go about and make trade this way?”
“The holy Saint Pancratius forbid!” he exclaimed, piously calling upon
his patron. But he spoiled the effect by adding instantly: “No, I do not
have to. I get all the trade there is in Mola anyway. It is very
little,” he shrugged, and turned the subject.
This Mola, the tiny town on the hilltop above Taormina, may be cited as
a typical example of what taxes, lack of education, usury, and as a
consequence, emigration, are doing for Sicily to-day. Though Mola lies
only about a thousand feet higher up in the air than Taormina, it is ten
times as far away by foot--and by foot you must go, “either your own or
another donkey’s!” as one weary but none the less enthusiastic visitor
put it on returning. The road--a good part of it is low stone steps, the
round, flat pebbles set on edge in mortar--winds along the uncertain
sides of the little valleys, and since not a single tree of any size
shades it from an almost tropical sun at full power, it is sufficiently
trying. Here and there a female beggar pops up most unexpectedly to
demand an alms “for the love of the blessed Christ who walked thus to
Calvary!”
The town curves in a semi-circle around the top of the hill, behind the
battered remains of stout old walls which even to-day are massive and in
places almost perfect, and might be turned to excellent account in
defense. Just where the road skirts the base of the cliff, one night in
December of 1677, forty stout-hearted native soldiers scaled the
wall--when you look up at it, it seems an impossible feat--with ropes,
and surprised and captured the French garrison then in possession. The
highly picturesque entrance by a carved archway under a bit of wall
leading outward at right angles from the overhanging cliff is commanded
by an equally picturesque evil-looking iron smooth-bore cannon.
So still is Mola that the old lines fit it perfectly:
“Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the moldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.”
It is literally the “Deserted Village.” Half an hour suffices to explore
the Corso--even tiny Mola has its highway named for the King!--and all
the silent high- and by-ways from end to end; mere _gradini_, crooked
and steep, slits between out-of-plumb houses whose only occupants seem
to be pigs. The biggest, blackest, dirtiest and leanest razorbacks
imaginable march solemnly up and down the front steps of the best
houses, or snore comfortably inside on the parlor floor. Occasionally a
savage mother with her little shoats takes up a good share of the way,
snapping viciously at anyone who ventures too close. Our “guide,” a mere
baby, offered to go and stir up such a family when he saw me about to
take its picture, and nearly lost a leg for his pains.
But in all these streets not a man is visible of adult years and able to
work. Only at the “Cathedral” can vigorous men be seen, the verger and
the priest. The whereabouts of the others are told in the single magic
word that spells so much to all Europe--“America!” It is literally true.
Of all the male inhabitants only those too poor, too feeble to make the
long trip, or too young to be acceptable as toilers, have remained at
home. Even the exceptions, the verger and the priest, gaze seaward
with longing eyes.
[Illustration: “Occasionally in Mola a savage mother with her shoats
takes up a good share of the way.”]
The “Cathedral” is a building to make the heart ache. Poor and ignorant
though they are, the people strive with cheap, garish colors and hideous
decorations to please the Deity as well as to give their lowly church
the air of a rich-folks’ Cathedral. What grips one most is to be found
in the sacristy. Tied tightly to the arm of a much betinseled Mary
Magdalen is a beautiful and amazingly thick braid of human hair. What is
the tragedy behind the oblation? What poor little girl from Mola came
cowering and repentant to the feet of the saint and fastened the simple
ex-voto in broken-hearted gratitude to the arm of her who wept over the
sacred feet and wiped them with her hair? Is it a local tragedy or one
from across the unfathomable seas? The verger pretends he does not know.
Yet as you wander through the unkempt streets of the deserted village,
you cannot help looking curiously about for any woman whose head shows
the trace of the votive shears.
Many a time throughout Italy we had been tormented by filthy beggars on
the steps of the cathedrals; but it was reserved for Mola to show us a
pig who owned to being a pig in such a place! As we came out a huge,
lean razorback grunted in savage disapproval, lurched to his feet, and
trotted heavily off down a side street.
If the ascent to Mola is difficult, what can be said of the coming down?
You stretch muscles you never knew you had, all the corns in the world
seem to have concentrated upon your luckless feet, and you pitch and
roll and toss like a mastless ship in a cross-sea.
