whitish, dry, and uninviting, dotted with white rocks projecting above the
surface; white little villages, each with its church and walled fields;
and topping all, on the summit of a rising ground, a town over which rise
the spires of a cathedral. This is Citta Vecchia, the "old city" as it was
called when the capital was transferred to Valletta, though the people
round about still call it by the Saracenic name of "Medina," (the town),
the more modern designation of "Notabile" being due to a complimentary
remark of Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Castile. No town in Malta is
more ancient. Here, we know from the famous oration of Cicero, that
Verres, Prætor of Sicily, established some manufactories for cotton goods,
out of which were made women's dresses of extraordinary magnificence, and
here also the same voluptuous ruler did a reprehensible amount of
plundering from temples and the "abodes of wealthy and honorable
citizens." In their time-honored capital the Grand Masters had to be
inaugurated, and in its cathedral every Bishop of Malta must still be
consecrated. But the glory of Notabile is its memories, for in all
Christendom there is no more silent city than the one towards which we
creep by means of the island railway which has of late years shortened the
eight miles between it and Valletta. Every rood, after leaving the
cave-like station hollowed out of the soft solid rock, and the tunnels
under the fortifications, seems sleepier and sleepier. Every few minutes
we halt at a white-washed shed hard by a white-washed "casal." And all the
"casals" seem duplicates of each other. The white streets of these
villages are narrow, and the people few. But the church is invariably
disproportionately large, well built, and rich in decorations, while the
shops in the little square are much poorer than people who support so fine
a church ought to patronize. There is Hamrun, with its Apostolic Institute
directed by Algerian missionaries, Misada in the valley, and Birchircara.
Casal Curmi, where the cattle market is held, is seen in the distance, and
at Lia and Balzan we are among the orange and lemon gardens for which
these villages are famous. The San Antonio Palace, with its pleasant
grounds, forms a relief to the eye. At Attard, "the village of roses," the
aqueduct which supplies Valletta with the water of Diar Handur comes in
sight, and then, at San Salvador, the train begins the steep pull which
ends at the base of the hill on which Notabile is built.
On this slope are little terraced fields and remains of what must at one
time have been formidable fortifications. But all is crumbling now. A few
of the Valletta merchants are taking advantage of the railway by building
country houses, and some of the old Maltese nobility cling to the town
associated with their quondam glory. But its decaying mansions with their
mouldering coats of arms, palaces appropriated to prosaic purposes,
ramparts from which for ages the clash of arms has departed, and streets
silent except for the tread of the British soldiers stationed there or the
mumble of the professional beggar, tell a tale of long-departed greatness.
A statue of Juno is embedded in the gateway, and in the shed-like museum
have been collected a host of Phoenician, Roman, and other remains dug out
of the soil of the city. Maltese boys pester us to buy copper coins of the
knights which are possibly honest, and their parents produce silver ones
which are probably apocryphal.
In Notabile itself there is not, however, a great deal to look at, though
from the summit of the Sanatorium, of old the Courts of Justice (and there
are dreadful dungeons underneath it still), a glance may be obtained over
the entire island. To the prosaic eye it looks rather dry to be the "Fior
del Mondo," the flower of the world, as the patriotic Maltese terms the
land which he leaves with regret and returns to with joy. There to the
south lies Verdala Palace, and the Boschetto, a grove in much request for
picnic parties from Valletta, and beyond both, the Inquisitor's summer
palace, close to where the sea spray is seen flying against the rugged
cliffs. The Bingemma hills, thick with Phoenician tombs, are seen to the
west, and if the pedestrian cares he may visit the old rock fortress of
Kala ta Bahria, Imtarfa, where stood the temple of Proserpine, and
Imtahleb near the seashore, where in the season wild strawberries abound.
Musta, with its huge domed church, is prominent enough to the northeast,
while with a glass it is not difficult to make out Zebbar and Zeitun,
Zurrico, Paola, and other villages of the southeastern coast scattered
through a region where remains of the past are very plentiful. For here
are the ruins of the temples of Hagiar Khim and Mnaidra, rude prehistoric
monuments, and on the shore of the Marsa Scirocco (a bay into which the
hot wind of Africa blows direct), is a megalithic wall believed to be the
last of the temple of Melkarte, the Tyrian Hercules.
