and burial-place of the Syracusan Greek, and the yet more famous Theater,
inferior to that of Taormina in the completeness of the stage and
proscenium, but containing the most perfectly preserved auditorium in the
world. The entrance to the Latomia, that gigantic, ear-shaped orifice hewn
out of the limestone cliff, and leading into a vast whispering-chamber,
the acoustic properties of which have caused it to be identified with the
(historic or legendary) Ear of Dionysius, has a strange, wild
impressiveness of its own. But in beauty though not in grandeur it is
excelled by another abandoned limestone quarry in the neighborhood, which
has been converted by its owner into an orangery. This lies midway between
the Latomia del Paradiso and the Quarry of the Cappuccini, and is in truth
a lovely retreat. Over it broods the perfect stillness that never seems so
deep as in those deserted places which have once been haunts of busy life.
It is rich in the spiritual charm of natural beauty and the sensuous
luxury of sub-tropical culture: close at hand the green and gold of orange
trees, in the middle distance the solemn plumes of the cypresses, and
farther still the dazzling white walls of the limestone which the blue sky
bends down to meet.
To pass from the quarries to the remains of the Greek Theater hard by is
in some measure to exchange the delight of the eye for the subtler
pleasures of mental association. Not that the concentric curves of these
moldering and moss-lined stone benches are without their appeal to the
senses. On the contrary, they are beautiful in themselves, and, like all
architectural ruins, than which no animate things in nature more perfectly
illustrate the scientific doctrine of "adaptation to environment," they
harmonize deliciously in line and tone with their natural surroundings.
Yet to most people, and especially so to those of the contemplative habit,
the Greek Theater at Syracuse, like the Amphitheaters of Rome and Verona,
will be most impressive at moments when the senses are least active and
the imagination busiest. It is when we abstract the mind from the existing
conditions of the ruin; it is when we "restore" it by those processes of
mental architecture which can never blunder into Vandalism; it is when we
re-people its silent, time-worn benches with the eager, thronging life of
twenty centuries ago, that there is most of magic in its spell. And here
surely imagination has not too arduous a task, so powerfully is it
assisted by the wonderful completeness of these remains. More than forty
tiers of seats shaped out of the natural limestone of the rock can still
be quite distinctly traced; and though their marble facings have of course
long moldered into dust, whole _cunei_ of them are still practically as
uninjured by time, still as fit for the use for which they were intended,
as when the Syracusans of the great age of Attic Drama flocked hither to
hear the tragedies of that poet whom they so deeply reverenced that to be
able to recite his verse was an accomplishment rewarded in the prisoners
who possessed it by liberation from bondage. To the lover of classical
antiquity Syracuse will furnish "moments" in abundance; but at no other
spot either in Ortygia itself or in these suburbs of the modern city, not
at the Fountain of Arethusa on the brink of the great port; not in the
Temple of Minerva, now the Cathedral, with its Doric columns embedded in
the ignominy of plaster; not in that wildest and grandest of those ancient
Syracusan quarries, the Latomia dei Cappuccini, where the ill-fated
remnant of the routed army of Nicias is supposed to have expiated in
forced labor the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, will he find it so
easy to rebuild the ruined past as here on this desolate plateau, with
these perfect monuments of the immortal Attic stage around him, and at his
feet the town, the harbor, the promontory of Plemmyrium, the blue waters
of the Ionian Sea.