After that Mola trip the most energetic traveler is apt to go to bed
very early, and so for the first time hears the night noises of
Taormina. The town makes quite a clatter on its way to bed--the click!
click! click! of hobnailed heels on the lava pavement, the light chatter
and songs of the children, which for all their occasional gayety have an
elusive element of the tragic in them, the fluting of some little
shepherd, and the tired bray of a home-going donkey glad the day’s work
is over. And every half-hour the bell-baiting! Would that Poe had heard
these Sicilian bells before he wrote his tintinnabulating rhyme. Beaten,
not rung, they clamor with the maddening insistence of fiends until the
ear rebels and no longer notices their angry tumult. One tradition has
it that there is not a bell-clapper in the island, for the returning
French took the iron tongues away after the Massacre of the Vespers, to
keep the people from ringing alarms. But the ingenious Sicilian found
that he could make much more noise with a hammer, and though six hundred
years and more have rolled by, he is still so tickled with the racket
that he seems each time to be trying to break all previous records. A
more plausible story is that the clappers were taken away by the
Neapolitans as recently as the day of Garibaldi’s arrival with his
thousand red-shirts in 1860.
Save for the bell-baiting only, silence reigns from about ten until two.
Then the first donkey’s tiny little overburdened feet come ticking down
the Corso, the whack of his rider’s stick and an occasional gruff
adjuration to the patient little mouse-colored beast recurring in a
regular work-_motif_. Slowly the light begins to come. A sleepy ringer
bangs out fifty irregular notes from his bell, hesitates a moment as
though not quite certain of his count, and adds one last vigorous clang
for good measure. Chanticleer first awakes the echoes, in strenuous
rivalry with stentorian peacocks. Again silence reigns for half an hour
or so. Then Taormina turns in bed, stirs luxuriously, yawns, and “gets
busy.”
Along the Corso donkeys bearing slim wine-casks and great tins of goats’
milk patter past at a smart pace; vegetable hawkers from the _piana_
shout their wares into open doorways; cats and chickens side by side
strike out into the daylight from the obscurity of their shelters,
stretching and flapping comfortably. Children, standing like models of
Justice, scales and weights in hand, call their merchandise, weigh and
measure with preternatural gravity, or eye older hucksters sharply as
the latter use their own scales to weight out a “penorth” of this or a
“haporth” of that.
These street views are keenly interesting, but after all it is Ætna that
makes Taormina an artist’s paradise. Travelers and artists alike come
for a brief glimpse or a sketch of Ætna, return again and again, or
perchance find the fascination of hoary crown and delicate lights and
shades so irresistible they settle down in the volcano’s shadow and
remain for years, proclaiming Taormina to be the rarest beauty spot in
creation.
One of the American artists who came twenty years ago and has never been
able to tear himself away from the thrall of the great cold peak, shows
his studies of its moods, a great stack of marvelous water colors made
at dawn, at noon, at sunset, at every hour of day and night, with every
whimsical effect cloud or sun or shadow could give as he sat at his
easel in a white-walled garden with the perpetually beautiful before him
as a model. Perhaps the most remarkable contrasts are from a perfectly
moonlight night to a clear dawn the next morning. All night the moon,
sailing in solemn round overhead, tints the peak’s snowy shoulders with
a faint greenish tinge that makes it the wraith of a volcano. A little
before four o’clock, slowly, tenderly, moon and pallid stars dwindle
into spookish reflections of themselves as the sky lightens, the velvet
blue of the night puckers into gelid gray, changes into pale
turquoise through which majestically sail a vast fleet of enormous
fluffy clouds, while Ætna rises dark and forbidding from the piana
below.
[Illustration: “Many a protesting goat is compelled to scramble up four
or five flights of dark stairs.”]
