At San Giuseppe the people, with cheery indifference, had turned the yard of the house of prayer into a den of thieves. Gambling of every sort known to the Sicilian peasantry was going on, and two games were running full blast, one on each side of the main entrance. There were the familiarp’tits ch’vaux; lotto on a black rubber sheet bearing numbers; the old familiar shell game, and a sort of crude roulette. Surrounding these stalls, of which there were nineteen on the sloping piazza between the church and the street, were hundreds of boys and young men, mostly lads of ten to twelve years. Their average play was onesoldoor penny, the minimum bet half asoldo, and the high foursoldi.
The façade of the church was covered with hundreds of oil-cups in rows. Inside, the whitewashed walls were hung, for the nonce, with a bewildering jumble of strips of gaudy colored cloth, pendantfrom the gallery, fringed and criss-crossed with gold lines like cheap wall paper. The image of San Giu’ (Saint Joseph), mounted upon a large float, waited at one side of the nave ready to go out on the men’s shoulders just at dusk for the procession, and around it stood eighteen candles, some of them six inches in diameter and no less than six feet in height. On the front of the float hung votive offerings, paintings in smudgy oils on cardboard, one showing the death of Benedetto Giuseppe, at the hand of an assassin.
Children with carts and poles and rubber balls played about while old men and women knelt praying on the stone floor, and young girls strolled about in giggling pairs. Four hundred or more guttering candles filled the church with smoke and falling flakes of soot, and “all the world” eddied in and out comfortably and contentedly, unawed by their church or their saint, making a comrade of holy Giuseppe and at peace with the whole of Creation, including even the foreign interloper with the camera, who sat to one side and watched as they made merry.
GOING westward from Palermo, the railroad cuts inland behind Monte Pellegrino, crossing the Conca d’Oro past many villas, and does not again touch the coast until, ten miles away, it reaches Sferracavallo, whose main street is so atrociously paved as to give the town its merited name—Unshoe-a-Horse. The line then skirts the shore for some distance, and the early morning scenes on the water to the right are more than lovely. Fishermen flit about in their white-winged boats or toil at launching the heavy craft. The waterfront of every village is a hive of industry. One picturesque and striking scene after another flits by until, at the end of an hour or so, we come out at Cinisi-Terrasini on the shores of the Gulf of Castellammare, a tremendous, sparkling expanse belted in by a fillet of gleaming white sand. From the bay, orchards and grain fields roll upward to the hills that pyramid, one upon another, into mountains dim and blue in the misty distance.
At Partinico we desert the shore and sweep in a ragged loop inland to pause a moment at thetown—it has a far reaching trade in oil and wine—before darting back shoreward again, unable to resist the fascination of Father Neptune. Close to the water’s edge another town, Balestrate, sprawls along shore among the dunes, over which grows a savage luxuriance of reeds and grasses, among which, on an occasional acre, wrested from barrenness, is a hut of thatch and a hardy family of hard working peasants. Can these be the descendants of the Sikans and Sikels who so long ago vanished from the earth; and are these huts anything like the primitive dwellings in which those still more primitive folk loved and bred and died? Certainly except for using iron tools and smoking tobacco, they seem to have little advantage over their progenitors. Paying back-breaking taxes and furnishing conscripts to-day is almost as bad as being at the mercy of a Greek tyrant with his demands for money and men.
At the head of the bay, three miles before the railroad reaches the town of Castellammare, once the seaport of Elymian Segesta, it turns southward, and ascends the valley of the Fiume San Bartolommeo. Its principal tributary is the Fiume Freddo (Cold Stream), once the Krimisos, near which a wonderful battle was fought between the Carthaginians, and the Greeks under Timoleon the Deliverer. So alarmed was Carthage by his prowess and activity that for the first time the Sacred Band, thepicked Home Guard, was sent over to Sicily. Near the Krimisos, Timoleon, undaunted by the desperate odds, hurled his eleven thousand Greeks against the 70,000 barbarians. Just before the conflict the Greeks met a mule train laden withselinon, or wild celery, the plant used at funerals. What omen could have been worse? Panic hovered in the air. But Timoleon’s wit was quick and sure. Gayly he made a wreath of the plant and crowned himself, with the remark that it was the crown used at the Isthmian Games. With a shout of relief officers and men followed his example, and confidence mounted high as the host marched on. In the battle that followed, the very gods of Hellas fought for the Deliverer, Zeus the Thunderer darkening the heavens and hurling his fiery bolts. Rain and hail quenched the ardor of the Carthaginians; the thunder deafened and the lightning blinded them—the whole storm drove straight in their faces. And the Greeks, marching forward steadily under the divine ægis, cut the Punic host to pieces, annihilated the Sacred Band.
