twelfth century, and its rose-window is a splendid example of the
glass-staining and composition of that time. According to a popular
legend, the Apostle Paul preached in the crypt-like chapel when he was
in town--“And landing in Syracuse, we tarried there three days” (Acts,
XXVIII:12)--and the monk shows the altar where he “celebrated the Mass.”
Unfortunately for the illusion, the original San Giovanni was a fourth
century structure, so St. Paul could not have seen it on his way to Rome
or at any other time. The monk also points out a granite column at which
he says St. Marcian was scourged to death, becoming the first martyr in
Syracuse, and his seat and vaulted altar-tomb.
St. Marcian’s column stands close to the entrance to the catacombs,
which underlie much of the Achradina quarter, and are not only far
larger than those at Rome, but are among the most imposing subterranean
cemeteries in the world. The main gallery, ten feet wide and eight feet
high, runs through the solid limestone for more than a hundred yards.
People of distinction were usually buried in the rotundas, large
circular chambers or chapels; and here, when the churches above ground
were destroyed, or open services interdicted, the hunted faithful
worshiped in secret. Here and there, now carved over a door, now rudely
daubed in red upon the side of some grave-niche, is the likeness of a
palm branch, dumb witness that here lay one who valued faith more than
life, and died a martyr.
Even in these dank and gloomy caverns brave souls made art of a crude
sort possible. Upon the walls, in the lunettes and above the chapel
altars are rough frescoes, poor things in color and design, but
breathing the civilizing message of that Divine love which nothing can
conquer. Walls and ceilings and doorways of this miniature city of
perpetual night are sooty and black with the fumes of the lamps the
Christians used. There is little doubt that large numbers of them took
refuge in the catacombs during the early persecutions. We to-day cannot
conceive of the horror of living in clammy darkness lighted only by the
feeble, guttering flames of little bronze lamps. But we can admire the
stern fortitude of men and women who could endure all things, and gladly
weave into the handles of those poor lamps the words “_Deo
gratias_--Thanks to God!” Unfortunately, not a tomb has been left
undisturbed, and the only relics now visible are an occasional small
pile of bones and smashed pottery; the few sarcophagi which were found
having been removed to the Museum where, out of place, they possess
little or no significance.
In the same vicinity is the Latomia dei Cappuccini, the largest and by
far the most impressive of the quarries, a huge, irregularly shaped gulf
whose sides are precipices, honeycombed with small pits, all carved out
of honey, or, it might be, from dull clouded amber, and whose uneven
floor here and there springs into the air in enormous fantastic columns
of golden-gray stone. Both walls and columns riot in luxuriant verdure
and flowers--silver vermouth, yellow spurge, glorious crimson roses
against green cataracts of glossy ivy and myrtle, honeysuckle and
clematis. In the heart of this vast floral labyrinth lofty pines reach
vainly upward toward the world from still depths where no breeze ever
scatters the leaves, no gales lash denuded branches; and sun-warmed and
dew-bathed, little groves of silvery-gray olives flourish beside prickly
pear, sulphur colored lemons, yellow nespoli, golden oranges, almond
blossoms all a mass of pallor or blushes in the tender warmth of early
Spring. Throughout this smiling beauty, shadows dapple rock and foliage,
like somber memories of the tragic Greek days, when the captured
Athenians were thrust into the inhospitable quarry, then no such glowing
garden as it is to-day.
“At first the sun by day was both scorching and suffocating,” says
Thucydides, “for they had no roof over their heads, while the Autumn
nights were cold, and the extremes of temperature engendered violent
disorders.... The corpses of those who died from their wounds, from
exposure to the weather, and the like, lay heaped one upon another. The
stench was intolerable, and they were at the same time afflicted by
hunger and thirst.... Every kind of misery which could befall men in
such a place befell them. This was the condition of the captives for
about ten weeks.... The whole number of the prisoners is not accurately
known, but they were not less than seven thousand.”
At the end of the ten weeks many of them were sold. Thucydides does not
explain the fate of those not disposed of in the great auction, but
Grote says: “The dramas of Euripides were so peculiarly popular
throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew by heart
considerable portions of them, won the affections of their masters. Some
even of the stragglers from the army are affirmed to have procured for
themselves, by the same attraction, shelter and hospitality during their
flight. Euripides, we are informed, lived to receive the thanks of
several among these unhappy sufferers, after their return to Athens.”[B]
[B] History of Greece.