Graciously a faint flush in the eastern sky increases in volume, deepens
in tone; the grim pile of the volcano on the west darkens at the top,
and as the ineffable pink spreads around behind it, the cone turns dead
and spectral, and the thin, cottony tuft of curling smoke above the main
crater eddies upward with all the seeming of steam on a foggy winter’s
morning. These first changes come with the measured caution of a master
painter working carefully lest through some hasty stroke he spoil the
effect of the tone picture to come. The light spreads. Neither camera
nor pen can keep pace with the instantaneous transformations on every
side. The vast crimson-coppery disc sails slowly up in majesty to eye
the little world of Taormina from behind the inky green shoulder of the
Greek Theater’s hill. The upper edges of the clouds turn pink and
silver; the lower, soft salmon pink, saffron, orange, gold. It is day!
There is something awe-inspiring, archaic, terrible about it all. It
suggests the ancient Egyptian belief of Amen-ra riding through the
horrible fastnesses of the Tuat in his sacred boat, and emerging in the
glory of the resurrection.
It is a chilly performance of a spring morning, and a hungry one. At a
quarter before six, an eight o’clock breakfast seems at a starving
distance; so the best thing to do is to come down into the street to see
the milk being delivered. Right, left, and everywhere are nothing but
goats! goats! goats! the whole length of the Corso; by twos, singly, in
herds of twenty or more, with a pair of fractious kids roped together
under their mother’s usually wide open, yellow old eye, or tied one to
each hind leg, very much to mother’s discomfort. They burst out upon the
Corso from narrow little _gradini_ as if they had been kicked out of
Mola on the crags above, and had not been able to check their speed on
the long roll down. The tobacconist whose shop is directly opposite the
hotel, opens at dawn to catch the early trade of the Mola goatherds in
snuff and _sigari_. If you catch his eye he will throw wide both arms to
include all the goats on the Corso, and exclaim: “_Latte de’capri è
molto bell’!_”
Take his gracefully conveyed hint, and ask for a glass. One of the
_ragazze_--two-thirds at least of the goatherds in Taormina and Mola are
young girls--milks a rich, warm, foaming pint. Whatever your misgivings,
the tobacconist is quite right--“Milk of goats is very beautiful!”--very
grateful to a cold and empty stomach.
The hotel is quite civilized, the honest goatherd milking his animals
into bottles which he carries in under the eye of a servant whose
business it is to see that there is no adulteration or watering. In the
private houses still more scrupulous care is observed. Many a protesting
goat is compelled to scramble up as many as four or five flights of dark
and difficult stairs to be milked in the “parlor” into the suspicious or
indolent housewife’s own can or bottle. The Taorminians are worried by
no inspectors or supervision of their milk supply, for the purchasers
are their own supervisors, and milk is one thing in Sicily absolutely
above reproach.
XIV
LIGHTS AND SHADES
Fountains in Sicily occupy much the same place in the life of the people
that the forum occupied in a Roman community of old. That is, the
fountain and its piazza are the center for exchanging news and gossip,
for recreation, for all the varied diversions the people have in common.
Taormina’s principal fountain lies just outside the old wall, not far
from the Porta Catania, the gate facing toward Catania. About the cool
and dripping basin gather the graceful young peasant girls, balancing
incredibly large and heavy amphorai of water upon their well poised
heads; pretty, kittenish children and grimgaunt old rheumatic gossips;
loutish waterboys in from the _piana_ with their great barrel-carts to
take the ichor of the gods back home; and generally the background for
all is a fringe of seedy, admiring youths, casting sheeps’ eyes at the
girls and wondering how long it will be until they can get married--or
sail for America!
This particular fountain is crowned by the arms of Taormina, which
consist of the twin castles of Mola and Taormina, and a mythological
creature with the body of a bull, the tail of a fish and the head of a
woman. Exactly what this beast is would tax the powers of the most
ingenious of zoologists to explain--possibly a “nature-faker” could do
it better.
From the Porta Catania the old town wall, perhaps twenty feet in height,
rambles up the hillside in weird curves and abrupt angles, following the
contour of the ground. Now that it is useless as a defense the thrifty
Taorminians have built up a row of tiny houses which cling limpet
fashion to the outside of the sturdy old masonry, through which windows
have been driven that add greatly to its picturesqueness. Wonderful
climbing bougainsvilleas and other vines have sprung up from the fertile
soil and spread their graceful tendrils higher and higher until almost
every window is smothered in a mass of tender greenery and blossom.
