trafficked with Carthage, with Sicilian Greeks, with Athens, with
anyone, in a word, as suited her purpose at the moment; but somehow she
usually came to grief through these very alliances. Indeed, it was her
continual bickering with Greek Selinus, her distant neighbor on the
southern shore, that first brought the meddling Athenians to Sicily, and
so indirectly caused the great war between Athens and Syracuse. To-day
there is not an Elymian ruin left in the city; all that remains of the
ill-starred metropolis is Greek and Roman.
The superb temple, alike a monument to Greek genius and the devotion of
the people, rises from a lofty plateau--a glowing golden shrine upon an
altar all of green, embayed by watchful, hoary mountains. Only the
massiveness of a Doric structure could so perfectly chime in with the
grandeur of Nature, so fittingly command the immense and silent though
turbulent landscape that rolls away from its feet. Revelation inspired
its location, and genius erected it--to stand lovelier and more
marvelous still after the lapse of ages than when there was a city near
by to detract from its majestic solitude.
The Greeks, with their unerring artistic sense, always built their
theaters in positions commanding magnificent views, and the little
theater here at Segesta, though only about half the size of the one at
Syracuse, looks out upon the sea, many miles away, and a magnificent
panorama of hills and forests on either side. Of the town only a few
very scanty bits of ruined houses have been uncovered.
One of the most lurid episodes in the city’s history occurred when the
tyrant Agathocles--he feigned to be a merry soul, though really a
butcher at heart, with massacre as his chief diversion!--tortured and
slaughtered ten thousand of the inhabitants, sold all the likely
looking boys and girls as slaves, repeopled the city with colonists of
his own, and called it Dikaiopolis, the City of Righteousness! Indeed,
Agathocles was in many respects the most picturesque despot Sicily ever
produced, and his career reads like a modern romantic novel. Born a
potter, he entered the army, was banished, recalled to Syracuse, married
a wealthy widow there, frustrated plot after plot against his life,
engaged in wholesale murders, established himself as a full fledged
tyrant, and made war against Carthage in her own territory--the first
time the arrogant daughter of Phœnicia had ever been tracked to her
lair by an enemy. Raising himself by treachery and massacre upon a
throne of his enemies’ skulls, Agathocles made himself master of all
Sicily, and for seventeen years more held his power intact, butcher and
trickster to the end, yet somehow managing always to retain the good
will of the masses.
From Calatafimi the train goes on southward past ancient Halicyæ, a big
town arrogantly perched upon a height, gemmed with a castle, to
Castelvetrano, where we leave it for the ruins of Selinus on the shore,
seven miles away. The trip is made either by carriage or on horseback,
as you may prefer. The acropolis, the pulsing heart of Selinus, is an
empty shell. Beneath our feet the historic pave over which rumbled the
springless chariots of Phœnician and Greek, lies buried in crumbling
débris; the fallen temples, the vast hillocks of ruin beyond, tell
mutely how great and how glorious must the city have been before
Hannibal the destroyer poured forth his savage wrath upon it; and in
street and plain the _selinon_, or wild celery, which named the city,
still thrusts upward to the same sun that warmed the early settlers.
On the hill east of the acropolis rise the ruins of the three largest
temples, colossal structures, but not a fragment of any other kind.
These stupendous edifices, even in their desolation, are among the most
inspiring of Sicilian monuments; especially when we remember that at no
time was the city first or even second among the Greek communities. And
from these temples of Selinus were taken the wonderful metopes--now in
the Palermo Museum--that so graphically illustrate the progress of
Greek-Sicilian temple sculpture. Here on the eastern hill the
Selinutines were busy raising to Phœbus Apollo his greatest fane when
the invader came, and, dropping their tools, the workmen hastened to
their doom. The structure was 371 feet long, 177 wide--so tremendous
that upon its base were erected forty-six giant columns, almost
fifty-eight feet high and twelve feet thick! It seems almost impossible
that so vast, so tremendously solid a structure should collapse like an
eggshell; and yet the seismic shock that evidently destroyed it tossed
those huge walls and columns lightly aside, voiding at a single stroke
the work of the builders who planned like genii and executed like
Titans. How was it, we wonder, that Selinus offended the mighty earth
gods as well as the god of war? And how long was it before they shook
the earth to its very vitals and completed the work of destruction the
barbarian had begun?