Others beside the Athenians have found their last beds here. In a gloomy
little side cave, cut in the wall a foot or two above the floor, is a
niche sealed with a marble slab--
Sacred to the memory of
Richard Reynall, Esq., British Vice Consul To Syracuse
He departed this life Sept. 16
A. D. 1838.
He was killed in a duel by an expert with weapons he
did not know.
What a vista that opens up! Who was the braggart who forced the quarrel,
what were the weapons, what the circumstances of the quarrel, the
conditions under which the courageous Englishman went consciously to
his fate? And how sad the legend inscribed to our own young countryman
upon a lonely niche in the soft tufa a little farther along--
“William Nicholson, Midshipman in the Navy of the United States of
America, who was cut off from Society in the bloom of life and
health on the 18th day of September, 104, A. D., _et anno ætatis
18_.”
Just above this _latomia_, among the olive groves and flowers,
surrounded by fine gardens, is a charmingly situated hotel, whence one
can look down into this sunken stone quarry-garden if he chooses, and
dream of swart laborers hewing out the stones that reared Syracuse a
city of cities, of the physical agonies and homesickness of the grave
Athenian slaves, or simply of the graciousness of Demeter in clothing
the ragged stones as not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed. But for
me the hotel by the Bay, the outlook over sparkling, living water, the
music of it ever in my ears. And to think of Syracuse is to think of the
Promenade of Arethusa, with its musical speech, its Greek faces all
about, its maidens and their lovers who need but the touch of
sympathetic imagination to be transformed into the nymphs and fauns of
Greek days!
XI
CATANIA AND MOUNT ÆTNA
Catania is the second city of the island in importance, and has a far
reaching trade in oil and wine, sulphur and grain and almonds, and the
other products of the rich and fertile plain at whose edge it stands
guard. It is a city of humdrum, a town which, like Milan, reminds one
strongly of some American manufacturing center with a large foreign
population, and surely nothing could be further from presenting an
historic visage at first sight. Yet its history is a picturesque and
vivid tapestry of which the main threads have always been the heroic
spirit and enterprise of its people.
Settled in 729 B. C.--when the city by the Tiber was only a quarter of a
century old--Kataneion or Katane in the sixth century became famous for
a reformer and lawgiver named Charondas, some of whose enactments were
decidedly original. Divorce he made simple.... Either husband or wife
could put away the other for sufficient cause; but neither could remarry
with _anyone younger than the person divorced_! And Charondas died by
one of his own laws, which forbade men to come armed into the General
Assembly. The story goes that he had been out in the hills hunting
robbers: when he came back the Assembly was in an uproar, and he hurried
in to quiet things. Instantly a member saw his sword, and cried:
“Charondas, you break your own law!”
“By Zeus!” he replied, “I will not set aside my law--I will confirm it!”
and he plunged the sword into his breast.
Long afterward, in B. C., 476, the emulous Tyrant Hieron juggled with
the city’s name and its people, depopulating it and then recolonizing it
with new settlers and giving it another name. Are the sober Catanians
who pass us to-day descended from the old citizens who came back into
their own when the Tyrant died? Or are this trolley-car conductor, this
gayly uniformed hall-porter, sons of the Hieronic colonists? And this
very street on which we study the Catanians of to-day--was it the
ancient way leading toward Ætna, for whom the city was renamed?
The chief reason for Catania’s modern appearance is--it is modern!
Destroyed so many times, now in part, again entirely, by Ætna, it is
more or less new, a veritable phœnix of Sicilian cities. Suspended
from the ceiling of our room in the hotel was the very newest thing, a
huge chandelier garnished with exceedingly new and shiny electric light
fixtures. But alas! when we attempted to illuminate, we found the
chandelier a hollow delusion. When the porter came, he smiled with the
indulgence of superior knowledge.
“The chandelier is not intended for lighting. That would be
extra--electricity is very expensive!” So we had to be content with the
feeble gleam of one honest tallow dip in a room almost as big as a whole
floor in a New York mansion.
