more day; why step on somebody’s toes now?
     The closer we get to Corleone, the more surprised I am at how nervous I feel. Barbara always says there are two ways she can tell when there’s another car behind us in Italy — I sit up straight and I stick my shoulders in my ears — and I’m driving high and tight now, even though the road behind us is empty. When we reach the town, though, suddenly we’re through it and on the other side: most towns have signs saying "To the center" or "To the Duomo," but if there are such signs outside Corleone, we’ve missed them. So we go back and try again, and still we can’t find Corleone. The third time, we use the never-fail method: instead of looking for signs that aren’t there or that we can’t see, we just do the opposite of what we did earlier, turning left where we went right and vice versa.
     Out of nowhere, suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of Corleone. I’m relieved: far from being a Sicilian version of Dodge City, the town is disappointingly tame. Food and drink venues have the same bland English names they have everywhere in Italy: Sweet Temptations, Big Burger, Black and White Pub, Excelsior Bar. There is a sandwich shop called Strange Days, and I think, okay, the owner is a Doors fan, but who’d buy a panino at a place called Strange Days? A man walks in front of me with a shotgun under his arm, and I think, "Pop-pop . . . pop!" But he’s a hunter, not a button man, and the heft of his game bag suggests that the rabbit and bird population around Corleone is significantly smaller today.
     Then I see it, just as we are driving out of town: a ragged plastic ad banner that says "BEVETE AMARO DON CORLEONE." In the town he made famous, I’m urged to try the after-dinner drink named after the fictitious don; other than that, I could be anywhere.
     Besides, the other little towns just south of Palermo — Partinico, San Cipirello, San Giuseppe Jato — are just as likely to breed killers and pentiti as Corleone. A half-literate graffito in San Giuseppe Jato says "GIOVANNI BRUSCA SI PENTE / 18 CARATI," which might be rendered along the lines of "GIOVANNI BRUSCA, 18-CARAT RAT." Since the penitent mafiosi have to go through a long process of proving themselves, the writing might be saying that Brusca hasn’t completely sold out — yet. Or simply that he’s not a very good rat. Or, more sinisterly, and as his re-imprisoning the week before suggests, that he is one of the many pentiti who may be playing a double game and cooperating with legitimate authorities only in order to retain as much as possible of their dark power.

THOUGH THE TWO shows at Folsom Prison never bordered on the mayhem that the edited recordings suggest, there were spontaneous exchanges between entertainers and audience, notably when Cash reached down to shake the hand of a convict named Glen Sherley, whose song "Greystone Chapel" he had just performed. Sherley had done time in the juvenile system before embarking on a career of small-time stickups; following jailbreak and recapture, he had been sent to the maximum security facility at Folsom. The prison was actually "an artistic beehive," writes Streissguth, where inmates painted, sculpted, wrote poetry, sang and played every instrument. Like the young Johnny Cash at Landsberg Air Force Base, Glen Sherley used music as a way to fly over the walls.
     With Cash’s support, Sherley was eventually paroled. As an American pentito, he profited nicely: having testified at Senate hearings on prison reform, Sherley married, bought a car (or more than one, since his inexperience at driving led to several wrecks) and even recorded an album that reached number 32 on the country charts.
     But old habits die hard for thugs in every country. Sherley’s unease with his new life surfaced as he began to disappear unexpectedly or lose his temper on stage. Bassist Marshall Grant recalls talking with Sherley in his room one day when the ex-con looked up and said, "‘Marshal, let me tell you something. I love you like a brother. I really love you like a brother. You’ve been so helpful with me. . . . I appreciate that.’ But he said, ‘You know what I would really like to do?’ I said, ‘No, man. What would you like to do?’ He said, ‘I’d like to get a knife and cut you all to hell. Let you lay there on the floor and bleed to death.’ He said, ‘Now that’s what I’d like to do to you. But I can’t. Unfortunately, I can’t do that, so let’s try to be friends.’" Sherley eventually left Nashville, rattled around the country for a few years, took up his druggy ways again, and, in 1978, shot himself to death on his brother’s porch.
     A few days after Cash died in 2003, it was Hallowe’en, so I dyed my hair black, made an eight-foot long cardboard guitar and wrote on it in spangles the names of his hits: "Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line," "Folsom Prison Blues" and the song that I now realize is Cash’s most Sicilian work, the woeful, resigned "I Don’t Like It But I Guess Things Happen That Way." Halfway through my round of parties, though, I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I thought I would.
     In the end, there was nothing fun about being Johnny Cash. I’ve never been to Dyess, and even if I had, it wouldn’t be the same Dyess that Cash grew up in. But the more I learned about Sicily, the more I saw what poverty and hunger and abuse can do to the human spirit. Cash was an entertainer, but he was a witness as well; he had seen what millions of others have seen in every country and every time, and he gave voice to their despairing vision. Johnny Cash didn’t have to be who anyone else wanted him to be. He simply had to remember where violent, unhappy men come from and sing about it.

THE NIGHT BEFORE we leave Sicily, we stay in a coastal town called Cefalù, a name with unsettling associations for one who grew up where I did. There were lots of Cefalus (the accent had been dropped long before) in South Louisiana, and they were just part of the sizeable number of Sicilians who had emigrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to escape hard times. Not, at least in the beginning, that the times were any easier in America. The new arrivals were poor and dark and wore strange clothes and ate food no one had ever heard of; they spoke a language that no one could understand and practiced a religion that, with all its saints and bloody icons, seemed idolatrous, almost pagan to the Pentecostals of Hammond and Amite. The Sicilians and other southern Italians were feared and mistrusted, and my mother, who was born on a farm in Tangipahoa Parish in 1902, used to recall with tight-lipped shame the brutal treatment that these new arrivals received in the Land of Promise. People still talked, she told me, of the eleven Italians who were accused of murdering police chief David Hennessey in nearby New Orleans in 1891; after they were acquitted, a mob dragged them from jail and hanged them.
     Our last morning in Sicily, we had breakfast at our hotel in Cefalù before driving through Lercara Friddi and Corleone and leaving the car at Falcone-Borsellino Airport outside Palermo and flying north. From where we sat in the dining room, we could see the Mediterranean. The sun on the water was blindingly bright; it would be a good day for driving. I took a bite out of my cannolo and looked up again and almost fell out of my chair in surprise. In the time it took to nibble a pastry, the water had been covered with a thick, yellowish fog. What had happened to the light? It had been there just a moment before. And then, as quickly as a song ends, as fast as a man falls to the earth when a bullet enters his heart, it was gone.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The two books I relied on most in writing this essay were Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily and Michael Streissguth’s Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece. Other valuable background information on Sicily comes from Danilo Dolci’s Poverty in Sicily, Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and The Death of the First Italian Republic and the Sicily volume in the Lonely Planet travel guide series; I also gleaned much from the various issues of The International Herald Tribune and La Repubblica that I picked up whenever I came to a town big enough to have a newsstand. I kept three works of fiction with me during the trip: Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Elio Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily and Giovanni Verga’s Little Novels of Sicily; life sprung from harsh soil and made art, these three books were my Sicilian equivalent of the Johnny Cash lyrics. No, I didn’t listen to my CD of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison as I made my way through Sicily because I didn’t have to; those songs have been playing in my head for years.