To see these picturesque cottages is to wish to end one’s days in one,
or at least to bring some of its perfume and beauty back home. Near by a
steep _gradino_ is a floral waterfall. On the house-sides, festooning
every post and projecting bit of masonry, brilliant flowers foam in pink
spray, as from some perfumed fountain farther up the hill where roses
distil their spicy fragrance from long, nodding branches.
Facing its own little piazza inside the wall, and just below the Corso,
is the Cathedral, which has a fine fourteenth century Gothic side
portal. Perhaps the service is fourteenth century, too. It is conducted
by the parish priest, a withered old man of grim and ascetic aspect, who
drones in out-of-key nasals through the ritual, his voice drowned out a
good deal of the time by the wheezy old organ, played by the village
cobbler. The choir consists of the verger and another man who appears
and disappears like a jack-in-the-box; at no time are more than two men
visible in the organ loft, but in their vigor they quite make up for
lack of numbers or inspiration. On the opposite side of the choir rises
what seems to be a larger and more imposing organ. It is really nothing
but a huge stretcher of canvas on which an instrument is painted,
evidently to impress visitors with the dignity and grandeur of this
mountain church.
When we were at service the good padre was assisted in his ministrations
by the verger--when he was not singing--who worked with a becoming sense
of the dignity of his position, and by an impish little acolyte in
flaming scarlet, who hopped about like a cricket. If ever there was a
little rascal who deserved excommunication for his pranks, it was this
juvenile mischief-maker, who swung his censer so as almost to choke the
old priest, keeping a more watchful eye upon the strangers than upon his
business, and scarcely stopping to crook an irreverent little knee as
he passed about in front of the altar. Once, stooping to rearrange the
priest’s robes, he did it with such a mischievous flirt, and such a
droll gleam in the brown eyes fixed on us, that we half expected to be
held up by a small highwayman after mass, and asked for a penny or two
in token of the sacrilegious show we had been permitted to witness.
The elders of the town sit upon the long bench or dais of red porphyry
where the archbishop would be enthroned should he visit Taormina. They
are curious old men, gnarled, withered apples full of sun and
wind-wrinkles, who wear the typical brown-gray-black shawl as a muffler.
Below them, on the throne’s lowest step, squat several of the oldest
women in the town. Over this seat a large and imposing shield bearing
the arms of Taormina is supported by a time-stained oaken eagle, who
leers with side-cocked head and an expression of inebriate gravity in
his partly closed eyes. He seems more a gargoyle, a grotesque, than a
strictly appropriate bit of ecclesiastical decoration.
Some of the peasant girls in the congregation are very lovely--perfect
young Madonnas; sloe-eyed, raven-haired; with exquisite features and
coloring, and distinctly Greek profiles. But they are not all dark;
there is also the florid blonde type the Latin peoples so greatly
admire, though it cannot bear comparison with the other. All of them
dress with a taste and a restraint hardly to be expected among mountain
folk only a few degrees removed from the primitive. Here and there a
fawn-like maid has thrown a Roman scarf with broad orange bands lightly
over her hair, its vivid colors in pleasing contrast with her simple
dark blue dress, piped with white, and the usual black silk apron that
distinguishes her as of a prosperous family.
About through the throng in the nave the worshipers’ children run freely
to and fro, laughing, crying, talking, calling to one another. Some
gather in little colonies on a step of the door at the foot of the
church and eye the scene with baby solemnity; and even when the Host is
elevated, some dainty nymph of three or four may unconcernedly clatter
higgledy-piggledy across the tiles in hobnailed shoon that wake the
ancient echoes, crying at the top of her small voice: “Papá! Papá!” to
an old farmer entering the door.
There is an indescribably moving something in the spectacle these poor
folk present as they sit and stand and kneel and make the responses with
the utter devotion of ignorance and superstition. Still, the outside can
not be forgotten, even in the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and as the big
bell up in the campanile booms the hour clear and mellow through the
sound of voice and instrument, the world, the flesh and the devil stir
the worshipers with a restless little movement of anxiety to get back
into the sunshine again.
The eagle over the bishop’s throne would appear to greater advantage in
the funerals to be met on the Corso, conducted by the Fraternity of the
Misericordia, which originated in Florence so many centuries ago. Weird
indeed is one of these processions, as it ambles leisurely along through
the heavy dust, often stirred by a light sirocco which flaps the robes
and sends the incense smoke eddying upward in sacerdotal wreaths.
