Chapter V: Part 5

The theater saw more than one drama not of the pure stage, for here eager multitudes watched the glorious combat in the Great Harbor, and here later the “purest hero in the whole tale of Sicily” appeared before his adopted countrymen. Noble by birth and nobler by deed, Timoleon of Corinth, sent in 344 B. C. with an army in response to the plea of Syracuse for aid against tyrants at home and barbarians from abroad, reëstablished the republic, sent for his wife and children, and retiring from public life, settled down to enjoy his later years near the people he had liberated. But though sudden blindness smote the grand old soldier-statesman, his faculties were unclouded to the last. Whenever Syracuse had need of the cunning of his brain, the citizens brought him in state, in a carriage, and led him to the stage of the theater, where out of the fullness of his experience he advised them for the welfare of Syracuse. Eight years only elapsed from his coming to his silent departure across the Styx; and “So died and so was honored,” Freeman tells us, “the man of the worthiest fame in the whole story of Sicily, the man who thought it enough to deliver others and who sought nothing for himself.”

And Timoleon was not only great--he was fortunate! To deliver a whole people quickly and well, to be smitten with the black affliction of blindness while still in the very zenith of his popularity--and so to add the people’s pity and love to their admiration--and then soon to die a beloved hero before the fickle public mind could forget him and the fickle public tongue learn to slander and to curse his name, was the highest fortune man could wish--though in all probability Timoleon himself never realized how kind the gods were to him!

From the upper level of the Theater the most desolate street of Syracuse climbs up the hill--the Street of Tombs, its burial vaults and niches yawning and yearning for the bodies they once sheltered. For centuries it has been the amiable custom, whenever the tomb of a great man is lost, to ascribe to him the finest mausoleum in the vicinity. We know positively that Timoleon was buried either in or very near the _agora_ of Syracuse. We know also that when Cicero was the quæstor of Sicily he discovered the tomb of Archimedes outside the city, and identified it by the geometrical diagram carved upon it to illustrate the master’s favorite demonstration that the solid content of a sphere is equal to two-thirds that of its circumscribing cylinder. Both mausolea have disappeared, and two fine Roman-Doric tombs beside the road to Catania have been arbitrarily identified with Timoleon and Archimedes, regardless of the rights of their original occupants.

Amusing incidents often transpire from the fact that the Sicilian is quite as eager to practice his halting English as we are to struggle with Italian. An ancient long-bearded monk in a very dirty robe opened the door of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista to us, and asked quickly: “_Tedesco?_”

“No.”

“Ah--_Russky?_”

“No.”

“Hmph. _Inglese?_”

“No.”

“_Diavolo!_ But you speak a little English, don’t you?”

“A little,” I replied--in Italian.

The monk stared at me in disgust. “If you can, why don’t you? I speak it whenever I get the chance.”

This exceedingly interesting church dates from the latter part of the twelfth century, and its rose-window is a splendid example of the glass-staining and composition of that time. According to a popular legend, the Apostle Paul preached in the crypt-like chapel when he was in town--“And landing in Syracuse, we tarried there three days” (Acts, XXVIII:12)--and the monk shows the altar where he “celebrated the Mass.” Unfortunately for the illusion, the original San Giovanni was a fourth century structure, so St. Paul could not have seen it on his way to Rome or at any other time. The monk also points out a granite column at which he says St. Marcian was scourged to death, becoming the first martyr in Syracuse, and his seat and vaulted altar-tomb.

St. Marcian’s column stands close to the entrance to the catacombs, which underlie much of the Achradina quarter, and are not only far larger than those at Rome, but are among the most imposing subterranean cemeteries in the world. The main gallery, ten feet wide and eight feet high, runs through the solid limestone for more than a hundred yards. People of distinction were usually buried in the rotundas, large circular chambers or chapels; and here, when the churches above ground were destroyed, or open services interdicted, the hunted faithful worshiped in secret. Here and there, now carved over a door, now rudely daubed in red upon the side of some grave-niche, is the likeness of a palm branch, dumb witness that here lay one who valued faith more than life, and died a martyr.

