These early streets are shifting drifts of fallen leaves, black tarmac buckling over chestnut and olive roots. In those parched hills above, orange orchards come into fruit and prickly pear thrives by scraps of cavalo nero tough and dark as volcanic earth. On the old town’s edges, morning vans are driving down packed with lemons, pumpkins, kale. The aunts are squeezing, snapping, sniffing, haggling, assembling raw the wedding feast. This town climbs to the sun but it starts in the sea. The cousins are fishing now: sardines flash from the waves. This morning has blown in a hot, dry storm like the breath of Etna. Blinded by flying hair, we gust through the labyrinth, shedding our decorative burden: fragments of bougainvillea, flowering fennel. Light flares and flashes round corners as we pass sugared streets, opal water, billowing balconies, to the church of the tortured virgin. It is frilly, pretty, might fly away: a high white wedding-cake iced for a bride of Christ. Inside is heavy and arterial, rooted by pillars and darkness and years: silver statues hold bones and braids but the soft eyes and breasts of martyrdom are remembered in the almond cakes we collect from the pasticceria. We pray to her for this day's bride, arrange pomegranates, figs, candles. In this tangle of morning streets, doors are shut against the wind. Quiet courtyards: a pushchair, a pile of post, some parsley in a jar; lizards flickering round pots of basil; plaster saints and strings of drying funghi. Indoors, something’s frying, something’s burnt, hot irons, hot hair, lost earrings – che ora e? Here is a Fiat-Vespa throng outside a riotous gastronomia loud with refrigeration and rowdy with uncles on errands shouting to the owner, snuffing salami, palpating tomatoes, considering olives. The feast, the feast - che ora e? The duomo doors are open now, the benches of the piazza lined with black nuns and elderly spectators, veils and handkerchiefs flying. The wedding swings in: a purring Maserati, door blown open, a white dog floats out across the piazza in a frenzy of escapist joy. A vertiginous heel, a leg rippling in creamy silk, a woman giving chase, hobbled by cobbles. The dog and a boy are under the fruit stall, rolling a wind-blown clementine. Crisp and scented, it is still holds its leaves. Mass in the duomo is hot and loud: pews packed, prayer cards fanning, we kiss, exchange babies and news. It is quiet only for the bread and wine. The young priest is tailored, handsome: his handmaids pour sacramental wine now and, later, his espresso. After, his collar is undone, white and flapping in the heat that makes nonna faint. An ambulance’s lament; thick-stockinged ankles up on the back of the pew. Waking, she worries about her dish: it’s veal. Come viene cotto? asks the priest kindly. Salsa di mandorle, e brissica rapa she replies, smiling and dazed. We emerge to an evening stilled: in sunset the town yawns, stretches, settles. The wedding party dances sedately on: side-streets dropping to the sea are dining rooms, the feast elemental. On each wide, shallow step – golden stone with the bloom of warm flesh - is a table and a plate of icy ocean: black urchins with custardy iodine innards; bloody mulberry granite, almond milk gelato; black, mineral wine. There is song, smoke, laughter and above all, air-borne Etna, silver clouds curling to her shoulders, blowing plumes of steam to the indigo sky. Home, past a tree loud with starlings, past bright Venus, hanging, past skinny cats winding the shadows to a woman’s voice calling them in: Sheila, Beppo, Annie. The air crisps; there is a woodsmoke trail to a lamp-lit circle of men on plastic chairs. The uncles are home, roasting chestnuts in a stove-pipe, rolling them in powdered salt. Some we eat, some we throw to the cats: they carry them off as gently as new kittens into the night. And now the dark is down, the dogs: released from the houses, muscled, low-slung, they flow out, join a loping, hungry pack, hunt rabbits on the hills and scraps in the streets. At night the wild is close; black shadows stretch through streets, down church aisles, across houses.