As to antiquities, Catania has its share--a Greek Theater, a Roman
amphitheater, a forum, baths, a nymphæum, and aqueduct, and so on. Most
of them, thanks to Ætna’s past activity, are now subterranean and but
partly excavated--indeed, almost forgotten. But Catania does better by
her celebrities. Tisias of Himera, locally nicknamed Stesichorus because
of his genius in perfecting the lyric chorus of the Greek drama
presented in the Theater some fourteen hundred years ago, has had a
large and handsome square named in his honor, as well as the street
leading straight from the heart of the town toward the mountain.
In the Piazza Stesicoro stands a monument to Catania’s favorite son,
Bellini the composer, born here in 1802 and brought back in 1867 from
Paris, where he died. A more effective monument is the Villa Bellini,
the city’s handsome, hilly public park. Myriad steep paths of clean
yellow and white pebbles carefully set on edge in mortar, picked out in
black and white scrollwork, and edged with solid walls of variegated
flowers, lead up to two fine knolls, on one of which is a trim little
belvedere flanked by flowerbeds. On the other is a large bandstand.
Between the two Ætna hangs motionless on the horizon, more like the
mirrored reflection of a volcano than a real mountain, his feet clothed
in the foliage of vineyard and forest, his head capped with snows that
almost never melt, gleaming in the sunshine like a giant’s silvery hair.
Another charming little park is the Flora della Marina, a narrow strip
of garden and greensward along the Bay. As you come through an arch of
the railway viaduct, it bursts upon you with the same effect that a
strip of brilliant Persian embroidery would have upon a somber coat, and
you exclaim with pleasure at the inviting lawns and starry beds of
bright colored flowers. Here and there idles an immaculate and lynx-eyed
customs guard in sailor’s uniform. From the ship’s mast in the center
floats the gaudy Italian tricolor; and in the background is a sailors’
home from which tarry old shellbacks stump out to sit dreaming on the
benches that give upon the Bay.
King Roger’s eleventh century Cathedral has been so restored, because of
the earthquakes that have wrecked it time after time, that it is simply
a huge, composite modern structure. It contains the tombs of various
members of the royal house of Aragón, who generally resided here while
the powerful baronial families were really ruling in Palermo the
capital. In 1445 King Alphonso the Generous founded the first Sicilian
university here, and for a long time Catania was the literary center of
the island. The handsome new university building, however, dates back
only to 1818.
Sicily has always been rather finicky about its saints, and Agatha of
Catania, Lucy of Syracuse and Rosalie of Palermo are only three among
many venerated virgin patronesses. Saint Agatha was executed by the
Roman prætor Quintianus, and has a chapel in the Cathedral containing
relics and jewels and a gilded silver statue said to contain her head.
In any event, the figure is highly revered, and every year, in February,
is carried in procession from church to church throughout the city.
Image and pedestal weigh several tons, and about three hundred men robed
in white, sturdy fellows all, have to shoulder the fifty-foot beams to
lift it. Even with so many bearers, the procession moves forward only a
few feet at a time, and it takes two or three days to complete the
ceremony.
Holy day spells holiday to the Latin, and his religious ecstasy finds
outlet in blazing fireworks, whoops of joyous enthusiasm, streets jammed
to suffocation. Windows and housetops as well as the streets are packed
with an eager, childish throng bubbling over with mercurial spirits. One
of the queerest features of this celebration, which goes back to time
immemorial, is a privilege allowed the usually demure and sedate women.
A young Catanian told me with great relish that on festival nights the
women veil heavily, completely hiding their faces with the exception of
the left eye. With that they may work such havoc as they can. Even the
bearers of the sacred image return the sly winks and coquettish glances
of the flirts whose identity is so perfectly concealed.
In the Piazza Duomo before the Cathedral, is a queer old lava elephant,
mounted upon a florid pedestal, bearing upon his saddle an Egyptian
obelisk. He looks down upon the noisy trolley cars circling about his
feet with an amused expression, as if ridiculing such foolish modern
means of conveyance. So old is he that no one knows when he was made,
nor why, though legend says the artist was the necromancer
Heliodorus--surely a man talented enough to fly through the air from
Constantinople to Catania to escape his persecutors, was capable of
executing even this weird beast!