But in Notabile, far before Apollo and Proserpine, whose marble temples
stood here, before even the knights, whose three centuries of iron rule
have a singular fascination for the Maltese, there is a name very often in
many mouths. And that is "San Paolo." Saint Paul is in truth the great
man of Malta, and the people make very much of him. He is almost as
popular a personage as Sir Thomas Maitland, the autocratic "King Tom," of
whose benevolent despotism and doughty deeds also one is apt in time to
get a little tired. Churches and streets and cathedrals are dedicated to
the Apostle of the Gentiles, and from the summit of the Sanatorium a
barefooted Maltese points out "the certain creek with a shore" in which he
was wrecked, the island of Salmun, on which there is a statue of him, and
the church erected in his honor. It is idle to hint to this pious son of
Citta Vecchia that it is doubtful whether Paul was ever wrecked in Malta
at all, that not unlikely the scene of that notable event was Melita, in
the Gulf of Ragusa. Are there not hard by serpents turned into stone, if
no living serpents to bite anybody, and a miraculous fountain which bursts
forth at the Apostle's bidding? And is not "the tempestuous wind called
Euroklydon" blowing at this very moment? And in the cathedral we learn for
the first time that Publius, on the site of whose house it is built,
became the first bishop of Malta. For is not his martyrdom sculptured in
marble, and painted on canvas? And by-and-by we see the grotto in which
St. Paul did three months' penance, though the reason is not explained,
and over it the chapel raised to the memory of the converted Roman
Governor, and not far away the Catacombs in which the early Christians
sheltered themselves, though whether there is an underground passage from
there to Valletta, as historians affirm, is a point in which our
barefooted commentator is not agreed.
All these are to him irreverent doubts. Notabile, with its cathedral, and
convents, and monasteries, its church of St. Publius, the "stone of which
never grows less," the seminary for priests, the Bishop's Palace and the
Bishop's Hospital, is no place for scepticism touching Saint Paul and his
voyages. Any such unbeliefs we had better carry elsewhere. The day is hot
and the old city is somnolent, and the talk is of the past. At the wicket
gate of the little station at the hill foot the engine is, at least, of
the present. And as we slowly steam into Valletta, and emerge into the
busy street, we seem to have leapt in an hour from the Middle Ages into
the Twentieth Century. The band is playing in the Palace Square, and the
politicians are in procession over some event with which we as seekers
after the picturesque are not concerned. But in Valletta we are in the
land of living men. Behind us is a city of the dead, and around it lie
villages which seem never to have been alive.
XIII
SICILY
Scylla and Charybdis--Messina, the chief commercial center of
Sicily--The magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater at
Taormina--Omnipresence of Mt. Etna--Approach to Syracuse--The famous
Latomia del Paradiso--Girgenti, the City of Temples--Railway route to
Palermo--Mosaics--Cathedral and Abbey of Monreale--Monte Pellegrino at
the hour of sunset.
To the traveller who proposes to enter Sicily by the favorite sea-route
from Naples to Messina the approach to the island presents a scene of
singular interest and beauty. A night's voyage from the sunny bay which
sleeps at the foot of Vesuvius suffices to bring him almost within the
shadow of Etna. By daybreak he has just passed the Punta del Faro, the
lighthoused promontory at the extreme northeastern angle of this
three-cornered isle, the Trinacria of the ancients, and is steaming into
the Straits. Far to his left he can see, with the eye of faith at any
rate, the rock of Scylla jutting out from the Calabrian coast, while the
whirlpool of Charybdis, he will do well to believe, is eddying and foaming
at the foot of the Pharos a few hundred yards to his right. Here let him
resolutely locate the fabled monster of the gaping jaws into which were
swept those luckless mariners of old whose dread of Scylla drove them too
near to the Sicilian shore. Modern geographers may maintain (as what will
they not maintain?) that Charybdis should be identified with the
Garofalo, the current which sweeps round the breakwater of Messina seven
miles to the south; but Circe distinctly told Ulysses that the two
monsters were not a "bowshot apart"; and the perfectly clear and
straightforward account given of the matter by Æneas to Dido renders it
impossible to doubt that Scylla and Charybdis faced each other at the
mouth of the Straits. The traveller will be amply justified in believing
that he has successfully negotiated the passage between these two terrors
as soon as he has left the Pharos behind him and is speeding along the
eastern coast of the island towards the city of Messina.
