with the “evil eye,” pinched my arm with a vigor astonishing in so aged
a creature, and shrilly demanded her gift. Annoyed, I asked her as
gently as possible, while the crowd grinned in derision: “But what have
you done that I should pay you?”
“Done!” she retorted. “Done! It is enough--am I not here?”
[Illustration: “We were suddenly halted by two juvenile troubadours,
seeking whom they might charm.”]
Declining to pay for being pinched, we worked our way slowly through the
tenacious rabble--which clamored for _soldi_--down into the courtyard of
the hotel that was once a pious house of prayer and fasting, the gray
and ancient Convento di San Domenico. Beyond the edge of the older town
it poises its massive stone bulk, whitewashed and scrupulously neat, on
the ragged edge of the cliff: where fragrant roses climb all about and
potted plants fringe the balustrades on all sides with rich color. It is
a joy to sit here and take tea, with the marvelous panorama of storied
coast and slumbering sea directly beneath. San Domenico is as cold as it
is lovely, and the guests are hardly to be envied their rooms, once the
silent stone cells of the monks. They are, however, to be envied the
charm of the great hall with its carven choir stalls and lecturn, and
the beautiful flower-decked cloisters. But where the crumbling Byzantine
arcades once echoed with the Vesper, the Matin and the Ave, now is heard
only the laughter of the heedless tourist, the chatter of children, the
swish of skirts, and the click of the camera-shutter.
From the stone balustrades of the terrace, one gazes down upon slopes
thorny with the spikes of the prickly pear, toothed and spurred with
many an ugly rock that must have been there when the intrepid tyrant,
Dionysius I, led his storming party up the slopes one winter night in
394 B. C., and forced his way into the very marketplace, only to be
repulsed by the heroic citizens and come tumbling down--literally, it is
said--six hundred feet among the rocks and thorns of the snowy ascent.
No wonder Dionysius hated Taormina after that! He disliked it before,
and his little impromptu toboggan filled him with a tyrant’s decision to
even things with Taormina sooner or later. Four years afterward he kept
his oath, in an outburst of savage fury that reduced the hamlet to ruins
but failed to injure it permanently.
The moldering palace of the once mighty Dukes of Santo Stefano is also
at this western end of the town. But all there is to see is a garden,
tangled and sweet, a deep well whose carven curb speaks eloquently of
the love of its former masters for the beautiful, and a barren earthen
room under the palace, where dingy mosaics upon the stucco walls peep
through the grime of ages. In one corner is a mortared pit about thirty
inches deep and two feet in diameter. The caretaker is contemptuous at
any failure to understand so simple a thing as an ancient bath, and
displays the superior air of one who, however economical she may herself
be in the use of such a luxury, is thoroughly versed in the theory of
its employment by others of less Spartan virtue.
Beyond this--nothing! The key is in Palermo. With the characteristic
fondness of Sicilians for separating buildings and their keys, the Duke
leaves it in the capital, so the Greek and Roman marbles stripped
ruthlessly from the Theater at the other end of town are usually
invisible.
But though they may not be visible, the Theater from which they were
taken is very much so. The Corso on the way is always a human and animal
kaleidoscope. Here a man holds his grateful horse by the bridle while
his wife lifts a black iron soup kettle to give the weary beast a drink
of warm and nourishing soup made of bread, vegetables and goats’ milk.
Yonder a demoralized old cat licks her kittens into shape on a shady
doorstep while a venerable hen looks on and seems to have a proprietary
interest in seeing the work properly performed. Cats and kittens and
dogs lie jumbled together, in genial disregard of the usual enmities,
suggesting the lion and the lamb parable.
Quaintly dressed peasants from the _piana_ stare at the visitor, and
vendors of antiquities call lazily from their black little holes in the
wall, advertising their strings of “ancient” pottery, that rattle
ominously whenever a wisp of breeze playfully tugs at them. A
carriage-full of tourists Baedekering through Sicily passes literally on
the jump, with craned necks and vociferous consultation of the fat
little red books so essential to comfort in this land where no one is
willing to confess that he really knows anything positively. Water-carts
creak by, a huckster whose wares are not yet all sold bellows most
musical of “_A-a-ar--ca--cio-o-o--fi-i-i-i!_” and from behind comes the
mellow boom of the cathedral chimes knelling away the brilliant hour.