Amber of a most unusual quality is a feature of Catania. Nearly every
store has some of it, in the rough, and made up into beautiful beads,
brooches, smokers’ articles, combs and ornaments of various sorts,
though it is not nearly so plentiful to-day as it was twenty years or so
ago. The merchants shake their heads over the future of this now high
priced commodity, for the best beds have been completely exhausted, and
the divers have greater difficulty every year in finding enough. Deeper
in color than the usual clear or clouded variety, this amber is a rich
marmalade color, with hues ranging from black and dark brown in the
cheaper grades through all the ochres and umbers to pure yellow of
different tones. The choicest pieces look as if the clear amber had been
dipped in oil or vaseline, giving it a distinct bluish tint, observable,
the dealers claim, in no other amber in the world--the same tinge that
is to be seen upon water when oil is spilled upon it; and the amount of
blue, and its brilliancy, determine the value of the product.
In some of the pieces are perfectly preserved mosquitoes, looking
exactly like bottled specimens in the museums.
“How old are they?” I asked one dealer.
The Catanian shrugged his despair of figures. “Oh! They were old already
when Homer sailed his ship in here on the way back to Troy. They must be
five hundred years old at least, _Signore_!”
After all, it is neither history, modern character, nor amber that makes
Catania, but Ætna. The finest view of him to be had from the city is
from the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San Niccolò, or San
Benedetto, on the western edge of the town. Its church, the largest in
Sicily and interesting in itself, contains one of the finest pipe
organs on the island, an immense instrument with five keyboards. When
we asked how soon the next service would be held--I consulted my watch
as I spoke--the custodian smiled. “_Gia!_ You will have a long time to
wait for the next service. It is played once a year, _Signore_. No more.
A very fine organist, the best in Italy, comes down from Naples and
plays. He has just been here!”
Since 1866 the monastery has been used as a barrack and school, museum
and library. On the roof rises the large dome of the Observatory.
Connected with it, and really of much greater practical importance, is
an underground laboratory and experiment station full of seismographs
and other instruments of the finest precision for the study and
recording of earthquakes. To anyone interested in vulcanological
phenomena, this deepset cavern and its curious apparatus make one of the
most fascinating objects of interest in Sicily--yes, in the world.
From the dome of the church of San Niccolò you see not only Ætna, but
the whole horizon. On all sides stretch the reddish-brown tiles of the
city, the flat evenness and monotony broken here and there as spire or
dome thrusts up through the red crust. Off to one side a prosperous
little street ends abruptly in a ragged edged wall of lava some thirty
or forty feet high, testifying mutely to the terrific activity that has
characterized Ætna at intervals for hundreds of years. A little farther
along desolation begins, and nothing is visible in that direction but a
long brown spoor leading up the giant’s side--a cold stone river to-day,
rough and scaly as an armadillo’s back, but once a fiery serpent whose
glowing jaws opened to engulf at least part of the metropolis. On either
side beyond the confines of the rebuilt town are vineyards and
silver-gray olive groves, vegetable gardens and glowing plantations,
full of warmth and color and contrast, and above all the hard china blue
of the hot Sicilian sky.
Above everything towers the tremendous bulk of
Ætna--Mongibello--standing superbly alone, lord of all this eastern
section of Sicily, rising from the sea without foothills or approach.
To-day the Titan sleeps, but in the eighty major awakenings recorded in
historic times, he has wrought incalculable destruction. Lava has poured
from those black lips in hissing floods, one of which covered forty
square miles; earthquakes which have laid fifty cities in ruins at once
have accompanied the fiery retchings of the monster; ashes and sulphur
and stones by millions of tons have rained destruction upon the fertile
countryside for miles around. Yet though he has wrought misery and death
ruthlessly, Ætna is also a benefactor, for the soil he has made and
fertilized bears crops of marvelous richness and abundance. Tradition
from the beginning has made the crater the prison of a cyclops, whose
struggles to free himself have caused the eruptions. Virgil sang of
him; Empedocles; many another. Sicily to them was preëminently the home
of the nether gods, and Ætna their most striking manifestation, a peak
of mingled fire and snow. Indeed, it was not until Dante came that men
were willing to believe anything less of Ætna than the supernatural.