Very bold and impressive grows the island scenery under the gradually
broadening daylight. Tier on tier above him rise the bare, brown
hill-slopes, spurs of the great mountain pyramid which he is approaching.
These tumbled masses of the mountains, deepening here where the night
shadow still lingers into downright black, and reddening there where they
"take the morning" to the color of rusty iron, proclaim their volcanic
character, to all who are familiar with the signs thereof, unmistakably
enough. Just such a ferruginous face does Nature turn towards you as you
drop down at twilight past the Isleta of Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria, or
work your way from the eastern to the western coast of Teneriffe, round
the spreading skirts of the Peak. Rock scenery of another character is
visible on the left, among the Calabrian mountains, dwarfed somewhat by
the nearer as well as loftier heights of the island opposite, but bearing
no mean part in the composition of the land- and sea-scape, nevertheless.
Mile after mile the view maintains its rugged beauty, and when at last the
town and harbor of Messina rise in sight, and the fort of Castellaccio
begins to fill the eye, to the exclusion of the natural ramparts of the
hills, the traveller will be fain to admit that few islands in the world
are approached through scenery so romantic and so well attuned to its
historic associations.
There are those who find Messina disappointing, and there is no doubt that
to quit the waters of a rock-embosomed strait for the harbor of a large
commercial seaport possessing no special claim to beauty of situation, is
to experience a certain effect of disenchantment. It would not be fair,
however, to hold the town, as a town, responsible for this. It is only
some such jewel as Naples or as Algiers that could vie with such a
setting. Messina is not an Algiers or a Naples; it is only an honest,
ancient, prosperous, active, fairly clean, and architecturally
unimpressive town. The chief commercial center of Sicily, with upwards of
eighty thousand inhabitants, a Cathedral, an Archbishop, and a University,
it can afford, its inhabitants perhaps believe, to dispense with æsthetic
attractions. But its spacious quays, its fine and curiously shaped port,
the Harbor of the Sickle as it was called by the ancients when after it
they named the city "Zancle," have an interest of their own if they are
without much claim to the picturesque; and the view from the Faro Grande
on the curve of the Sickle, with the Sicilian mountains behind, the
Calabrian rocks in front, and the Straits to the right and left of the
spectator, is not to be despised.
Still, Messina is not likely to detain any pleasure-tourist long,
especially with Taormina, the gem of the island, and one might almost say,
indeed, of all Italy, awaiting him at only the distance of a railway
journey of some sixty to a hundred miles. The line from Messina to
Giardini, the station for Taormina, and the spot whence Garibaldi crossed
to Calabria in the autumn of 1860, skirts the sea-coast, burrowing under
headlands and spanning dry river-beds for a distance of thirty miles, amid
the scenery which has been already viewed from the Straits, but which
loses now from its too close neighborhood to the eye. The rock-built town
of ancient Taormina is perched upon a steep and craggy bluff some four
hundred feet above the railway line, and is approached by an extremely
circuitous road of about three miles in length. Short cuts there are for
the youthful, the impetuous, and the sound in wind; but even these
fortunate persons might do worse than save their breath and restrain their
impatience to reach their destination, if only for the sake of the varying
panorama which unfolds itself as they ascend from level to level on their
winding way. There can be no denying that Taormina stands nobly and
confronts the Straits with a simple dignity that many greater and even
higher cities might well envy. To see it from a favoring angle of the
battlemented road, with the southern sunlight bathing its bright white
walls and broken lines of housetops, with the tower of Sant' Agostino
traced against the cone of Etna, and the wall that skirts it almost
trembling on the utmost verge of the cliff, while at the foot of the
declivity the Straits trend southward in "tender, curving lines of creamy
spray," to see this is at least to admit that some short cuts are not
worth taking, and that the bridle-path up the hillside might well be left
to those animals for whose use it was constructed, and who are generally
believed to prefer an abridgment of their journey to any conceivable
enhancement of its picturesque attractions.
