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Vistas in Sicily

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Title: Vistas in Sicily

Author: Arthur Stanley Riggs


        
Release date: July 31, 2012 [eBook #40381]

Language: English

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produced from images made available at The Internet Archive)








VISTAS
IN
SICILY

[Illustration]

ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS




VISTAS
IN
SICILY


THE BLUE BOOKS OF TRAVEL


_The Real Palestine of To-day_

BY LEWIS GASTON LEARY

_Windmills and Wooden Shoes_

BY BLAIR JAEKEL, F.R.G.S.

_Vistas in Sicily_

BY ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS, F.R.G.S.

_Italian Lanes and Highroads_

BY RUSSEL W. LEARY

Other titles in preparation on England, France, Germany, Spain and other
countries.

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY

_Publishers_

UNION SQUARE NORTH NEW YORK CITY

[Illustration: _Negative by W. von Gloeden._

“Sprightly little goatherds, whose heads are the heads of Greek fauns.”
(Page 12)]




VISTAS
IN
SICILY

BY

ARTHUR STANLEY RIGGS
F. R. G. S.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.

Published, November, 1912

TO

MY WIFE

The acknowledgments of the author are due to the editor of The Travel
Magazine, for his courteous permission to reprint some of the chapters
which follow.

A. S. R.

Massy-Verrières,

France, June 5, 1912.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

INTRODUCTION                                                       i-xii

I DISCOVERY                                                            1

II PALERMO                                                            17

III A NIGHT OF DISSIPATION                                            30

IV CATHEDRALS                                                         42

V PALACES AND PEOPLE                                                  56

VI THE PLAIN OF PANORMOS                                              74

VII AROUND THE ISLAND                                                 87

VIII THE ROAD TO SYRACUSE                                            107

IX THE HARBOR AND THE ANAPO                                          123

X SYRACUSE THE PENTAPOLIS                                            133

XI CATANIA AND MT. ÆTNA                                              152

XII TAORMINA                                                         167

XIII SOME MOUNTAIN VISTAS                                            178

XIV LIGHTS AND SHADES                                                192

XV THE CITY THAT WAS                                                 207

XVI THE NORTHERN SHORE                                               215

XVII THE WESTERN SHORE                                               233

XVIII _Addio, Sicilia!_                                              249

THE BEST BOOKS ON SICILY                                             265

INDEX                                                                269




THE ILLUSTRATIONS


THE FAUN                                                   _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

PALERMO, FROM THE PORTA NUOVA                                          5

MTE. PELLEGRINO AND THE VIA BORGO                                     17

THE MUSICAL WATER-SELLER                                              22

THE WONDERFUL SICILIAN CART                                           25

PART OF THE CITY STREET-CLEANING DEPARTMENT                           26

A PIECE BITTEN OUT OF CONEY ISLAND                                    28

AN “ECONOMICAL KITCHEN”                                               32

THE FRIED-ENTRAILS MAN                                                32

THE HOLY BAMBINO OF THE ONIONS                                        36

THE GARIBALDI THEATRE                                                 41

THE PALERMO CATHEDRAL’S FACADE                                        42

KING ROGER’S SARCOPHAGUS                                              44

THE MONREALE CATHEDRAL                                                49

THE CREATION OF EVE, MONREALE CATHEDRAL                               52

INTERIOR OF THE CAPPELLA PALATINA                                     60

THE “CHURCH OF THE VESPERS”                                           75

THE “POOR MAN’S PROMENADE”                                            85

THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD, GIRGENTI                                      101

SYRACUSE, FROM THE GREEK THEATRE                                     115

QUEEN PHILISTIS’ COINS                                               120

ÆTNA, THE GREEK THEATRE, AND TAORMINA                                171

A TAORMINA WATER-GIRL                                                176

TAORMINA KNITTING-SCHOOL PUPILS                                      179

THE MOLA PIGS                                                        184

“GOATS! GOATS! GOATS!”                                               189

THE TROUBADOURS                                                      200

MESSINA--“THE CITY THAT WAS”                                         208

CEFALÙ, ACROSS THE FIELDS                                            217

THE CEFALÙ CATHEDRAL’S FACADE                                        220

SOLOUS, THE CITY OF THE ROCK                                         225

“FIVE MINUTES FOR REFRESHMENTS”                                      251

SANTA ROSALIA’S GROTTO                                               258




VISTAS

IN

SICILY




INTRODUCTION


Sicily is the rarest flower of the great midland sea. Built up on the
North in a series of beetling cliffs, the island slopes gently down
through mountain chains and undulating plains to the golden Southern
shore. An enormous triangle it is, spiny with lofty peaks--Ætna towers
more than ten thousand feet in the air--spangled with flowering meads
and dells where Nature loads the air with fragrance; pierced with
infernal caverns, whence choking workers extract a large part of the
world’s sulphur from the palaces of the former gods of the nether world;
and fringèd about on every side with the lace-like foam of opal waves.
It is rich in beauty and desolation, rich in song and story, rich in
architecture, splendid and varied.

To understand the beauty and charm of Sicily, however, it is essential
to know something of the island’s picturesque and vivid story. We
Americans are rarely familiar with it. Strange as it may seem,
considering Sicily’s importance through many centuries, its consecutive
history still remains to be written. Books there are, to be sure, but
none attempts to cover more than a portion of one of the most intense
chronicles in the world. Thucydides, in his “Peloponessian War,” tells
in glowing phrases of the débacle that wiped out the Attic forces and
left Sicily supreme. Later still, in the ante-Christian era Diodorus, a
native of the island, prepared a flowing story of the Sicily he knew. It
has been one of our chief sources of information ever since. In modern
times the historians Grote and Curtius have included in their histories
of Greece such parts of the Sicilian narrative as are germane to their
work; and the English historian Freeman, in a monumental unfinished
work, has left us a minutely detailed account of Sicily from prehistoric
times to the reign of Agathocles. The Italian Amari, to go yet farther,
handles the Saracen period with care and skill, and Gally Knight tells
briefly of the dashing Normans and their fanciful architecture. But of
the later periods almost nothing of lasting value has been written.
Moreover, the books of travel dealing with Sicily are few in comparison
with those which tell of other lands, and not many Americans discover,
unaided, the paradise they omit from their itineraries.

The most usual mistake made regarding Sicily is that it is a little
island, vaguely located in imagination somewhere near Italy and peopled
by Italians--its inhabitants, Black Handers, organ-grinders,
scissors-men, ditch-diggers and the rest, _mala gente_ all. Sicily is
near Italy--two miles away, in fact--and it is full of Italians, in the
sense that they are Italian subjects. But by heredity, by instinct, by
everything that pertains to racial culture and development, they are far
from being Italians yet. The explanation is a simple one. By consulting
the map you see that the triangle--with an area of some ten thousand
square miles--is not only in the center of the Mediterranean from East
to West, but that it is also a great stepping-stone between Europe and
Africa. In ancient days, when all the civilized world bordered the
Mediterranean, the geographical position of Sicily gave the island an
especial political character and importance. And naturally, while it
remained the very center of the civilized world, it was a rich prize to
be fought for by each Nation which rose to power.

Tradition--as usual--peoples the land first with gods, both beneficent
and malign, and then with giants to whom Homer refers in the Odyssey:
Laistrygones, Cyclops, Lotophagi. After these “poetic monsters” came the
Sikans, Sikels and Elymians, genuine peoples, who may be called the
prehistoric natives as distinguished from the historic foreigners. Of
the three the Sikels, undoubtedly blood-brothers to the pioneers of Rome
and Tuscany, are the most interesting; and a legend has it that they
drifted on rafts from the Italian mainland across the channel now called
the Strait of Messina, about 1100 B. C. They were permanent and
important enough to give the island the name Sikelia, which is still
current in our modified form, Sicily.

The first of the historic foreigners to enter were the Phœnicians,
the Canaanites of the Old Testament, who lived in Tyre and Sidon and the
other cities that lay in the narrow strip of lowland between Mt. Lebanon
and the Mediterranean. They spoke Hebrew, as the Israelites did, but
their worship was the foul and bloody service of Baal and Ashtaroth.
They were the boldest seafaring men in the world; the most cunning
traders,--who came to barter the Tyrian purple, the glass, the gold
jewelry, and the little images of their own manufacture with the rude
and primitive peoples already in possession. The Mediterranean had no
terrors for their little barques, and they established trading posts and
even actual colonies all along its coasts; one even, Gades of
Tarshish--the present Cádiz--faced the ocean itself, beyond the strait
now called Gibraltar, where the Pillars of Hercules guard the entrance
to the Mediterranean. Phœnicia has left us no means of dating her
settlements in Sicily, but we know that they were founded sometime
between the coming of the Sikels in the twelfth century and the coming
of the Greeks in the eighth.

The Greeks called these only rivals of theirs “barbarians,” a name they
applied to all who did not speak Greek. Yet this proved nothing as to
their civilization, for at this early date the Phœnicians were far
advanced in the material arts over all Europeans, including the Greeks
themselves, who learned of them. The most precious acquisition of all
was the alphabet, from which every one of the forms of written speech
now used in Europe has evolved. The Phœnicians may not have invented
it; they may merely have taken it from farther East along with their
other material arts. But they were the distributors, the teachers, the
popularizers, and as such we owe them an unpayable debt.

The real history of Sicily, as a land playing a considerable part in the
affairs of the world, begins with this coming of the Greek, and it is to
his presence that the story owes its peculiar and immutable charm. As
early as the times of the Odyssey the Greeks had some vague notion of
Sicily. Everyone who has read that marvelous poem remembers that the
suitors of Penelope threatened to sell the disguised Odysseus to the
Sikels; and old Lærtes had a Sikelian slave woman. But no doubt the wily
Phœnician traders told stories calculated to frighten away
adventurous explorers; so it was quite by accident that the news which
brought about the initial settlement reached Greece.

Driven by storms upon Sicilian shores Theocles, an Ionian Greek, found
himself late in the eighth century gazing from the deck of his tiny
craft upon a strange land. This he explored a little before returning
home and there reported it as a good country, with inhabitants it would
be easy to conquer. The prospect tempted his fellow-countrymen. They
were colonizers, not traders, and in the next hundred and forty years
they occupied most of the coast of Sicily--Trinakria, Three
Promontories, they called it--making of the island a second Greek world.
Indeed, the city of Syracuse, founded in 734 B. C. by Dorians from
Corinth, eventually became the rival and peer of Athens in wisdom,
beauty and strength.

Though the various independent cities of Sicily fought bitterly and
continuously, their strife seemed only to develop genius and bring forth
wonders in architecture, art and letters. The lofty purity of Greek
civilization found its highest expression in magnificent temples which
for grandeur and simplicity have never been excelled. To-day there are
ruins of no less than twenty of these imposing houses of worship in
Sicily, all of them of the same style, and many of colossal proportions.
The arts of the sculptor and of the numismatist are represented in the
museums by metopes which tell graphically of the evolution of the Greek
ideal in temple decoration, and by coins which for pure beauty and
delicacy have no equals in even Greece itself.

A record of the illustrious Greek litterateurs who came to Sicily as
visitors, or to spend the rest of their lives, is a list of immortals:
Simonides, Sappho, whom an enthusiastic contemporary called the
“violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho”; Pindar, whose quaint
lyrics give us much of our early Sicilian history; and Æschylus,
immortal poet and playwright. Small wonder if with such inspiring
examples in their midst native geniuses should have risen to great
heights. Tisias of Himera is said to have set in order the lyric chorus,
and so to have gained his name of Stesichorus. Epicharmus was the
inventor of comedy, at least of the special Sicilian type. Some of his
plays deal with mythology, many with cookery, and his comedy, “The
Wedding of Hebe,” furnishes epicures with a list of the Sicilian
dainties of his day. Empedocles of Akragas, the most distinguished of
Sicilian thinkers, became prominent as a physician and poet. Philistus,
and the later Diodorus of Agyrium, were historians of the first rank.
The fame of Archimedes the mathematician is imperishable; and
Theocritus, also of Syracuse, gave to the world the first bucolics and
pastorals ever written--strains so sweet that the very ditties the
wandering shepherds on the hills to this day pipe to their flocks are
but parodies of the lilting songs he made centuries ago.

The commercially minded Phœnicians gave the Greek colonists little
trouble, but when Phœnicia’s mighty African daughter--Carthage--grew
up, she struggled long and hard for a permanent foothold upon the
coveted isle. The crafty Carthaginians chose as the moment for their
great effort the time when Xerxes the Persian, with forty-six Nations,
was marching against Greece the mother-country, and Sicily could expect
no assistance. But “Zeus was too strong for Baal,” and both barbarian
hosts went down to crushing defeat--some say on the same day--the
Carthaginians at Sicilian Himera, the Persians at Salamis. Had it been
otherwise, the very civilization of Europe would have been overthrown.
The Carthaginians, though defeated, were not beaten. They kept coming;
and two hundred years later King Pyrrhus of Epirus had to come over from
Greece to rescue Greek Sicily. As he left the island he remarked
prophetically: “What a wrestling ground I leave for Rome and Carthage!”

Pyrrhus was right--the wrestling soon began in the first of the great
Punic Wars, which ended with the utter defeat of Carthage. But while she
was driven out, Rome came in to stay, and by 214 B. C. had swallowed up
the whole island. Sicily was made the first Roman province, and
experienced all the misfortunes of a “carpet-bag government.” For
centuries the peace made stable by Rome prevailed throughout the island,
and the cities could no longer fly at each other’s throats. But as the
price of this enforced tranquillity, former great ruling centers like
Arkagas and Syracuse began to dry up into almost nothing as provincial
towns, intellectual advancement ceased, and during the whole thousand
years of Roman administration, Sicily kept the downward path in every
field of endeavor.

In this relaxed and enervated condition, the island fell an easy prey to
the marauding Saracens; the condition of the Sicilians, worn down by
oppression, explains their feeble resistance. Nothing could kindle a
National feeling, and the conquest was marked by only a desultory
struggle, in which the fervor of a few Christian devotees dared oppose
the Muslim spirit of proselytism. In 965 it was all over. The Saracen
had driven out the decadent Roman in the names of Allah and the Prophet,
and established his own brilliant exotic civilization. Intellectual
activity and agricultural development were fostered, and the Muslim
régime, though it was not to have any such permanence as the Roman it
displaced, nevertheless developed with a splendor and rapidity that
shamed the backward Christians.

Last of all the great molders of Sicily came the Normans, knights who
with their keen blades carved a slice out of the Byzantine Empire on the
Italian mainland and, conquering the Sicilian Muslims, built up a
kingdom for themselves. Sicily’s period of greatest glory dawned with
their conquest. They developed a splendid fabric of feudalism; and all
the arts as well as the more usual graces of civilization stamped the
new kingdom for their own. The very Italian language, as Dante himself
acknowledges, had its feeble beginnings in the court of the Emperor
Frederick II at Palermo. The power of Frederick, who was Emperor of
Germany as well as King of Sicily, was a thorn in the sides of the
Popes, who at this period claimed the right to dispose of all the crowns
of earth. So after Frederick’s death the Pope gave away the Sicilian
crown to his own trusty defender, Count Charles of Anjou; and he,
capturing the island from Frederick’s son, Manfred, turned it over to
the shameful misrule of his lieutenants. Sixteen years later, in 1282,
the French paid dearly for their oppression in the terrible massacre of
the Sicilian Vespers, when they were exterminated throughout the island.

Then the Sicilians invited Don Pedro de Aragón, the son-in-law of
Manfred, their last Norman king, to rule them; and the Aragonese
dynasty, with varying fortunes, lasted until 1409, when it became
extinct, and Sicily was attached to Spain and governed by Spanish
viceroys. Never did a government care less for its subjects; and when
the Spaniards evacuated at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they
left the unhappy island almost destitute.

Sicily had long since ceased to be the center of the civilized world;
and now, a mere appendage, she was tossed relentlessly from one
sovereignty to another in the bitter struggle to maintain the balance of
power. From this time onward her story is a complicated record in which
France, Spain, Savoy, Austria, and even England herself are almost
inextricably tangled. All this time, too, the common people, the
backbone and life of the island, groaned under well nigh intolerable
conditions. Gladstone, writing in 1851 of the Bourbon government, then
ruling Sicily as a part of the Kingdom of Naples, said that its conduct
was “an outrage upon religion, upon humanity, upon civilization and upon
decency.”

But in this, her darkest hour, Sicily was not forgotten. Her insistent
appeals for help, and the blood she had poured out in continual protest
against the vicious Bourbons, were too loud a cry for the liberty-loving
and adventurous spirit of Giuseppe Garibaldi to ignore. With his
immortal “Thousand” he answered, and became not merely the liberator of
Sicily, but the hammer under whose forging blows the discordant states
of the Italian peninsula were welded together into the new and coherent
Italy. Thus at last a single man put the period to the island’s troubled
history, ended definitely her ambitions for individual greatness and
made her an important part of a greater and more powerful whole.

So it is clear that there has never been a Sicilian nation, nor has
there ever been even a Sicilian language; but every great race that
dwells about the Mediterranean at some time has had a part in Sicily’s
story, and each race in its turn has left an indelible imprint upon
language and customs, upon architecture and people. Here one sees a pure
Greek face of classic beauty; there a Saracen gazes calmly upon us out
of features which could come only from the burning desert and the
infinite starry night in the open; and yonder, a Roman, proud and
silent, bends to toil the Romans of old never knew. On many a hill rises
the matchless, mellow ruin of a Greek temple, lovely as anything Greece
itself can show; and in the cities the architectonic genius and spirit
of the races blend in structures dignified and massive, or light and
airy almost to the point of being fantastic.

This is Sicily to-day, the home of all beauty, the abiding place of a
people as picturesque in character as they are in face and costume; and
the sympathetic traveler, living the joy of the moment, as do the
Sicilians themselves, comes into possession of much of the unforgettable
charm and perfume of this island of delights.




_Vistas in Sicily_




I

DISCOVERY


Sicily in spring appeared to us like water in the desert. That we knew
nothing of the island was a misfortune we shared in common with most
Americans. Such vague ideas as we had were derived mainly from long-past
schooldays of wearisome geography, and from newspaper accounts of the
Mafia, whose members seemed always to be Sicilians. But when, after a
stormy fortnight among the volcanic dust-clouds of a great Vesuvian
eruption, we determined to escape that choking atmosphere, the royal
Road to Rome chosen by the tourists--terrified by the belchings of the
volcano--did not appeal to us. Instead, with some trepidation, as
explorers entering a wild and dangerous unknown land, we decided upon
Sicily. Our baggage packed and in the hallway, we came out to Gregorio,
the cabman we had patronized through many a day of work and danger
around Vesuvius.

“Where now, milords?” he smiled at us cheerily, noting the hand baggage.

“To the steamer, Gregorio--to Sicily.”

“To Sicily!” he exclaimed, dropping his whip in sheer amazement. “_Santo
Dio!_--why?”

The haze of volcanic cinders still hanging thickly over Naples was
answer enough, with the added explanation: “We must breathe; we must
rest.”

“Yes, but--” His emotions choked him. Here was Naples deserted by the
thousands of foreigners whom a few days of Vesuvian bellowings had
frightened into abject panic. Cabs rusted at the street corners by
scores; and now he, too, was to be idle. It was too much! Not even the
promise of engagement upon our return could dispel the gloom that had
wiped away his smile.

“_Gia!_” he grunted darkly, shaking his head. “If the _Signori_ ever
return. Who knows, _per Baccho_! Sicilians are _mala gente_, brigands,
murderers--”

It was too late to withdraw, notwithstanding Gregorio’s cheerful
prophecy, and he drove us to the wharf, a mournful figure drooping upon
his box--and we sailed on Friday the 13th, at thirteen minutes past six!
But whether it was because of lack of respect for either fateful numbers
or hoary nautical superstition, or because of skill upon the bridge, the
swift and trim little _Galileo Galilei_ brought us pleasantly in the
glorious dawn to Sicily, and an hour later Palermo--the
capital--shimmered through the smoky mists veiling its Golden Shell.

[Illustration: Map of Sicily]

It was an easy and a delightful voyage, the steamer clean, the sea
smooth. But if one is sea-fearing instead of sea-faring, he may go
comfortably from Naples by train, via Reggio and the Strait of Messina,
only two miles across by ferry. Or, if he be a sea-roving globe-trotter,
he may take one of the numerous Mediterranean liners leaving New York
the year round, and make the trip without a single change all the way to
Palermo; and these vessels are so large and so steady that the trip is
robbed of half its terrors to the most timid soul.

But if money is an object, it is better to go by way of Italy, where
little commutation books for Sicilian travel, called _tessere_, are to
be obtained. Each _tessera_ is a small pocket coupon-book sold in every
large city, from Rome southward, from February to June. The books
contain detachable coupons which entitle the holder to a discount
ranging all the way from ten to seventy-five per cent in the cost of
transportation, food, lodging, merchandise and amusements in the
theaters. They cost ten _lire_ (two dollars) apiece; and it is necessary
only to fill out a given leaf with the date, the names of the stations
to and from which the holder wishes to travel, and to present it at the
station to obtain the discount on accommodations in any class desired
on railway trains and steamers. A saving so large may be effected by its
use that the transportation cost of the trip melts almost into
insignificance.