History repeated itself May 15, 1860, when, on the hills of Calatafimi, again a deliverer of the people, this time Giuseppe Garibaldi, crushed a foreign enemy and oppressor. Many an army had marched and camped and fought among these hills and vales, and the powdery dust of the milk-white roads had puffed up from the feet of Elymian and Phœnician,Greek and Roman legions. But never before had a victory meant so much to civilization as the success of the badly armed but desperately determined and immortal Thousand who followed the gray-haired sailor-hero. And history repeated itself yet again when Garibaldi, like Timoleon, refused everything for himself, counting it honor enough to serve Sicily so well.
While it is possible to drive from Castellammare to all the points of interest in the vicinity, and they are many, it is better to go on by the train to the station Alcamo-Calatafimi. Neither town is near the railway station, but eitherdiligenziaor carriage is to be had for the ride—four miles to Alcamo, an old Saracenic town which still keeps a certain oriental tang, or about six miles in the other direction to Calatafimi. Almost straight north, along the high-road to Castellammare, are the ruins of Segesta, a spot full of tragic memories.
Segesta—Egesta it was then—one of the two great Elymian cities, 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-daythere 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 ofPhœnician 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 theselinon, 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 tossedthose 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. Fartheralong, 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 steamersLombardoandPiemonte, 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 theyleft 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,latomieand 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, ifa 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 minorinterest, 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 ofintermittent 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 andhooded 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 nolonger 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, yonderajimezwindows 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 ordrip 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.
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, withdarting 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 theFesta 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 behindeverything 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.
“Baby, tied to mother’s tail, managed to get a few pints of breakfast as the crowd posed.”“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 uniquefesta 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 waveson 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 earlyenough 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 theVia al Santuario, the Way totheSanctuary? 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 atorrente, 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 oftwenty 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.
Instead of beating his beast as almost every other boy does when the animal balks at the steeper part of the ascent, “Sancho” ran lightly forward and began picking up wisps of the straw gleaners had dropped on their way down the mountain. When he had a handful, he held the bunch of fodder outtemptingly, and yelled “Aaaaaa-ah-ah!” “Rosinante” snorted, sniffed suspiciously, and with a suddenness that almost slid “Don Quijote” over her haunches into the road, bolted forward for the tidbit. A mouthful at a time it was given to her, and thus the hardest part of the way was quickly passed over without a blow being struck.
“Do all the donkey-boys do this?” I asked, surprised at the humanity of the proceeding.
“Sancho’s” reply was disconcertingly frank. “Oh, no,Signore. I am the only one. I can’t afford to buy a new donkey, and if Iwear this one out, how can I bringforestieriat Pellegrino? The other boys beat their donkeys—yes! But then, they can get new ones every little while!”
Once above the long series of viaducts that keep the road on an even plane of ascent over gullies and chasms, the way ceases to be so steep. On the rocky slopes, hardy Swiss cows graze among stones that seem incapable of yielding even thistles. When all the sparse grass is gone, with muzzle and hoofs the hard-working cows turn over boulders of considerable size and eagerly lick up the meager, pale blade or two of grass they conceal, finishing the attack by calmly devouring the fat little snails that cling to the moist earth and the under side of the big stones—I saw this myself. The cows have a hard time of it indeed, trudging out from the city every morning, grazing and rooting all day among the rocks,and then going down at night to be milked from door to door.
But the goats have an even harder time. Some are seen every day on the very apex of the mountain, mere black specks against the sky. They clamber up there opposite the telegraph and semaphore stations without a thought of the journeys they must make in the evening. On coming back into town with heavy bags, their owners drive them ruthlessly up four or five flights of stairs to give some lazy customer as little as half a pint of their strong, rich milk.
Near the top of this Via del Santuario is the roofless chapel of Croce, the Cross, which projects bastion-like from the jutting brow of the hill. Here every year a priest from the monastery on the heights, standing where he can see the whole splendid sweep of the Golden Shell below, a rippling sea of green and gold, returns thanks for its fertility during the past season, and beseeches heaven for a continuance of it for another year.
The chapel of Santa Rosalia is in the gloomy cavern to which the lovely maiden fled to escape the temptations of her uncle’s court in Palermo; a court full of the factitious splendor and richness of the East, with Saracens all about and an atmosphere which, to say the least, was probably not conducive to saintly meditation. She is a mysterious and interesting figure, this daughter of themighty Duke Sinibaldo and niece of King William the Good. How could she ever have cast aside the ease and luxury of the elaborate civilization in which she had been reared, and come to this stalactite grotto, dripping and cold, where her companions were no lords and ladies in waiting, but only the bats and small mountain animals seeking shelter from inclement weather?