That the Carthaginians cut off the temple builders at their work is
proven by a visit to the quarries, some distance inland. From the
necropolis, west of the river, the road winds in, and before the
quarries are reached we pass block after block of the shaped stones
abandoned in transport to the temples. In the great pits themselves one
may look on, almost as if time had been annihilated, at the various
stages of the work--there are some huge blocks from eight to ten feet
long and eight feet thick, corresponding exactly with the column drums
of the temple marked G on the plans for the use of visitors, and without
doubt intended for that edifice. It is an object lesson one cannot soon
forget, of the blighting breath of war, a tragedy without words that is
inexpressibly moving.
To the southwest of Selinus is the Punta di Granitola, where the Arabs
landed in 827 A. D., Koran in one hand, sword in the other--the last
African invaders to conquer the island, let us hope. Farther along, on
both shore and railroad, is Mazzara, with a Norman cathedral and ruined
castle; and straight northwest on a little promontory of its own is
Marsala, better known for its sweet, rich wine than as the modern
successor of Carthaginian Lilybaion. Though Marsala--the name is Arabic:
Marsa Ali, Ali’s Harbor--was never possessed by the Greeks, its story is
nevertheless vivid and varied. As the chief stronghold of Carthage, it
played a vital part in the struggle for supremacy in this “barbarian
corner” of the island. Pyrrhus besieged it in vain, and thirty years
later Rome besieged it unsuccessfully for eight years in one of the most
stubborn and remarkable campaigns in history. Afterward, during the
Roman period, the city was known as “the most splendid,” and was made
the capital of the western half of Sicily, Syracuse being the eastern
capital. It became an important dockyard and naval station, whence the
Roman campaigns against Africa were dispatched. Don John of Austria,
too, sailed hence on his expeditions against the Turks.
It was into the harbor of Marsala on that memorable 11th of May, 1860,
that the two little steamers _Lombardo_ and _Piemonte_, which the
revolutionists had shanghaied from the Rubattino Company up at Genoa the
week before, sneaked to land Garibaldi and his red-shirt brigade. They
got ashore safely, in spite of the Bourbons’ cruisers, and before they
left for Calatafimi Garibaldi posted his now famous proclamation
claiming Sicily for King Victor Emmanuele.
Of course there are a cathedral, Punic and Christian tombs, the remains
of ancient walls and harbor works, _latomie_ and so on, but to-day
Marsala really spells only--Wine! The largest and most important
establishments are those of the Englishmen Ingham and Woodhouse, and the
Sicilian Florio of Palermo. But there are numerous others not so well
known nor doing so large a business. The long, low, white bodegas are
open to the inspection of visitors, and to those who have never seen
them, the processes of blending and converting with the use of the
“mother” wines, the mechanical bottling and corking, the labeling and
packing departments, the endless rows of hogsheads and the strongly
vinous atmosphere, all possess an attraction peculiarly their own. There
is something of interest in every foot of each establishment.
But--_verbum sap_! Beware the atmosphere, and the testing to which you
are invited. In all the great wine-making countries it is considered a
legitimate joke to befuddle the careless American whose enthusiasm
outruns his prudence. One or two sips of the wine may be taken with
dignity, but Marsala, like its Spanish cousin, Sherry, is a heady wine,
and the rich, heavy air of the winery and wareroom alike bespeak caution
on the part of the investigator, if a delightful memory is not to be
spoiled by a pricking conscience.
Around the old harbor to the north of Marsala are extensive salt works,
and between it and Trapani are about forty-five more, all worked by
private capital, since Italy’s royal monopoly has not been extended to
Sicily. Salt is one of the island’s most valuable exports, and the
salt-pans down by the sea, at Trapani--the ancient Drepana of
Carthaginian days--have made the city the most prosperous place, for its
size, in the island. From a distance the heaps look as if an army of
invading Saracens had pitched their tents upon the flats, and quaint
windmills add a distinctly Dutch note to the scene. The heavy brine is
pumped up into shallow excavations or “pans,” as the tanks are called.
The hot Sicilian sunshine and the warm African breezes do the rest. When
the water has evaporated, the pans are thickly coated with the crystals,
which workmen shovel into glittering heaps and cover with tiles to
protect them. There the salt waits, for either the refinery or for
shipment in bulk as a crude product.