[Illustration: Palermo, “the Panormos of old ... looks straight out
toward the rising sun.”]

It seems too good to be true, but there is a reason for it. Count
Florio, of the Florio-Rubattino Steamship Company, one of the most
public-spirited men in Sicily, to popularize the island as a place of
resort, to stimulate local travel in the best months of the year, and so
to augment the revenues of both people and island, persuaded the
Government to grant special rates on its railways by giving a sixty per
cent discount on his own private steamers. Various large stores,
theaters, cafés and hotels perceived the reason in his argument, and
quickly followed his example. Moreover, as the Annual Sporting Reunion
is held in Palermo during the late winter, it was felt--as proved to be
the case--that inducements in the way of discounts on the cost of
everything would considerably increase the patronage and make the annual
games and races much more a feature of the island than ever before.

Curiously enough, for a people so fond of red tape, the Sicilians have
not smothered the _tessere_ with senseless regulations. The concierge of
your hotel can fill out and present the book for you when you wish to
leave a city; the railroad ticket agent is not concerned with anything
but your signature; and there are no difficulties about photographs as
identification. But woe to the person who gives his tessera to a
careless concierge! Half a dozen others may have done the same thing at
the same time, and the _tessere_ have become mixed. Unless one wishes to
forge the usually almost indecipherable Italian name on the little green
leaves, no ticket is forthcoming, no matter how fluent the explanation
given; and a new book becomes a necessity.

These winter and spring months are ideal for travel in this
Mediterranean isle. In every age Sicily’s climate has been sung as
halcyone, and in the days when Cicero was quæstor under the Roman rule,
he did not exaggerate greatly when he said that there is never a day
when the sun does not smile at least once. Not even Mentone or the other
resorts along the Riviera can boast of a warmer or more sensuous charm
than Sicily. January, which is the worst and rainiest month of the
Sicilian winter, is very like the first two weeks of May in the northern
part of Europe; and a short time later, when travel begins to waken the
island, the sun shines clear and hot, an overcoat is wholly unnecessary
except in the evening.

Ripe and green fruit and blossoms are to be seen at the same time on the
orange and lemon trees, and by April the scraggy old olive trees bend
beneath the weight of their dull green fruit, just beginning to blush
with purple. The air is full of the scent of myriad flowers, and the
railway tracks, sometimes for miles, run between hedges of
geraniums--six to eight feet high--whose pungent fragrance fills the
flying trains. The summer climate is as mild and salubrious as that of
the winter, for even in July and August the average is not more than
seventy-seven or seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit; about the same as in
our own Atlantic States. Occasionally, during one of the African
siroccos that sometimes sweep across the island, the mercury rises to an
hundred or so; but the sirocco is a rare occurrence, fully as apt to
occur in mid-winter as in summer.

In a climate of this sort the jaded city-dweller, searching for health
and rest, finds an ideal environment, and while the hotels are not the
equals of the fashionable New York and London hostelries, they are
comfortable and moderate in price; and many of them have splendid
gardens attached, where one may have tea, or rest and wander at will
among the scented bowers. One boasts a considerable aviary, and another,
perched at the very edge of a precipitous crag, serves refreshments upon
a stone promenade with the blue African Mediterranean right below, and
the peaks of the Dark Continent faintly suggesting themselves through
the mists of the horizon. Many of the best-known of these hostelries are
located at historic spots, where history and imagination can conjure up
the past vividly--aided, perhaps, by a too generous dinner. More than
one traveler has fought the siege of Taormina all over again in his
post-prandial dreams, and gone tumbling down the nine-hundred-foot
slopes with the Greek tyrant, to wake up on the stony floor of his own
bedroom!

Notwithstanding, the food is good, except in the more remote districts,
where goat’s flesh is usually the literal _piéce de résistance_. In many
of the hill centers the wine of the country, the _vin ordinaire_, as the
French put it, is remarkably pure and good, while for general
attractiveness and cleanly condition, the hotels as a class rank very
well indeed. Not so much can be said for the servants, for the Sicilian
accepts dirt as a thing given of God and therefore not to be too
severely quarreled with under any circumstances; yet he does his best to
live up to the finicky notions of the foreigner who, to his unprejudiced
eye, is so jaundiced. And the Sicilian’s best, in his efforts to please
the stranger, is a very warm-hearted and genial best indeed, full of
cheery smiles, of the utmost willingness to fetch and carry, of entire
devotion, sometimes to the point of doing actual violence for his
patron.

It is characteristic of the people, indeed, that, having so long served
for nothing, they should welcome the chance to serve for their own
profit and pleasure combined; and the service is as pleasant to reward
as it is to receive. Furthermore, the reward need not by any means
always take the form of cash. In Italy everywhere one goes it is always
tip! tip! tip! But in Sicily it is a delight to learn that one often
secures as much for a smile and a gracious word of thanks as for a cash
gratuity. In fact, tips are not infrequently refused. I shall never
forget the expression that crossed the face of a schoolboy to whom I
once offered half a _lira_, ten cents, for some trifling service. There
was hurt pride in the rich brown eyes upturned to mine as the dirty
little paw waved away the coin without a word. Another time, in the
course of a detailed exploration of a prominent agricultural school in
Palermo, the young priest in charge remonstrated with me, half in
amusement, half in indignation, because “you offered my máma money!” To
the apologetic remark that it is very hard to know when not to offer
money, since everyone elsewhere in Italy expects it, the young
philosopher, as cordial and proud as he was abjectly poor, helped
himself to one of my cigarettes with a neat word of thanks and replied:
“Ah, but here it is different! We are a simple, kindly folk in Sicily,
always ready to do whatever we can for the well mannered foreigner. And,
friend, when you go out, do not try to corrupt my boys with money,” was
his parting admonition regarding tips for any of his pupils.

This picturesqueness of character extends to face and costume as well,
and in the remoter places the dress and faces of the ancients may be
observed, striking a curious note of contrast with the exceedingly
modern and well appareled folk of the larger centers. Only fifteen miles
by carriage from Palermo, back in the mountains at Piana dei Greci--an
Albanian colony founded during the latter part of the fifteenth
century--the peasants still hold during festival time to their rich and
exceedingly beautiful costumes of embroidered silken gowns and breeches
heavily picked out with gold. And a costume wedding can usually be
arranged for the benefit of the interested visitor, who is expected to
pay the officiating priest and make a modest gift to the newly married
young couple.

But ancient or modern though the costume be, the demeanor of the wearer
is almost invariably the same, courteous and respectful--one might even
say eager--to give nothing but pleasure to the stranger. And this is
true even of the cab-drivers. We had come to Sicily weary to
exasperation of the importunities and rascality of the Neapolitan
jehus--Gregorio was a smiling exception. To our delight we found
ourselves able to take a ride in Palermo, of half a mile or more, in a
clean, well-kept barouche, drawn by a well-fed little Arab stallion, for
ten cents--and no tip necessary or expected.

The prices for longer excursions were on the same basis, and for weeks
we had the services of a cab, a magnificent horse, and the peerless
Gualterio, for about two dollars a day, including what to the Sicilian
mind was a generous gratuity. And the carriage “ran sweetly,” as
Gualterio assured us it would; nor was it--in his own words--“dirty,
like some!” Of course, the Sicilian cabman, for all his courtly manners
and engaging smile, his soft voice and his continual appeal to the
ladies, with the set phrase “_La Signora vuol’ andare_--The Lady would
like to ride?” (as she usually did, to the enrichment of the cabby) is
not much more to be relied upon for facts, or as a guide, than his
brethren in Naples or anywhere else in the world. The first time we saw
one of the numberless slender stone towers that dot Palermo from end to
end, rising to a height of about twenty feet, covered with fine vines
and dripping countless tiny streams of water, Gualterio smiled
angelically when asked what it was.

“It is very simple, Signore,” he replied instantly. “It is one of the
watch towers, built to enable the guards of the royal Château of La
Favorita to keep watch over the entire estate at once.” It seemed a
curious thing that royal guards should combine duty with the pleasures
of a cooling showerbath; but when I appeared to doubt it, Gualterio
simply pointed at the iron ladder leading from top to bottom outside.
“Behold,” he said. “Are not the ladders still there by which the guards
climbed up and down?” Later we found the structures to be irrigating
towers, as useful as they are picturesque, which is saying a good deal.
How to make a cab-driver truthful is a recipe one seldom or never
learns. Perhaps there is a way, but his fictions are so harmless and
amiable, so entirely diverting and ingenuous, that it seems a pity to
spoil a child of Nature with ironclad rules for veracity.

Nor is the cabman the only Sicilian given to hyperbole or metaphor. The
tendency is marked in all primitive peoples--a large part of the
Sicilians are still primitive--to tell an inquirer the thing they
suppose he most wishes to know; and the Saracenic blood in the Sicilian
has doubtless left him a certain heritage of poetic imagination and
exaggeration for the most utter commonplaces of life. At any rate, this
inclination is found throughout the island, and it does not, except to
the flustered tourist-in-a-hurry, seem a peculiar drawback or fault.
Indeed, it rather adds to the fascination of the people, who appear to
fit perfectly into their environs. Wild looking young girls,
cherry-and-olive of skin, gossiping about the central fountains of their
home towns, bear huge replicas of red Greek amphorai upon their well
poised heads with all the grace of Greek maidens. Sprightly little
goatherds, whose heads are the heads of fauns, and whose half naked and
ruddy bodies are often clad in skins, ramble over the precipitous hills
with nimble herds able to crop a living from mere stone-piles; and the
fauns, Pan-like, pipe to their goats strains Theocritus might have
loved. Swart mountaineers dress like their own rough hills in shaggy
clothes topped off by big rough shawls; and seamen clump about, afloat
and ashore, in boots and “oilers,” or barelegged. The city folk are
equally artless, with their tiny marionette theaters, their homeless
meals in the open air markets, their goat-blessings, their innumerable
other _feste_.

And the Sicilians are not the only entertaining characters one meets.
Sometimes our own countrymen--more often countrywomen!--are not far
behind them. At a little mountain hotel, one evening at dinner a
vivacious, black-haired, sloe-eyed, young woman with the air of one who
comes, sees and conquers, told me in a breath her name, place of
residence, father’s occupation, and asked for my credentials. I was
rather stunned, but one of her companions--there were five of them in
all--reassuring me by “Oh, don’t mind Dulcie! She’s all right,” I
admitted my identity.

With characteristic American energy the trippers “did” the town in one
day, and long before we were ready for breakfast the next morning, drove
away in an ancient barouche crammed to the guards with luggage, and
drawn by three horses so rickety we wondered at the daring of the five
women in accepting it. Dulcinea--have I her name right?--perched beside
the grinning driver, her agile hands full of guidebooks, umbrellas and
so on, gesturing with the fluency of Sicilian temperament itself, took
in everything with a last comprehensive glance, and commanded the
triumphal equipage to move. The hotel manager stood by the door blinking
and dazed. Drawing a hand across his brow as the chatter died away in
the distance, his lips moved in something that doubtless was a tribute
to the “wonderful Americans!”

In another dining room a weighty German, seating himself ponderously,
drew from his pocket a sort of dog-chain which he carefully threw around
his neck and attached by a spring clasp at either end to his napkin,
spread carefully under his expansive chin. By the way, many Germans
travel in Sicily; they seem especially interested in its classical
history. The caretaker in one of the _latomie_ in Syracuse complained:
“Most of the people who have been here this year were Germans. Me, I do
not like the Germans. They have no pockets! Now Americans are grand.
They are all pockets.” After we left he may have concluded that some
Americans are very German. There are many English, too, for they are
everywhere; sometimes interesting, sometimes not.

Besides these folk of to-day, legend and fable have peopled the island
with myriad nymphs and goddesses, gods and dæmons and heroes, equally
interesting. Here in the smoldering caverns of Ætna dwell the grim Sikel
gods of fire. There in the lofty central plateau is the very pool beside
which Proserpina was weaving her daisy chain when stolen by Pluto and
carried away to be queen of the nether world. High on the peak of an
ancient western hill is the dueling ground where Hercules wrestled with
King Eryx. And off the eastern shore are the very rocks the Cyclops
Polyphemus hurled in his impotent rage at the escaping Odysseus.

But song and story are not necessary to invest the natural scenery with
its full share of beauty and importance. The Sicilian Apennines, like
forked lightning, zig-zag sharply down from the northeast corner to the
central southern shore--the rugged, cloud-piercing backbone of the
island. Greek temples, great golden honeycombs of myth and history,
tower up from hilltop and swale of emerald spangled with the gold of
spurge and buttercup, splashed with the impish fiery tongues of
countless poppies; bright groves of orange, lemon, citron, almond and
carob trees in both fruit and flower scent the air with almost
overpowering sweetness; broad brown fields bear acres of the dull green
prickly pears; an occasional huge plot of ground newly plowed, with
moist red furrows, waits open-lipped, to receive seed or shoot; and
everywhere, acre upon acre, extend the vineyards, low-trellised and
green, till from a height the country that the gods loved looks like a
huge crazy quilt, folded and rumpled and vivid, dropped from the
finisher’s hand and left lying where it fell.

Picturesque towns on the very tips of inaccessible crags, walled about
and defended by Nature, give perfect pictures of isolation. Other towns,
white cities springing up from the golden sands of the African sea,
coquette with the emerald waves that lap hungrily at their very doors.
And the dashing tunny-fisheries off-shore--the brilliant sunshine
glinting on the flapping white sails--the water boiling about the
frantic monsters as they plunge and struggle to escape the stabbing
gaffs of their captors; the water red and green and black at last, and
the long line of huge, gleaming bodies--like titanic Spanish mackerel
varnished an opalescent black--strewn upon the white and sparkling
beach!

What more could man wish to see?

[Illustration: Monte Pellegrino looms square and massive at one tip of
Palermo’s crescent harbor.]




II

PALERMO


Most of the passenger steamers come into Palermo shortly after dawn, and
in the pleasant, vernal weather of late winter, or in the real spring,
the great bay is a waveless sheet of gilded beryl, dotted here and there
with small boats so still they seem sculptured, in strong relief against
the purple outlines of the cliffs at either horn of the bay. On the
right, Monte Pellegrino looms square and massive; on the other horn’s
tip Monte Zaffarano peers through the vapors, and the bay between their
rugged shoulders is pent off from the sea by the slender arms of moles
springing outward from the shore. Inside these breakwaters, solemn,
black trans-Atlantic liners await their passengers, and flocks of rakish
small boats, with queer, high, projecting cutwaters and painted in every
dazzling, garish color that fancy can suggest, hop about like so many
water-beetles. Prosaic fishing smacks full of rich, soft colors and
melting lines idle along to lazily lifted sweeps, or linger beside the
mole. And rusty little “cargo-boats that ’aven’t any ’ome” contrast
sharply with the trim white Florio-Rubattino liners.

Early as the hour is, half of male Palermo seems to come to the dock to
shout a cheery welcome as the boat comes in. Throngs of hotel runners
and porters crowd the wharves, all clamoring for recognition, each
trying to drown out his neighbor’s voice; their queer, staccato cries,
combative and challenging, sound as if projected from a huge phonograph
to float loosely upon the jangling air. Yet for all this eagerness it is
hard to find a man not too busy shouting to attend to the baggage. When
one is secured, however, he vanishes like a gnome, to return a few
moments later with the pleasing intelligence that he has smuggled your
trunk through the customs guards, and is ready to perform prodigies with
your handbags.

Palermo’s modern commercial port is distinct from the ancient harbor of
La Cala, now devoted almost exclusively to small fishing craft and
rowboats because of its shallowness. Between the two basins projects a
blunted little promontory, the reminder of that ancient tongue of land
which divided the bay of Panormos of old. On that projecting finger of
ground the Phœnicians built their mighty city, which looked straight
out toward the rising sun. Yet no one knows what its ancient name was,
nor what the citizens called themselves; we know it only by its Greek
name of Panormos, All-Haven. And though the Phœnicians have passed
completely from the entire earth, and the Greeks remain a great Nation,
this city which the Phœnicians founded is still Sicily’s most
beautiful and prosperous center, while the wonderful Greek metropoli of
Akragas and Syracuse have dried up like mummies within the battered
outlines of their once splendid shells.

Palermo has long and deservedly borne the name of La Felice, The Happy.
It is a white city with houses of pearl and roofs of carnelian,
shimmering with golden sunlight against the dark background of vine-clad
hills on the horizon and the rich green of the most fertile plain in the
island, that sweeps, a vast natural amphitheater, from the edge of the
sea up to the seats of the white gods on the cloud-veiled crags.
Splendidly set is the city in the warm lap of its Conca d’Oro, the
Golden Shell that blooms with countless orange and lemon trees whose
golden fruits flash amid the glossy green of the foliage and give the
rolling plain its name. Pink and white almonds, citron, palms, ilex and
pomegranate make it a great botanical garden, perfumed with the jasmine
of Araby, the geranium, the pallid lily and the rose. The system of
irrigation introduced centuries ago by the Saracens still obtains
throughout this favored plain, increasing its productiveness
twenty-fold. Fringing the city, splendid villas and great beautiful
gardens bring a blush to the emerald cheek of the rolling environs. One
feature of parks and gardens throughout Sicily that no American can
fail to notice is the lack of prohibitory signs, such as “$1
$2” Royal, noble or ordinary, these grand floral and arboreal displays
are open to the public practically all the time, yet no one is ever
offended by débris left by picknickers, by broken-off twigs or blossoms.
The Sicilian knows that an infraction of the rights of the owners would
result immediately in the closure of these parks and gardens, and he
respects his privilege of entry.

Many who come to Palermo do so expecting to find a typical south-Italian
seaport, indescribably filthy, and teeming with guides and beggars--as
determined as their native fleas to make a living from the visitor. To
all such the reality comes as thrice welcome. They find a city
beautiful, teeming with life and color, brilliant and irresistible, its
citizens well dressed, orderly and courteous, at least so far as the
traveler sees them. They congest the narrow sidewalks in an easy-going,
gossiping, arm-in-arm throng never in a hurry and never to be stirred to
haste by the polite “_Permesso, Signori!_” of the foreigner. Rather when
urged to speed do they stop short to stare in amazement at such a
phenomenon as anyone pressed for time.

Handsome shops with alluring window displays line the principal
thoroughfares, which run through the city in a huge cross. Clean,
convenient trolley systems vein the capital’s face with crows’-feet in
thin gray lines; enticingly black and narrow little _vicoli_ thread
devious ways among the houses, where the curious may wander unafraid,
and unashamed of his curiosity and interest. And every alley, every
byway and passage is spotlessly clean; while the gardens of the city,
scattered with prodigal lavishness throughout even the business section,
are beautiful beyond description. At first the senses refuse to take in
anything more than a strange, exotic, gorgeous medley of light, color,
sounds; an unfathomable jumble of men and animals, of quaint buildings
and strange vehicles, of street cries weird but melodious, of the
faintly scented brilliant atmosphere--of the half-revealed,
half-guessed-at Soul of the City.

Perhaps the two main streets constitute the best monument the Spaniards
have left behind them. They may not have cared for Sicily; but for
themselves and their convenience and comfort they cared much. So the
Spanish viceroy, Don Pedro de Toledo, ran a fine broad street straight
from the smiling sea through the middle of the town, and called it for
himself, the Toledo. It is now the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele--practically
every city of any importance in Italy has testified in this same way to
its love for the united country’s first king. Crossing this ancient
Toledo is the other highway, the Via Maqueda, laid out by another
viceroy, the Duque de Maqueda, a short time later. The curious
square--it is an octagon, by the way--where these two streets intersect
at right angles, is called by the whimsical Sicilians the Quattro Canti,
or Four Corners. The façades of the abutting buildings are concave, and
each affords lodgment for statues of a Season, a Spanish King and a
female saint--who might be in a deal better company!

Our first morning on the Corso we were halted by a terrific outburst of
sound from the very heart of the throng.

“What’s that?” I exclaimed, swinging my camera into position. “A fight;
somebody being murdered?”

[Illustration: “The water-seller, whose bellow has musical quality and
charm.”]