Even in these dank and gloomy caverns brave souls made art of a crude sort possible. Upon the walls, in the lunettes and above the chapel altars are rough frescoes, poor things in color and design, but breathing the civilizing message of that Divine love which nothing can conquer. Walls and ceilings and doorways of this miniature city of perpetual night are sooty and black with the fumes of the lamps the Christians used. There is little doubt that large numbers of them took refuge in the catacombs during the early persecutions. We to-day cannot conceive of the horror of living in clammy darkness lighted only by the feeble, guttering flames of little bronze lamps. But we can admire the stern fortitude of men and women who could endure all things, and gladly weave into the handles of those poor lamps the words “_Deo gratias_--Thanks to God!” Unfortunately, not a tomb has been left undisturbed, and the only relics now visible are an occasional small pile of bones and smashed pottery; the few sarcophagi which were found having been removed to the Museum where, out of place, they possess little or no significance.

In the same vicinity is the Latomia dei Cappuccini, the largest and by far the most impressive of the quarries, a huge, irregularly shaped gulf whose sides are precipices, honeycombed with small pits, all carved out of honey, or, it might be, from dull clouded amber, and whose uneven floor here and there springs into the air in enormous fantastic columns of golden-gray stone. Both walls and columns riot in luxuriant verdure and flowers--silver vermouth, yellow spurge, glorious crimson roses against green cataracts of glossy ivy and myrtle, honeysuckle and clematis. In the heart of this vast floral labyrinth lofty pines reach vainly upward toward the world from still depths where no breeze ever scatters the leaves, no gales lash denuded branches; and sun-warmed and dew-bathed, little groves of silvery-gray olives flourish beside prickly pear, sulphur colored lemons, yellow nespoli, golden oranges, almond blossoms all a mass of pallor or blushes in the tender warmth of early Spring. Throughout this smiling beauty, shadows dapple rock and foliage, like somber memories of the tragic Greek days, when the captured Athenians were thrust into the inhospitable quarry, then no such glowing garden as it is to-day.

“At first the sun by day was both scorching and suffocating,” says Thucydides, “for they had no roof over their heads, while the Autumn nights were cold, and the extremes of temperature engendered violent disorders.... The corpses of those who died from their wounds, from exposure to the weather, and the like, lay heaped one upon another. The stench was intolerable, and they were at the same time afflicted by hunger and thirst.... Every kind of misery which could befall men in such a place befell them. This was the condition of the captives for about ten weeks.... The whole number of the prisoners is not accurately known, but they were not less than seven thousand.”

At the end of the ten weeks many of them were sold. Thucydides does not explain the fate of those not disposed of in the great auction, but Grote says: “The dramas of Euripides were so peculiarly popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew by heart considerable portions of them, won the affections of their masters. Some even of the stragglers from the army are affirmed to have procured for themselves, by the same attraction, shelter and hospitality during their flight. Euripides, we are informed, lived to receive the thanks of several among these unhappy sufferers, after their return to Athens.”[B]

[B] History of Greece.

Others beside the Athenians have found their last beds here. In a gloomy little side cave, cut in the wall a foot or two above the floor, is a niche sealed with a marble slab--

Sacred to the memory of
Richard Reynall, Esq., British Vice Consul To Syracuse
He departed this life Sept. 16
A. D. 1838.

He was killed in a duel by an expert with weapons he
did not know.

What a vista that opens up! Who was the braggart who forced the quarrel, what were the weapons, what the circumstances of the quarrel, the conditions under which the courageous Englishman went consciously to his fate? And how sad the legend inscribed to our own young countryman upon a lonely niche in the soft tufa a little farther along--

“William Nicholson, Midshipman in the Navy of the United States of
America, who was cut off from Society in the bloom of life and
health on the 18th day of September, 104, A. D., _et anno ætatis
18_.”