Artists with easels and sketching kits lumber heavily by on their way
back from the Theater, the only great ruin of which Taormina can boast.
There is little now in the shattered playhouse to make alive its glories
of Greek days, for as it stands it is largely a Roman ruin. The
conquerors built amphitheaters throughout the island, but their theaters
were in almost every instance merely enlargements or adaptations of
older structures. Here in Taormina the building shows perfectly what the
Romans did with the stage, which is in an almost perfect state of
preservation. The playhouse, hewn in great part from the living rock,
measures three hundred fifty-seven feet in its greatest diameter, while
the diameter of the pit or orchestra is no less than one hundred and
fifteen feet. The stage itself is quite narrow, with a vaulted channel
or passage underneath for the water, used in flooding the arena, for the
naval combats that the degenerate Romans preferred to Greek drama.
Behind the stage the wall they built--of plain red brick instead of the
costlier marble of early days--is still two stories high, and four of
its granite Corinthian columns, with parts of the architrave, have been
reërected to show the decorative scheme. Directly behind are the
entrances upon the stage, one at the right, another at the left; and in
the center a great ruinous breach in the wall where was once the third
or central entrance. On each side are niches which contained statues,
and in the side wall at each end of the stage are the _vestiaria_, the
dressing-rooms of the actors. What is left of the auditorium proper--the
superstructure added by the Romans is all gone--shows that the seats
were divided into nine _cunei_, sections shaped like wedges; and so
perfect were the acoustics that even yet, ruined though the structure
is, the slightest word spoken upon the stage is distinctly audible at
the very farthest extremity of the upper tier of seats.
The way up to the topmost seats is through grass and weeds starred with
tiny flowerets, mantling over the scars of Time. Sitting there where
Greek and Roman and Saracen in turn have mused before, he is cold indeed
who does not thrill to memory and to the marvelous panorama spread
below: on the right, tier on tier of the eternal hills in warm brown,
their crowns of Saracenic-looking castles lending a militant air to
their own stern beauty; below them, a confused medley of roofs and
spires, roads and wandering walls, Taormina; through the _scena_ one of
the grandest vistas in all creation--Ætna the giant holding heaven and
earth apart, his feet in the mists of the low rolling farmlands, his
mighty crest lost amid the clouds of the spring afternoon; and reaching
away into infinity, the passionless Ionian Sea of song and story,
murmuring a susurrant requiem for the vanished glories of other days.
XV
THE CITY THAT WAS
From Taormina to Messina the train hurries along at what seems breakneck
speed--through vine and olive yards; past broad shallow, dry _fiumi_,
dusty in summer but heavily walled on both sides against the coming of
the winter and spring freshets. Now the hills rise bold and sheer, as we
dash into and out of innumerable little smoky tunnels, like a firefly
flashing through tangled brush. High on one hillside an old cemetery
looks down--an enormous file of dusty old pigeon-holes tossed out from a
Titan’s office and abandoned among the greenery.
There comes a town; a queer, quaint, smelly little fishing
village--Ali--whose distinct perfume wafts in through even closed
windows. Every house in it possesses atmosphere, character, a certain
uncouth distinction all its own. Farther on goats--a big herd of
them--munch their way along the beach undisturbed by our noisy passing,
walking in the cool water up to their fetlocks, eating seaweed and
wagging their cronish old heads over the salty feast. What must be the
flavor of their milk! But the goats are forgotten as up the Strait from
Reggio steams the great car-ferry _Scylla_, since six miles away along
the sweeping curve of the Italian shore to the north, the ugly gaunt
rock of Scylla herself crouches against the dun background of iron
shore.
Scylla and Charybdis, those fabled monsters of early Hellenic legend,
apparently had no terrors for the pirates of Kymé who, Thucydides tells
us, planted the first nursling settlement of Zankle, later Messina, in
one of the most splendid natural locations ever utilized by man--a long,
narrow strip of flat shore along the Bay, where the mountains stand well
back, and only the foothills come near the water. Before the town
shimmers one of the finest harbors in the world, a big circular bay
fenced in by a low and sandy strip curved like the sickle the Sicilian
Greeks called Danklon or Zankle. The site was a natural emporium at the
point where the East and the West meet and are one; an ideal location
for a great strategic, commercial and social center.