Trapani itself is one of the cleanest towns in the island, as well as
one of the most prosperous, and of course has its Via Garibaldi, which
proves its fraternity with all other Sicilian cities. While there is
nothing really great in it, in either architecture or art, the city is
nevertheless full of minor interest, and various objects of art ranging
all the way from pieces of the Middle Ages down to the present day
statues of King Victor Emmanuele II and Garibaldi, neither of which is
yet forty years old. One could while away many a pleasant day loitering
among these things--the Cathedral, with its Crucifixion by Van Dyck, and
splendid old carven seats in the choir; the quaint decorations of Sant’
Agostino, where the Knights Templars worshiped centuries ago; Lucca
della Robbia’s marble-framed Madonna in the other church of Santa Maria
di Gesù; the seventeenth century polychrome wooden statues by Trapani’s
own sons in the Oratory of San Michele; the queer tower of the
Spedadello down in the Ghetto, and so on. Equally pleasant it is to
wander along the tree-shaded promenade at the water’s edge, or as far
out as the Torre di Ligny, on the very tip of the “sickle” (_drepana_)
that Trapani thrusts out into the sea.
Off shore, the picturesque Ægadian Isles rise like jewels from the sea.
From the middle of the eighteenth to the last quarter of the nineteenth
century they were owned by the noble Pallavicini family of Genoa. They
are still private property, since in 1874 Signor Florio of Palermo, the
steamship man and wine grower, added them to his multifarious interests
and made them the headquarters of the most important tunny fishery in
Sicily.
Trapani possesses the usual historical interest of intermittent
conflict between the races that struggled for the possession of the
island, but its legendary story is even more gripping. Virgil pictures
the founding of the city by the hero Æneas and his Trojans after Troy
had fallen, the death of the venerable Anchises, and the festival Æneas
instituted in honor of his father’s uneasy spirit. The poet’s soaring
imagination carried the hero on up the mist-shrouded mountain behind, to
worship at the fane of his mother Venus. This cloudy peak was named
after Eryx--son of Butes, the mighty wrestler--who challenged Hercules
to a test of strength, and was vanquished by that worthy robber, who
stopped while driving off Geryon’s stolen herds long enough to win the
match and take the mountain as his prize.
With the beginning of history it appears in the possession of the
Elymians, who claimed to be descendants of the Trojans. Twenty-five
hundred feet in the air rises Eryx, to-day Monte San Giuliano, reached
from Trapani by an interminably winding but easy road that twists and
turns half a hundred times in its ascent. Up through the purple shadows
of gulches, along the sharp edges of startling acclivities winds the
trail, with halcyone fields of every brilliant flower and plant below,
and great expanses waving with grain, green and gold with lemons and
oranges, red with the fresh wounds of the plow. Hide-sandaled and
heavily caped and hooded peasants, shepherds who seem to have stepped
right out of Odyssey or Æneid, carrying classic water or wine flasks,
greet us cheerily along the way. As we near the top the reason for these
heavy garments becomes apparent in the lower temperature, for Eryx is a
peak and a city of fog, often a little world by itself far above the
earth, unseen by and unseeing city and plain below, looking down only on
the tufted white of rolling mists. Cyclopean fragments of ancient walls
and natural precipices blend into one another and into the present town
walls, above steep approaches to the Gates of Trapani, of the Heralds,
and of the Sword, the three entrances to all that exists of Eryx to-day,
where less than three thousand souls live in that part of the town
nearest the ruins of the temple, whose very altars long since crumbled
into the dust of oblivion.
In the days when the Elymians were its masters, the mountain was sacred
to a goddess who evidently had the same functions as the Roman Venus.
What her Elymian name was we do not know; but since the Phœnicians
called her Astarte, the Greeks Aphrodite and the Romans Venus, one after
the other, we may feel sure that whatever her original name, she stood,
as did those later goddesses identified with her, for love and beauty
and sustenance. And though centuries have passed, and the altar before
her whereon no blood was permitted to be spilt no longer bears the fire
of sacrifice, the priestly ideal of woman still presides over this
sacred rock so high among the mists. For here where the pagans worshiped
their unknown goddess, to-day the Virgin gazes down upon the unchanging
sacrifice of years, the hearts of men.