Just above this _latomia_, among the olive groves and flowers, surrounded by fine gardens, is a charmingly situated hotel, whence one can look down into this sunken stone quarry-garden if he chooses, and dream of swart laborers hewing out the stones that reared Syracuse a city of cities, of the physical agonies and homesickness of the grave Athenian slaves, or simply of the graciousness of Demeter in clothing the ragged stones as not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed. But for me the hotel by the Bay, the outlook over sparkling, living water, the music of it ever in my ears. And to think of Syracuse is to think of the Promenade of Arethusa, with its musical speech, its Greek faces all about, its maidens and their lovers who need but the touch of sympathetic imagination to be transformed into the nymphs and fauns of Greek days!

XI

CATANIA AND MOUNT ÆTNA

Catania is the second city of the island in importance, and has a far reaching trade in oil and wine, sulphur and grain and almonds, and the other products of the rich and fertile plain at whose edge it stands guard. It is a city of humdrum, a town which, like Milan, reminds one strongly of some American manufacturing center with a large foreign population, and surely nothing could be further from presenting an historic visage at first sight. Yet its history is a picturesque and vivid tapestry of which the main threads have always been the heroic spirit and enterprise of its people.

Settled in 729 B. C.--when the city by the Tiber was only a quarter of a century old--Kataneion or Katane in the sixth century became famous for a reformer and lawgiver named Charondas, some of whose enactments were decidedly original. Divorce he made simple.... Either husband or wife could put away the other for sufficient cause; but neither could remarry with _anyone younger than the person divorced_! And Charondas died by one of his own laws, which forbade men to come armed into the General Assembly. The story goes that he had been out in the hills hunting robbers: when he came back the Assembly was in an uproar, and he hurried in to quiet things. Instantly a member saw his sword, and cried: “Charondas, you break your own law!”

“By Zeus!” he replied, “I will not set aside my law--I will confirm it!” and he plunged the sword into his breast.

Long afterward, in B. C., 476, the emulous Tyrant Hieron juggled with the city’s name and its people, depopulating it and then recolonizing it with new settlers and giving it another name. Are the sober Catanians who pass us to-day descended from the old citizens who came back into their own when the Tyrant died? Or are this trolley-car conductor, this gayly uniformed hall-porter, sons of the Hieronic colonists? And this very street on which we study the Catanians of to-day--was it the ancient way leading toward Ætna, for whom the city was renamed?

The chief reason for Catania’s modern appearance is--it is modern! Destroyed so many times, now in part, again entirely, by Ætna, it is more or less new, a veritable phœnix of Sicilian cities. Suspended from the ceiling of our room in the hotel was the very newest thing, a huge chandelier garnished with exceedingly new and shiny electric light fixtures. But alas! when we attempted to illuminate, we found the chandelier a hollow delusion. When the porter came, he smiled with the indulgence of superior knowledge.

“The chandelier is not intended for lighting. That would be extra--electricity is very expensive!” So we had to be content with the feeble gleam of one honest tallow dip in a room almost as big as a whole floor in a New York mansion.

As to antiquities, Catania has its share--a Greek Theater, a Roman amphitheater, a forum, baths, a nymphæum, and aqueduct, and so on. Most of them, thanks to Ætna’s past activity, are now subterranean and but partly excavated--indeed, almost forgotten. But Catania does better by her celebrities. Tisias of Himera, locally nicknamed Stesichorus because of his genius in perfecting the lyric chorus of the Greek drama presented in the Theater some fourteen hundred years ago, has had a large and handsome square named in his honor, as well as the street leading straight from the heart of the town toward the mountain.

