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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.