Port in a Storm – Frank McNally on the strange story of the Sicilian Emmets

In the picturesque town of Cefalù last week, sheltering from a storm that had suddenly swept in off the Tyrrhenian Sea, I remembered one of the stranger stories that have ever crossed the Diary’s desk.

It came via Texas, from a Dallas-born Vietnam veteran called Anthony Palasota. But it centred on his grandfather Joe, who had emigrated from Cefalù early last century and whose surname – unusual in Italy except for its ending – was Emmeti.

The explanation, as Anthony recalled from a childhood listening to his grandad’s recollections, told with a heavy Sicilian accent, was that the family had Irish roots.

Details were vague, but an ancestor had once been in big trouble with the English and had tried to enlist the help of Napoleon. Later, somehow, an infant member of the clan ended up in Sicily, orphaned at the age three by his mother’s death.

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Anthony still half-remembered this story when, one day in the 1960s, waiting for his date in a stranger’s house, he started leafing through an encyclopedia.

It fell open on a page with a photograph that could have been of one of his uncles. Except that the man pictured was no Sicilian. He was Robert Emmet. And in that epiphanic moment, the Cefalù grandfather’s back-story finally made sense.

This plot may also have some resonance for fans of Moore’s Melodies. Although he didn’t name either party, Thomas Moore had the dead Emmet and his surviving fiancée Sarah Curran in mind when he wrote the famous ballad She is Far from the Land.

The land in question was Ireland and heroine’s place of exile – though also unnamed – was Sicily, where the real-life Curran did live for a time after Emmet’s death, and where Moore portrays her pining away, indifferent to the amorous overtures of local men:

“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,/And lovers are round her, sighing;/But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps/For her heart in his grave is lying.”

The song was in keeping with a tendency whereby Curran’s story, although tragic enough in reality, was exaggerated and romanticised as part of Emmet’s posthumous hagiography, to the point where as one biography puts it she became “an almost fictional heroine”.

Moore even seems to suggest she died in Sicily, which is untrue. Hence his closing verse: “Oh make her a grave where the sunbeams rest,/When they promise a glorious morrow;/They’ll shine o’er her sleep, like a smile from the West/From her own loved island of sorrow.”

In the more prosaic reality, it was as a married woman that Curran had gone there. After Emmet’s execution in September 1803, she was banished from the family’s Dublin home by her father – the lawyer John Philpot Curran – and first went back to their native Cork to live with friends.

Two years later, in 1805, she married Capt Robert Henry Sturgeon of the Royal Staff Corps, then followed him to a posting in Sicily.

By 1807, she was pregnant. But after Capt Sturgeon was ordered home to England at Christmas of that year, the baby was born at sea, during another storm, and died only days later, in early January.

Curran’s sad story ended when, weakened by consumption and the difficult birth, she too died, in May 1808, at Kent.

When her father refused her wish to be buried alongside her sister in Rathfarnham, she had to make do instead with whatever sunbeams rest on the cemetery at Newmarket, the family’s original home in Cork.

As for the heartbroken Sturgeon, bereft of wife and child, he was killed in battle a few years later, near the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

For several reasons, therefore, the tale of a Sicilian three-year-old, orphaned by its mother’s death but retaining an Italianised version of the surname Emmet, does not quite add up.

Yet it seems at least remarkable that an emigrant from Cefalù should have brought such an origin myth with him to New Orleans, and later Texas, and that there was also a striking likeness in the family with their famous near-namesake.

Last week’s storm, by the way, coincided with a wedding in Cefalù's impressive 12th-century cathedral, a Unesco-listed structure dating from the Norman occupation, which presides over the town like a citadel.

As the bride climbed the steep steps, the wind whipped at her dress, clouds darkened, and thunder rattled ominously. Cafés in the side streets facing the sea laid their parasols flat before the gale would.

But the wedding guests were all safely inside the church before the skies opened. Then the storm passed as quickly as it came. By the time the bride and groom re-emerged, happily for symbolism, the pretty town was once again bathed in sunshine.