The town is rugged and irregular and personal to a degree that
captivates the most hardened sightseer--crooked, narrow streets, full of
quaint buildings rich in Eastern touches: here a latticed casement
suggesting veiled women and mystery, yonder _ajimez_ windows divided by
delicate little columns, farther along an harmonious blending of the
Norman and Moorish on sculptured pillar capital and gallery. The people
are as captivating as the town--caped men stalking to and fro like comic
opera brigands, women whose loveliness has made Eryx noted.
Foliage so rich and varied that only a catalogue can describe it riots
in the garden once part of the temple precincts, and sprouts between the
stones of the ancient, partly ruined castle that legend would have us
believe was erected by no less a personage than Dædalus himself. To-day
the castle is partly used as a prison, and it is a warden who admits to
the quiet precincts. Crumbling bastion and curtain, roofless hall and
moldy dungeon keep, silent corridor and deserted rampart, where no
Elymian spears now glisten in the occasional sunshine or drip gloomily
with the characteristic golden fog, weave a powerful spell, so powerful,
so enchanting none would be surprised in the slightest did the castle
suddenly galvanize into life, and the figure of the lovely goddess of
eld once more smile in the little temple whose foundations only now
exist.
It is a city, a castle, a location only to be sketched. No colors, no
details can at all conjure forth the charm at once so definite and so
elusive. See Eryx!--even if you have no æroplane and must either “ride
or walk”--a guidebook solemnly advises this as the best way to reach the
summit--up that splendid road into the very skies.
XVIII
ADDIO, SICILIA!
In Sicily all roads lead to Palermo. And if they do not, you manage to
make them. And no matter how many times you return to that city of
splendid light, you always find that there is some pleasant or
interesting or profitable trip out from the city that you have missed
before: perhaps to the picturesque Albanian colony of Piana dei Greci;
or up in the hills to the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San
Martino, founded by Gregory the Great in the sixth century; or to the
village of Acquasanta near by for the sea-bathing; or even to the
convict island of Ustica, about five hours away, whose population was
killed or carried off by pirates as recently as the middle of the
eighteenth century; and always--unless you have spent a year straight
through in the city,--you will find some new festival to gladden your
eyes and deafen your ears. It may be that after a tiresome day your
matutinal slumbers are rudely disturbed by a weird clamor in the street
long before getting-up time. Growlfully you turn over and try to sleep
again. The racket goes right on, with darting insistence, and by and by
you grow interested enough to ring for a maid and ask why in the name of
Morfeo the concierge doesn’t go out and put on the soft pedal if he
can’t entirely stop the bedlam!
“Why, _signori_!” cries the girl, astonished at ignorance of so
important an event. “It is the _Festa della Madonna dei Capri_--the
Feast of Our Lady of the Goats. We have it every single year. Everybody
is out!”
It sounds that way! There is no use in trying to sleep, so you get up
wrathfully and open the shutters. Along the dusty way in solemn
processions march conscious-looking cows, wreathed and garlanded with
flowers. Now and then a stately bossy ambles by, wearing a three-foot
horseshoe of red and white roses, rising above her horns like a halo,
and exhaling, if not the odor of sanctity, at least right sweet odors
withal. Other cows have about their necks painted wooden poke-collars
surmounted by floral horseshoes, or wear simply strings of flowers; and
behind nearly every cow tags her mournful looking baby. The goats,
fairly strutting with pride, however, are the most ludicrous members of
these amazing cavalcades, for they have bouquets attached with wire and
toothpicks to twisted horns and even to their sub-tails, which wig-wag
signals as they bob along with arched necks. Occasionally a lone lamb,
waddling toilsomely behind everything else, bleats its disgust and
weariness, its immaculate wool tied full of flaring crimson or blue
ribbon crosses, its tail banded with ribbons in a network until it looks
like the foot and ankle of a dancing girl.
[Illustration: “Baby, tied to mother’s tail, managed to get a few pints
of breakfast as the crowd posed.”]
Before them all march the “bands,” scratch organizations of amateur
players who discourse painfully upon all manner of instruments, wind,
string and brass. The fortunate morning we saw this unique _festa
pasturale_, I really wanted to make pictures, but mindful of my chilly
sunrise experience in Taormina, neither blare of bands nor tinkle of
bells could move me until after breakfast. Then, alas! the decorated
animals had all passed by, and I had to be content with a plain,
motherly cow, whose baby--tied to mother’s tail!--managed to get a few
pints of breakfast as the crowd posed. I made the picture-taking as slow
as possible, to give the poor little calf five minutes for refreshments.