[Illustration]
At Taormina one may linger long. The pure, inspiriting air of its lofty
plateau, and the unequaled beauty of the prospect which it commands, would
alone be sufficient to stay the hurried footsteps of even the most
time-pressed of "globe-trotters"; but those who combine a love of scenery
with a taste for archæology and the classical antique will find it indeed
a difficult place to leave. For, a little way above the town, and in the
center of an exquisite landscape stand the magnificent ruins of the Greek
Theater, its auditorium, it is true, almost leveled with the plain, but
more perfect as to the remains of its stage and proscenium than any other
in Sicily, and, with one exception, in the world. But there is no need to
be a scholar or an antiquarian to feel the extraordinary fascination of
the spot. Nowhere among all the relics of bygone civilizations have Time
and Nature dealt more piously with the work of man. Every spring and
summer that have passed over those mouldering columns and shattered arches
have left behind them their tribute of clasping creeper and clambering
wild flower and softly draping moss. Boulder and plinth in common, the
masonry alike of Nature and of man, have mellowed into the same exquisite
harmony of greys and greens; and the eye seeks in vain to distinguish
between the handiwork of the Great Mother and those monuments of her
long-dead children which she has clothed with an immortality of her own.
Apart, however, from the indescribable charm of its immediate
surroundings, the plateau of the theater must fix itself in the memory of
all who have entered Sicily by way of Messina as having afforded them
their first "clear" view of Etna, their first opportunity, that is to say,
of looking at the majestic mountain unintercepted at any point of its
outline or mass by objects on a lower level. The whole panorama indeed
from this point is magnificent. To the left, in the foreground, rise the
heights of Castiglione from the valley of the Alcantara; while, as the eye
moves round the prospect from left to right, it lights in succession on
the hermitage of S. Maria della Rocca, the Castle of Taormina, the
overhanding hill of Mola, and Monte Venere towering above it. But,
dominating the whole landscape, and irresistibly recalling to itself the
gaze which wanders for a moment to the nearer chain of mountains or the
blue Calabrian hills across the Strait, arises the never-to-be-forgotten
pyramid of Etna, a mountain unrivaled in its combination of majesty and
grace, in the soft symmetry of its "line," and the stern contrast between
its lava-scarred sides, with their associations of throe and torture, and
the eternal peace of its snow-crowned head. It will be seen at a closer
view from Catania, and, best of all, on the journey from that place to
Syracuse; but the first good sight of it from Taormina, at any rate when
weather and season have been favorable, is pretty sure to become an
abiding memory.
Twenty miles farther southwards along the coast lie the town and baths of
Aci Reale, a pleasant resort in the "cure" season, but to others than
invalids more interesting in its associations with Theocritus and Ovid,
with "Homer the Handel of Epos, and Handel the Homer of song;" in a word,
with Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, and the much-enduring Ulysses. Aci
Castello, a couple of miles or so down the coast, is, to be precise, the
exact spot which is associated with these very old-world histories, though
Polyphemus's sheep-run probably extended far along the coast in both
directions, and the legend of the giant's defeat and discomfiture by the
hero of the Odyssey is preserved in the nomenclature of the rocky chain
which juts out at this point from the Sicilian shore. The Scogli dei
Ciclopi are a fine group of basaltic rocks, the biggest of them some two
hundred feet in height and two thousand feet in circumference, no doubt
"the stone far greater than the first" with which Polyphemus took his shot
at the retreating Wanderer, and which "all but struck the end of the
rudder." It is a capital "half-brick" for a giant to "heave" at a
stranger, whether the Cyclops did, in fact, heave it or not; and, together
with its six companions, it stands out bravely and with fine sculpturesque
effect against the horizon. A few miles farther on is Catania, the second
city in population and importance of Sicily, but, except for one advantage
which would give distinction to the least interesting of places, by no
means the second in respect of beauty. As a town, indeed, it is
commonplace. Its bay, though of ample proportions, has no particular grace
of contour; and even the clustering masts in its busy harbor scarcely
avail to break the monotony of that strip of houses on the flat seaboard,
which, apart from its surroundings, is all that constitutes Catania. But
with Etna brooding over it day and night, and the town lying outstretched
and nestling between the two vast arms which the giant thrusts out towards
the sea on each side, Catania could not look wholly prosaic and
uninteresting even if she tried.
