The Sicilian Defense

A project I’m working on—not related to Poster House—has got me thinking a lot about how hard it is to sell paradise.

I’ve developed the habit in the years I’ve been consulting, and then curating, for Poster House of looking for posters available on the market that are relevant to whatever project I’m working on. There’s usually one up in my studio while I’m writing, if nothing else, and it provides both the inspiration and the perspiration to get the job done: I look at the poster lovingly and it looks back at me—keeping me ahead of the deadline.

I indulge this habit for all my projects. (You should see—or maybe not—what came up when I began work on my current personal project about life in American prisons.) Since I’m also working on a book about Sicily, I’ve been looking for good posters advertising that island. This presents a unique challenge because posters advertising Sicily are, typically, well…not good. 

Now, Sicily is wonderful—maybe my favorite place in all the world. The island—for the unfamiliar, it’s the big one off of the southern tip of Italy, sitting sentinel in the middle of the Mediterranean—is, by any objective measure, a prize. It’s a plum so juicy that the denizens of a dozen different civilizations have reached to pluck it from its tree from the beginning of recorded history until now, and who knows how many men with spears and boats before them tried to pry off pieces of its fertile shores.

Sicily’s architecture reflects some of these incursions: it holds the great temples of the Greeks, and some of the finest monuments of the golden age of Islam. And it’s got everything you’d want as a visitor: charming people and an unbelievable landscape forged by tectonic plates, dotted with ruins and palaces. There’s outrageous food, too, and vibrant wines nurtured by the volcanic soil around the constantly burbling Mount Etna.

When I look over the posters for Sicily—the best place, with the blandest promotions—a thought comes to mind: advertising is unquestionably the art form that touches the regular person’s life more than any other. Unless you have a private art collection, if you want to see a painting, you must raise your body from the couch and go to a museum or a gallery. For a photograph, it’s the same thing. If you want to hear live jazz, you must go to the club. But advertising will come at you all day, every day, bringing you images and sometimes music. Advertising is the art of selling things, and posters are, at their core, the great artifacts of that art. Why, then, is it that the most beautiful things are so often the hardest to sell?

There’s a scene in the television show Mad Men (I know, I know, bear with me) where the board of tourism for the young state of Israel (I know, I know, bear with me) comes to the Madison Avenue advertising agency where the show is set, hoping to discuss a new campaign in the run-up to the 1960 Otto Preminger film Exodus about that nation’s founding. The biggest minds in advertising are stumped: Israel is a beautiful nation full of good-looking people, they point out, with beaches, resorts, and an eye to the future. But it’s hard to sell a place burdened by so many preconceived notions: they just can’t get past the existing marketing of biblical sites, of the Promised Land, and of Jesus, to consider any other angle.

There’s so often an oceanic divide between what we want and what we see. 

Think of it in terms of something simple: food. If a person has decided they’re not interested in pickles, no pickle advertisement is going to convince them to try another one. If a person loves pickles, no new pickle advertising is ever really needed. Americans consume 5,200,000 pounds of pickles a year. When’s the last time you saw a fancy new TV commercial for one? A poster?

In the case of my beloved Sicily, the same problem occurs. (Woe betide the poster dealer trying to sell an advertisement for Sicily even to me, the easiest target in the world.) People have an image of the island in their minds: peasants in colorful rustic carts. Goats. Classical ruins. Prickly pears and lemon trees. Women on vespas (not today, mind you, these women are strictly 1955). Men in caps. And, of course, organized crime.

In other words: No groundbreaking pickle advertising is needed to sell Sicily even to the average potential tourist.

What it gets, instead, is the trinacrian (a word referring to Trinacria, the ancient name for Sicily) answer to the sword and sandals problem the creatives faced in Mad Men: nothing new.

This problem surely plagues tourism boards the world over: the clichés are what people want. After all, spend any afternoon in Paris and you’ll see plenty of foreigners walking around with their little berets, their striped shirts, and their baguettes as they pose for pictures in front of the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower.

Everybody who visits China seems to end up at the Great Wall, and everybody who goes to Israel—no matter what their fictional board of tourism or their fictional TV advertising agency might suggest—ends up at the Wailing one.

Is the Sicily that’s being sold ever the Sicily that’s being seen? Hardly ever, it would seem, especially in our modern era: a quick look at influencer videos on social media—the most ubiquitous advertising in the world today—shows that what people want this year is still yesteryear. So many beige, crumbling buildings. So many lemon skirts. So many 17th-century churches, lavish in detail, ornate in design, never changing.

The tourists still come. The advertising still works. Which leads, I suppose, to another question: if it’s not baroque, why fix it?

B.A. Van Sise FRGS is a photographic artist, author, and curator, primarily focused on the intersection between language and the visual form. Previously a journalist for The Village Voice and Newsday, he is also the author of Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust, and On the National Language: the Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi and Crisosto Apache. His work has been featured in major solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Skirball Cultural Center.