[Illustration: Messina--“The City that Was!”]
It has always been a notable city. Now we see it in the scarlet page of
history as the home of the pirate, the prey of the Carthaginian, the
bandit stronghold of the Mamertine, the first glorious conquest of the
dashing Norman; then glorying in the wealth the Crusades poured into its
lap as the kings of the earth passed by in their search after the
impossible and unattainable. Now we hear of it as the prey of a
despot, an absentee monarch; now as the favorite of a king who loaded it
with privilege; now as the bulwark of all Sicily against incursion from
the mainland when Charles of Anjou, after the Vespers, came down upon
Messina like Byron’s Assyrian. Every man became a soldier, every woman
in the city--ladies accustomed to ease and luxury as well as their less
fortunate sisters--a worker. A song still popular in Sicily runs:
_Deh com’ egli è gran pietate_
_delle donne di Messina,_
_veggiendo iscapigliate,_
_portando pietre e calcina!_
“Oh, what a pity ’tis to see the ladies of Messina carrying stones and
chalk!”
One of the things that brought disaster upon Messina was its location
upon the line of contact between the primary and secondary formations of
Ætna and Vesuvius, where the shock of earthquake is necessarily the most
violent and frequent. And during the last two centuries or so every
misfortune that could befall a city has befallen it--siege, bombardment,
fire, inundation, cholera, plague, earthquake. Yet through it all,
however severe the visitation, the city has been great and undaunted,
rising heroically from every catastrophe to begin anew; great in
commerce, too, as well as in the heroic spirit of its citizens.
Notwithstanding its tragic story, of late years it was a dusty,
commercial town, eminently set upon minding its own business and giving
little heed during business hours to anything but business.
In the evening, however, the whole town was out of doors, gathering in a
dense throng to listen to the band concert in the Piazza di Municipio.
Grave and reverend seigniors puffing at black Italian cheroots, fat
wives on their arms or waddling behind under the weight of their
wonderful jewelry; young sparks who wore their hats rakishly and eyed
the daughters of families with roguish airs of expert judgment in
petticoats; flashy corner loafers whose visages betrayed their
character--or lack of it; solemn family parties to whom this open air
concert was the diversion of the week; and scores of impish little
ragamuffins whose specialty seemed to be vociferous appeals to smokers
for cigarette stubs. But the crowd was very Italian, very good-natured,
very indolently happy. _Dolce far niente_ ruled, save for the
industrious bandsmen, and everybody enjoyed himself in his own way.
In the eighteenth century the wide and handsome promenade along the
clear waters of the Strait was named _La Palazzata_, because the stately
_palazzi_ of the nobility lined its entire length, and each palace was
equal in height, style and construction to all its neighbors. But slowly
there crept into the city the sneaking spirit of commercialism. The
haughty nobles fell upon evil days and died. Their palaces became shops,
hotels, stores; the old glory was fading fast, and the new was a tawdry
imitation. The splendor of the _Palazzata_ waned before the vigor of
expanding trade that filled the wharves with casks of spoiling lemons
for the manufacture of acids and essential oils. The very air of Messina
became impregnated, redolent of the pungent essence of fruit turning
into gold.
But that was not the end. The _Palazzata_--aye, all Messina--was doomed
to fall in the crowning misfortune of the centuries. The terrible
earthquake predicted almost to the minute by Mr. Perret of the Vesuvius
Observatory, smote the city while it slept, on the morning of December
28, 1908. The earth became a shaken old carpet, ripping, tearing,
rending apart hideously, crumpling upon itself. The sea receded and
heaped itself in mountains of waters, the beach lay bare. The grim gods
of the nether world smiled; they piled the sea and the waves higher into
an Olympian bolt, hurled it resistless and foaming upon the helpless
town, again to take toll of man’s rashness. Palace and hotel, shop and
church trembled--vacillated--crashed down into agonizing ruin, burying
half the city in their débris. In the city alone 77,283 persons
perished. Humanity stood aghast before a catastrophe so tremendous that
the intelligence could not grasp its full significance of horror. And
when the final relief work was completed, the last reports tabulated,
the toll of Ætna on both sides of the Strait--in Calabria as well as in
Sicily--mounted up to two hundred thousand--nearly a quarter of a
million lives!