It is time, however, to resume our journey and to make for that hardly
less interesting or less beautifully situated town of Sicily which is
usually the next halting-place of the traveller. The route to Girgenti
from Syracuse is the most circuitous piece of railway communication in the
island. To reach our destination it is necessary to retrace our steps
almost the whole way back to Catania. At Bicocca, a few miles distant from
that city, the line branches off into the interior of the country for a
distance of some fifty or sixty miles, when it is once more deflected, and
then descends in a southwesterly direction towards the coast. At a few
miles from the sea, within easy reach of its harbor, Porto Empedocle, lies
Girgenti. The day's journey will have been an interesting one. Throughout
its westward course the line, after traversing the fertile Plain of
Catania, the rich grain-bearing district which made Sicily the granary of
the Roman world, ascends gradually into a mountainous region and plunges
between Calascibetta and Castrogiovanni into a tortuous ravine, above
which rise towering the two last-named heights. The latter of the two is
planted on the site of the plain of Enna, the scene of the earliest
abduction recorded in history. Flowers no longer flourish in the same
abundance on the meads from which Persephone was carried off by the Dark
King of Hades; but the spot is still fair and fertile, truly a "green
navel of the isle," the central Omphalos from which the eye ranges
northward, eastward, and south-westward over each expanse of Trinacria's
triple sea. But those who do not care to arrest their journey for the sake
of sacrificing to Demeter, or of enjoying the finest, in the sense of the
most extensive, view in Sicily, may yet admire the noble situation of the
rock-built town of Castrogiovanni, looking down upon the railway from its
beetling crag.
Girgenti, the City of Temples, the richest of all places in the world
save one in monuments of Pagan worship, conceals its character effectually
enough from him who enters it from the north. Within the precincts of the
existing city there is little sign to be seen of its archæological
treasures, and, to tell the truth, it has but few attractions of its own.
Agrigentum, according to Pindar "the most beautiful city of mortals," will
not so strike a modern beholder; but that, no doubt, is because, like
Syracuse and other famous seats of ancient art and religious reverence, it
has shrunk to dimensions so contracted as to leave all the riches of those
stately edifices to which it owed the fame of its beauty far outside its
present boundaries. Nothing, therefore, need detain the traveller in the
town itself (unless, indeed, he would snatch a brief visit to the
later-built cathedral, remarkable for nothing but the famous marble
sarcophagus with its relief of the Myth of Hippolytus), and he will do
well to mount the Rupe Atenea without delay. The view, however, in every
direction is magnificent, the town to the right of the spectator and
behind him, the sea in front, and the rolling, ruin-dotted plain between.
From this point Girgenti itself looks imposing enough with the irregular
masses of its roofs and towers silhouetted against the sky. But it is the
seaward view which arrests and detains the eye. Hill summit or hotel
window, it matters little what or where your point of observation is, you
have but to look from the environs of Girgenti towards Porto Empedocle, a
few miles to the south, and you bring within your field of vision a space
of a few dozen acres in extent which one may reasonably suppose to have no
counterpart in any area of like dimensions on the face of the globe. It is
a garden of moldering shrines, a positive orchard of shattered porticoes
and broken column-shafts, and huge pillars prostrate at the foot of their
enormous plinths. You can count and identify and name them all even from
where you stand. Ceres and Proserpine, Juno Lacinia, Concord, Hercules,
Æsculapius, Jupiter Olympius, Castor and Pollux, all are visible at once,
all recognizable and numerable from east to west in their order as above.
It is a land of ruined temples, and, to all appearance, of nothing else.
One can just succeed, indeed, in tracing the coils of the railway as it
winds like a black snake towards Porto Empedocle, but save that there are
no signs of life. One descries no wagon upon the roads, no horse in the
furrows, no laborer among the vines. Girgenti itself, with its hum and
clatter, lies behind you; no glimpse of life or motion is visible on the
quays of the port. All seems as desolate as those gray and moldering fanes
of the discrowned gods, a solitude which only changes in character without
deepening in intensity as the eye travels across the foam-fringed
coast-line out on the sailless sea. There is a strange beauty in this
silent Pantheon of dead deities, this landscape which might almost seem to
be still echoing the last wail of the dying Pan; and it is a beauty of
death and desolation to which the like of nature, here especially
abounding, contributes not a little by contrast. For nowhere in Sicily is
the country-side more lavishly enriched by the olive. Its contorted stem
and quivering, silvery foliage are everywhere. Olives climb the
hill-slopes in straggling files; olives cluster in twos and threes and
larger groups upon the level plain; olives trace themselves against the
broken walls of the temples, and one catches the flicker of their branches
in the sunlight that streams through the roofless peristyles. From Rupe
Atenea out across the plain to where the eye lights upon the white loops
of the road to Porto Empedocle one might almost say that every object
which is not a temple or a fragment of a temple is an olive tree.