But La Signora was not minded to be left a widow in a strange land for
the sake of a putative photograph, and halted me. The cry stopped: as we
listened it began again. Angry and defiant, bellicose even, it rose
clear and strong above the noise of the street, held a moment, faded in
slow diminuendo into the beautifully clear note of a great and playful
animal baying for sheer joy of his own strength. The sauntering crowds
paid not the slightest attention to the amazing volcanic outburst of
vocal fireworks; not one of the alluring shops beside us was emptied of
its customers; the tiny Sardinian donkeys in the shafts of the gayly
painted little carts did not even lift an ear, but pattered gravely
onward; and we, moving with the crowd, looked sheepishly at one
another when we reached the corner. Standing in an angle of two house
walls was a little seller of sweetened water, holding his big red
amphora by one ear, his gaudy little yellow-red-blue stand bright with
clinking bottles and glasses. As we stopped, he stunned us again with
his musical bellow, and knowing we would not buy his “_Aaaaacquuuuaaaa!
Aaaaacquaaaaaaaa d-o-l-c’!_” struck a picturesque attitude and posed for
us instead. He is there yet--or another water-man is, for it is a fine
corner for business.

Along the Via Maqueda and its continuations, the Ruggiero VII and the
Avvenida della Libertà, the fashionable _corso_, or afternoon driving
promenade of all classes, takes place. The handsome street is an endless
chain of moving vehicles of every description. Here a spanking team of
blooded bays with silver-mounted harness draws the smart London trap of
a young Florio; there a rickety old barouche, guiltless of varnish for
many a long year, so crowded with a stout family party of six that its
rheumatic springs creak, and the wind-broken old hack who pulls it feels
his waning powers severely taxed. A splendid young Arab, full of blood
and pride, pulling a new victoria, follows a ducal cart and precedes
another overflow meeting, this time a stag party. Flashily dressed young
gallants with cigarettes and straw hats _à l’Anglais_, loll back in
decent traps and carts, making sheep’s eyes at the demure young girls
who ride in maiden reserve beside their silent mothers.

Every Palermitan who can, rides in this social promenade. What matter if
his vehicle be but a cheap hired victoria; what if he go to bed
supperless; has he not had the supreme delight of playing milord in
elegant leisure among the nobility and the rich _forestieri_ (tourists)
who take the air on the city’s stateliest avenue?

It not infrequently transpires that one carriage, one horse and one
coachman are owned--and alternately used--by two or three families. The
coachman in all probability not having been paid for a year or two,
cannot afford to run away; the emaciated steed, not having had a really
square feed of good sweet oats for an equally distressing period, could
not run away if he would; and if both horse and driver should by fell
conspiracy bolt, the faithful old carriage would quickly fall to pieces
rather than have any part in the undoing of its worthy owners.

[Illustration: “There is nothing to equal the Sicilian cart, carved,
yellow, panelled.”]

Those of the nobles too poor to own a carriage alone, and far too proud
to appear in hired ones, are not too proud to adopt the tactics of their
humbler brethren, and go shares in an outfit with other nobles of equal
pretensions and as poor as themselves. Only one extravagance marks the
common ownership of what might be called these “party rigs.” Each count
or baron or prince naturally boasts “arms” as the insignia of his
rank; and these symbols must of necessity embellish his carriage doors,
that he who walks may know at a glance the name and fame of him who
rides. From this dilemma the Sicilian has contrived an ingenious escape.
Each noble has his own set of emblazoned doors. So when the tired horse
brings his Highness the Prince back to his “palace,” presto! off come
the princely doors, on go the ducal or baronial ones, and his Grace the
Duke or the Baron rides serenely off in his own private equipage!

Of all the vehicles in the world, there is nothing, however, to equal
the Sicilian cart, carved, yellow, paneled with lurid paintings that run
the gamut of myth and history. One we saw had upon its panels scenes
representing Columbus sailing from Palos and discovering America; a
bloody fight around the citadel of Acre; the hermitage of Santa Rosalia;
and on its tailboard a vivid presentation of the massacre of the
Vespers. These carts are never very large, as carts go; but they are so
marvelously wrought, they ought surely to come under the provisions of
the law which forbids the exportation of any works of art. Wheels,
shafts, axles, the edges of sides and posts and tailboards are all
worked into neat geometrical designs, and on the axle is a carving built
up clear to the bottom of the cart, a mass of intricate scroll-work and
gingerbread, in the middle of which sits the patron saint of the
fortunate owner.

“If you expect a cart-driver to tell you the truth, make him swear by
the saint sitting upon his axle,” is almost a proverb in Palermo. Would
there were saints on the cabs, too!

Often the horses’s decorations are equally fantastic, with a three-foot
cock feather rising between his ears, an apoplectic purple bouquet of
yarn upon the saddle, and plenty of shrill little bells at jingly
intervals all over. These gorgeous outfits are used for ordinary
delivery work, and after working hours the family put chairs in and go
for a ride in state. The bit is as queer as the harness: it isn’t a bit
at all, but a plate of spring-steel strapped loosely over the horse’s
nose, an horizontal prong projecting on either side. Attached to the
prongs, the reins give the driver complete control over his animal,
since by pulling them he gently but effectively cuts off the beast’s
breath. This makes runaways impossible, and besides, is much more humane
than a bit of the usual sort.

The city’s street cleaning department is not such a joke as it appears.
Looks are not its strong point--keeping the town immaculate is. The
carts are simply scaly old specimens of these brilliant equipages; and
the animals are tiny Sardinian donkeys, as pretty and gentle as any pet
lamb, and scarcely bigger. One velvety little gray beauty we saw on the
Via Maqueda was undoubtedly heartbroken at having such disagreeable work
to do. We talked to him and petted him, but to all our caresses he
made not the slightest response, merely hanging his head and suffering
his fate silently, like the brave little beast that he was.

[Illustration: “The city’s street-cleaning department is not such a joke
as it appears.”]

Perhaps it is the cleanliness of these streets that makes the people use
them as drying-rooms. In Naples they wash in the streets, and hang the
clothes from window to window in narrow alleys. But in Palermo the
people go much farther--they cover the façades of their very finest
houses with linen which flaps in plain sight even during the fashionable
_corso_ on the broad avenue.

On this same Via Maqueda are the two large theaters. The Mássimo, or
Largest Theater, is a splendid structure, well named, for it is the
largest theater not only in Italy but in all Europe, a dignified
adaptation of ancient Greek ideals to present day needs. A block farther
on is the Politeama Garibaldi, with a Roman triumphal arch entrance, and
a two-storied Greek colonnade encircling frescoed walls whose
polychromatic decorations are so exceedingly Pompeiian they suggest that
Palermo may be the birthplace of a new renaissance in Italian art.

The Sicilian of any class is always picturesque, always individual. He
could scarcely be anything else if he tried, and the life of the masses
in the city is like a show at the theater--a show, at that, in which
even the supernumeraries are ever imbued with due regard for the proper
setting and action of the piece. There is no more typical specimen of
this condensed picturesqueness than the water-seller, whose bellow has
musical quality and charm, as you discover after your first shock. He
calls up Egypt and the streets of Cairo. Really, he is the survival of
an ancient Arab custom. You find him everywhere, especially among the
lanes of the Fiera di Pascua, the Easter Fair, a piece bitten right out
of the heart of Coney Island. The Easter season, by the way, is an
exceedingly fortunate time to spend in Sicily, because of the
multitudinous festivities going on.

For the Fair, great bare sheds spring up overnight in the square beside
the Mássimo, mushroom-like--a sunstruck Babel of crazily built and
decorated shops and stalls and booths where everything imaginable is to
be bought, from tinware and toys to rosaries and vegetables. About the
booths eddies a jovial mob, pushing, chattering, playing practical jokes
on one another, eating candy and the dubious Sicilian equivalents for
frankfurters and kraut. Bands blare out fitful, horrible music from the
roofs or windows of small sheds curiously mounted with painted legends
or astonishing pictures in which the lack of perspective is the most
prominent feature, unless it is the artist’s entire disregard for the
principles of anatomy. “Barkers” in plate armor manufactured out of
ancient kerosene tins from which the odor has by no means departed,
vie with ridiculous clowns and short skirted dancers in proclaiming the
attractions of their rival marionette and “minstrel” shows. And
everybody wants to pose. Indeed, the Sicilians have a good humored mania
for getting in the way of the camera, even when they know they are not
wanted there and will never see a single copy of the picture.

[Illustration: “‘Barkers’ in plate-armor ... in the Easter Fair, a piece
bitten right out of Coney Island.”]

I leveled my camera at one queer stall, and instantly the people sprang
together solidly, completely obscuring the booth, each man crying to his
neighbor: “_Aspett’! Aspett’! Il fotografo!_” In vain I pleaded. In vain
Gualterio shouted and threatened and argued. The merrymakers laughed,
and nodded, and stood like statues. In the confusion an important
policeman stepped up, saluted respectfully, and said: “Excellency will
be kind enough to move out into the street again. He is attracting
citizens, and blocking the entire square.”

Then he began unhurriedly turning over the human kaleidoscope.




III

A NIGHT OF DISSIPATION


Palermo is chimneyless. Hovels and palaces alike have no fires, except
for cooking, and among the poorer classes very little of that is done at
home, the people being steady patrons of the _cucine economice_, or
“economical kitchens,” especially of those in the vicinity of the great
public markets.

Anxious to see these typical aspects of city life in tabloid form, we
had our own dinner early one evening, and told Gualterio to take us
through the poorer quarters, to show us the people getting their
suppers, both at home and in the old market. Obeying literally, he drove
us through countless _piccoli vicoli_ or narrow alleys, dark little
canyon-like slits between the houses.

Strange shadowy forms flitted about under our horse’s very feet; black
doorways gave yawning glimpses of deeper gloom beyond, lighted only by a
tiny candle; here and there we passed vague silhouettes--a hungry man
standing, hat on, before a table or sideboard gulping down his meager
dinner, or a woman, Rembrandt-like, knitting, mending, reading, or
amusing a child, in soft relief against the murk of the interior. Sharp
cries from the driver warned away the children sitting in the street, so
narrow that the wheels of our carriage scraped the house walls on both
sides while going through; women knitting slipped their chairs
momentarily back into the doorways in order to let us pass. Street lamps
at long intervals twinkled feebly, and after six or eight such streets
were traversed we emerged into the glare and brilliance of the slightly
depressed Piazza Caraccioli, home of the Fiera Vecchia or Old Market.

Halting the victoria on one side of the square, we wandered about on
foot among a bedlam more picturesque than, and fully as noisy as, the
Easter Market. To describe the scene adequately is impossible--no one
who has not seen it can gather more than the vaguest idea from any
printed description of this vivid cross-section of lower class Sicilian
customs.

Dazzling light and pitchy darkness alternate sharply, with no
intermediate nuances of softer shadow, and the hurrying people rush
hither and yon like so many busy ants. Adding to the confusion of the
scene, the peddler and vendor shout out their wares: “Water!” “Olives!”
“Artichokes!” “Fish!” A chorus of lesser cries swell into diapason
invitations to buy all manner of things one does not wish and can not
possibly use, and there is much good natured chaff for the
_forestieri_. Men, women and children by the score are everywhere, some
eating where they stand, some carrying food home.

Small pails of gleaming charcoal bear upon their heads great kettles of
boiling artichokes. Steam and aroma from the cooking meats and
vegetables; the smoke of lamps, candles and torches and burning fat and
grease in the frying pans; escaping gases from the ranges in the
“economical kitchens,” from the charcoal fires, and from the coal
stoves; the innumerable smells of fresh vegetables, meat, fish, both
salt and fresh, cut flowers and goats, with an additional tang of cheap
wine, gushing from big casks into pails and bottles in the open shops,
mingle in a composite odor by no means as unpleasant as might be
thought.

The whole scene is a delight to the eye. Here is a good sized wine shop,
its front entirely open, showing two rows of casks and an imposing array
of copper bright as the sun; yonder a vegetable store completely covered
with onions suspended in long strings, bunches and wreaths, decorated
fancifully with green leaves and little rosettes which afford a
background of decidedly striking type for an image of the Holy Bambino,
itself of onion color, and barely discernible among the rustling strings
of bulbs over the door.

[Illustration: “Vendors of fried entrails ... squat beside their
baskets.”]

[Illustration: “The people are steady patrons of the Economical
Kitchens.”]

Beside us a tiny restaurant, its front all gas-range, yawns enticingly,
while opposite glows the fiery eye of an artichokeman’s tiny charcoal
fire. Vendors of fried entrails and stomachs squat beside their frying
pans and baskets, perforated ladles in their hands, exactly like our
frankfurter men; while water-men with their highly colored stands full
of clinking glasses swing along, bellowing cheerfully.

Great gaudy signs in blue, red and yellow proclaim the prices of empty
eggs, strung on threads, or impaled upon wooden spearlets, and stuck up
over the front of a shop. Evidently the Palermitan distinguishes as we
do between “eggs,” “fresh eggs” and “strictly fresh eggs,” for the price
varies considerably. However, the careful buyer we watched trusted not
in signs or portents, but weighing each egg carefully as he bought,
placed a dozen or more of the fragile things in his coat pockets despite
the throng. Why a purchaser never comes home with an omelet in his
clothes is a mystery, for we found it exceedingly difficult to work our
way through the crowd. Yet, when I questioned the egg-seller he declared
that no one ever broke an egg.

A man with a pretentious stand like the American quick lunch counters
stood behind a narrow smoking counter full of hidden fire, bearing a
frying pan on top. On his left a bowl of strong shredded cheese faced
other dishes of butter and rolls. He was a very popular caterer, too,
for while we stood watching him a number of customers came up, giving an
order in the peasant dialect which we could not understand, and the
proprietor with a deft turn of his hand split a roll, covered it
liberally with a rich thick layer of shredded cheese looking like
toothpicks, placed upon that a few scraps of the meat he was cooking
below, and deluging the whole with a spoonful or two of boiling grease,
served up the tit-bit to his eager customer. In Sicily the butchers sell
the offal and entrails of slaughtered animals, which in America are
turned over the soap manufacturers or thrown away. The kitchen-man who
buys them cuts up the stuff, boils it in its own fat, and sells it in
the reeking buns at a penny apiece. The sturdy Sicilian seems to enjoy
and thrive on this horrible mess, and even the children come toddling up
to clamor for their share.

Macaroni of all sorts, curled, fluted, twisted, frilled, chopped into
squares and lead pencil lengths, woven, braided into shapes numberless,
decorates several of the stalls. Other booths sell candles; others,
shoes; still others, nothing but cheese. Cobblers are everywhere,
although it seems impossible--in a town where so many people go
barefoot--that one-tenth of the shoemakers, who work from six o’clock in
the morning until nearly midnight, can find anything to do.
Notwithstanding this external poverty, however, there are in the houses
of the very poorest in practically every section of the town
sewing-machines, whose tireless treadles throb and pulse by day and far
into the night, the seamstress bending over her work lighted only by
the spasmodic flickerings of a little candle.

Tiring after an hour or so of the bustle and confusion and glare, we set
off again. In and out we wound, as in a dream, peopling the streets with
imaginary rascals ready to rob or kidnap, until at last in a small open
square we came to the brilliantly lighted wineshop and café of _Sainte
Rosalie_, whose proprietor, himself partly French, thus Gallicizes the
name of the town’s patron saint, and at the same time adds distinction
to his café in the eyes of lower class Palermo. We stopped curiously,
and the proprietor, immediately forgetting his patrons, invited us to
get out and inspect the place.

Filling almost one entire side of the large front room is a huge stove
built of mortar-covered brickwork, upon which bubbled a couple of
cauldrons, one full of goats’ stomach, the other containing scraps of
something or other. Both smelled good--but how they looked! Opposite the
stove hung meat which had been fresh that morning; piles of vegetables
completely filled up the counter and various tables. All the coppers and
cooking utensils were spotless, and marvelous to relate, there is a real
chimney, and running water, both hot and cold. Sometimes you see a house
which has a genuine iron cooking stove--but it stands in the parlor and
the stovepipe is thrust conveniently out into the street above the
closed lower half of the front door.

The café is divided into two parts by an arch, and no curtains being
hung, the diners can see perfectly how their food is being cooked.
Leading us through into the _Sala di pranzo_, the proprietor, with a
sweeping bow, waved us into two chairs at a table beside two native
couples who were taking their belated suppers. The peasants greeted us
frankly and pleasantly, the women smiling, and the men doffing their
caps with a hearty “_Buona sera, signori!_”

Not knowing exactly what was expected of us, we ordered _vino e pasta_,
supposing we would receive some sour, fiery fluid, and the bad Sicilian
bread. Instead there was set before us a large flagon of reddish-brown,
rather heavy dessert wine, a little too sweet to be palatable to
Americans, but nevertheless delicious. Clean though coarse napkins and
glasses accompanied it, and delicious almond sweet-cakes in far greater
quantity than we could eat. The price of this refreshment was so
ridiculously small that we wondered at first whether Boniface had not
made a mistake.

Our trip through the market and the _piccoli vicoli_ thus pleasantly
finished, I told Gualterio to take us to the theater.

That anyone would be willing to miss a minute of pleasure he must pay
for was incomprehensible to his simple mind. Draining his beaker at a
gulp, he nearly dropped the glass in astonishment. “_Ma--signore! É
troppo tard’! Ora si finisc’ il prim’ atto!_” he exclaimed. “It is too
late! The first act is surely over!”

[Illustration: “The Holy Bambino ... barely discernible among the
rustling strings of onions over the door.”]

”Oh, I did not mean the fine theaters where the rich people go, but a
little theater, a theater of the people--where you go when you have an
evening to yourself.”

A curious expression came over his face, but making sure that we knew
what we were talking about, he drove rapidly to the door of a dirty and
dilapidated looking house in a small side court. Though we did not
expect marionette shows to be given in a very splendid auditorium, we
were scarcely prepared for this, rather hesitating to enter.

The door was divided, the lower half closed, the upper open. Inside hung
a short, flapping black curtain, while about the door loitered a little
group of street urchins who dodged up when the doorkeeper’s back was
turned, to peep eagerly into the slit of brilliance that revealed the
stage between the upper edge of the half-door and the bottom of the
curtain.

As we, too, peeped, Gualterio whispered that here was a theater whose
audience numbered the very poorest and the humblest in the city, adding
apologetically: “Perhaps it is too poor for Excellency. I have been here
and enjoyed the performance, but Excellency is accustomed to the fine
theaters, and the Signora may not like this very well.”

On the contrary, that was exactly the sort of theater we did wish to
see. The glimpse we got through the open door of the auditorium however,
was not reassuring; and furthermore there was not a woman present. I
knew all about the custom of the Sicilian theaters, which announce two
different sorts of plays--“To-night for men;” “This is a play for
ladies.” Naturally, seeing no sign of the more particular sex, I jumped
at the conclusion that this must be a man’s night. But disturbed by our
conversation outside, the doorkeeper-proprietor and at least half of the
audience politely arose and insisted that we should enter. With some
misgivings we did so, paying two cents apiece for seats. Afterward I
learned that the impresario had charged us exactly double what anyone
else paid.

The seats consisted of a few hard wooden benches without any backs, and
the one reserved place in the entire theater--which was a room perhaps
thirty feet square with two galleries some five feet above the floor on
both sides--was a single broken-backed kitchen chair perched upon one of
the benches in the middle of the house. The only well dressed man in the
room, who occupied it, gallantly sprang down at once, and with a
delightfully courtly bow and smile assisted the protesting Signora to
his place. The audience numbered about forty or fifty fisherman,
peddlers, a cabman or two and a miscellaneous collection of as jovial
looking pirates as ever scuttled a ship or slit a throat. But for all
their appearance, they behaved exactly like American opera-goers, and
the stir that our entrance made set every tongue chattering at a lively
pace.

The stage stretched across the end of the pit at a height of perhaps
three or four feet above the floor, and on a rack of some kind at the
left of the place where the footlights should have been, was a quantity
of wilted green vegetables. Thinking of what happens to inferior actors
in the rural districts here, I inquired with some anxiety if the
vegetables had been laid aside for that purpose. But the man to whom I
spoke, missing the joke entirely, replied with the utmost simplicity:
“Oh, no, Giuseppe laid his pack there because it was too big to place
between the seats.”

How homelike it would seem to the weary street hawker in New York, could
he but stop at the theater on his way home, and occasion no remark by
leaving his left-over stock in trade at the feet of the actors for the
time being.

As soon as La Signora was ensconced upon her uncertain “reserved seat,”
the men who sat beside me on either hand began to explain the play in
what they probably considered words of one syllable. The fancily dressed
young man at my right seemed impatient at the remarks of my white-haired
left-hand neighbor, who smelled strongly of tar, and whose sixty years
and showerbath dialect made him both attractive and unintelligible to
me. Both men talked at once and at high speed. In the meantime everyone
else all over the house was talking cheerfully; and the play was
proceeding as calmly as though there were no interruption. Between the
two explanations, neither of which I could understand, I had
considerable difficulty in catching the words of the play, which was
being read by a gentleman whose lungs must have been rubber and whose
throat brass. He stood back of the proscenium somewhere and bellowed or
whispered in fine frenzy at every dramatic point, as the marionettes
performed their astonishing evolutions.