In the Piazza Stesicoro stands a monument to Catania’s favorite son, Bellini the composer, born here in 1802 and brought back in 1867 from Paris, where he died. A more effective monument is the Villa Bellini, the city’s handsome, hilly public park. Myriad steep paths of clean yellow and white pebbles carefully set on edge in mortar, picked out in black and white scrollwork, and edged with solid walls of variegated flowers, lead up to two fine knolls, on one of which is a trim little belvedere flanked by flowerbeds. On the other is a large bandstand. Between the two Ætna hangs motionless on the horizon, more like the mirrored reflection of a volcano than a real mountain, his feet clothed in the foliage of vineyard and forest, his head capped with snows that almost never melt, gleaming in the sunshine like a giant’s silvery hair.

Another charming little park is the Flora della Marina, a narrow strip of garden and greensward along the Bay. As you come through an arch of the railway viaduct, it bursts upon you with the same effect that a strip of brilliant Persian embroidery would have upon a somber coat, and you exclaim with pleasure at the inviting lawns and starry beds of bright colored flowers. Here and there idles an immaculate and lynx-eyed customs guard in sailor’s uniform. From the ship’s mast in the center floats the gaudy Italian tricolor; and in the background is a sailors’ home from which tarry old shellbacks stump out to sit dreaming on the benches that give upon the Bay.

King Roger’s eleventh century Cathedral has been so restored, because of the earthquakes that have wrecked it time after time, that it is simply a huge, composite modern structure. It contains the tombs of various members of the royal house of Aragón, who generally resided here while the powerful baronial families were really ruling in Palermo the capital. In 1445 King Alphonso the Generous founded the first Sicilian university here, and for a long time Catania was the literary center of the island. The handsome new university building, however, dates back only to 1818.

Sicily has always been rather finicky about its saints, and Agatha of Catania, Lucy of Syracuse and Rosalie of Palermo are only three among many venerated virgin patronesses. Saint Agatha was executed by the Roman prætor Quintianus, and has a chapel in the Cathedral containing relics and jewels and a gilded silver statue said to contain her head. In any event, the figure is highly revered, and every year, in February, is carried in procession from church to church throughout the city. Image and pedestal weigh several tons, and about three hundred men robed in white, sturdy fellows all, have to shoulder the fifty-foot beams to lift it. Even with so many bearers, the procession moves forward only a few feet at a time, and it takes two or three days to complete the ceremony.

Holy day spells holiday to the Latin, and his religious ecstasy finds outlet in blazing fireworks, whoops of joyous enthusiasm, streets jammed to suffocation. Windows and housetops as well as the streets are packed with an eager, childish throng bubbling over with mercurial spirits. One of the queerest features of this celebration, which goes back to time immemorial, is a privilege allowed the usually demure and sedate women. A young Catanian told me with great relish that on festival nights the women veil heavily, completely hiding their faces with the exception of the left eye. With that they may work such havoc as they can. Even the bearers of the sacred image return the sly winks and coquettish glances of the flirts whose identity is so perfectly concealed.

In the Piazza Duomo before the Cathedral, is a queer old lava elephant, mounted upon a florid pedestal, bearing upon his saddle an Egyptian obelisk. He looks down upon the noisy trolley cars circling about his feet with an amused expression, as if ridiculing such foolish modern means of conveyance. So old is he that no one knows when he was made, nor why, though legend says the artist was the necromancer Heliodorus--surely a man talented enough to fly through the air from Constantinople to Catania to escape his persecutors, was capable of executing even this weird beast!

Amber of a most unusual quality is a feature of Catania. Nearly every store has some of it, in the rough, and made up into beautiful beads, brooches, smokers’ articles, combs and ornaments of various sorts, though it is not nearly so plentiful to-day as it was twenty years or so ago. The merchants shake their heads over the future of this now high priced commodity, for the best beds have been completely exhausted, and the divers have greater difficulty every year in finding enough. Deeper in color than the usual clear or clouded variety, this amber is a rich marmalade color, with hues ranging from black and dark brown in the cheaper grades through all the ochres and umbers to pure yellow of different tones. The choicest pieces look as if the clear amber had been dipped in oil or vaseline, giving it a distinct bluish tint, observable, the dealers claim, in no other amber in the world--the same tinge that is to be seen upon water when oil is spilled upon it; and the amount of blue, and its brilliancy, determine the value of the product.