By far the most interesting of the ruins from the archæologist's point of
view is that of the Temple of Concord, which, indeed, is one of the
best-preserved in existence, thanks, curiously enough, to the religious
Philistinism which in the Middle Ages converted it into a Christian
church. It was certainly not in the spirit of its tutelary goddess that it
was so transformed: nothing, no doubt, was farther from the thoughts of
those who thus appropriated the shrine of Concord than to illustrate the
doctrine of the unity of religion. But art and archæology, if not romance,
have good reason to thank them that they "took over" the building on any
grounds, for it is, of course, to this circumstance that we owe its
perfect condition of preservation, and the fact that all the details of
the Doric style as applied to religious architecture can be studied in
this temple while so much of so many of its companion fanes has crumbled
into indistinguishable ruin. Concordia has remained virtually intact
through long centuries under the homely title of "the Church of St.
Gregory of the Turnips," and it rears its stately façade before the
spectator in consequence with architrave complete, a magnificent hexastyle
of thirty-four columns, its lateral files of thirteen shafts apiece
receding in noble lines of perspective. Juno Lacinia, or Juno Lucinda (for
it may have been either as the "Lacinian Goddess" or as the Goddess of
Childbed that Juno was worshipped here), an older fane than Concordia,
though the style had not yet entered on its decline when the latter temple
was built, is to be seen hard by, a majestic and touching ruin. It dates
from the fifth century B. C., and is therefore Doric of the best period.
Earthquakes, it seems, have co-operated with time in the work of
destruction, and though twenty-five whole pillars are left standing, the
façade, alas! is represented only by a fragment of architrave. More
extensive still have been the ravages inflicted on the Temple of Hercules
by his one unconquerable foe. This great and famous shrine, much venerated
of old by the Agrigentines, and containing that statue of the god which
the indefatigable "collector" Verres vainly endeavored to loot, is now
little more than a heap of tumbled masonry, with one broken column-shaft
alone still standing at one extremity of its site. But it is among the
remains of the ancient sanctuary of Zeus, all unfinished, though that
edifice was left by its too ambitious designers, that we get the best idea
of the stupendous scale on which those old-world religious architects and
masons worked. The ruin itself has suffered cruelly from the hand of man;
so much so, indeed, that little more than the ground plan of the temple is
to be traced by the lines of column bases, vast masses of its stone having
been removed from its site to be used in the construction of the Mole. But
enough remains to show the gigantic scale on which the work was planned
and partially carried out. The pillars which once stood upon those bases
were twenty feet in circumference, or more than two yards in diameter and
each of their flutings forms a niche big enough to contain a man! Yon
Caryatid, who has been carefully and skillfully pieced together from the
fragments doubtless of many Caryatids, and who now lies, hands under head,
supine and staring at the blue sky above him, is more than four times the
average height of a man. From the crown of his bowed head to his stony
soles he measures twenty-five feet, and to watch a tourist sitting by or
on him and gazing on Girgenti in the distance is to be visited by a touch
of that feeling of the irony of human things to which Shelley gives
expression in his "Ozymandias."
The railway route from Girgenti to Palermo is less interesting than that
from Catania to Girgenti. It runs pretty nearly due south and north across
the island from shore to shore, through a country mountainous indeed, as
is Sicily everywhere, but not marked by anything particularly striking in
the way of highland scenery. At Termini we strike the northern coast, and
the line branches off to the west. Another dozen miles or so brings us to
Santa Flavia, whence it is but half an hour's walk to the ruins of
Soluntum, situated on the easternmost hill of the promontory of Catalfano.
The coast-view from this point is striking, and on a clear day the
headland of Cefalu, some twenty miles away to the eastward, is plainly
visible. Ten more miles of "westing" and we approach Palermo, the Sicilian
capital, a city better entered from the sea, to which it owes its beauty
as it does its name.