The area of Sicily is some ten thousand square miles, and this greatest
of European volcanoes occupies almost one-twentieth of it. It is nearly
11,000 feet high--the ascent is practicable only in Summer--and covered
with more than two hundred smaller volcanoes or cones, huge
safety-valves for the big boiler, through which the continual ebullition
of the slumbering hell within finds exit in steam and vapors.
Having experienced the doubtful delights of climbing smaller
Vesuvius--it is less than half Ætna’s height--we decided that Ætna was
to be ours from a distance only, much as we regretted not to see the
indescribably magnificent effect of sunrise from its peak. Many visitors
are satisfied to make the shorter, easier trip up the Monti Rossi, “The
Brothers,” two of the minor craters thrown up in 1669 on the side of the
main peak. They rise to the not inconsiderable height of three thousand
feet themselves, and the views from them are very fine. It is possible,
moreover, to encircle the mountain by railway, and so to enjoy very
satisfactory vistas of both volcano and countryside--vast ragged plains
of lava like petrified sponges of red and black and gray, the dark,
fertile soil the lava makes, rich with vineyards and fruit plantations,
small “safety-valve” craters, often hissing threats, and farm-houses
among the trees in this, the most thickly populated agricultural
district in creation. A brief stop over at one or more of the towns
along the line affords still further opportunity to see the Titan and
his works.
All these towns are rich in history, and the most surprising and
impossible echoes come ringing out of the past at the touch of a modern
foot. For instance, Adernò, a comfortable town with a big, dilapidated
Norman castle in it, stands on the spot where Dionysius I founded his
city of Hadranum twenty-three hundred years ago. Near it once stood the
Sikel temple of Hadranos. Instead of human guardians, more than a
thousand great dogs protected this shrine of the fire god, and their
fame spread all over the world. Fragments of this structure are still to
be found in a private garden near the town.
The railroad--it is called Circumetnéa--not only encircles the mountain,
as its title indicates, but also climbs up along the slopes, reaching an
altitude at one point 3,195 feet above the sea. This gives the traveler
an opportunity to see two of the different zones or belts of vegetation
on the volcano. Lowest of all is the cultivated zone, in which
deciduous growths and the grapes of Ætna play a prominent part. Just
above the tracks begins the second belt, known as the _Regione Boscosa_,
or forest region, which reaches up nearly four thousand feet higher.
This consists mainly of evergreen pines, of birches in its upper
section, and of a few insignificant groves of oak. The third and topmost
division, extending to the black lipped silent crater itself, is the
sterile _Deserta_, where only the most stunted vegetation exists.
In 1040 that Byzantine would-be deliverer of Sicily, Giorgios Maniakes,
attacked the Saracens outside Maletto. The Norwegian Prince--afterward
King--Harald Hardradr, and a considerable body of his berserkers formed
part of the Byzantine army; and the allied forces scored a decisive
victory. A century and a quarter later a monastery was founded there,
and in 1799, during the Bourbon period, Ferdinand IV gave the whole
estate to Lord Nelson, creating him Duke of Bronte, a nearby town whose
name means thunder. The Villa, as it is now called, is still the
property of an Englishman, the Viscount Bridport, who also retains his
local title.
The most picturesque of these Ætnean towns is Randazzo, an interesting
place where the women throw voluminous white shawls over their heads
when they go to mass. Although Randazzo is closer to the crater than
any other town, it has always escaped destruction, and so is full of
exceedingly interesting medieval remains--houses, a palace with an
inscription in Latin so poor that a schoolboy might have written it, and
a ducal castle now used as a prison. What an untoward fate for a noble
structure from whose walls project the sharp iron spikes where the
ancient Dukes impaled the heads of criminals they executed! During July
and August Ætna may be ascended from Randazzo. The trip takes only about
six hours, and the hotel proprietor will provide guides, mules and food
for about seven dollars (American), for each climber.
Another echo of ancient days is the little Byzantine church at Malvagna,
the only one of its kind in the island, by the way, that survived the
Saracen invasion and conquest.