The puppets were handsome armored figures about three feet high, clothed
in glittering plate and chain armor, accoutered cap-à-pie, their shields
properly blazoned and their surcoats faithful models of the garments
worn by the ancient knights. Marching, filing and counter-filing, they
made addresses to the accompaniment of stiff, clattering gestures,
fought duels of deadly outcome with clashing weapons and rasping wires
in the glare of half a dozen smoky oil lamps, and moved about easily,
manipulated by the expert hands of operators who were standing in the
wings. Every little while a human hand would burst into view,
grotesquely gigantic compared with the puppet whose fate was in its
keeping.

[Illustration: The Politeama Garibaldi, one of Palermo’s two greatest
theaters.]

The play was one of the familiar favorites, representing the
endeavors of invading Moors to convert Christian Sicilians to
Mohammedanism, but the author was somewhat mixed in his history. Beside
the Sicilians and Moors he worked in Frenchmen, and before the play was
over, the story was that of a struggle between the two Christian
nations, the Mohammedans obviously forgotten. The wicked, wicked
Frenchmen were, of course, defeated, and their bloody schemes met with
the noisy condemnation of the little crowd, while their opponents, the
ancestors of these same street boys and hucksters and fishermen, won as
hearty approval.

In the interval between the fourth and the last acts I had a chance to
inquire of my neighbors why there were no women present. Both men
regarded me with astonishment, and the younger answered first.

“Women? Women in the theater? Why, the theater is not good for them. I
never bring my woman!”

Evidently a foreign woman was different, and none of the audience seemed
to regard it as strange that one should be among them. As we came out
into the fresh night air, Gualterio was apologetically solicitous, a
little nervous as to the success of his experiment in bringing us to
this particular theater. But our manifest satisfaction with our night of
dissipation speedily reassured him, and all the way back to the hotel he
sang _canzone_ to his chunky little Arab out of pure joy and
thankfulness.




IV

CATHEDRALS


It has already been pointed out that the Easter season is an especially
good time to be in Palermo. On Easter morning the great Court of the
Lord before the Cathedral is a surprising picture. Upon the heavy stone
balustrade enclosing it sixteen massive saints meditate benignly in the
scented air. The great gray cement yard, flowers all colors of the
rainbow, marble Santa Rosalia--patroness of Palermo--the huge church
itself: all are bathed in the most brilliant sunshine imaginable. Words
and pictures alike fail to give any adequate expression of it. The noise
and unrest of the busy Corso are forgotten in this magic precinct;
smiling, happy men, women and children stream through the yard,
picturesque in their holiday attire; while from the windows drones the
chant of the Mass, like the buzzing of a swarm of kindly bees hovering
over the flowers. The white glare of the Egyptian desert is never more
blinding than a Sicilian spring morning radiance.

[Illustration: The blending of different architectural forms in the
Palermo Cathedral gives it charm.]

Though the service calls, religion in Sicily takes small heed of the
antics of foreigners, and if one chooses to stay outside in the
courtyard and take photographs, it causes not the slightest comment. The
main charm of the Cathedral lies in the curious blending of its
different forms of architecture--Arabic, Norman, Gothic; which produces
a dashing and almost whimsical effect in its fine arcades, its rich
friezes and battlements, its interlacing arches, and its airy turrets
outlined against the blue sky. Two graceful flying arches connect the
Cathedral with the campanile or belfry which, as is often the case, is
separated from the Cathedral proper--in this instance across the street.
The vast structure as a whole is the very epitome of Sicily’s many sided
culture and art during her high tide of glory, the Norman period. A
witty Englishman has fitly remarked that the badly restored and
whitewashed interior, however, is of the “railroad station type.”

In the south aisle chapels, though, are the excellent tombs of the
kings, the grim and silent last homes of the marvelous Frederick, that
“Wonder of the World,” of Henry VI, The Butcher, of Constance the
Broken-Hearted, and of others. A great crimson porphyry sarcophagus
holds the dust of King Roger, of whom it has been well said indeed that
he was “one of the wisest, most renowned, most worthy, and most
fortunate princes of his time” (Freeman). Kneeling Norman nobles carved
in white marble upbear the simple, boxlike mass of porphyry upon their
armored shoulders. What an expression of the homage of the people! The
simple inscription, in Latin, reads:

    IN QUIET AND PEACE, ROGER, STRENUOUS
        DUKE AND OF SICILY FIRST KING,
  IS DEAD IN PANORMOS, THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY
              IN THE YEAR 1154.

So it would seem that we are not the first people to discover “the
strenuous life!”

And King Roger’s life was certainly strenuous. But it was nothing at all
compared to the career of his father, who landed stealthily in Sicily by
night with a handful of trusty knights and men-at-arms, captured Messina
before breakfast, and stormed on through the island, felling the
Saracens like so many saplings. The Norman conquest was distinguished
throughout by the most impossible feats of both personal valor and
consideration; the island was ready for Roger to knit together and
administer when he succeeded his father, and played the rôle of lawgiver
and organizer to his fiery parent’s conquests. And young Roger rose even
higher than his father. Where he had been Count, Roger made himself not
only King of Sicily, but ruler of a considerable part of Southern Italy
as well. What manner of man he was is shown by an ancient mosaic still
on the wall of the church of the Martorana, a remarkable example in
itself of Norman-Sicilian art. Notwithstanding the tremendous
temporal power of the Popes in those days, this descendant of the
vikings refused to be crowned by the papal legate, and the mosaic
represents him placing the diadem upon his head with his own hands.

[Illustration: “A great crimson porphyry sarcophagus holds the dust of
‘Roger, Strenuous Duke.’”]

The Martorana church was built by the King’s High Admiral, Giorgios
Antiochenos, a versatile gentleman indeed, who amused himself while on
shore leave or duty by building bridges and churches, importing silk
weavers and generally playing the constructive and highly intelligent
official, whose good works have long outlived himself.

Throughout the island it is eminently proper to keep the key of a
building as far away from its door as possible--it is the _custode_ of
La Martorana who gives open sesame to the Scláfani Palace. As you drive
over, he ticks off its history on his bony fingers with the precious
key: Built in 1330; afterward a grand hospital; to-day a barrack for the
Bersaglieri or mountain riflemen. Practically the only remaining
evidence of its former grandeur is a tremendous fresco attributed to a
long-forgotten Flemish painter, on one of the walls of the courtyard.
The fresco, measuring some eighteen feet in height by about twenty-two
in length, is called _Il Trionfo della Morte_, The Triumph of Death, and
its name is fully borne out by its grisly realism, as the white horse
and his ruthless skeleton rider trample down those who wish to live,
and ignore the wretched who plead in vain for release from their misery.
With the latter group stands the painter himself, palette and mahlstick
in hand; it is said he was taken ill while a guest in the palace.
Perhaps the painting commemorates his feelings during that unfortunate
experience.

It is frankly ugly--there is no other word to express it--yet it still
clings to the white wall and produces an astonishing effect, especially
when one remembers that it is a faithful expression of the religious
feeling of the epoch it stands for. While we were studying it, a
well-fed American-in-a-hurry, evidently a person of importance
Baedekering through Sicily, rushed into the court, asked abruptly if
that were the great picture, thrust both hands into his pockets and,
with feet wide apart, appraised it a few moments in patent disgust. It
costs about a _lira_ and a half--something like thirty cents of our
money--to see the fresco. Pulling out a handful of loose change to pay
the custodian, the stranger glanced first at his hand, then back at the
painting.

“Thirty cents! Thirty cents--that’s exactly what it looks like!” he
exploded, and was off before we could get our breaths.

That Palermo had queer taste in the old days is indicated by the
Scláfani fresco; and further evidence is not lacking in the crypts of a
Capuchin monastery, a short distance outside the Porta Nuova. The
vaults, long ago used as a burial place by the wealthier families of the
city, contain at present some eight thousand embalmed bodies. This
subway full of mummies is divided into several sections, the men and
women segregated from each other and from the monks and priests, who
have a gallery apart. Some of the bodies are in coffins or caskets of
various sorts, but many have been hung up by the neck in cords like
hangman’s nooses. Some skulls are entirely fleshless, while others are
partially covered. Hands whose fingers have shrunk to black bits of
petrifaction hang loosely from rotting gloves which now appear several
sizes too large. Heads have slipped back to stare up at the cobwebbed
ceiling, turned sidewise with most diabolical leers, moved forward as
though to combat the visitor. Not a single skull is expressionless, even
if devoid of flesh. Some are jocose, some piously sad, some morose, some
menacing and grim.

Within the artillery barrack a little farther out, is a ragged tower
some thirty feet high that represents the ancient villa of La Cuba. An
Arabic frieze about the bare exterior suggests the residence of some
haughty old Emir of Palermo. The iconoclastic archæologists, however,
have shattered the popular belief by deciphering the inscription to
prove that no Saracen ever lived there, but that the mansion was erected
in 1183 by the grandson of Roger, King William II, “The Good,” of whose
reign one chronicler of the period wrote: “There was more security then,
in the thickets of Sicily than in the cities of other kingdoms.”
Modesty, though, could scarcely have been the most conspicuous of that
monarch’s many virtues, for the inscription reads: “In the Name of God,
clement, merciful, give heed. Here halt and admire. Behold the
illustrious dwelling of the most illustrious of the kings of the earth,
William II.”

Tired out one night after a long day following the hounds through the
forests outside Palermo, this same King William II, “The Good,” lay down
to sleep on a hill overlooking the city. And in his sleep, he dreamed:
Out of the glades floated the shining figure of the Virgin, mysterious
and inspiring, telling the awestruck monarch that the church he had
sworn to build for her must be erected on that very spot. Slowly the
dazzling vision faded, and when he awoke William named the hill Mon
Reale--Royal Mount--at once beginning to prepare for the most splendid
church in Sicily, a house of prayer worthy of both its divine patroness
and its royal founder.

In 1174 the actual construction began, and eight years later, thanks to
the pious aid of the King’s mother, Margaret of Aragon, the Duomo of
Monreale was solemnly consecrated. It was, however, unfinished outside,
and to this day its barren exterior hints nothing of its interior
magnificence.

[Illustration: “The Monreale Cathedral rises like a fortress before the
town.”]

Around the Cathedral sprang up a populous little city of jammed-together
houses along constricted, hilly streets, and eight centuries have not
changed the town appreciably. It is possible to ascend by tram this
crested slope upon whose brow the Middle Ages still reign.
Unfortunately, the cars are not personally conducted to stop at the best
viewpoints, so it is better, though more expensive, to take a cab.

Once in a while in Europe the recognition of class distinction grips an
American with a strangle-hold. That day in the Monreale tram it seized
me, when a fat, overdressed middle-class woman of forty or so began to
give herself more airs than a duchess. With her little son, she was
taking up room enough for four ordinary people, when a spotlessly neat
old peasant woman, with a decent murmur of apology, sat down in the
half-vacant space alongside. The bourgeoise flared like a Sans Gene,
jabbed at her parcels brusquely, and told her loudly not to intrude upon
her betters. It was then that I wished for a second-class car, to save
the old woman from such gratuitous effrontery.

The Cathedral rises like a fortress before the town; its main
doors--between two massive square towers, giving upon a dusty little
square--are rich bronze leaves full of low-reliefs from Old Testament
history. The first impression on entering is of a dazzling blaze of
golden light, beating upon and beaten back from golden walls with
stunning effect, in which the details of design and ornamentation, for
all their clarity and importance, are so marvelously subordinated that
they but add to the glowing display. Though the superb glass mosaics
cover an area which Baedeker--with “Made-in-Germany” accuracy--declares
to be 70,400 square feet, the lower walls are all pure white marble,
with an upper border and slender bright-colored bands which run
perpendicularly through the spotless white like the embroidery upon a
holy robe. The vast nave and aisles are light and airy. There is
complete absence of any artificial decoration--no tawdry, meaningless
images, no hideous ex-votos to distract the eye. Harmony is the keynote
of every inch of the decorations; from pave to rooftree there is not one
inconsistent or jarring note.

The great dome of the main apse is completely filled by a bust of the
Christ in the same glittering, marvelous, indescribably mellow glass
mosaic that covers thousands of square feet upon the walls. It is the
face of the man traditional, the visage of one whose appearance has been
handed down from father to son since the beginning, the likeness of a
founder, a prophet. And the still, solemn wonder of it fills one like
the recurrent chords of a great and stately harmony. It is the one
feature that stands out high above the blinding golden haze.

“Not a jarring note”--and yet, who that has seen those forty Old
Testament mosaic tableaux on the upper walls can help recalling his
first start of amazement at their literalness. They speak a dialect of
art; they translate the Bible stories that the uneducated medieval mind
could not read, into something that everybody could understand. A
snow-white Eve worming her way out of an equally pallid dreamer’s side,
and afterward decorously introduced by God Himself to Adam, is startling
enough. But how about Noah, draped by a modest son, while in the vinous
slumber brought about through a too generous testing of the liquid
sunshine of his own vines? No details of these ancient histories was too
insignificant or too broad for the artificers to weave lovingly into
their master-work; and nothing could better illustrate the pure
simplicity of the medieval mind to which anything Biblical was holy, and
fit for presentation to all the world.

One of the most noticeable features of the Duomo is the clearness and
delicacy of every detail. In St. Mark’s in Venice, time has blurred and
defaced almost everything and the better part of the mosaics is
crumbling into soft decay; but here in Monreale the delineation is so
vivid and sharp, each color so soft and pure in tone, it seems as though
the master workman had laid down his tools but yesterday to pronounce
his _chef d’œuvre_ complete.

We are apt to think of cloisters as gloomy, forbidding places, where
half frozen monks with blue lips and hair shirts shiver about their
religious tasks and wish--if they are human!--they had never been born.
Of course, there are such cloisters--but not here in Monreale, where the
glorious sunshine bathes all that is left of the monastery King William
erected for his Benedictine monks beside the Cathedral. Pleasant
cloisters these, warm and blooming and fragrant with ozone and the
perfume of the flowers. And very pleasant, indeed, very much worth
while, must have been the lives of the jovial Benedictine brothers
during the high and mighty reign of William the Good! Even after seven
hundred years the silent arcades are lovely, filled yet with slender
columns about which climb ribbons of mosaic and garlands of living vines
to set off the different capitals--the finest examples of twelfth
century carving in the world. Every capital is different, and almost
every one tells a story. The visitor can unravel for himself ancient
legend or Bible story, picking out old familiar figures here and there
in the mellow marble; or if he chooses, he can meditate upon the curious
fact that the Normans were producing this glorious work in the island of
the sun long before Giotto was born.

[Illustration: “A snow-white Eve worming her way out of an equally
pallid dreamer’s side is startling.”]

Monreale’s streets are rugged and steep, but very clean and decent. The
Monrealese, instead of naming their Corso for Italy’s first king, have
named it for the town’s most famous son, the seventeenth century
painter Pietro Novelli, whose studies of the monks are moving figures,
clearly establishing him as the foremost materialist Sicily ever
produced. On the Corso is Grado Salvatore’s three-boy-power macaroni
factory, a queer, rambling, black sort of a cavern, lighted only by the
front door. A macaroni-machine looking for all the world like Benjamin
Franklin’s old hand printing press occupies the front on one side; and
Salvatore himself sits in the little blue and white tiled sink before
it, fanning and snipping the wriggly paste as the boys twist the screw
and force it out in long strings. On the other side of the partition is
a cluttered-up sales-room where every imaginable shape of macaroni and
spaghetti decorates the shelves. Behind all is the mixing-room, joyously
dark; and you may handle the doughcakes to make sure they are pure and
clean! No matter if your hands are very dirty, after your sightseeing;
the good folk of Monreale will take no particular harm after what they
have doubtless experienced at other hands. None the less, as a general
thing the interior of a Sicilian paste shop compares favorably with that
of an American bakery, and the workers themselves are quite immaculate,
with soft, clean, pink hands like a woman’s.

After it comes from the press, the macaroni is cut into six-foot lengths
and hung up outside the shop to dry in the sunshine. By the time it has
collected sufficient dust and germs to make it stiff--two or three days
are usually long enough--it is cut into package lengths and sold. In
Southern Italy it often occupies a good part of a roadway, or even hangs
over a busy coalyard; but in Sicily both its manufacture and sale are
cleaner and more wholesome; and the macaroni made in Termini is famous
for its quality. Whether it is something in its manufacture, or some
subtle quality of the flour from which it is made, the Sicilian _pasta_
seems generally to have a flavor and a delicacy lacking in the Italian
variety.

The three juvenile assistants--boys who had the haunting native eyes of
soft yet gleaming brown dusk, lustrous as old Marsala wine full of the
sun--did not seem in the least to mind the drudgery of turning their
endless screw. But while we were handling doughcakes in the black
backroom with genial Salvatore, they stopped “twisting the twist” and
somehow managed to spread the news throughout the entire village that
there were strangers within their gates; and a crowd of small boys,
beggars, and others who seemed to have no occupation gathered at the
front door, demanding vociferously that they be photographed, chaffing
each other and us, and arranging themselves according to their own ideas
of a picturesque group.

While there was no stately ceremony to welcome us, the freedom of the
town was clearly ours after that picture taking. Nobody asked for so
much as a copper penny, and gruff, cheery voices called after us
heartily: “_Buon viaggio! A rivederci, signori!_ Good-by! Come back
again!” And Monreale has been branded as a town “whose beggars are very
importunate!”

Bad as the Sicilian beggars are supposed to be, we experienced less
annoyance from them throughout the island than from their pertinacious
brethren of Naples and the mainland generally.

At the brow of the hill is a terrace garden, the “Eden
Restaurant”--where by all means you must take tea. The little
establishment amuses rather than disappoints; and though it scarcely
justifies its grandiose title, it commands a view that no doubt
suggested the name to its proprietor. Falling away from its feet, the
hill cascades down in great billows to the cool green and orange sea of
the Conca d’Oro. And when the trolley car turns the shoulder of the
hill, in Palermo--misty and dun in the gathering dark--lights like
jewels flash out in scintillating ripples that spread and widen and
sparkle as you race down the dusty mountain road, leaving medieval
Monreale silent and spectral behind.




V

PALACES AND PEOPLE


“Palace” in Italian is a flexible and generic term, and the examples of
“palaces” one sees in Sicily give an entirely new sense of the
elasticity of the Italian language, and the freedom with which the
people use it. _Palazzo_ means really any building or structure of any
sort where wealthy, a noble, or a royal family lives now, or ever has
lived; and some of these structures are as remarkable for their
disreputable appearance as others are for their beauty and richness,
resembling nothing in the world so much as American tenement houses. One
such is unforgettable--a dingy white, square, four-storied building with
green shutters and a large central doorway, owned and occupied by a
titled and wealthy family whose members move in the highest society
throughout the island. The ground floor is taken up entirely by stables,
the servants, and rats as large as kittens. The mezzanine floor above is
given over to two insurance companies, whose signs cover a considerable
part of their story. Above, the really noble family lives in stately
fashion.

It was when idling up the Nile that we first met the older son of the
family. Becoming friendly on desert and river, the Sicilian confided in
me his desire for a northern alliance, readily admitting the difficulty
of reconciling his fiery temper with that of any wife he might choose
among his own people.

“I’d like an American,” he declared, shrugging, “but if I can’t get her,
I’ll take an English girl. With cool northern blood in their veins, my
children might well show the virtue and strength which has made you
Anglo-Saxons what you are. You see, here in Palermo I am a wealthy man.
I am ‘Your Grace,’ ‘Your Highness.’ But in New York or London or Paris I
am only one of ‘those poor Sicilians.’ I should like to marry a wife
whose income, together with mine, would enable us to live as becomes the
nobility in those cities.”

I made as diplomatic a reply as possible, but I am very much afraid that
the gentleman left me feeling that Americans are after all a cold and
unappreciative people, though he did express a desire to continue the
acquaintance in Palermo. When we reached that city, we learned from
various sources of the aggravating inhospitality of the romancing
nobility, one of whose favorite pleasantries consists of ardent
solicitations to foreigners to call, and the presenting of cards which,
upon scrutiny, are found to bear either no address or only the Italian
legend for “General Delivery.”

Nevertheless, to our surprise, he called on us the morning after his
return from an extended trip through the Holy Land, and learning that we
intended to leave the next day, insisted that we drive out with him that
afternoon. About three o’clock we were informed with great éclat that
“His Excellency the Egregious Lord X--” did us the honor to await us.
Ready at the door to bow us out to the emblazoned barouche with its
black-liveried coachman and lackey hovered an unsuspected congregation
of obsequious hotel employés. Many of them we had never before seen;
none of them had hitherto deigned to notice our daily peregrinations in
Gualterio’s coach of state. But now that one of the dear nobility they
reverence almost as much as in medieval times recognized us socially, we
were quite plainly persons of consideration. Our splendor, however, was
short-lived. We had time only for a swift visit to a handsome club with
extensive grounds, to the Caffè Massimo for a taste of its famous
green-almond ices, and to the Giardino Inglese for a glimpse at its
botanic charms, for we had an engagement for tea at the American
Consulate.

