U’ risu cammina nzemmula cu li vai

U’ risu cammina nzemmula cu li vai is a Sicilian proverb meaning “What makes one man laugh makes another man cry.” In the novel, it turns commercial good fortune into a measure of someone else’s distress: prosperity does not arrive separately from suffering, but alongside it, often because of it.

Meaning and First Application

The proverb is introduced after a violent fever epidemic, when Christmas carols have alternated with funeral laments and supplies of medicinal bark have nearly run out. The larger apothecaries, including Canzoneri’s, charge what the narration calls the price of gold, while people urgently need the remedy. Into this shortage comes an unexpected shipment of spices brought by Barbaro at the new year. The Florio store fills with chests, and news of the arrival spreads overnight.

The next day the shop is crowded. The first customers are not only desperate people seeking medicinal herbs: apothecaries, small retailers, and a few physicians also gather outside, hats off and money ready, pleading to buy bark they cannot obtain elsewhere. The proverb marks the reversal in the Florios’ circumstances—the stock and demand that benefit the business are bound to an epidemic that brings illness and death to others.

Trade, Scarcity, and Fortune

The proverb’s commercial setting belongs to a wider account of the spice trade. A stick of cinnamon or a root of ginger passes through many hands, travels by mule or camel in long caravans, crosses the ocean, and reaches European ports. Each leg adds to its cost, making spices luxuries for those able to buy them and profitable goods for those who can sell them. Their uses extend beyond cooking to medicine and cosmetics, and they carry associations with distant lands.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British and French traders have displaced Venice as leading sellers, shipping medicinal herbs as well as sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate from overseas colonies. Falling prices, expanding markets, and open harbors increase the volume of trade and the number of merchants able to enter it. Palermo’s aromatari have organized a guild and even have their own church, Sant’Andrea degli Amalfitani. The proverb’s particular crisis is therefore set against a broader market in which access, supply, and profit are unevenly distributed.

The Florios’ Expanding Network

The Florios’ gains depend not simply on owning a shop but on managing the movement and timing of goods. For some time, they have rented a warehouse within the Palazzo Steri property, behind the customs offices. Its cool, guarded rooms hold spices in transit to other ports or awaiting sale to merchants. Because import duty is paid only when goods enter Palermo, wholesalers can reduce their tax burden by paying rent on storage instead of paying tariffs before the goods are sold into the local market.

Their stock links several routes: spices from India obtained through the British, goods from French colonies bought in Livorno and carried across the Tyrrhenian Sea by Italian sailors, and quality merchandise from around the Mediterranean. The Florios are not yet as rich as the Canzoneris, but their business has advanced rapidly; the stockroom in Via dei Materassai has become too small. The contrast gives the proverb a continuing economic resonance: a merchant’s rise is shaped by a system where scarcity, transport, storage, and access to buyers determine who can profit.

Recurrence and Significance

The proverb returns as an interpretive key to the novel’s unequal turns of fortune. Elsewhere, a customer’s visit allows Ignazio to slip away to the bookkeeper, where the scale of the Florios’ warehouse and commercial network becomes visible. In another scene, Vincenzo watches Giulia open a tin of tuna in brine from the Arenella tonnara, which he owns in partnership with Augusto Merle. The metallic click, the brine, and the smell of fish lead Vincenzo into memories of the kitchen at Piano San Giacomo and an earlier method of preserving tuna in a wax-sealed earthenware pot. Goods thus carry both present commercial value and personal memory.

The proverb does not claim that every success is itself a moral wrong. Rather, it insists on the simultaneousness the narrative repeatedly stages: a crowded shop during an epidemic, a profitable commodity whose extraction deforms workers’ backs, or a family’s abundance shadowed by remembered hardship. Its compact balance of laughter and tears expresses a world in which fortune is real, but never the whole story.