Exactly how long Rosalia maintained herself here in holy seclusion no one knows, but the date of her death seems to have been about 1170. In any event, she lay peacefully in oblivion until in 1624 some bones were discovered in the cavern. At that time a plague was raging, the city panic stricken, and when the bones were brought in to the Cathedral, the plague stopped. Such a coincidence was too striking to be ignored by the simple-minded, so Rosalia was canonized and appointed the patron of the city, because of her gracious intervention on behalf of the people against whose ancestors she had shaken off the dust of her feet.
Filled with that dramatic religious fervor which has found its expression in so many wonderful pilgrimages, from the Crusades to the present, all Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to worship before the niche in the grotto where she died. Miracle after miracle was performed; and to-day the whole city, whether religiously inclined or not, is devoted to its female saint, whose relics are believed to bepreserved in a huge funerary urn surmounted by her statue, and kept in the treasury of the Cathedral. The monument, which is solid silver, weighs more than fourteen hundred pounds. Every year her festival is celebrated with great pomp, a huge car, fifty feet high and as big as a house, being dragged through the streets amid the acclamations of the faithful. The float is also brought out in solemn procession whenever her intercession is especially desired for the city.
No attention has been paid to the gratuitous information of a scientist that the saint’s relics are really only animal bones. The late Andrew D. White, in his “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology,” says: “When Professor Buckland, the eminent osteologist and geologist, discovered the relics of Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the slightest diminution of their miraculous power.” Certainly no Palermitan to-day would listen to any Goth who attempted to tell him such a story as this; and even to heretic Americans, the “scientific” attitude which delights in iconoclasm is hard to comprehend. Why should the scientist who claims that his only wish is to benefit humanity, take from the poor and miserable any belief that heals them, however idle or superstitious that faith may seem to him?
“All Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to worship in the grotto where Rosalia died.”“All Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to worship in the grotto where Rosalia died.”
Eventually up on the mountain a chapel was constructed whose artificial wall meets the edges of the grotto, enclosing it completely. There is no roof to this outer section except over the front door; and the sunshine, falling upon the floor between entrance and choir, gives this open court the air of a pleasant vestibule roofed only by the azure, and throws into strong, shadowy relief the cavern beyond, with its candles twinkling in the dusk before the altars. A handsome black iron screen divides outer court from inner grotto; and both are paved with big, uneven stones worn to glassy slipperiness by the knees of the devout. The natural rock roof is weird and fantastic, covered with stalactic pendants, colored in all the shades of brown and green by the highly alkaline water that whispers perpetual requiem into myriad leaden gutters which carry it to the sides, and so preserve the decorations from destruction. Bent and twisted and angled, the gutters seem the branches of so many dead trees sprawling high among the jumbled rocks.
At the rear of the chapel is a handsome white marble and mosaic altar, and nearer the front, enclosed in a glass case under an elaborate and massive shrine of highly colored marbles, is the figure of the saint over which Goethe rhapsodized. By the light of a flickering taper thrust between the marble bars, little by little the image within takes shape in the gloom. The head and hands are marble, therobes gilt. She seems to sleep naturally, a young girl of eighteen or twenty, her head easily disposed upon the pillow, her lips just apart; exactly, as the great German expressed it, as if she might breathe and move at any moment. Upon her breast blaze the crimson jewels of the Cross of Savoy, presented by Queen Margharita herself, and innumerable other tokens, among them a huge golden heart, the gift of a Palermitan cardinal. Gold and silver watches, jeweled rings, loose precious stones, bracelets, necklaces, and other ornaments by the dozen lie about the glass casket or upon the gilded robes, which are exquisitely worked with lacelike tracery. And to one side is a gilt scepter fully five feet long.
Opposite, on the wall, a white marble slab marking the niche where the bones lay, bears the words:
VT QVOLOCO,ET SITVD. ROSALIAE SACRVM CORPVSADMIRABILI OPERE LAPIDEIS THESIS INSERTVMANNOS FERMECCCC DELITVERIT,QVOD MAIORES NOSTROS LATVIT, NOBIS DIVINITVS INNOTVITPOSTERI NON IGNORARENT:IPSIVSEXPIRANTIO IMAGO VBI IACVERAT SITA EST:ARA SUPERIMPOSTA ANNO IVBILAEIM DC XXV
From the grotto-chapel, past a group of goatherds’ houses and through their attendant flocks, it is only about a quarter-mile stumble to a jutting spur which forms the highest crag of the mountain.Perched there between the halves of a dismantled arcade of plaster columns, stands a colossal figure of Santa Rosalia, hundreds of feet above the sea. Lightning has beheaded the statue twice, and the two marble heads lie in a little hollow at the saint’s feet. After the second bolt from the heavens the Sicilians, who are not by any means a wealthy people, put on a third head—a cheap plaster one; and though many a fierce storm has raged about Pellegrino since then, not once has the lightning struck the statue—perhaps the plaster head is not worth destroying.