Tragedy and farce clasp hands in the pitiful _cortége_. The boy members
of the Guild amuse themselves and shock the beholder by pulling their
ghastly masks awry, contorting their faces into uncouth grimaces, and
winking portentously through the large eyeholes. The men are scarcely
better--even the pall-bearers laugh, joke, turn freely to pass a word
with some acquaintance in the street or up in a window, and tilt the
casket so recklessly that the cross and crown on top slip about and all
but fall off. Their white frocks are too short, and from beneath the
skirts protrude very baggy trouser-legs, dirty socks, or even a few
inches of bare leg thrust hastily into shoes donned for the nonce, and
left with strings dangling in the dust. Inquisitive goats and uncertain
chickens get in the way and are either lifted to one side, carried along
and petted for a few moments, or gently pushed out of the way with a
kindly foot.
Strange indeed was a double funeral we saw one sultry afternoon. At the
head marched the ancient Guild, bearing a curious double cross, perhaps
eight feet high and apparently very heavy. Nailed to its upper
limb--askew, of course--was a small light cross. Behind the men walked
eighteen little girls in ordinary street dress, and after them six older
girls in black, marching in couples, each pair carrying a large floral
wreath. The middle pair bore their wreath with an air that did not
distinguish the others, since it surrounded a framed picture of the dead
man. Directly behind the picture came a priest, his hands clasped over a
missal which he held firmly against his well-fed stomach.
After the living, the dead--the first of the coffins was a tiny one of
flaming pink, stolidly handled by four sturdy lads of the Guild, who
took as much interest in it and the proceedings as though they were
bearing a crate of lemons to market. Immediately behind, four unusually
tall Guildmen bore the man’s coffin, large and black, with a cross and a
silver crown resting upon it. On either side trudged the womenfolk of
the family, one in each file carrying a smoking plate of incense that
nearly choked her, while two files of friends brought up the rear of the
procession proper, followed by the usual rabble.
Through the heavy African air the cathedral bells tolled with an
inexpressibly sad intonation as the little cavalcade passed along the
street. But even the relatives were compelled to laugh when from the
rear, running at full speed, came a panting boy of about ten bearing the
canonicals of the officiating priest. The robe flapped behind in most
undignified fashion, one corner occasionally raising a little spurt of
dust as it swept the stones; and every few steps the boy yelped an
unintelligible sound, to bid the marchers slow down and let him catch up
before the priest entered the cathedral.
However, the touch of the ridiculous that turns tears to laughter is
never far away in Sicily. Turning into a side street, one of those
little _gradini_ or flights of slippery stone steps which make up most
of Taormina’s lesser byways, and thinking only of the funeral, we were
suddenly halted by two of the juvenile troubadours who lie in wait for
strangers, or patrol the streets, seeking whom they may charm. They
sprang out at our approach, struck tragic attitudes, and began to shout
out an old pirate song at the top of their thin little pipes. Lustily
they sang, till the veins in their small foreheads bulged blue with the
effort, screaming out the bloodthirsty words of the ancient ditty with
gusto, and acting their parts like veterans. It was all so sudden, so
utterly ludicrous, that we laughed until we cried. The moment we began
to laugh, the larger boy frowned, stopped singing, and shaking his pudgy
fist at us indignantly, announced: “I am a singer! A very good
singer--you listen to me!”
No cosmopolitan tenor could have put more outraged dignity and
temperament into a protest. But sturdily they began all over. Here and
there we caught a phrase about a wicked captain who stole a lovely
maiden from her doting parents and took her away on his rakish barque to
rove the smiling seas. Before I could reward them a large boy, who had
kept away the crowd during the singing of the infant highwaymen, touched
me on the arm.
“_Signore_--you should pay me all. I....”
“Oh-ho! So you think you are their impresario, do you?” I demanded.
“_Sissignore! Si! Si!_” he exclaimed joyfully, not in the least
understanding anything but that I seemed willing to play into his hands.
“Are you a relative of the great Hammerstein?” I asked.
“Probably, sir. I do not know. Does the gentleman live in Taormina?”