It had not taken us long to arrive at the conclusion that Consul Bishop
was a very Bishop of Consuls, and it was due to his kindly interest and
hints that we enjoyed considerable intimacy with the life of the people,
and also had a good opportunity to see under actual conditions not only
the delights of being a foreign representative of the United States,
but also the drawbacks of such a position. Incidentally, it is,
generally speaking, both wise and pleasant to introduce one’s self at
the Consulate immediately on arriving in a foreign city where a stay of
any length is contemplated. In case any untoward incident should arise
later, such acquaintance with the consul would prove of inestimable
advantage, and would save unpleasant and wearisome investigations of
one’s right to American citizenship and his character. And if the consul
prove, as is now generally the case, a man of parts and charm, the
result will prove most happy for the visitor who desires to see and know
the best the city can afford.

The royal residence in Palermo, rising from the Piazza Vittoria, the
highest point in the city, is scarcely more remarkable than many of the
private _palazzi_. Ordinary as Palace and Piazza are now, in medieval
times this was the fortified citadel: a place of arms and chivalry, of
turrets and bastions, of fortresslike buildings forming the defensive
key to the city. But little have Time and the barbarous restorer left.
First comes an arcaded court, then two flights of marble stairs, and
then room after room, tastelessly over-decorated. One marvels at the
dullness of royalties who could so slavishly consent to the stuffy
vulgarity of these apartments, when before them was a model in the room
declared to have been King Roger’s own. Its mosaics have faded not a
whit in the long centuries; design and color hold soft and true to the
walls, and this kingly chamber in its dignity and splendor shames the
tawdry display of the monarchs who came after. Time spent in such rooms
is wasted.

The Cappella Palatina, or royal chapel, is a tiny temple richly
embellished with marvelous mosaics, but so smothered by the
encroachments of the formless Palace that half its beauty is lost for
lack of light. It is not even a structure by itself, but a part of the
main building, which King Roger added about 1132 in honor of Saint
Peter, to whom he dedicated it. Perhaps, because of its position, or
perhaps by design, the nave and aisles were left almost unlighted; but
seventy-five feet above, the architect pierced the dome with eight
apertures, to flood apse and chancel with a glorious nimbus of sunshine,
which finds a fit mirror in gleaming walls inlaid with golden glass.

[Illustration: “The Cappella Palatina ... a tiny temple richly
embellished with marvelous mosaics.”]

The illumination is, however, confined entirely to the choir save for an
hour or so in the morning, when the sidewalks glow with the genius of
their artist creators--and fade as one watches into shadowy old
tapestry. At first it is a darkly mysterious place, indistinctly peopled
by spectral figures on every side. Then slowly, as the eyes habituate
themselves to the gloom, out from the mellow background lean strong,
stern figures. Saints and angels pray, plead, wing their way across the
walls; patriarchs and prophets act out the stirring chronicles of the
Old Testament and New. High above the choir and tribune, halved by the
circumambient light, a majestic, supramundane figure, cross-crowned with
the diadem of supreme sacrifice, holds forth the Book upon whose snowy
page blazes the royal message in golden letters that need no flame of
fire to bid them shine--’Εγώ εἰμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου: “I am the Light of
the world.”

The single-mindedness of medieval artists is always astonishing.
Anything from the Bible was apparently meet for the walls of this
sumptuous house of prayer, which, instead of being a mere bit of florid
decorative architecture belonging to the King, is a vivid pictorial
history. Very realistic is the scene at Lazarus’ tomb, where a man, with
head turned away, holds his nose with one hand as he tilts the tightly
swaddled body to an upright position. A little farther along, on the
same wall, the artist represented Jesus being baptized by John the
Baptist in a dark stream which flows past in snow white ripples. John is
sheltered by a section of bright olive-green wall, and at their feet
cherub heads peep through the wavelets. All the figures, though very
stiff and formal, as might be expected of work in such intractable
material, are admirably done, and the faces in particular are
expressively stern and reposeful.

Restoration has not harmed the chapel, and both it and its decorations
and furniture remain intact--the magnificent mosaic pulpit, in the
Lombard style; the giant candelabrum beside it, about fifteen feet high,
a superb piece of pure Byzantine sculpture with a wealth of mythological
details, which strikes a strange pagan note in this Christian church;
and the stalactite ceiling, carved wood of the best period of Saracenic
workmanship, much after the style of the ceilings of the Alhambra at
Granada. The Saracen glorified it with magnificent star-shaped coffers,
geometrical designs, Cufic lettering--his religion allowed him no image
of anything in heaven above or the earth beneath--and the less
prescribed Norman placed his saints and virgins in the divisions of the
stars. Yet the work was done with such rare skill--so thoroughly were
the Saracens artists first and Mohammedans afterward--that nowhere is
there a clash of motive or execution. It fills one with the delight of
the East, the subtle perception of masses of color shaded and mellowed
by time.

That, unfortunately, cannot be said of Palermo’s other royal residence,
the little Summer palace of La Favorita, built by the Bourbon King
Ferdinand IV under the shoulder of Monte Pellegrino, and evidently his
conception of a Chinese nobleman’s residence. Striking a jangling note
of color in the landscape, it stands boldly forth a great rubricated
initial upon the green and gold of the smiling Conca d’Oro. Surely there
never was such another freak of royal fancy! In their search for the
bizarre, King Ferdinand’s architects and decorators succeeded in
cramming into one architectural nightmare the styles of a dozen realms
and epochs; and the result is a queer hodge-podge of no artistic value,
but of mirth-provoking interest to the traveler. Only Mr. Kipling’s
famous phrase can describe it--“A sort of a giddy harumfrodite!”

In the King’s suite, Japanese artisans may have decorated the
bedchamber, some forgotten artist from hundred-gated Thebes the ceiling
of the anteroom, and then with supreme disregard for these exotic
effects, the royal humorist--if he were such!--must have turned over the
beautifying of his dressing room to a commonplace decorator of modern
times, and permitted him to do his worst.

The dining table, a huge circular affair, is the _piéce de résistance_
of the whole palace. Nothing queerer--or more entirely up-to-date and
practical--has ever made its appearance in the most recently constructed
American houses. Standing upon a massive cylindrical shaft that runs
straight through to the kitchen in the basement, the table is a sort of
combination dumbwaiter-quicklunch counter. At each place a silver tray,
imbedded in a small shaft, connects below with the main trunk, and these
trays, operated automatically with the larger central charger, answer
djinn-like by serving a whole course at once, smoking hot, when the
royal host rubs the button at his place. Slow eaters might find it
somewhat disconcerting to turn from conversation back to--an empty black
hole before them! But perhaps King Ferdinand was not a joker.

Every room has some freakish combination peculiarly its own, some in
Turkish, Arabic or Pompeiian motives, and one huge reception salon in
hand-painted silk with Chinese mandarins in full ceremonial costume upon
the walls. Above all are the luxurious smoking and lounging rooms, and
of course, a wide, tiled veranda on each floor affording sweeping views
on either hand.

To the Sicilian in his blissful ignorance, La Favorita appears a
masterpiece, the people generally regarding the _château_ with the
reverence of simplicity. Indeed, poverty and ignorance are the
mainsprings of life for a majority of the people. Nor is ignorance
confined to the masses. A Sicilian doctor in Palermo, himself graduated
from one of our greatest universities and therefore an exception to the
rule, told me in all seriousness that a majority of the “society people”
of the capital could read nothing more difficult than the daily papers.
“They often forget how to spell their own names”--you don’t wonder much
at that when you see some of the names!--“and their notions of first aid
in sickness or injury are barbarous and medieval. When my wife and I
first began to practise in Palermo, we tried to help the people with
clubs and societies of a semi-educational nature. But we had to drop it
all. You can’t begin education with the adults.”

This was recognized a century ago by one of the foremost patriots of
Sicily, the Prince of Castlenuovo, who was one of the prime movers in
lifting his island out of the medievalism of Ferdinand’s régime. Out in
this region of the suburbs--known as _I Colli_ (The Tops), and dotted
with splendid villas--and not far distant from Ferdinand’s Favorita, the
Prince established a model farm, kitchen garden and dairy where the boys
of both rich and poor families are taught by experts how to get the most
out of the ground without having recourse to the antiquated methods of
their forefathers. And if one may judge from the attitude of the young
students and the eagerness with which they display their knowledge, the
big Institute is still proving most successful.

The boy who showed us about said proudly that when he finished his
schooling he was to be overseer of a big plantation up country, much
like the one spreading around us. America had no attractions for him. In
his own words: “My father has taught me to love Sicily very much,
_signore_. He makes much money in his business in N’ova York. But I will
be patriot. I stay here. I study. By and by I can help my poor country
to grow rich!”

Gardens and boys are interesting, but the stockyards of the school are
a revelation. Goats and kids, sheep and lambs, magnificent bulls and
kine and soft-eyed, frisky little calves have each their separate yards,
all immaculate; and in the neat brick addition to the cow-stables is a
model piggery comfortably full of grunters, who seem to appreciate
quarters where a fresh handkerchief dropped in an occupied pen can be
recovered quite unsoiled. The school dairy is as complete as it is
wholesome and clean; but you are not likely to go far outside until
another phase of the milk industry appears--a donkey carrying large jute
panniers full of goats’-milk potcheese, or _ricotta fresca_. The whey
oozing from the bags and the donkey’s sweat gather a crust of dust over
all. Don’t manifest a talkative interest--unless you wish to have the
peasant merchant urge you to try “just a taste, _signori_!”

Among the splendid estates of _I Colli_, the Villa Sofia is one of the
finest, and the genius of its creator, a wealthy Briton named Whitaker,
shows what may be accomplished by perfect taste when man and Nature work
together harmoniously to draw the most and best from the breast of the
warm and generous earth. Villa, by the way, is almost as flexible a term
in Italian as palace. It means not merely a house for summering, but
grounds as well as mansion; and many of the houses quite equal the
so-called palaces. Another estate worthy a visit is the Villa of the
late Count Tasca--this is out Monreale way--who laid out the grounds as
an experimental agricultural station, and who was one of the first men
in Sicily to farm on a scientific basis. But he dearly loved royalty,
too. On the “basement” door of the house a bronze tablet impressively
records with a wealth of adjectives the fact that Queen (Dowager)
Margharita once took luncheon here with the delighted owner, and that
ever since the premises have had an added value and charm because of her
Majesty’s visit.

Occupying the monastery of the suppressed and exiled Filippini monks,
the Palermo Museum--a vivid epitomization of all Sicily’s various
periods and renascences of art and culture--is given a distinct
character of its own by the crumbling though palatial home housing it,
worthier far to be called a palace than many of the _palazzi_ of the
nobility. You are apt to be disappointed on entering, however, when the
courteous guardian of the gate informs you that you will be “permitted”
to leave your cameras with the incumbrance clerk across the entrance
hall. In vain you plead, catching sight of some of the untrammeled
beauties of the first courtyard just beyond. But the guard is
uncompromisingly honest; you enter in without so much as the moral
support of a sunshade.

The little court is a veritable wild Eden. Flowering vines drip down
over the edges of the walls and twist about the pillars; a single
prickly pear rears its fat donkey-cars above the cornice and glories in
the sunshine; great bursts of foliage clothe in green the joints of the
corners. In the center of the courtyard a low stone fountain basin full
of brilliant plants affords a picturesque foothold for a sixteenth
century Triton drinking deep from a conch. And over on the left, just
beyond the archway that gives an entrancing vista of the second court
beyond, a tender vine wreathes completely about the tragic column topped
with a cross of iron from the Piazza dei Vespri, in which it once stood
to mark the spot where some of the French who fell in the massacre were
buried.

Sidewalks and columns, cornice and roof are a museum in themselves,
decorated with quaint bits of ancient and medieval architecture, some
actually built in as parts of the cloister, others arranged in artistic
abandon about the shade-dappled walks. But why puzzle out ancient
inscriptions on crumbling marbles when the second court beckons, like a
coquettish woman, from the stern lines of the archway? Shake off the
persistent employé who offers to be your mentor, and pass through into a
tropical palm garden where the luxuriance of the foliage almost hides
the antiquities. No attempt has been made to curb the riotous
propensities of the plants. Palm tree and shrub, flowers in beds and
rows, vines and creepers give the brilliant court the air of a Spanish
patio. But you have really come to see the antiquities, and gradually
getting back your sense of proportion, you look about.

Directly before you is a queer, somewhat battered thing of dark stone,
looking more like a bathtub than anything else. It proves to be a
sarcophagus; one of the rare prehistoric Sikel monuments, of inestimable
value in studying the customs and culture of the vanished people, whom
the Greeks so effectually absorbed that the only trace we have of their
mode of life is in a few such scattered pieces as this from the tombs,
though even these are often of doubtful authenticity.

Papyrus reeds, descendants of the paper-plants imported into Sicily long
centuries ago by some forgotten Arab, rear their puffball heads from the
fountain, a little grove of living feather dusters. Who knows but that
the thrifty Saracen caretaker may have used them to dust out his
immaculate mosques and public baths?

So varied and comprehensive a collection as the Museum contains has
required consummate skill and taste to arrange coherently, and
throughout the entire building the director, Professor Salinas, has done
his work so admirably that each group’s significance is fully apparent.
In the various halls are quaint old pictures and triptyches so ugly that
their very repulsiveness spells the perfect expression of the art of
their time, marvelous coins which gave Sicily the reputation of leading
the world in numismatics during the Greek era, and most important of
all, the metopes.

Carven slabs from the temple friezes--what a story they tell of the
primitive and ardent culture of the early Greeks perched upon their twin
hills at Selinus, beside the sounding deep! One whole hall is lined with
them, arranged symmetrically in series, speaking even to-day with the
voice of that mystic lore which, to understand, reveals ancient Sicily.
And though individual carvings excel them in precision and beauty, as a
series denoting the exact progress of Greek Sicilian art from its
crudest to its most perfected form, the metopes are unsurpassed.

Moreover, these metopes from the temples of Selinus recall a story so
tragic, so amazing, that comparisons fail and mere words avail little to
picture its horror. Selinus was still young, and the wealthy and
expanding Selinuntines were still engaged in building their tremendous
temples in 409 B.C. when Hannibal Gisgon with his Carthaginians fell
upon the city with a ferocity that is even yet appalling in its details,
butchering the inhabitants ruthlessly, and expunging the city from the
book of the living. But Hannibal was in a hurry. He had no time to spare
to destroy structures of such problematical value as unfinished temples,
since he purposed to avenge the defeat and death of his grandfather,
Hamilcar, at Himera on the north shore of the island. Giving the
temples and the desolate city over to the owl and the locust, he hurried
northward, flushed and confident. So it was that the partially completed
homes of the bright gods remained until the shock of earthquake hurled
them crashing down into chaos.

Centuries elapsed in the silence of desolation before the metopes, which
Freeman so aptly calls “the choicest offerings Selinuntine piety could
offer the immortal gods,” were picked carefully by the archæologists
from the ruins and ranged upon the plaster walls of the Museum, showing
the evolution of the art from the weird, uncouth shapes of the earlier
metopes to the finished later shapes of gods and heroes and men. Yet so
rapid was the development of the sculptors that within a century the
first metopes had become curiosities, and the later work so superior it
is hard to realize it was produced in the same age. And one cannot but
wonder what might have been the fullest flower of this strong, budding
genius at Selinus, had not the insatiable African smitten it with his
blighting breath of war.

One palace that has fallen upon evil days, after as picturesque a past
as any building in the island can boast, is the lofty home of the Barons
of the Chiaramonte. In the fourteenth century, during the Aragonese
period, these and other nobles became so powerful that no systematic
administration of Sicily by the government was possible, and the
palace--usually called Lo Steri--is an excellent manifestation of the
Chiaramonte power. Grim and stiff outside, it still preserves within
something of the magnificence of the days when knights in armor clanked
through its lofty halls and ladies in quaint headdresses and billowing
skirts peeped through the folds of the arras and tapestries to watch the
wheels of intrigue and government go round. Many a dark tale could these
old halls tell. Andrew Chiaramonte, the last of his line to rule, was
dragged hence to the block in 1392, and the palace became the court,
with justice taking the place of chicanery. Later on the Spanish
viceroys made it their official residence, and in 1600 it became the
seat of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. In the inner courtyard is the
private chapel, where no doubt many of the Inquisition’s bitter and
fruitless tragedies had their inception. The whole structure smells of
blood. To-day, as the Dogana, or Custom House, it is as useful as
ever--and for the Sicilian importer no doubt still a palace of most
unpleasant inquisition.

King William the Bad, King Roger’s son, and father of William II, the
Good--who built the Cathedral of Monreale--called his favorite palace in
Arabic La Zisa, the Beloved or the Splendid. It is of distinctly Moorish
character--bare walls unrelieved by projecting decorations of any sort,
with Oriental doorways, pointed-arch windows, and a heavy battlemented
frieze. In King William I’s time the palace eunuchs were almost as
powerful as they were at Constantinople, and most of the palace
officials were Saracens, which is perhaps one reason for the
architecture of the structure. William himself lived the idle, sensual
life of a voluptuary, and toward the end of his reign, with Oriental
indifference, shut himself up in his splendid house and refused any bad
news.

It is not hard to see in the mutilated grandeur of the main hall why he
fell a victim to the insidious charm of the East, for more than any
other place in Palermo this chamber breathes of “Araby the blest.” The
ceiling is a great stalactite vault: a little fountain still bubbles
down over steps of mosaic; and it runs across the floor through square
pools exactly as do those other similar fountains in the Alhambra at
Granada. Only the frescoes on the walls are modern, replacing ancient
panels of marble which once embellished the villa. No--there was one
other modern touch: a flock of tiny white wax ducks, belonging to the
caretaker’s little daughter, bobbing serenely about in the rippled
pool!




VI

THE PLAIN OF PANORMOS


A short distance outside the Porta Sant’Ágata--one of the southern
gates--on the edge of the rolling Conca d’Oro, is the Campo di Santo
Spirito or cemetery, a lovely greensward full of curious tombs and
graves and vaults. Its chapel is old and bare, a relic of the Cistercian
monastery established on the same spot in 1173 by Archbishop Walter of
the Mill, the English mentor of King William the Good. Doubtless the
Archbishop had much to do with the King’s goodness, since his father was
William the Bad. When the church was restored in 1882, the greatest care
was taken to preserve at least the spirit of the prelate’s design, with
the result that among these Sicilian graves under the matchless blue of
the Sicilian sky there stands an English church of the Middle Ages.
Close beside it on the 31st of March, 1282, just at the tap of the bell
for evening prayer, began the terrible massacre of the Sicilian Vespers,
while in the city near by the great bell of San Giovanni boomed out the
knell of all the Frenchmen in the island and the downfall of the
heartless House of Anjou. Many of the French who perished in that
orgy of slaughter have been buried here.

[Illustration: The bells of the church of the Holy Spirit boomed the
knell of the French in the Sicilian Vespers.]

This massacre has often been declared a premeditated rising, but it was
really a popular spontaneous outbreak which began at the vesper hour on
Easter Tuesday. The church of the Santo Spirito was then a favorite
place for worship, and the people on this occasion were moving quietly
between it and the city when some two hundred Frenchmen appeared among
them, and alarmed the natives greatly by their more than usually
offensive remarks and bearing. In the throng was an attractive young
Sicilian woman with her lover. Unprovoked, a French soldier addressed an
insulting remark to her. Her escort naturally resented this, and
instantly all the bitter ignominy and the wrongs the patient islanders
had endured at the hands of their French oppressors boiled over. Though
practically unarmed, the Sicilians attacked the French so fearlessly
that of the two hundred present, not a single one escaped. The church
bells sounded a wild alarm, and yelling “_Morte ai francesi!_ Death to
the French!” the blood-maddened mob streamed back into town, killing on
sight, storming palaces and houses, and dispatching even those Sicilians
known or suspected to have friendly relations with the Angevins. Brief
as the struggle in Palermo was, no less than two thousand French
perished; and the brand the Palermitans had kindled swept its fiery way
through the island until every Frenchman was either dead or a fugitive.
And though the War of the Vespers that followed this summary vengeance
lasted for years, the rule of the House of Anjou was over so far as
Sicily was concerned.

Farther out from the city the beautiful precincts of the old Minorite
monastery and church of Santa Maria di Gesù ramble along the steep side
of one of those emerald hills that bound the Conca d’Oro. Long pebbled
paths lead up from the gate through cool green vistas dotted with
stately trees and headstones; and, with a pride which is the more
curious in a Minorite--whose pledges are of humility and poverty--the
monk who lets one in explains that this cemetery has never been used by
any except the wealthiest of Palermo’s noble families. Many of the
graves are decorated with huge wreaths of artificial flowers in
dishpan-like tin cases, glass-covered and frequently containing faded
photographs of the deceased, the men appearing very stiff and
uncomfortable in their best clothes, tall collars, and derby hats. Some
of the “pans” are a yard in diameter by about eight inches deep, the
wreaths draped with plentiful streamers of black upon which are stamped
in gold letters suitable inscriptions and the names of the departed.