No one who has ever seen the pastures in and near Palermo wonders at the
poor beasts’ melancholy air of appetite. You find some of these grazing
fields on the slopes of Monte Pellegrino when you go toilsomely up to
visit the shrine of the city’s virgin saint, Rosalia. The little Mount
of the Pilgrim has not always borne that name; only since the great
plague of 1624, in fact. Before that, for ages, it was Herkte, or
Heircte. Square-faced and rugged, it rises in a sheer precipice from the
waves on one side, an isolated limestone crag, and slopes less abruptly
down to the Conca d’Oro on the other. In 248 B. C., Hamilcar the
Carthaginian, who camped up on Herkte to keep in check the Romans in
Palermo, cleared and planted fields with grain to feed his hungry
troops. There are still scanty cultivated fields on the mountain, and
though now, from a little distance, Pellegrino seems even balder than it
is, large herds of cattle manage by hard work to crop a meager living
from its insignificant grass and herbage.
Visiting Pellegrino’s upper slopes and the little chapel in the grotto
of Sta. Rosalia is as much a part of seeing Palermo as the visit to the
Colosseum is a part of seeing Rome. But it is not quite so easy as some
of the other little journeys about Palermo, since the steep ascent
cannot be negotiated by carriage. Either on four feet or on two the trip
must be made--most people make it on four. Tumultuous donkeyboys lie in
wait in the Piazza, Falde at the foot of the mountain, and “bark” the
merits of their beasts with a vigor that is sometimes confusing, while
the donkeys themselves--mere burros they are, tiny but powerful--gaze at
their burdens-to-be with a droll air of resignation. Most of the saddles
are medieval housings built of boards, over which odds and ends of
coarse carpet have been nailed until they look like Joseph’s famous
coat. Lucky visitors, or those who start early enough after either
breakfast or luncheon to have room for choice, pick the more commonplace
and comfortable leather saddles that decorate two or three of the newer
donkeys. Otherwise, eating from the mantelpiece for a day or so
afterward is almost a necessity!
The road up the hill is a splendid piece of engineering as well as a
picturesque and romantic highway. Who but Latins would construct at vast
expense a road like this simply for the ease and comfort of pilgrims to
a shrine no more illustrious than scores of others, and call it the _Via
al Santuario_, the Way to _the_ Sanctuary? Partly on the solid rock of
the mountain, partly on graceful arched bridges or viaducts, it leaps
upward in short, acute angles, now spanning the dry bed of a _torrente_,
now edging its way along the precarious parapet of a crag. Large, smooth
pebbles set on edge in mortar, divided and bordered by three lengthwise
parallel strips of lava or some other equally durable stone and crossed
by other strips every fifty feet or so, make it apparently as enduring
as Pellegrino itself. On either side rises a low, thick stone wall, and
every few hundred yards are white signposts with the name in black
letters.
From the Piazza Falde--_falde_, in Italian, means flank, skirt--it leads
upward in an easy ascent that continues for two or three hundred yards.
But after the third turn, it takes a sudden inclination of twenty
degrees or more out of the horizontal. That begins the real climb,--and
the view. Palermo, the Conca d’Oro, the sea below, the mountains
behind, appear and disappear with each turn, like the ever-changing film
of a motion-picture.
The Japanese say there are “two kinds of fools: those who have never
ascended Fuji-yama, and those who have ascended him twice.” The proverb
applies here on Pellegrino perfectly. It is as great a mistake not to
make the journey once as it would be needless to make it a second time,
for no one can ever forget the picturesque climb up that zig-zag road on
donkey-back. When the writer went up, everybody who saw the miniature
procession laughed. We three, beast, boy and man, made a sight Cervantes
would have smiled to see. Equipped with a stout club, the plump boy
answered very well for Sancho Panza. With my camera case over my
shoulder in lieu of a target, and my tripod-legs projecting at
impossible angles, I did very well as Don Quijote. And the faithful
burro was surely a replica in miniature of Rosinante, long ears flopping
disconsolately back over her neck.