Sleeping and praying, weeping and cursing, unconscious and paralyzed
with terror, Messina died in the murdering cruelty of the most appalling
of all the disasters the heroic city had ever known.
The Cathedral, which was begun in 1098 and finished by King Roger, had
shared the misfortunes of the city. Earthquake and fire and the still
more vandal hand of the restorer had robbed it long before of almost all
semblance to the plans of King Roger’s architects. And the gods of the
earth, being no respecters of buildings, hurled it down into ruin like
the commonest hut in the city. Not all its massiveness and splendor
could save it from the common fate; not all its treasures of goldsmith’s
work and sculpture and art. But though it fell, the people of the
dauntless city did not blench. Crushed and dazed as they were, one of
the first buildings they put up was a new house of prayer. Hastily
knocked together of rough boards, the triumphant symbol of hope and
faith nailed firmly above it, that pitiful church spoke dramatically of
the spirit that defies defeat and honors victory.
The city has arisen anew in a metropolis of more than 65,000 souls,
with suitable churches now. Moreover, the commercial spirit of the
people asserted itself almost immediately, and exports began with
scarcely any delay. In the new Messina that has sprung up--a little to
the south and a trifle farther inland--away from the chaos of wrecked
buildings and blasted hopes, there is at least a measure of safety. It
is largely a wooden city; the buildings are restricted in height, and no
fires are permitted expect in the kitchens, which are built of brick.
The American relief work is especially interesting to us. No less than
1336 two-room-and-kitchen houses were put up by American hands and with
American materials and money in the new Messina, and five hundred more
across the Strait in Reggio di Calabria, a total of 1836, capable of
housing more than 12,000 people. Each family is bound under pain of
expulsion to observe stringent rules for public safety and sanitation,
approved by Queen Elena herself. In places these low, white clapboarded
cottages, shaded by mulberry trees, have a decidedly New England town
appearance. Beside these, American funds built an hotel with
seventy-five rooms and thirteen or fourteen baths; a church where some
350 people can worship; two schools that care for eighty children each,
and the Elizabeth Griscom Hospital, in which every available resource of
modern sanitary engineering in design and construction was employed.
White-walled and red-roofed, it stands high on the hillside, a very
attractive sight from the Bay, its windows commanding a sweeping view
which is a tonic in itself.
During the reign of horror that followed the fall of the city, fire and
snow, rain and pestilence added their agonies to the already overflowing
tragedy. But British and American, Russian and French bluejackets toiled
heroically, regardless of personal danger from falling ruins or
infection from the stench of thousands of unburied corpses, to help
their Italian brethren succor the wounded and rescue the dying. King
Victor Emmanuele himself, disregarding comfort and personal safety,
hurried to the scene and risked his life in superintending the work of
rescue, endearing himself to the Nation by his cool bravery and
resourceful tenderness to the sufferers. And not only the King, but
Queen Elena, who accompanied him, struggled through the ruins day after
day, braving hardships and danger, aiding the wounded and dying with her
own hands. All Italy arose and called her blessed. They gave her a new
name. She was no longer merely _Regina d’Italia_--Queen of Italy--but
_Regina di Pietà_--Queen of Pity.
XVI
THE NORTHERN SHORE
Along the northern coast from Messina westward to Palermo, almost every
foot of the way has some historic interest. High among the precipitous
cliffs above the present station of Rometta, the Christians held out
against the invading Saracens--who had entered the island in 827--until
965. Rometta was the last place to fall. A little farther along the
rocky shore Sextus Pompey was annihilated by Agrippa in the battle of
Naulochus in B. C. 36. Milazzo, sixteen miles from Messina, is the site
of ancient Mylæ, Messina’s first colony, which had a stirring time of it
through all the centuries. The last big event in her history was
Garibaldi’s victory over the Neapolitans, freeing the city from the
hated Bourbon rule.