The monks were chanting sleepily in a choir gallery as we entered the
sacristy of the little church, to examine some interesting unfinished
cartoons upon the walls for frescoes never executed--our guide an
amazing friendly young brother whose face was a replica of Giotto’s
unforgettable fresco of Dante in the Florence Bargello. Fra Giacomo, he
called himself; and his interest in the world generally, his simple
attitude of dangerous curiosity in everything not connected with the
cloistered life, made us think of Hichens’ sorry hero--if hero he could
be called!--in the “Garden of Allah.” Neither he, nor any of the other
monks with whom we came into contact anywhere in either Sicily or Italy,
had the spiritual austerity that is so marked a characteristic of the
Spanish monk; nothing at all of the bearing or atmosphere that instantly
stamps a man as either genuinely consecrated or fanatic--according to
the eye with which he is seen.

This lack of spirituality came out strongly when, wholly ignoring the
service going on, Fra Giacomo dragged a confessional with a dreadful
clatter across the tiled floor to serve as a camera-stand from which he
insisted that I photograph the poor, bare little altar with its tawdry
image beneath in a glass case. At each outburst of the rasping din, the
monks aloft--seemingly quite undismayed by the sacrilege--kindly sang
with greater zeal that they might not hear our profane noises.

From the monastery a zig-zag path leads to the very top of the hill,
where two once highly venerated female saints had an altar and a
hermitage on a fine bit of bluff overlooking the Conca d’Oro. Here the
country unfolds below like a huge military map, the roads written with
white ink, the sea in sapphire, the Conca d’Oro in emerald and topaz,
and the city in agate. Far in the distance, beyond Palermo, Monte
Pellegrino looms soft and vague, its square shoulders half hidden in
bluish haze, with the sea fading so delicately into the sky that often
the horizon line is lost. Nestling among the lemons in the foreground
are large chimneys, the sign visible of an irrigation system nearly a
thousand years old, of Saracenic origin. Hills and plain alike murmur
with flowing water, for wherever the Arab went he turned barrens into
gardens, planted and tended and improved, and devised irrigation systems
so complete and permanent that--considering his resources and the
times--our own watering schemes in the West seem puerile and scattering.
To-day in the Conca d’Oro about an hundred steam engines pump up water
from artesian wells and subterranean rivers, while conduits and
water-wheels utilize every drop that issues from the springs. So fertile
is the soil that this irrigation has increased the yield from seven to
one hundred and fifty dollars an acre.

There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the Gesù, some subtle
ether of sympathy, perhaps, that makes the visitor’s presence on the
hill known to all the children round. At any rate, they pop out of the
earth, and as you come down from the hermitage at the very top of the
step to the main buildings, you are pretty certain to hear a scratching
noise on the low stone wall at one side of the road. Naturally you look
over. At the cleft upper end of a long pole a spray of lemon blossoms
scrapes along the rough wall; at the lower end, some twenty-five feet
below in a grove, an attractive child clamors to you for “_Due soldi
mangiare_--Two cents, to eat!”

As we were leaving the monastery, “Dante’s” interest in worldly affairs
came out strongly once more. Pointing to my camera, he asked
plaintively: “Have you a plate left for me?”

I let him choose his own pose and his own background. With the skill of
an artist he selected a stone step flanked by lofty cypresses, and
taking out his breviary immediately lost himself in meditation which
required some imagination to consider holy. The photograph made, he
spoke again, his wistful expression intensified.

“Now will you please register the package? Many tourists have been here
and taken pictures, several of myself. They all promised to send me
copies. I know they did so,” he sighed regretfully, with a charity which
would have been ludicrous had it not been so childishly unaffected and
sincere, “but I never got a single one. Oh, but the mails are bad here!”

Genial Gualterio, for all his eagerness to serve us to our best
advantage, could not forget his own advantage once in a while, and
cheerily singing on his box, drove us far out of our way, at last
drawing rein before the mouth of a large cavern which appeared to be
full of very dirty children whose hands were full of very dirty bones.
On the other side of the road lay a pool covered with green slime. I was
getting out with my camera when Gualterio stopped me abruptly. “Oh, no,
_signore_, there is nothing worth examining; but I thought you might
like to see the Giants’ Cave, which is full of old fossils, and the Mar’
Dolc’!”

No visitor is likely to be thirsty enough to drink of the “sweet water”
that reminds him of Gunga Din and his goatskin bag. It is to be hoped,
moreover, that the slimy pool is only the overflow of the Mare Dolce
(Sweet Water), most famous of the Conca d’Oro’s innumerable springs.
Neither is one likely to speculate in bones of doubtful authenticity. So
the only thing to do under the circumstances is to be just as cheerful
as the cabman, and drive back to the ruins of the old Saracen-Norman
stronghold of La Favara, whose splendor was famous during the Middle
Ages, for there Frederick II, greatest of all kings of Sicily, held
royal court. The brilliant court has vanished, and the castle itself is
a crumbling wreck, a mere dank stable and storehouse, dark and ill
smelling. Yet merely to see it recalls Frederick’s striking personality
and character. And it is to be remembered that he was not merely
Emperor of Germany and King of Sicily, but King of Italy, Sardinia,
Apulia, Burgundy and for a while of Jerusalem. His connection with that
city and with the Sixth Crusade forms one of the most picturesque and
pleasant incidents of that fierce and warlike age. Speaking Arabic
fluently--besides several other languages--he was able, through sheer
force of character and winning personality, to negotiate treaty after
treaty with the Saracens peacefully, winning the Holy City itself
without striking a blow, and remaining its king for a decade during
which peace instead of bloodshed was the rule. His army even contained a
picked body of Saracen troops which he made his personal bodyguard.
There was nothing, in fact, in either the intellectual or the political
life of his age which this man, described by the Latin chroniclers as
_stupor mundi_, “wonder of the world,” failed to grasp and master
thoroughly. And in all the whirl of his incessant activities at home and
abroad he found time to be a poet and scholar, to encourage learning in
all its branches, and, most important of all, to articulate and reduce
to written form the crude Italian speech of the day.

If you care for an experience out of the usual in this smiling island,
stop on the Bagheria road at the church of San Giovanni dei Lebrosi or,
as some Americans call it, “The Leprosy,” in the midst of a settlement
of tanners. Here you are attended by three women, each flourishing a
large key, all dirty and unkempt, and a barking, snapping, currish crowd
of begging children. One of the three women unlocks the door of the
alley at whose inner end the church stands. The stench is almost
stupefying, the air thick with vapors. The second woman opens the door
of the church, one of the oldest Norman structures in the island, now
painfully restored with obtrusive brick and whitewash, and the third
proves to be the keeper of the sacristy. Still another huge key now
appears--this time in the hands of a surly man, who insists on showing
you out another way, through an orange grove, though your carriage is in
plain sight at the foot of the lane. These evil-looking children and
caretakers are the most pertinacious and insolent you will encounter
anywhere in the island. Has the fetid atmosphere anything to do with
their crabbed humor?

In this plain of ancient Panormos, as both city and district were once
known, there comes vividly to mind a curious battle scene. To-day we
experiment with automobiles and aeroplanes as instruments of war: more
than two thousand years ago disaster overtook the arms of Carthage
because General Asdrubal placed his reliance in the then new-fangled
elephant auxiliaries. Rome, for all she was conquering the world,
trembled before these “great gray oxen,” as the legionaries called
them.

However, the Consul Metellus, who commanded inside the city, directed
his attention effectually first of all to these splendid targets moving
ponderously and disdainfully up against him. Pain-maddened by a
ceaseless shower of darts and arrows, the great beasts shook off their
helpless drivers and charged furiously to and fro, trumpeting, goring,
trampling, wild engines of destruction which did more mischief to the
Carthaginians than to Rome; and before night fell over the field of
slaughter, the Romans led captive more than half of the hundred and
twenty once dreaded Titans that had been Asdrubal’s reliance, but which
had cost him the battle.

Continuing toward the city along the road called the Corso dei Mille,
over which Garibaldi and his immortal Thousand marched to victory, we
pass close beside the old Ponte d’Ammiraglio, built some eight hundred
years ago by King Roger’s Grand Admiral Giorgios Antiochenos. In those
days it spanned the swift Fiume Oreto, but now the fickle water has
chosen another bed, leaving the massive stone bridge high and dry, and
looking very useless and absurd in an open field.

Entering the town by the Garibaldi Gate--the liberator is even more
frequently honored than the first King--we follow Garibaldi Street to
the Piazza della Rivoluzione, in which a queer, old, bent, apparently
half-intoxicated figure of the crowned Genius of Palermo marks the spot
where the first revolutionists gathered twelve years before the
Thousand captured the city. Near by in the Piazza della Croce dei Vespri
is the monument in memory of the French massacred in 1282, and buried
here beneath a single marble column surmounted by a cross and surrounded
by a railing of lances and halberds. At the corner of the square, built
in a housewall, is a single fifteenth century column, marking the site
of the palace in which Governor St. Remy, who was the lieutenant of
Charles of Anjou at the time of the massacre, lived and is said to have
been besieged.

From the railroad station a broad street, the Via Lincoln, leads to the
bay. Gualterio volunteered the information that the street, “la Via
Lin-col-ni,” was named for a “great Sicilian patriot who was shot long
before we were born!” It would have been a pity to disillusion him and
rob Sicily of so great a figure, so we kept a smiling silence.

Beside the bay is an exquisite little park with broad lawns, splendid
trees and paths laid out like the spokes of a huge floral wheel; one of
the most perfect gardens in Sicily. It is called Villa Giulia, in honor
of Donna Giulia Guevara, wife of the viceroy, Marcantonio Colonna, who
founded it in 1777. The gardener’s little boy, a cherub of soft black
eyes and winsome smile, afforded another striking proof of the
beneficent effects of education upon the children. Announcing proudly
that he was learning to be a gardener himself, he flitted from flower
to flower like an amorous bee, fondling, smelling, praising each burgeon
in turn, and naming the plants with a perfect flood of Latin botanical
terminology.

[Illustration: “The ‘Poor Man’s Promenade’ stretches away toward Mte
Zaffarano, dim and misty.”]

It was in this lovely park that Goethe spent a great deal of time during
a Sicilian sojourn in 1789, reading Homer and seeing the Villa’s
beauties with so sympathetic an eye, he wrote of it that it looked like
fairyland and transported him into ancient times. His _Italienische
Reise_ is particularly enthusiastic on Sicily, and he sums up the
island’s importance with a glowing tribute: “Italy without Sicily leaves
no image in the soul--Sicily is the key to all.”

In clear weather a large raised terrace at the southeast corner of the
Villa affords a peep at distant Ætna’s hoary crown. But if the weather
be too hazy to see the Titan, the nearer view compensates in great
measure for the invisible volcano. To the southeast the “poor man’s
promenade” stretches away in a misty vista toward Monte Zaffarano. The
fishing boats tie up here, and the fishermen and their families make
merry over their early suppers at open-air tables in the dusty, unpaved
square that extends inland from the broad and level beach. In the other
direction the broad Foro Italico or Marina, a handsome, tree-lined
esplanade circumscribing the edge of the bay, with Monte Pellegrino
rising massive and dominant at the other end of the town, miles away,
affords a striking contrast. This is the “rich man’s promenade,” and
here, in summer, Fashion makes its evening _corso_. Half Palermo sits in
its iron-bottomed chairs sipping at the ices and cool drinks for which
the cafés are noted, and smoking countless _sigaretti_, while the other
half rolls lazily by in its carriages of state.

From the Villa Giulia a line of old palaces marks the landward side of
the Marina all the way down to the foot of the Corso, at its other
extremity. Many of them belong to nobles whose names are woven deep into
some of Sicily’s most important history. Down near the Porta Felice--the
Happy Gate--a little wooden pavilion juts boldly out into the sea, a
combination library and tearoom, whose presiding genius is an English
gentlewoman, charming of speech and manners. No pleasanter way of
resting after a hard day’s work sightseeing can be found than to sit
here over cups of steaming Ceylon, while the sea shimmers an iridescent
opal, ruffled with streaky little ripples of protest for the approaching
night. And afterward what more fitting than to reënter Eden by the Happy
Gate--the Porta Felice--named as a memorial of the Lady Felice Orsini,
wife of the Viceroy who built it. Happy Lady Felice, to have such a
monument--and _porta felice_ in truth, looking one way out over the
sparkling sea and the other upon the city beautiful.




VII

AROUND THE ISLAND


Fascination and Palermo are synonymous; the subtle charm of the city
works into one’s very blood. Day after day and week after week roll by,
until with a start of surprise that is akin to consternation one
realizes that unless he has a year to devote to the island he must seek
fresh vistas soon or leave Sicily, having seen nothing but the capital.
Regretting is as vain as it is foolish. The only thing to do is to go!

Until you do, you have no idea of what the _tessere_--those amazing
little bargain books--do for the Sicilians. Not only do they bring
foreigners with money to spend, but natives of every class and station,
unable to travel at other seasons of the year, flock to the ticket
window with the _tessere_ in their hands; and many of them who
ordinarily would travel third class make a _festa_ of their trips by
buying first-class accommodations with the aid of the rebate.

There is no Pullman system in Sicily. The first arrivals at the station
take the best seats, and hold them against all comers. If you do not
like cheap tobacco, and do like air, it is a good plan to reach the
station early. All this we learned by experience; so we were ready to
leave Palermo some time before the train was, and secured a little
stateroom called a _berlina_, in the front of the car, whence an
unobstructed view on both sides is to be had.

Scarcely is the capital left behind than it is completely forgotten in
the astonishing floral display that flashes past--an unending
motion-picture in vivid colors. For miles the track runs close beside
the sea between deep floral hedges. Crimson geraniums from five to eight
feet in height blazing with color, pink wild roses, sweet-scented white
locust blossoms, spiky prickly pear, the yellow striped spears of the
agave, and pink and lavender morning glories vining among and over them
all give one the impression of being hurled through a giant hot-house.
But here is no cultivation. Sicilian Nature, with prodigal lavishness,
is alone responsible for the brilliant pageant. At the feet of the
taller plants burgeon scarlet poppies, low, earth-nestling lavender
cactus blossoms, and legions of dazzling buttercups. More poppies among
the grass and grain contrast with whole acres of heavy-headed deep
crimson clover, in which the hungry cattle wade to their knees.

On the landward side of the railroad undulate the hills in soft nuances
of green, speckled and flecked with ever-changing light and shade.
Farmhouses massively built of rough unshaped stone, because the stone
is there and mortar is cheap and the labor costs nothing, stand at long
intervals among the golden grain square and squat, each with a heavy
Normanesque battlemented tower. The poorer houses barely show their
roofs or towers above the dense groves of lemon or orange. Sometimes
part of a white wall appears through the bushy tree foliage, which is
varied by occasional wide stretches of vines on low, far-reaching
trellises, over which stands a slim-bodied palm, an alert, lonely
sentinel.

The sea shimmers like glass in the gay sunlight, and even from the
rapidly moving train the bottom is visible, sometimes ten or fifteen
feet below the surface. White stones and deep purple patches of weed lie
like pearls and amethysts imbedded in the heart of the cool emerald.
Tiny reefs, far from their islets, and big, jagged rocks show their
teeth at the ragged coast line through fringes of snowy foam. Ever
shifting car-window prospects float by on the wing, and before you can
fairly appreciate one, you pass another.

Around a curve, the train dashes into a big fishing village, a sturdy
hamlet of nets and boats, of men in bare legs and knitted caps with
tassels, of houses packed together on the side of a steep hill,
struggling upward like lame sheep; a town of tiles and whitewash huddled
together under the protection of a dozen stalwart-steepled
belfries--Termini Imerese, busiest of Sicily’s provincial towns, famous
for its macaroni. Here were the celebrated hot springs of Himera, where,
legend says, Hercules bathed after his great wrestling match with King
Eryx. It is said that the water from these springs gives the macaroni
its characteristic flavor. And here Agathocles, the Peter the Cruel of
Greek Sicily, was born.

A few miles east of Termini the railroad leaves the shore, and turning
southward enters the valley of the Torto, to begin climbing the rugged
backbone of Sicily; the watershed between the ancient African and
Tyrrhenian Seas. We might be in another country and clime, so different
is the scenery as we puff on southward, the way bordered on either hand
by the ruins of medieval castles and by little mountain towns still
living in the Bronze Age. Near Lercara, forty-eight miles from Palermo,
the sulphur mining district begins, where the mephitic gases from the
smelting furnaces have poisoned and stunted vegetation and herbage,
giving everything a ghastly mummified look, besides polluting the keen
mountain air with an unmistakable brimstone flavor.

At Aragona-Caldare Girgenti first appears, seven miles away, surely “a
city set upon a hill that cannot be hid.” Yet to-day it is no more like
the ancient Greek Akragas, founded twenty-five centuries ago, than the
dried sponge is like the live one. All that is left of this richest and
most splendid of Sicilian metropoli is huddled within the confines of
its former acropolis, high on the top of the hill. The greater city,
which spread clear down to the temples that fringe the abrupt southern
edge of the plateau, has vanished completely, and the bright homes of
the gods, crumbled into mellow ruin, stand alone beside the shattered
wall, in the midst of the everlasting beauty of hill and plain.

In its palmy days--which began after the battle of Himera and lasted
until the Carthaginian siege--Akragas was so wealthy and so filled with
splendor that the record is almost incredible. The Akragantines’ flasks
and body-scrapers, for use in the baths, were of gold and silver, their
beds of ivory, their feasts and celebrations magnificent. At the wedding
of the daughter of Antisthenes, one of the two leading citizens, there
were eight hundred chariots in the wedding procession, every single
citizen was feasted, and the whole city seemed ablaze from the smoke and
flame of the innumerable bonfires. Even more noted was the hospitality
of Gellias. His slaves stood always at every gate of the city, to bid
all who came thither welcome as his guests. Once, indeed, he even
entertained--clothed, lodged and fed--five hundred cavalrymen and their
horses. And, as Freeman says, these men, Antisthenes and Gellias alike,
were neither tyrants nor lords nor oligarchs, but simple citizens of
the democracy.

The main source of the city’s wealth was her trade with Carthage,
especially in the grape and the olive, neither of which grew in Africa
at that time. Evidently, though, the grapes were not all sent to
Carthage, for Timæus tells us that a house in the city was nicknamed the
“Trireme” because some young men of fashion got very drunk there one
night, and imagining they were in a reeling, rolling ship at sea, began
throwing the furniture overboard to lighten the laboring craft. When the
generals of the Commonwealth came rushing in to quiet things down, the
drunken boys mistook them for gods of the raging sea, and prayed them to
calm the storm!

Empedocles, one of Akragas’s most famous sons, laments that his fellow
townsmen “gave themselves to delights as if they would die to-morrow,
while they built their houses as if they were going to live forever.”
Little did these luxury-loving folk think that the very barbarians whose
trade was so enriching them would at last grow envious and snatch back
by force the wealth they had built up for their neighbors. Empedocles,
by the way, is one of the most picturesque characters in the whole story
of Sicily. A political leader and an engineer who did wonders for the
sanitation of the city, he refused supreme control when he might have
had it, and proclaimed himself a sort of primitive socialist early in
his career. But later in life he seems entirely to have forgotten his
previous socialistic theories. Dressed in a purple robe with a golden
girdle, brazen shoes, and a Delphic wreath for his thick hair, he
wandered from city to city proclaiming himself, in the words of one of
his own poems, the _Katharmoi_, “An immortal god, and no longer a mortal
man.”

Nearly a sixth of Sicily’s sulphur is exported from Porto Empedocle,
Girgenti’s ancient haven, six miles distant. From the station platform
one sees all around reddish-yellow and gray hills covered with small
dumps and pierced with scores of drives, dotted with little shanties and
pricklied over with chimneys where the miners are delving and smelting.
On the sidings near the depot scores of flat cars are heaped high with
huge pressed cakes of the sickly greenish-yellow sulphur, while the
roadway leading to the freight-house is fulvid with powdered brimstone,
and the atmosphere faintly suggests things infernal. In the city museum
the antiquarian may study the tile stamps of the Roman period--Girgenti
was Agrigentum then--for impressing the sulphur cakes before they
solidified.

Outside the station every train draws a barking crowd of _facchini_
(porters) and hotel-runners, from whom you escape into an hotel omnibus.
We chose a tiny, rickety, low-roofed vehicle, which had developed
rheumatism and gout in every complaining spring and joint. Delighted to
secure the only first class passengers who had come on that express, the
driver whipped up his three emaciated nags and we started on the long,
circuitous, heart-breaking climb up the steep hills to the citadel
above.

The bus was scarcely moving when a face appeared at the rear door, not
of the usual hotel porter who rides behind, but of a Murillo cherub,
brown-eyed and dark, with a lurking smile so ingenuous and charming that
one must have been stony-hearted indeed not to succumb to the spell of
his innocent sorcery.