In some of the pieces are perfectly preserved mosquitoes, looking exactly like bottled specimens in the museums.

“How old are they?” I asked one dealer.

The Catanian shrugged his despair of figures. “Oh! They were old already when Homer sailed his ship in here on the way back to Troy. They must be five hundred years old at least, _Signore_!”

After all, it is neither history, modern character, nor amber that makes Catania, but Ætna. The finest view of him to be had from the city is from the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San Niccolò, or San Benedetto, on the western edge of the town. Its church, the largest in Sicily and interesting in itself, contains one of the finest pipe organs on the island, an immense instrument with five keyboards. When we asked how soon the next service would be held--I consulted my watch as I spoke--the custodian smiled. “_Gia!_ You will have a long time to wait for the next service. It is played once a year, _Signore_. No more. A very fine organist, the best in Italy, comes down from Naples and plays. He has just been here!”

Since 1866 the monastery has been used as a barrack and school, museum and library. On the roof rises the large dome of the Observatory. Connected with it, and really of much greater practical importance, is an underground laboratory and experiment station full of seismographs and other instruments of the finest precision for the study and recording of earthquakes. To anyone interested in vulcanological phenomena, this deepset cavern and its curious apparatus make one of the most fascinating objects of interest in Sicily--yes, in the world.

From the dome of the church of San Niccolò you see not only Ætna, but the whole horizon. On all sides stretch the reddish-brown tiles of the city, the flat evenness and monotony broken here and there as spire or dome thrusts up through the red crust. Off to one side a prosperous little street ends abruptly in a ragged edged wall of lava some thirty or forty feet high, testifying mutely to the terrific activity that has characterized Ætna at intervals for hundreds of years. A little farther along desolation begins, and nothing is visible in that direction but a long brown spoor leading up the giant’s side--a cold stone river to-day, rough and scaly as an armadillo’s back, but once a fiery serpent whose glowing jaws opened to engulf at least part of the metropolis. On either side beyond the confines of the rebuilt town are vineyards and silver-gray olive groves, vegetable gardens and glowing plantations, full of warmth and color and contrast, and above all the hard china blue of the hot Sicilian sky.

Above everything towers the tremendous bulk of Ætna--Mongibello--standing superbly alone, lord of all this eastern section of Sicily, rising from the sea without foothills or approach. To-day the Titan sleeps, but in the eighty major awakenings recorded in historic times, he has wrought incalculable destruction. Lava has poured from those black lips in hissing floods, one of which covered forty square miles; earthquakes which have laid fifty cities in ruins at once have accompanied the fiery retchings of the monster; ashes and sulphur and stones by millions of tons have rained destruction upon the fertile countryside for miles around. Yet though he has wrought misery and death ruthlessly, Ætna is also a benefactor, for the soil he has made and fertilized bears crops of marvelous richness and abundance. Tradition from the beginning has made the crater the prison of a cyclops, whose struggles to free himself have caused the eruptions. Virgil sang of him; Empedocles; many another. Sicily to them was preëminently the home of the nether gods, and Ætna their most striking manifestation, a peak of mingled fire and snow. Indeed, it was not until Dante came that men were willing to believe anything less of Ætna than the supernatural.

The area of Sicily is some ten thousand square miles, and this greatest of European volcanoes occupies almost one-twentieth of it. It is nearly 11,000 feet high--the ascent is practicable only in Summer--and covered with more than two hundred smaller volcanoes or cones, huge safety-valves for the big boiler, through which the continual ebullition of the slumbering hell within finds exit in steam and vapors.