To the traveller fresh from Girgenti and its venerable ruins, or from
Syracuse with its classic charm, the first impressions of Palermo may very
likely prove disappointing. Especially will they be so if he has come with
a mind full of historic enthusiasm and a memory laden with the records of
Greek colonization, Saracen dominion, and Norman conquest, and expecting
to find himself face to face with the relics and remainder of at any rate
the modern period of the three. For Palermo is emphatically what the
guide-books are accustomed to describe as "a handsome modern city"; which
means, as most people familiar with the Latin countries are but too well
aware, a city as like any number of other Continental cities, built and
inhabited by Latin admirers and devotees of Parisian "civilization," as
"two peas in a pod." In the Sicilian capital the passion for the
monotonous magnificence of the boulevard has been carried to an almost
amusing pitch. Palermo may be regarded from this point of view as
consisting of two most imposing boulevards of approximately equal length,
each bisecting the city with scrupulous equality from east to west and
from north to south, and intersecting each other in its exact center at
the mathematically precise angle of ninety degrees. You stand at the Porta
Felice, the water-gate of the city, with your back to the sea, and before
you, straight as a die, stretches the handsome Via Vittorio Emanuele for a
mile or more ahead. You traverse the handsome Via Vittorio Emanuele for
half its length and you come to the Quattro Canti, a small octagonal
piazza which boasts itself to be the very head of Palermo, and from this
intersection of four cross-roads, you see stretching to right and left of
you the equally handsome Via Macqueda. Walk down either of these two great
thoroughfares, the Macqueda or the Vittorio Emanuele, and you will be
equally satisfied with each; the only thing which may possibly mar your
satisfaction will be your consciousness that you would be equally
satisfied with the other, and, indeed, that it requires an effort of
memory to recollect in which of the two you are. There is nothing to
complain of in the architecture or decoration of the houses. All is
correct, regular, and symmetrical in line, bright and cheerful in color,
and, as a whole, absolutely wanting in individuality and charm.
It is, however, of course impossible to kill an ancient and interesting
city altogether with boulevards. Palermo, like every other city, has its
"bits," to be found without much difficulty by anyone who will quit the
beaten track of the two great thoroughfares and go a-questing for them
himself. He may thus find enough here and there to remind him that he is
living on the "silt" of three, nay, four civilizations, on a fourfold
formation to which Greek and Roman, Saracen and Norman, have each
contributed its successive layer. It need hardly be said that the latter
has left the deepest traces of any. The Palazzo Reale, the first of the
Palermitan sights to which the traveller is likely to bend his way, will
afford the best illustration of this. Saracenic in origin, it has received
successive additions from half-a-dozen Norman princes, from Robert
Guiscard downwards, and its chapel, the Cappella Palatina, built by Roger
II. in the early part of the twelfth century, is a gem of decorative art
which would alone justify a journey to Sicily to behold. The purely
architectural beauties of the interior are impressive enough, but the eye
loses all sense of them among the wealth of their decoration. The stately
files of Norman arches up the nave would in any other building arrest the
gaze of the spectator, but in the Cappella Palatina one can think of
nothing but mosaics. Mosaics are everywhere, from western door to eastern
window, and from northern to southern transept wall. A full-length,
life-sized saint in mosaic grandeur looks down upon you from every
interval between the arches of the nave, and medallions of saints in
mosaic, encircled with endless tracery and arabesque, form the inner face
of every arch. Mosaic angels float with outstretched arms above the apse.
A colossal Madonna and Bambino, overshadowed by a hovering Père Eternel,
peer dimly forth in mosaic across the altar through the darkness of the
chancel. The ground is golden throughout, and the somber richness of the
effect is indescribable. In Palermo and its environs, in the Church of
Martorana, and in the Cathedral of Monreale, no less than here, there is
an abundance of that same decoration, and the mosaics of the latter of the
two edifices above mentioned are held to be the finest of all; but it is
by those of the Cappella Palatina, the first that he is likely to make the
acquaintance of, that the visitor, not being an expert or connoisseur in
this particular species of art-work, will perhaps be the most deeply
impressed.