The hotel on the Via Atenea--the only street in Girgenti worthy the name
of a thoroughfare--proved a seedy, disreputable looking establishment,
giving upon the narrow way in a black hole into which we plunged, to
find a pair of winding, cold stone stairs in the rear up which we
stumbled to the second story office. But the drawbacks of this inn--and
there are better ones in town--were fortunately most of them on the
outside. Our room was really comfortable, and the luncheon considerably
better than we dared expect, though the dessert, in a dirty glass
cake-dish, consisted of oranges, nespoli, or Japanese medlars, large raw
broad-beans, and something that looked like celery but proved to be
_finocchi_, or fennel, one of the staple foods of the people,
apparently a natural source of concentrated paregoric.

When the porter announced that our landau was waiting after luncheon, we
questioned the ability of the three mangy, half-starved horses--the same
team which had brought us from the railway station--to drive all the
afternoon over the amazingly steep and hilly roads; but assured that
these very animals had been doing the same work for “twenty years or
more” we started off congratulating ourselves on escaping the guides,
unnecessary nuisances.

As we stepped out at the little antique Gothic church of San Niccolà,
the cherub suddenly appeared before us.

“Hello! Where did you come from?” I inquired.

The lad only shook his head, but the coachman, whose face was all one
broad grin, waved his whip at the rear of the carriage. “_A dietro_--On
behind!”

It was true. For miles that child had clung to the rear axle in the
choking dust for the sake of a little silver. With an air of modest
assurance he introduced himself--“Alfonso Caratozzo, _signore_. I am
just twelve years old. For six years I have been the best guide in
Girgenti, and all the grand foreign gentlemen are much pleased with me.
I can show you everything.”

Alfonso’s large claim was fully justified by his conduct of our affairs,
his poetic appreciation not only of the beauties of the scenery but of
his own dignity and importance as counselor and pilot of the _forestieri
americani_--and no one who wishes a guide can do better than to inquire
for Alfonso the Wise!

Never was the mixed civilization and pagan ancestry of the Sicilians of
to-day brought more vividly to our attention than in this little church
of San Niccolà. The attractive girl custodian was a perfect young
Saracen Sicilian, black-eyed and raven haired, with big gold and coral
earrings. Beside her Alfonso, as purely Greek as she was Moorish, looked
every inch a faun. The girl knew what stories she had to tell very well.
Alfonso, however, evidently bored by the history of ancient Akragas from
the day of its founding, whispered: “Pay no attention to her, _signore_.
She tells this to everybody!”

Shades of Diodorus--what should she tell!

Near by stands a little Roman building dating from the second century B.
C. Somehow it got the name of Oratory of Phalaris, though it certainly
was not in existence in Phalaris’s time. How strange that such a
building and such an idea should be associated with this most widely
advertised of Greek tyrants! Of all the disputed stories told of him,
that of the brazen bull is most widely known; and without his bull,
Phalaris would be no more than an hundred obscure tyrants in other Greek
cities. The legend declares that an artist named Perillos made a
monstrous hollow brazen bull in whose shoulder was a door through which
the victim could be thrust. When the fire underneath heated the
diabolical invention, the cries of the sufferer, issuing through the
nostrils, sounded like the roarings of the enraged animal. The tyrant,
with a proper sense of humor, immediately tested the efficiency of the
image upon its luckless inventor Perillos. In later times apologists
denied these stories; but Pindar, writing within a century after the
death of Phalaris, summed up Sicilian public opinion of that day very
tersely in the lines:

    _“Phalaris, with blood defiled,_
     _His brazen bull, his torturing flame,_
     _Hand o’er alike to evil fame_
     _In every clime!”_

Very different indeed are his praises of Theron of Akragas, one of the
greatest and best of the Greek tyrants, with whom he was contemporary.
The Second Olympian Ode is perhaps the most fulsome. Cary rendered it:

    _“Theron for his conquering car_
     _Shall spread a shout of triumph far and wide;_
     _True to his friends, the people’s pride;_
     _Stay of Akragas and flower_
     _Of many a noble ancestor;_
     _They, long toils and perils past,_
     _By the rivers built at last_
     _Their sacred bower, and were an eye_
     _To light the land of Sicily._
     _And I will swear_
     _That city none, though she enroll_
     _A century past her radiant scroll,_
     _Hath brought a mortal man to light_
     _Whose heart with love more genial glows,_
     _Whose hand with larger bounty flows,_
     _Than Theron’s._”

It was during the reign of Theron that the city, approaching the height
of its prosperity and pride, joined forces with Gelon and the Syracusans
in defeating Hamilcar’s Carthaginians in a tremendous battle at Himera.
The victors took an immense number of the defeated soldiers captive, and
Theron began to rush forward epoch making municipal improvements. The
slaves, being only human, could not last forever, and they were worked
hard while their strength endured, toiling in the stone quarries,
building the city wall, excavating a huge fishpond, and commencing the
construction of the magnificent temples along the southern rampart.

“Tyrant,” by the way, in that age of civilization, did not necessarily
mean a brutal, oppressive or fire-breathing monster. Indeed, some of the
tyrants were among the best rulers Greek Sicily ever had. As Freeman
says, “tyrant” meant a forceful usurper, a man who raised himself to
the supreme authority when kings and kingship were not only unlawful but
were not even the fashion.

Of the six glorious temples--among the most brilliant achievements of
the most brilliant period of Greek freedom in Sicily--only two remain
standing, at the verge of the hill, limned in all their marvelous Greek
severity and simplicity against the tender landscape. Overhead burns the
cobalt sky of Sicily; around them burgeon crimson poppies, delicate
buttercups and spurge, and other flowers innumerable. Flute-voiced birds
swing and sing in among the olives, in air languid with the perfume of
the almond in bloom.--And in the clear sunlight of the South, the
temples themselves glow with a golden radiance that must surely be a
faint reflection of the fires of the immortal gods.

Models of Doric simplicity, these temples consisted only of a windowless
shrine for the god, surrounded by an open colonnade, the whole covered
by a gabled roof. Their design was at once the result of the climate and
of Greek civilization. The religion was intimately connected with
devotion to the State; hence the homes of the gods, who were both the
patrons and companions of the people, were public buildings, their
porticoes open to the daily life and commerce, the intercourse of the
citizens.

The Greek religion was beautiful, rarely beautiful. But exclusive,
mysterious? No! Its rites were simple--choral hymns, rhythmic dances,
ceremonies executed by the citizens themselves. And the priests guarded
no occult sciences, as did the Egyptians; kept to themselves no written
hieroglyph unintelligible except to the initiate. They were laymen,
married men with families, soldiers, merchants, men engaged in every
walk of life.

Marvelous architects, those old fifth century Greeks! To give their low
and heavy buildings greater charm than was possible with mere straight
lines, they made their columns gently swelling; smaller at the top than
at the bottom. At the corners of the edifice they even sloped them
slightly inward. They bent the foundation upward a little in the middle,
and did the same thing with the long line of the entablature above. Yet
it would seem that they were given to gilding the lily. They covered the
rich golden travertine of which the edifices were built with a thin coat
of white stucco or mortar, upon which were painted striking ornaments in
many brilliant colors. It is hard to believe that the temples when
painted could have been as magnificent as they are to-day; yet they must
have been--who are we to impugn Greek taste!

[Illustration: The Temple of Concord “was used in the Middle Ages as the
Church of St. Gregory of the Turnips.”]

The Temple of Concord, because of its use in the Middle Ages as the
church of Saint Gregory of the Turnips, is one of the best preserved
pagan buildings in existence, all of its thirty-four giant columns still
standing. It makes a picture of beautiful and serene old age that
loses nothing by comparison with the eternal youth of its surroundings.
House of peace it has been called, and house of peace it still is, after
the storms and wars of more than fourteen centuries have ebbed and
flowed about its massive base.

The _custode_, a garrulous old soldier, insists on your instantly taking
the view from the architrave above the cella, which really is
magnificent. But you are not ready for that just yet. Why must these
caretakers always tease you to do something when you don’t want to!
Glimpsing the fat little red book in your pocket, he smiles
sardonically. “Ha! You wish to be let alone?” he exclaims. “Ha! You
believe the book of a German, not the word of a Sicilian. But does the
book tell you the Christians who turned this temple into a church were
the first Sicilians to embrace the Faith? No, _signore_--but you believe
your German book. Very good, believe it!” and he stalks away, secure in
his precious tradition.

From the Temple of Concord the road ascends gently, parallel to the
ancient wall, until it reaches the southeastern angle of the precipitous
plateau, occupied by the so-called Temple of Juno. Below it on the east
flows the San Biagio, zigzagging in a southwesterly direction to join
the Drago torrent, with which it enters the Mediterranean at the old
harbor of Emporio. Perched upon this lofty cliff, nearly four hundred
feet above the sea, the temple commands a wonderful view.

This structure is in far less perfect condition than the Temple of
Concord, only twenty-five whole columns standing, while everywhere the
mellow golden stonework is marked with peculiar dull, bloody stains
supposed to be traces of the fire set by the Carthaginians in 406 B. C.,
in their endeavor to burn the city. The tradition seems to have little
foundation in fact, for on other ruins, parts of the old Greek wall, and
even on some of the rocks of the vicinity, the same strange stains are
frequently visible, and appear to be a natural property of the stone,
possibly due to its exposure to the weather.

Here I sent Alfonso away on an errand, and another small boy guide hung
about us until we entered the holy of holies. Springing upon a shattered
block of marble which he said had been the altar where the huge statue
of Juno had once stood, he took an absurdly constrained position, and
cried: “Look, _signore_--Juno stood here--just like me!”

One of the most alluring ruins is the fragment, called for want of a
better name presumably, the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Embayed in a
grove of olive and almond, resting upon a veritable carpet of flowers
among which climb tangled vines, rise four stately columns, silhouetted
sharply against the dazzling sky, and supporting a honey-colored
fragment of entablature. And though the archæologists declare the
columns to have been taken from two different edifices and arbitrarily
joined, this detracts not a whit from the grace and beauty of the
restoration and its surroundings.

Olympian Jupiter it was who had--as befitted the king of the gods--the
largest temple. Indeed, after the vast temple of Diana at Ephesus, this
was the largest Greek shrine ever built. Now all there is to be seen is
a vast formless heap of cut stones in a living sea of brilliant yellow
bloom. Unafraid, these star-eyed flowerets lovingly enfold shattered
column and pediment, creep up into the sacred close of the cella or
sanctuary, and kiss the huge prone figure of one of the thirty-eight
titanic Atlantides or caryatides, about twenty-five feet in height,
which are believed to have supported the entablature. The colossal
edifice measured about three hundred and seventy-two feet long, at least
one hundred and eight-two wide, and probably about one hundred twenty
high.

And these are not all, by any means. There are more ruins of temples,
within and without the walls, more interesting to explore than to read
about; there are Christian catacombs and tombs; the megalithic wall, and
the Porta Aurea, the Golden Gate that looks straight out over the golden
southern sea. And there are also some very interesting antiquities on
view in the Museum--but beware the specious vendors of relics who hang
around the temples and the hotels. The Greeks of twenty centuries ago
did not stamp their products, “Made in Germany!”

All along the way are vast numbers of peculiar white lumps on grass and
leaves and walls, clinging like burrs to even the fruit and treetrunks.

“They are snails, Excellency,” explained Alfonso, “and very good to eat.
After it rains they grow big and fat. Then they are very sweet.”

Springing down from the box, the child tore a fat snail from the wall,
and hopping up again, cracked it open skillfully with his teeth, drew
out and ate the quivering mollusc. Waving his hand toward some more
large specimens on the wall, he asked: “Excellency would like some too?”

“Excellency has just had his luncheon,” opportunely interposed the
driver. “Snails are not good for dessert.”

Within the acropolis again, we dismissed the landau out of pity for the
wretched horses, and rambled about on foot. Before reaching the
Cathedral we passed Alfonso’s home, where he introduced us to his family
with all the éclat of a noble presenting friends at court; and poor as
these Sicilians were, we found among them all--father, mother, aunt,
cousin, three sisters and a brother--no lack of that inborn courtesy
which distinguishes the Latin peasant.

Collectively the family showed us the church of Santa Maria dei Greci,
in which are supposed to be incorporated the scanty remains of the
principal sanctuary of either Zeus Atabyrius or Minerva, while some
urchin, locked out and so deprived of all opportunity for tips,
playfully stoned the church door. The Cathedral is more interesting,
though the apse is over richly stuccoed, covered with scrolls and
cherubs in gold and white. One of its chief treasures is a madonna,
painted by Guido Reni, though not comparable to his best work. In the
sacristy is a really fine old white marble sarcophagus of the Roman
period, bearing reliefs of the myth of Hippolytus and Phædra.

But nothing within is comparable to the view from one of the windows at
the sunset hour. It recalls the Biblical prophecies of Canaan with the
chalky roads for the milk, and the gold of the daisies, mustard and
marigolds for the honey of this Promised Land. The chief charm of the
scene as the hills lie weltering under the fading glory of the sinking
sun are these same milky roads, flowing through the verdant swards and
vales. In the background the ugly, prosaic sulphur pits, dumps and
chimneys make splashes of harsh modern color in this world-old
landscape. It is a scene unforgettable. Slowly, gently, the soft
rosy-bluish evening haze creeps up the hillside; bit by bit the purple
shadows deepen, the soft harmonies of tender green melt into the blur
of the background, and only the creamy highways stand out distinct.

Not so very many years ago this entire region was unsafe because of the
brigands. Now one may go anywhere about Girgenti with perfect security.
Nevertheless, a pair of Carabinieri--they always travel in pairs, by the
way--gorgeous in all their glory of black and scarlet, with cockaded
cocked hats, were always somewhere within range when we were outside the
city proper. They seemed to take as keen an interest in the ruins as we
did, though temples must have been an old story to them.

Alfonso spoke to one of these kindly familiars whom we passed,
struggling to make his greeting as careless as the familiar “Hello!” of
the American streets. Good humoredly the Carabiniero answered him, and
as we went on, the boy remarked with innocent egotism: “You saw him,
_signore_? He is my friend. You are with me, and he would let nothing
happen to you. It is good to know the police--as I do!”




VIII

THE ROAD TO SYRACUSE


To the northwest of Girgenti the country is honeycombed with sulphur
pits and it is not very hard to credit the ancient myth that the gates
of Hades opened here. After the train leaves the trunkline of the
railway at Aragona-Caldare, tunnels and sulphur mines make up most of
the scenery. This entire district has a smitten look, and on the bleak
rolling plains and rugged hills are dreary towns whose chief charm, as
they flit past in a continuous gray motion picture, lies in their
historical suggestions. The most important and flourishing city we pass
is Caltanisetta, the center of the sulphur industry, which produces more
than half a million tons annually. The mines are most of them primitive
in the extreme, and machinery is practically unknown, while in many of
them fuel is so scarce and costly that the operators burn the raw
sulphur itself in their _calcaroni_ or smelters.

Shortly before reaching Santa Catarina Xirbi, the junction town where
the tracks join the Palermo line, we have our first glimpse of Mt. Ætna,
its snowy cap hanging in the distance like a low white cloud. Small
gorges and tunnels follow in rapid succession, and the train pants
upward in tortuous curves through the barren valleys, until we look up
at Castrogiovanni, the Enna of the ancients. It lies in an almost
perfect horseshoe on a precipitous rock, and so surrounded by nearly
perpendicular approaches, so walled in by Nature with beetling crags,
that none of its innumerable ancient besiegers was ever able to storm
it. Treachery--and once starvation--did for it what armed assault never
could. Livy rightly called it “a city inexpugnable,” and it probably is
so yet, for it has recently been strongly fortified after the most
approved modern style. The ascent is by a road which--well, try it for
yourself. But the town, once reached, pays for the climb in its
magnificent views. It is the navel (_umbilicus Siciliæ_) of Sicily, and
from the loftiest tower of the former citadel there sweeps away a
mountain cyclorama such as not even Switzerland can excel--Ætna, peaks
without number, range on range and tier on tier, melting into the haze
of heaven. Towns, thousands of feet in the air, cling desperately to the
steep, unfriendly sides, or perch precariously on the tops of
needle-pointed mountains. And on the South, beyond hills and plain,
dimples the ultramarine of the African sea.

For centuries before the adventurous Greeks colonized the hill, Enna was
the principal home of a Sicilian goddess, the patron of natural
fertility and of the harvest, whom the Greeks identified with their own
Demeter, and the later Romans with Ceres. Not a stone of her temple is
left, and we can do little more than speculate upon its site, said to
have been where the old citadel now stands. About two hours to the south
by carriage is that once lovely little lake of Pergusa, where Pluto met
and straight-way stole the lovely Proserpina to be the queen of his dark
realm. It was then a district so fair that Diodorus said the hounds
often lost the scent of their quarry, so rich was the fragrance of the
flowers. But alas! the spot is blasted now. Gone are the splendid shade
trees in whose branches the singing messengers of spring carolled; gone
all the beauty of Pergusa, now but a dirty little pond, where peasants
steep their flax. But at least we can think of it still in Ovid’s words:
“A spot at the bottom of a shady vale, watered by the plenteous spray of
a stream that falls from wooded heights; where Nature decks herself in
all her varied hues, where the ground is beauteous, carpeted with
flowers of many tints.”

Ætna appears again soon after the entrance to the valley of the Dittaino
is passed, and beckons with such insistence that the train hesitates
only a moment--at the station for Valguarnera Assoro--right before the
railway restaurant. It is a tumbledown little shack with a big sign:
_Ristorante G. Galliano_. If you are on good enough terms with the
Signor Conductor, he may wait long enough for you to have a sip of the
excellent country wine and a taste of the “beautiful goat” the
redoubtable Galliano purveys to such as can pay his very modest price. A
few miles farther on is the station for Agira, which occupies the site
of one of the very oldest Sikelian cities, lying back from the railroad,
up in the hills. Later it was the birthplace of the historian Diodorus,
who gives a picturesque account of his native village.

Half an hour later the railway emerges from the hills upon the plain of
Catania--so productive of grain that from the very beginnings of local
history it has been known as the granary of Sicily--and leaving the main
line at Bicocca, puts Catania and the great volcano behind, heading
southward for Syracuse. Fine crops appear around the famous Lake
Lentini, Sicily’s largest inland body of water, varying from about nine
to twelve miles in circumference, according to the season. It is a
dreary tarn, looking so like a big mud puddle or a meadow overflowed by
stagnant salt water that it is easy to credit the tales of the mephitic
vapors and exhalations and fevers which have made it the scourge of the
neighborhood.

Evidently the Sicilian railroads provide no drinking water for the
employés in wayside stations, for as we stopped the combination
telegraph operator, baggage smasher, ticket agent and general utility
man ran out to the locomotive and tapped the brass faucet in the tender
for a drink. There is a big water-wheel a few miles farther on, arranged
exactly like an Egyptian _sakiyeh_, and no doubt a survival of the
Moorish wheel installed in that very well centuries ago. The apparatus
is very simple. A horizontal wheel is geared loosely into a vertical one
by big, clumsy wooden teeth. Over it projects an arm to which some
patient draft animal is hitched. A long grass rope carrying an endless
series of pottery jars or buckets completes the outfit by running over
the vertical wheel, and all the water that does not splash back into the
well flows into an irrigating pool and the ditches. The mule who worked
this particular wheel acted as if he too were a Moorish survival,
unaccustomed to modern inventions. Anyway, he tried to bolt when the
engine shrieked. His plunging blindfold gallop sent the water flying in
all directions, giving his peasant master a much-needed bath and earning
the poor beast a beating, the blows of which could be distinctly heard
as the train sped on. Around a curve Mt. Ætna appears again in all its
majesty, filling up the entire background, looming more than twice as
large as familiar Vesuvius. Its lower slopes are green and the upper
reaches snow covered, split like a sore lip, with dark curves, queer
bumps and sharp little corners of uplifted skin. Above them poises the
soft black, slightly indented cone, canopied by a ridiculous tuft of
cottony smoke no bigger than a handful at such a distance.

Agnone is a hedge of yellow daisies, a deep pasture full of reddish
brown kine, a farmhouse of stone with thatched shelters for the animals
in the midst of rich cultivated lands. A mile away gleams the sea, a
dull turquoise green flecked with windy ripples and dotted here and yon
with white--“Silver sails come out of the west.” The tall timothy on
both sides of the track, and other fields planted with oats and spiky
cactus, seem mere picturesque settings for countless fiery poppies.
Sheep by the hundred bolt in terror from the wild shrieks of the
locomotive, preferring to run straight ahead on the track as long as
they can possibly keep out of the way of the engine. Bold headlands here
and there lower their stubborn crests for a few yards to give the flying
train instantaneous vistas of wet sand gleaming far below, like blades
of golden sickles edged with silver filigree.

In rapid succession these rugged scenes slip behind, and we run along
the shore past salt farms and their windmills; then a boldly jutting
island, brave with forts and churches, rising out of the sea like
Venice--Augusta the picturesque, modern survivor of Xiphonia, scene of
many a fierce battle and bloody conquest.