Thatall forestieri have money, so why shouldn’t they pay? is the logic of the Italian, and everywhere except in Sicily he carries it to the absurdities; and even in this blissful isle an individual sometimes forgets his geniality by turning highwayman for the nonce. A tatterdemalion goatherd, for instance, charged me sixteen cents for a milked-to-order pint of goat’s milk.
“Sancho” regarded the transaction with undisguised scorn. “By Bacchus, but allforestieriare fools!” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me to get it for you? I could get all you wanted for four cents!”
Yet notwithstanding his philosophizing “Sancho” generously let me off with only the usual gratuities.
A day or so later—with so much yet undone—grieving that we must leave the island which had taken so mighty a grip on our hearts, we rolled down, for the last time, through the Place of the Four Winds, and went aboard the beautiful littleMarco Polo.
Half a dozen Nations decorated the Bay with their colors from a score of mastheads. Here lay a filthy little Greek tramp whose faded blue and white stripes fluttered limply from her steam-spitting stern; there a smutty white trading barque with gaping red seams and burnished copper, hairy a foot below the water line with grass and moss; yonder trim white steamers of the N. G. I. Disconsolate we sat on the promenade deck watching the lively scene along the Scala Florio. A tiny breeze was stirring, and the slip of new moon came staggering up the blue vault with the rotund body of her deceased mother in her thin little wide-stretched arms, followed at a respectful distance by a winking, blinking satellite. Pellegrino and distant Grifone showed soft and dim in blue and pink and gray, like the too closely cropped hide of a young donkey.
On the wharf were tears and laughter. An eager crowd drove up in ever increasing numbers and thronged the space about the gangplank to give their friends a hearty send-off. Farther out a young girl sang atrociously to a wheezy handorgan, while a small boy, cap in his teeth, clambered overtheMarco Polo’srail and begged for pennies. A gold-laced official, with an important beard and furious mustachios, marched aboard with as dignified a stride as his five-feet-two permitted, and instantly the quiet ship became alive. Boatswains bellowed gruff orders, a steam-donkey somewhere forward chattered right merrily, and down in the hold theingegniero“turned over” his engines to make sure everything was working properly. A serpentine hawser slipped from its bitt on the wharf and splashed writhing into the water at our feet—we were sailing.
But no—at this very last instant a shout from the empty Place of the Four Winds a block away, stopped us. The heartiest send-off of all was yet to come. Roaring and spitting fire and smoke, a huge automobile in gray warpaint tore through the square, skidded to the edge, stopped as though it had rushed into a stone wall, and fairly shot a young man out upon the gangplank just as it quivered on the rise, while women shrieked and men laughed.
His two companions were on the dock in a second, seized his shiny little black box-trunk, swung it to and fro once or twice, and hurled it after him with such precision that it caught the unlucky passenger in the small of his back and bowled him over squarely. As he was rising to his feet, white with astonishment and rage, his heavy handbag, thrownwith the same forceful kindliness, knocked him down a second time, and ship and dock chorused happily together. Meantime the automobile panted contentedly as the fasts were cast off bow and stern, the screw began to revolve, and the whiteMarco Poloslipped out into the gathering night.
Silently we fled the harbor, dotted now with myriad dancing lights; curtseyed gracefully out past Santa Rosalia’s statue, nine hundred feet aloft on the crag; dashed by small clusters of lights in a shadowy pocket of the outer hills, and were at sea again. Once more the long, slow roll of Mediterranean was under our feet, its grateful salt breath in our nostrils.
A boy with the dinner-gong came yam-yam-yamming down the decks. We did not heed him. The whirling screw was throbbing a different refrain in our ears—
“Thou art the garden of the world, the homeOf all Art yields or Nature can decree;E’en in thy desert what is like to thee?Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy wasteMore rich than other climes’ fertility,Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin gracedWith an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.”
“Thou art the garden of the world, the homeOf all Art yields or Nature can decree;E’en in thy desert what is like to thee?Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy wasteMore rich than other climes’ fertility,Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin gracedWith an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.”
THE END
FREEMAN, Edward A.—History of Sicily, 3 vols. A tremendous unfinished work covering Sicily from prehistoric days to the reign of Agathocles. Very heavy and redundant, but precise and accurate. Story of the Nations: Sicily. By the same author, but a complete, very compact history in one moderate volume.
Paton, W. A.—Picturesque Sicily. Very good.
Sladen, Douglas.—Sicily. A huge two-volume narration of the author’s personal experiences. Humorous, informative, slangy, and hastily done but superbly illustrated. An English publication; costs about $20.
Tweedie, Mrs. Alec.—Sunny Sicily. A good but limited book.
There are also several books covering parts of Sicily, or some of its customs; these are generally to be had in the larger public libraries.
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