We must again return to the mountain, for Etna, it must be remembered, is
a persistent feature, is _the_ persistent feature of the landscape along
nearly the whole eastern coast of Sicily from Punta di Faro to the Cape of
Santa Croce, if not to the promontory of Syracuse. Its omnipresence
becomes overawing as one hour of travel succeeds another and the great
mountain is as near as ever. For miles upon miles by this southward course
it haunts the traveller like a reproving conscience. Each successive stage
on his journey gives him only a different and not apparently more distant
view. Its height, ten thousand feet, although, of course, considerable,
seems hardly sufficient to account for this perpetual and unabating
prominence, which, however, is partly to be explained by the outward trend
taken by the sea-coast after we pass Catania, and becoming more and more
marked during the journey from that city to Syracuse. There could be no
better plan of operations for one who wishes to view the great mountain
thoroughly, continuously, protractedly, and at its best, than to await a
favorable afternoon, and then to take the journey in question by railway,
so timing it as to reach the tongue of Santa Croce about sunset. From
Catania to Lentini the traveller has Etna, wherever visible, on his right;
at Lentini the line of railway takes a sharp turn to the left, and,
striking the coast at Agnone, hugs it all along the northern shore of the
promontory, terminating with Cape Santa Croce, upon approaching which
point it doubles back upon itself, to follow the "re-entering angle" of
the cape, and then, once more turning to the left, runs nearly due
southward along the coast to Syracuse. Throughout the twenty miles or so
from Lentini to Augusta, beneath the promontory of Santa Croce, Etna lies
on the traveller's left, with the broad blue bay fringed for part of the
way by a mile-wide margin of gleaming sand between him and it. Then the
great volcanic cone, all its twenty miles from summit to sea-coast
foreshortened into nothingness by distance, seems to be rising from the
very sea; its long-cooled lava streams might almost be mingling with the
very waters of the bay. As the rays of the westering sun strike from
across the island upon silver-gray sand and blue-purple sea and
russet-iron mountain slopes, one's first impulse is to exclaim with
Wordsworth, in vastly differing circumstances, that "earth hath not
anything to show more fair." But it has. For he who can prolong his view
of the mountain until after the sun has actually sunk will find that even
the sight he has just witnessed can be surpassed. He must wait for the
moment when the silver has gone out of the sand, and the purple of the sea
has changed to gray, and the russet of Etna's lava slopes is deepening
into black; for that is also the moment when the pink flush of the
departed sunset catches its peak and closes the symphony of color with a
chord more exquisitely sweet than all.
From Cape Santa Croce to Syracuse the route declines a little perhaps in
interest. The great volcano which has filled the eye throughout the
journey is now less favorably placed for the view, and sometimes, as when
the railway skirts the Bay of Megara in a due southward direction, is
altogether out of sight. Nor does the approach to Syracuse quite prepare
one for the pathetic charm of this most interesting of the great, dead,
half-deserted cities of the ancient world, or even for the singular beauty
of its surroundings. You have to enter the inhabited quarter itself, and
to take up your abode on that mere sherd and fragment of old Greek
Syracuse, the Island of Ortygia, to which the present town is confined (or
rather, you have to begin by doing this, and then to sally forth on a long
walk of exploration round the _contorni_, to trace the line of the ancient
fortifications, and to map out as best you may the four other quarters,
each far larger than Ortygia, which, long since given over to
orange-gardens and scattered villas and farmhouses, were once no doubt
well-peopled districts of the ancient city), ere you begin either to
discover its elements of material beauty or to feel anything of its
spiritual magic. It is hard to believe that this decayed and apparently
still decaying little island town was once the largest of the Hellenic
cities, twenty miles, according to Strabo, in circumference, and even in
the time of Cicero containing in one of its now deserted quarters "a very
large Forum, most beautiful porticoes, a highly decorated Town Hall, a
most spacious Senate House, and a superb Temple of Jupiter Olympius." A
spoiler more insatiable than Verres has, alas! carried off all these
wonders of art and architecture, and of most of them not even a trace of
the foundations remains. Of the magnificent Forum a single unfluted column
appears to be the solitary relic. The porticoes, the Town Hall, the Senate
House, the Temple of the Olympian Jove are irrecoverable even by the most
active architectural imagination. But the west wall of the district which
contained these treasures is still partially traceable, and in the
adjoining quarter of the ancient city we find ourselves in its richest
region both of the archæological and the picturesque.