Having experienced the doubtful delights of climbing smaller Vesuvius--it is less than half Ætna’s height--we decided that Ætna was to be ours from a distance only, much as we regretted not to see the indescribably magnificent effect of sunrise from its peak. Many visitors are satisfied to make the shorter, easier trip up the Monti Rossi, “The Brothers,” two of the minor craters thrown up in 1669 on the side of the main peak. They rise to the not inconsiderable height of three thousand feet themselves, and the views from them are very fine. It is possible, moreover, to encircle the mountain by railway, and so to enjoy very satisfactory vistas of both volcano and countryside--vast ragged plains of lava like petrified sponges of red and black and gray, the dark, fertile soil the lava makes, rich with vineyards and fruit plantations, small “safety-valve” craters, often hissing threats, and farm-houses among the trees in this, the most thickly populated agricultural district in creation. A brief stop over at one or more of the towns along the line affords still further opportunity to see the Titan and his works.

All these towns are rich in history, and the most surprising and impossible echoes come ringing out of the past at the touch of a modern foot. For instance, Adernò, a comfortable town with a big, dilapidated Norman castle in it, stands on the spot where Dionysius I founded his city of Hadranum twenty-three hundred years ago. Near it once stood the Sikel temple of Hadranos. Instead of human guardians, more than a thousand great dogs protected this shrine of the fire god, and their fame spread all over the world. Fragments of this structure are still to be found in a private garden near the town.

The railroad--it is called Circumetnéa--not only encircles the mountain, as its title indicates, but also climbs up along the slopes, reaching an altitude at one point 3,195 feet above the sea. This gives the traveler an opportunity to see two of the different zones or belts of vegetation on the volcano. Lowest of all is the cultivated zone, in which deciduous growths and the grapes of Ætna play a prominent part. Just above the tracks begins the second belt, known as the _Regione Boscosa_, or forest region, which reaches up nearly four thousand feet higher. This consists mainly of evergreen pines, of birches in its upper section, and of a few insignificant groves of oak. The third and topmost division, extending to the black lipped silent crater itself, is the sterile _Deserta_, where only the most stunted vegetation exists.

In 1040 that Byzantine would-be deliverer of Sicily, Giorgios Maniakes, attacked the Saracens outside Maletto. The Norwegian Prince--afterward King--Harald Hardradr, and a considerable body of his berserkers formed part of the Byzantine army; and the allied forces scored a decisive victory. A century and a quarter later a monastery was founded there, and in 1799, during the Bourbon period, Ferdinand IV gave the whole estate to Lord Nelson, creating him Duke of Bronte, a nearby town whose name means thunder. The Villa, as it is now called, is still the property of an Englishman, the Viscount Bridport, who also retains his local title.

The most picturesque of these Ætnean towns is Randazzo, an interesting place where the women throw voluminous white shawls over their heads when they go to mass. Although Randazzo is closer to the crater than any other town, it has always escaped destruction, and so is full of exceedingly interesting medieval remains--houses, a palace with an inscription in Latin so poor that a schoolboy might have written it, and a ducal castle now used as a prison. What an untoward fate for a noble structure from whose walls project the sharp iron spikes where the ancient Dukes impaled the heads of criminals they executed! During July and August Ætna may be ascended from Randazzo. The trip takes only about six hours, and the hotel proprietor will provide guides, mules and food for about seven dollars (American), for each climber.

Another echo of ancient days is the little Byzantine church at Malvagna, the only one of its kind in the island, by the way, that survived the Saracen invasion and conquest.

A delightful little excursion may be made from Catania by carriage and boat along the coast to the Scogli de’ Ciclopi. To the prosy geologists, who mess about with their little hammers, these tremendous boulders are no doubt merely evidences of titanic natural convulsions. But to the rest of mankind, with a love for blind old Homer, they are the stones poor clumsy Polyphemus hurled at escaping Ulysses and his intrepid companions. The stately hexameters of the Odyssey give the story a noble swing--the brawny Greek hero burning out the drunken giant’s eye with the blazing end of a pole; the escape in the chilly dawn clinging to the bellies of the cyclop’s sheep while he ran his huge hands over their backs; the launching of the little boat, and the daring mockery of the bewildered giant.