The train runs over _fiumare_ after _fiumare_--riverbeds dry in Summer,
rushing torrents in Winter--and vineyards stretch beside the track in
vast expanses of low, bushy vines, ripe with promise. Then, with a
shriek, the engine drags us in a cindery cloud of smoke through the
promontory on which stood Tyndaris, the Greek colony founded by
Dionysius I. The town stood nine hundred feet above the black hole into
which we plunge. What would be the sensations of this swash-buckling
Greek could he see the rock to-day, with the trains, black worms darting
through the solid rock he never dreamed of penetrating! More tunnels
follow fast, then another cape, and a stretch of glad, open, smiling
country that makes one think of the orchards at home.
Picturesque towns, groves of oleanders, battered old Roman bridges and
medieval castles in which life is still of the Dark Ages, flit by
rapidly until Caronia is reached. Here, nearly 2,600 years ago, a Sikel
settlement called _Kalé Akté_--Beautiful Shore--was made under an
ambitious leader named Ducetius, who hoped to save the remnant of his
people who were still free in the interior, from absorption by the
Greeks. A single defeat, however, crushed this native rising, and all
hope of Sikel independence vanished in 444 with the death of Ducetius.
“Beautiful Shore” withered away until to-day Calacte is a commonplace
Sicilian town with even a commonplace name, and only its memories to
save it from utter insignificance.
[Illustration: Cefalù, across the fields from a car-window of the fast
Palermo express.]
And then we come to Cefalù, a town whose reputation depends on its dirt,
its beggars, and its Cathedral. And there is no excuse for either dirt
or mendicants, since it is a thriving commercial and manufacturing city
with ample resources to keep itself clean, and purged of begging
pests. The name tells its location--_Kephalé_, in Greek, meant head;
that is, promontory in this case, and the old Sikel city occupied the
crest of the big jutting headland thrusting straight out into the sea
and rising over 1,200 feet in height. On this elevation--seventy minutes
now of stiff climbing it takes to reach it, over boulders and the
detritus of centuries--the Sikels built them a safe city, and swept it
about with massive battlemented walls, carried clear down to the sea.
Parts of them are still in very good condition; no doubt through the
centuries they have been restored again and again.
The “Head” is bald now--a snowy pate with only a sprinkling of
grass--and but one building of uncertain age remains to testify to the
different races that have ruled upon this lofty spot. After its
acquisition by the Greeks it was important as their western outpost on
the northern shore of the island. The one small ruin still standing
seems to be that of a Sikel building, of unique structure and great
interest. The huge irregular stones in part of it indicate its original
appearance, while all about them the decently cut and shaped blocks show
an Hellenic restoration. From this height the view is
all-embracing--Pellegrino towering above Palermo forty miles to the
west; the gaunt black fire peaks of most of the Lipari Islands--once the
windy isles of Æolus--straight out to sea in the northeast; and behind
us fertile stretches of rolling country checkered with farms and
vineyards; town after town set upon impossible rugged peaks, mountains
whose tops tear ragged holes in the mist clouds.
In the near distance is the Punto della Caldara, where the shrewd and
wily sons of Tyre and Sidon, full of the instinct of commerce, not
combat, beached their frail craft and sat down at the feet of the Sikel
natives for barter, within easy eyeshot of this eyrie. No doubt from the
battlements the natives peered down with less of an eye for the splendid
view than for the marketplace of the swarthy, black-bearded Canaanites;
and thither they were lured by tempting displays of the royal purple of
Tyre, the gold of distant Tarshish far to the west, and the glass and
ornaments and statuettes that the Phœnician tempters knew how to make
and to market so much better than their uncouth selves.
As we came down from the desolate heights, it began to rain. Within a
few hundred yards of the town we passed the house of an old _contadino_
who sat calmly inside his jute-walled goatpen meditating. In the kitchen
door stood his brawny wife, feeding the unkempt, shrewish looking old
goat with soup full of green onions from her husband’s bowl, and
diverting herself betimes by lashing the gentle philosopher vigorously,
after the fashion of Mrs. Caudle.