Augusta was founded in a most picturesque way by Emperor Frederick II.
The town of Centuripe up in the hills, having roused the imperial ire by
its sedition, was effectually razed. Then Frederick punished its people
still further by driving them all into this spot and commanding them to
stay there and be good. Perhaps its stormy birth in a measure accounts
for Augusta’s stormy history. The most spectacular affair it ever
witnessed was the tremendous naval duel between the fleets of France and
Holland in 1676, when Admiral Duquesne defeated the Dutch Admiral De
Ruyter, who afterward died of his wounds in nearby Syracuse. Following
the coast closely, we flit swiftly past the Hyblæan Hills, eager to stop
for some of their historic honey, but relentlessly carried onward by the
insensate iron horse, that knows not nor cares for the sweets that rival
the product of Hymettus.

All the way from Augusta the track borders the shore of the Bay of
Megara, where anchored Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus, the Athenian
generals who came to attack Syracuse in 415 B. C. with a fleet so vast
that men paled merely to see it whiten the horizon. But to-day, instead
of the tents and sails of invading hosts, you see evaporating-tanks and
windmills, and snowy piles of salt dotting the rugged shore in serried
ranks. Rushing across the neck of the promontory of Thapsus--now called
Magnisi--we skirt Trogilus Bay, where the conquering fleet of Marcellus
the Roman lay two centuries after the Athenian _débâcle_, cross the old
Dionysian wall, sweep around the bold headland, and stop at Syracuse.

Don’t be disappointed in Syracuse by what you see of the dirty little
provincial town that yawns sleepily at you between the railroad station
and your hotel. Suspend judgment until you reach the Greek Theater, and
from the top row of seats carven into the eternal rock, look out over
the gracious panorama below. Beyond the sparsely settled vineyards and
groves covering what was once the Greater Syracuse, lies the city of
to-day on Ortygia, an oyster-shell full-heaped with pearls, in a
sapphire setting of twin harbors and glittering sands. The alchemy of
golden sunshine transmutes whitewashed tenements into Greek palaces,
fishing luggers into stately galleys of war, and prosaic modern peasants
into the soldiers and citizens of a happier and more stirring day. And
as you stand breathless with the wonder of it, history unfolds itself in
memory, with something at every step to drive that history home, be it
Sikel, Greek, Roman, Saracen or Norman. The ruins of the mighty fortress
atop the inland hill breathe of the Age of Tyrants, and to follow the
herculean walls of Dionysius around the deserted plateau fills one with
awe and wonder anew, for the work seemingly has been performed by a race
of giants. Below, yawning in the seacoast of Achradina, dim caverns
invite the explorer’s rowboat. There are the Street of Tombs to
search for relics--though most likely you will find only a few scattered
bones; the Castello Maniaces on the tip of Ortygia, full of Byzantine
memories; charming walks to and through the quarries, the famous
_Latomie_; the astonishing catacombs and the Anapo trip. A score of
other delightful excursions the visitor can take, providing he is not
driven forward by the exigencies of a cut-and-dried itinerary, that
wickedest and most specious of all excuses for not seeing enough of a
country really to enjoy it!

[Illustration: “From the top row of seats in the Greek Theater look out
over the gracious panorama below”--Syracuse.]

The mother colony was founded in 734 B. C. on the little island of
Ortygia, named for the quail the Greeks found there in great coveys.
From its very beginning the benignant gods smiled upon Syracuse, and it
prospered so rapidly that within seventy years it was founding colonies
of its own. Under the tyrant Gelon, son-in-law of the great and good
Theron of Akragas, and later practically co-ruler with him of all Greek
Sicily, the era of Hellenic supremacy began, with Syracuse in the van of
progress. Indeed, Syracuse was of such paramount importance that
sometimes its history is mistaken for the history of Sicily. Tyrants
good and bad rose and fell; democracy overthrew tyranny, and tyranny
overthrew democracy. Demagogues--the word means literally “popular
leaders”--rose to stir the people to action against the government or
the tyrant--and sometimes threatened to become tyrants themselves.
Seeing how easy it was to sway the rabble with hot words, men of every
class began to practice public speaking; no young man’s education was
complete without it; and oratory first became an art in Sicily.

From the island of Ortygia the city spread up the hilly mainland in four
new boroughs--Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis and Epipolai--making a mighty
pentapolis; a community which was not only the foremost of all the Greek
cities in the island, but much the greatest in physical extent of all
the Greek cities in the world, and for a time the greatest city of
Europe as well as of Greece. This naturally made Athens jealous, and in
415 B. C. the pent up force of Attic wrath loosed itself in a tremendous
blast against Syracuse. But Athens’ traditional enemy, Sparta, sent the
island city help, and the Athenian arms went down in one of the most
appalling defeats of all history. After this vivid chapter, governments
and tyrants rose and fell again as before, deliverers came and conquered
in the name of the people, and passed, and at last the young giant Rome
stepped in with brazen legionaries and put a period to the brilliant
story.

To-day, as in the beginning, the city is on Ortygia, the houses crowding
together behind the old walls like birds on a roost, and you wonder why,
when there was such ample space on the shore, the people huddled
together so. The streets, moreover, are amazingly shifty. On foot you
set out to explore the town and encircle it by keeping as close to the
walls as possible--a matter of a mere hour and a half, with plenty of
time to idle by the way. According to the maps this should be no great
feat, but try as you may, it seems impossible to lay a true course, and
becoming discouraged after slipping off one street four or five times,
you abandon yourself to the vagaries of these astonishing high and
byways--they fade into one another without sign or signal, they vanish
on front doorsteps, end after half a block in blind alleys, terminate in
bastions which lead one to suppose that the sea must be below on the
other side, only to turn up somewhere else in most mysterious fashion,
and not always running in the same direction as their beginning.

There is little that is up-to-date about Syracuse. To a great extent it
lives in medieval seclusion and its people are simple, genial folk so
wholly out of touch with the world that whatever is essential for
comfort or convenience is proper in public. On one street, for instance,
I saw the economical wife of a small shopkeeper wash her baby’s only
frock--a slim little red calico--and button it to dry over the bulgy
part of a lamppost, which looked choked and uneasy as the tiny slip
fluttered in the wind. Meantime the _piccola signorita_ disported
herself amiably in the street--and all her frolicking in the dust could
not hurt what she wore.

Near the center of the city stands the Cathedral, a queer combination of
battlemented Moorish castle, ancient Greek temple and modern Christian
structure. Nearly thirteen centuries ago Bishop Zosimus of Syracuse
began the work of turning the ruined temple--built early in the sixth
century B. C.--into a Christian church, filling in the peristyle with a
solid wall in which some of the Doric columns are still visible. The
Saracen invaders turned it into a mosque in the year 878, and for two
centuries _muezzins_ chanted the names of Allah and Muhammad from its
walls. With the Norman conquest in the eleventh century the building
again became a Christian house of worship, and though the earthquake of
1693 destroyed a part of it, the damage was soon repaired and it has
ever since remained the diocesan church of Syracuse. Like many of the
often restored cathedrals of Meridional Italy, its interior is barren
and uninteresting, but its exterior, with Greek entablature and columns,
Saracenic frieze and battlements, and hideous Renaissance façade and
portico is unique among Christian churches.

There seems some doubt among the archæologists as to the deity worshiped
here in pagan days. It was formerly ascribed to Diana, but the
authorities now generally believe it was the shrine of Minerva, though
Cicero’s glowing description of the Temple of Minerva (Athena) places
that structure in a location apparently different from the site of the
present Duomo. The orator says he saw a temple on whose apex was “...a
great brazen shield overlaid with gold, which served as a landmark to
sailors on entering the port. The folding doors of ivory and gold were
also adorned with a marvelous golden head of Medusa.” Most of these
magnificent treasures were stolen. The Roman prætor Gaius Verres, a
gentleman with a highly cultivated taste in works of art, stripped
Syracuse--and all Sicily, in fact--absolutely bare of everything the
Roman armies had overlooked. And when at last he was brought to book for
his crimes, he fled into voluntary exile with his plunder rather than
face the scathing invective of Cicero.

The archæologists’ dubiety regarding the name of the temple has no room
in the minds of the street arabs, however, who vociferously proclaim it
the “_Tempio di Diana_,” and will not suffer you to leave until you have
paid for this volunteered information.

Diagonally across the Piazza Duomo is the externally unimposing Museum.
Its collection, however, is both interesting and intelligently arranged.
It covers the civilization of Sicily from the bone and flint implements
of the extinct prehistoric Sikels, through the transitional Greek period
of the metopes from Selinus, to the splendid coins and vases of the
city’s supremacy as an Hellenic center of culture and art. In fact, the
profile of Arethusa, on coins signed by Evanetus and Kimon, is
considered the most exquisite Greek head known to us. In those days
coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, accustomed to signing
their work, like painters and sculptors, and these two, Evanetus and
Kimon, have left us a noble set of coins in which the Greek conception
of divinity appears at its best. The most beautiful marble is a Venus
Anadyomene, discovered in 1804, and preserved almost intact save for the
head and one arm.

Not very far away there are ruins of another and very remarkable Greek
temple, formerly called for Diana, but now generally considered to have
been dedicated to Apollo--the archæologists seem to have a grudge
against the virgin huntress! There is not much else that is Greek, but
as you wander through the narrow streets, scattered bits of mediæval
architecture appear in the most unexpected places, like the splendid
Sicilian-Gothic and Saracenic windows of the Montalto and Lanza palaces,
all the richer and more wonderful because of the surroundings from which
they look down upon the squalid streets and out-at-heel people. The
later Palazzo Municipale, or City Hall, is a fine example of the
architectural spirit of the seventeenth century, its type that of a
private palace, a baronial mansion rather than a public building.
During this period great attention was paid to ornamental ironwork for
decorative purposes upon the façades of buildings; and all about us are
delicate and satisfying window balconies, some of which plainly testify
to their Spanish origin.

[Illustration: “In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost
rank, and signed their works.”]

The first of the Greek settlers brought their home legends with them to
Sicily, where they found a friendly soil, attaining their fullest
perfection in the sympathetic hands of the Latin poets. Some of the most
beautiful weave through the story of Syracuse, and the most delightful
walk in the city--one you will want to take often--leads you straight
along the edge of the Great Harbor, on a wide, tamarind-bordered
esplanade, with the town wall rising behind, to the picturesque,
papyrus-fringed little pool accounted for by one especially gracious
tale, and called the Fountain of Arethusa.

Long centuries ago--so runs this immemorial fable--there bubbled up out
of the beach of the Great Harbor a crystal spring. And close by, in the
briny waters themselves, another little fount gushed forth, pure and
sweet. The airy Greek fancy could not pass by so remarkable a
coincidence, and the Syracusans quickly came to believe that the twin
springs were the gentle nymph Arethusa, the well-beloved of Artemis
(Diana), and her river-god lover Alpheus; that Arethusa, too impetuously
wooed by Alpheus on the island of Ortygia in Old Greece, had been
graciously changed by Artemis into a spring, and taking the long, dark
journey under the Ionian Sea, had escaped to the sunlight again in the
newer Ortygia in Sicily; that Alpheus, not faint-hearted, had changed
himself to her own watery shape, and following hard and fast, had missed
her by the merest trifle only, bubbling up in a second spring in the
waters of the harbor close beside his beloved. But Poseidon of the sea
was mightier than nymph or river-god. Shaking his mighty bed one day, he
burst open the wall about fair Arethusa.--To-day her water is salt, not
sweet, and no more does her lover Alpheus bubble up beside her in the
Bay.




IX

THE HARBOR AND THE ANAPO


Another of the beautiful legends with which the history of Syracuse is
deeply interwoven is the story of Kyana--Cyane--and Aidoneus or Pluto.
To run it to earth take a stout green and blue rowboat across the Porto
Grande, about two kilometers wide, to the river Anapo. The snapping
breeze blows briskly, and the boat tumbles about in lively fashion upon
the sparkling sapphire, past the big motionless yachts at anchor and the
slow-curtseying sailing craft coming into the docks from the _saline_ or
saltworks in the marsh below the river.

What a contrast between the harbor of to-day and that of twenty-three or
four centuries ago, when not another city in the world could boast so
great a port, so populous a harbor! Here swam the merchant fleets of all
Sicily, of Greece, of Phœnicia, the navy of haughty Syracuse, the
innumerable small boats that darted about between ship and shore--and
remember, too, that these were sailing craft,--every one sea spiders
with oars for legs in windless weather. Around the curving line of the
shore for three miles the ships docked, from island tip to rivermouth.
Fringing the bay were sloping beaches where they careened and calked and
tarred their galleys with slave labor. Shipyards, arsenals, and
merchants’ warehouses lined its shores. All the activities of a great
maritime people hummed about this bay with its margin of city. And all
the city’s splendor, all her power, sprang from the harbor, and from her
control of the waters, exactly as England, two thousand years later,
began to rise to her present eminence by virtue of her position and her
skill in deep waters.

Only a little imagination is required to picture the salt-boats of the
twentieth century as the short, clumsy triremes which on that memorable
September 1, 413 B. C., brought about the dramatic climax of the war
between Athens and Syracuse. The Athenians’ fleet bottled up in the
Great Harbor by a line of chained-together galleys and merchant hulks
anchored from the tip of Ortygia to the promontory of Plemmyrion a mile
south, prepared to force its way out.

All Syracuse and both armies lined the shores, stood up on the seats of
the distant Theater, crowded the housetops to encourage the fighters
with their cheering and shouts. The rival commanders made their usual
orations, exhorting the crews to acquit themselves as men and patriots.
Out into the Bay rowed the fleets--Grote tells the story vividly:
“Inside this narrow basin, rather more than five English miles in
circuit, one hundred and eighty-six ships of war, each manned by more
than two hundred men, were about to join battle--in the presence of
countless masses around, near enough both to see and to hear; the most
picturesque battle probably in history, without smoke or other
impediments to vision, and in the clear atmosphere of Sicily.”

At the first onset the impetuous Athenian attack, headed for the
barrier, broke through the Syracusan defense, and the Athenians were
shouting with triumph as they began to cut the hawsers fastening
together the blockading hulks, when the Syracusan triremes closed in on
them from all sides, and the action at once became general and
desperate. Ship crashed against ship, and vessels once lashed together
rarely separated. Though Syracuse could throw only seventy-six triremes
of the line against the hundred and ten heavy Athenians, she reinforced
her vessels with a perfect cloud of mosquito craft that hovered,
stinging and galling, about the equal antagonists. In a measure the
action demonstrated the efficiency and value of the small, swift cruiser
or torpedoboat of later times, to which the light craft may be
considered analogous, never daring to do more than shoot and run, and
shoot and run again.

Thucydides makes the peaceful harbor ring and echo again with the
surging of the dramatic chorus of citizens and armies urging on the
fight:

“And the great noises of many triremes fallen foul of one another both
amazed the seamen and prevented them from hearing what their leaders
directed; for they directed thick and loud on both sides, not only as
naval art required, but also from sheer eagerness, the Athenians crying
out to their fleet to force the passage ... and the Syracusans to theirs
how honorable a thing it would be to hinder their escape, and by this
victory to improve every man the honor of his country.... While the
conflict raged on the water, the land forces had a struggle and sided
with them in their affections.... For the fight being near, and not all
of them looking upon one and the same part, he that saw his own side
prevail took heart and fell to calling upon the gods that they deprive
them not of safety; and they that saw their friends have the worse, not
only lamented but shrieked outright.... And one might hear in one and
the same army, as long as the fight upon the water was doubtful, at one
and the same time, lamentations, shouts that they won, that they lost,
and whatever else a people in great danger is forced differently to
utter.”

Every one of the Athenian fleet and twenty-six Syracusans had gone
ashore or foundered, only fifty vessels being left afloat, when the
fight ended. Vainly did the Athenian generals plead with their men to
fight again next day with those ships which could be hauled off the
beach and made seaworthy; but so terrific had been the chaos, so utterly
broken was the spirit of the Attic fleet, that the men refused to go
aboard again, and the retreat was soon begun.

Forty thousand men, “like the emigrant population of a city, wandered
laden with their baggage away from the coast into a country hostile to
them, without any definite goal for the journey, without sufficient
supplies of food, without confidence in their ultimate preservation,
tortured by fear, lost in speechless or stolid despair, or raging in
savage fury against men and gods; ... but most terrible of all was it to
leave on the desolate shore the many wounded and sick, who raised their
voices in loud lamentation as their relatives and tent-fellows departed,
or clung to the skirts of their garments, and let themselves be dragged
along for a brief distance, till they sank prostrate to the ground.”[A]

[A] History of Greece, iii, 402; Dr. Ernst Curtius.

For days they struggled on, followed, harassed and headed off by the
victorious Syracusans and their Lacedæmonian allies, at last
surrendering from sheer mental and physical exhaustion, though they knew
full well the inevitable result--slavery for every soldier, an
ignominious death for every general, the ruin of their country as a
world power of the first rank.

Something of all this runs through one’s mind as the rowboat approaches
the low, glistening line of shore, with the wide, clean mouth of the
Anapo in its center. For some distance before we actually enter the
river, its pale green current cuts a furrow sharply through the heavier
salt brine of the Bay. And it is fresh, not salt, long after it leaves
the protection of its native banks. Into its brawling current pull the
boatmen, expatiating volubly, not upon the scenery as one would
naturally expect, but upon the virtues of their particular craft and the
value of their time!

No doubt these boatmen are fair types of the rugged island sailors who
so nobly acquitted themselves twenty-three hundred years ago on the
sparkling bay. Their deep, expressive eyes, and finely chiseled faces,
full of Greek lines, amply confirm the historians’ story of their
descent. Indeed, a majority of the Syracusans are of the classic Greek
type, with little or nothing about them to suggest the later influence
of alien races.

Perhaps an hundred yards inside the mouth of the stream, beside a
bridge, always stands a bevy of laundresses, stout-hearted,
thick-thighed women with massive shoulders and muscular waists, their
skirts carefully tucked up above their knees. Around their bare legs the
icy water swirls in smart ripples, yet they toil there for hours
together, seeming not to mind the cold in the slightest, though a few
old crones on the bank testify mutely in their deformed hands and
rheumatic feet to the power of the river gods who thus repay the
profanation of their pellucid stream.

Piled in baskets upon the shore and lying in bluish wet lumps upon black
rocks are the clothes; and the linen is stout indeed that resists the
battering those furious workers give it--a heavy club, a powerful right
arm, a rough bare stone in running water which contains not a little
sand and never a trace of soap. Indeed, the more pieces one’s linen
comes home in, the more certain he may be that he has a good laundress!

From the time a boat comes within hail until it disappears under the
bridge beyond there is little washing done, the amiable amphibians
evidently preferring to watch than to wash. Indeed, the only way to get
a picture of them in action, is to threaten to pass by without paying
toll unless they work. And then what washing it is! Not far beyond the
laundresses is the open plain on the left of the stream, where two
mutilated pillars, some ten minutes’ or so walk back from the bank, are
all that is left of the temple of Zeus Olympus. The temple was built
about the beginning of the sixth century, and King Gelon covered the
statue of Zeus in it with a robe of pure gold which he made of the
precious metal taken from the defeated Carthaginians at Himera; but
about a century later Dionysius I took away the robe to convert it to
his own purposes, telling the people, with grim humor, that it was “too
cold in winter and too heavy for summer.”

In the Cyane brook the men work slowly along, poling, pulling by the
grasses, halting in little nooks in the banks to let down-coming boats
slip by, rowing when they can. The limpid stream twists hither and yon
through soft tinted fields alive with brilliant flowers. Here and there
weeping willows, splendid old hairy trees, lean over the water and trail
their long green tresses upon its quivering mirror. Exquisite papyrus
plants, sylphlike shoots, top-heavy with the weight of their huge
feather-dustery plumes, in places line both banks thickly for yards, or
stand isolated in stately clumps ten, fifteen, eighteen feet high. Their
presence is accounted for by two distinct traditions--one that they were
brought in the ninth century by the invading Arabs. This is probably
true, but there is no poetry about it. The other and prettier story
tells of a gracious Pharaoh a thousand years earlier who, charmed by the
reports of King Hieron’s lovely and gentle queen, Philistis, sent her as
his choicest gift the loveliest thing dark Egypt could produce.
Whichever story suits your fancy best--believe it!

Whether they have lived in Sicily for ten centuries or twenty, the reeds
still spring in slender, graceful stalks of tender green, without leaf
or gnarl, from the moist earth, nodding their powder-puff heads lazily
over the sparkling water and dreaming--if plants ever dream--of their
sun-steeped home of eld beside placid Father Nile. Nowhere else in the
world to-day does this paper-reed of the ancient Pharaohs grow wild; and
here it strikes a strange exotic note among the harmonies of European
flower and field.

Clear as crystal and blue as the heavens is the circular po

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