The Palazzo Reale may doubtless too be remembered by him, as affording him
the point of view from which he has obtained his first idea of the
unrivaled situation of Palermo. From the flat roof of the Observatory,
fitted up in the tower of S. Ninfa, a noble panorama lies stretched around
us. The spectator is standing midway between Amphitrite and the Golden
Shell that she once cast in sport upon the shore. Behind him lies the
Conca d'Oro, with the range of mountains against which it rests, Grifone
and Cuccio, and the Billieni Hills, and the road to Monreale winding up
the valley past La Rocca; in front lies the noble curve of the gulf, from
Cape Mongerbino to the port, the bold outlines of Monte Pellegrino, the
Bay of Mondello still farther to the left, and Capo di Gallo completing
the coast-line with its promontory dimly peering through the haze.
Palermo, however, does not perhaps unveil the full beauty of its situation
elsewhere than down at the sea's edge, with the city nestling in the curve
behind one and Pellegrino rising across the waters in front.
But the environs of the city, which are of peculiar interest and
attraction, invite us, and first among these is Monreale, at a few miles'
distance, a suburb to which the traveller ascends by a road commanding at
every turn some new and striking prospect of the bay. On one hand as he
leaves the town, lies the Capuchin Monastery, attractive with its
catacombs of mummified ex-citizens of Palermo to the lover of the gruesome
rather than of the picturesque. Farther on is the pretty Villa Tasca, then
La Rocca, whence by a winding road of very ancient construction we climb
the royal mount crowned by the famous Cathedral and Benedictine Abbey of
Monreale. Here more mosaics, as has been said, as fine in quality and in
even greater abundance than those which decorate the interior of the
Cappella Palatina; they cover, it is said, an area of seventy thousand
four hundred square feet. From the Cathedral we pass into the beautiful
cloisters, and thence into the fragrant orange-garden, from which another
delightful view of the valley towards Palermo is obtained. San Martino,
the site of a suppressed Benedictine monastery, is the next spot of
interest. A steep path branching off to the right from Monreale leads to a
deserted fort, named Il Castellaccio, from which the road descends as far
as S. Martino, whence a pleasant journey back to Palermo is made through
the picturesque valley of Bocca di Falco.
The desire to climb a beautiful mountain is as strong as if climbing it
were not as effectual a way of hiding its beauties as it would be to sit
upon its picture; and Monte Pellegrino, sleeping in the sunshine, and
displaying the noble lines of what must surely be one of the most
picturesque mountains in the world, is likely enough to lure the traveller
to its summit. That mass of gray limestone, which takes such an exquisite
flush under the red rays of the evening, is not difficult to climb. The
zigzag path which mounts its sides is plainly visible from the town, and
though steep at first, it grows gradually easier of ascent on the upper
slopes of the mountain. Pellegrino was originally an island, and is still
separated by the plain of the Conca d'Oro from the other mountains near
the coast. Down to a few centuries ago it was clothed with underwood, and
in much earlier times it grew corn for the soldiers of Hamilcar Barca, who
occupied it in the first Punic War. Under an overhanging rock on its
summit is the Grotto of Sta. Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, the
maiden whom tradition records to have made this her pious retreat several
centuries ago, and the discovery of whose remains in 1664 had the effect
of instantaneously staying the ravages of the plague by which Palermo was
just then being desolated. The grotto has since been converted, as under
the circumstances was only fitting, into a church, to which many
pilgrimages are undertaken by the devout. A steep path beyond the chapel
leads to the survey station on the mountain top, from which a
far-stretching view is commanded. The cone of Etna, over eighty miles off
as the crow flies, can be seen from here, and still farther to the north,
among the Liparæan group, the everlasting furnaces of Stromboli and
Vulcano. There is a steeper descent of the mountain towards the southwest,
and either by this or by retracing our original route we regain the road,
which skirts the base of the mountain on the west, and, at four miles'
distance from the gate of the town, conducts to one of the most charmingly
situated retreats that monarch ever constructed for himself, the royal
villa-chateau of La Favorita, erected by Ferdinand IV. (Ferdinand I. of
the Two Sicilies), otherwise not the least uncomfortable of the series of
uncomfortable princes whom the Bourbons gave to the South Italian
peoples.