Blind and raging, crossed for the second time in his blighted life by puny beings he could crush with one hand, Polyphemus tore off the top of a small hill and threw it, missing the Greeks by a hair, but raising such a wave that their boat was almost washed ashore. Again Ulysses cried out upon him, and again the giant threw. And to this day the rocks tower out of the sea, one of them over two hundred feet above water and a couple of thousand feet in girth. Out of this giant’s missile the Italian authorities have made them a geodetic survey and hydrographic station. What would Homer--or Ulysses!--think if he could see the rocks to-day? Curiously enough, though the Odyssey particularizes regarding these two of the Scogli, or Rocks, it says nothing whatever as to the other five of the group.

Right here another picturesque legend dealing with Polyphemus develops. For miles along this shore, town after town has _Aci_ prefixed to its name, as a reminder of the story of Galatea and Acis. Polyphemus--huge, gross, uncouth monster--had no attraction for the dainty nymph, but as so often happens in even the prosaic days of fact, his bulk did not keep him from loving Galatea passionately. So when--if one may be irreverently colloquial--the shepherd boy Acis “cut him out,” Polyphemus crushed him to death with stones in Galatea’s bower. Olympus heard her piteous mourning, and from the lifeblood of Acis sprang a crystal stream which imparted its life to the fields of Catania until jealous Ætna drank it up. But Acis lives in spite of the giant. Acireale, Acicastello, Aci San Antonio--how quaintly pagan and Christian myths mingle in the Latin countries!--and many another Aci perpetuate him.

Acireale, about ten miles from Catania on the main line of the railroad to Taormina, is a pleasant place to make a stay. Its mineral springs, the delightful views by sea and shore, the walks and drives in every direction through surroundings of the keenest interest and beauty, and, for those who are fond of the water, the little boat trips in the vicinity, make it a most agreeable spot in which to idle during the soft Sicilian Spring.

XII

TAORMINA

Sicilian railroad trains have the very amiable--or would some people spell that word exasperating?--habit of never running according to schedule. One is tempted at times to wonder why they have a time-table at all! Express or local, the train is always either too late or too early. You may take your choice of reaching the station well ahead of the “due” time, and vegetating until the little locomotive sniffles shamefacedly in, away late, or going on time and finding the carriage doors locked, the train ready to leave, and the guards very much disinclined to open for you. A jingling of one’s pocket usually unlocks the doors in such circumstances, however.

Did I say, “express or local”? Which it is is a puzzle, since it is all one. The “local” part of the train has to rush madly by stations whenever the “express” part does; and the “express” half is obliged to halt whenever the “local” end comes to a station it especially likes. Which train you ride in depends entirely on the label that happens to be on your car! But even with these vagaries, the railways are good, the employés courteous, usually amenable to jingling reason, and the service unusually safe. A railroad inspector I talked with explained this safety tersely. “Italians or Sicilians would not matter. But, _per Baccho_, to smash up foreigners--we can’t afford it!” As to that, their private reasons are none of our affair. That we can feel safe, and be safe, is the main thing.

The day we came to Taormina we reached the station too early, and a miracle occurred. The train was early, too--fifteen minutes too early!--and we secured an excellent compartment and waited. That was decidedly too early to go ahead with safety, so engineer and conductor strolled about town making friendly calls, a trainman had an _apéritif_ at a nearby _caffé_, and we started at last in leisurely fashion--five minutes behind time.

The station is Giardini-Taormina, at the sea level; and Giardini, though theoretically Taormina’s “harbor,” is only a little fishing village. Yet here twenty-five centuries ago the first of Sicily’s deliverers, the noble Timoleon of Corinth, landed to begin the work that built him such fame and gave Sicily such liberty. And in 1860 the second Deliverer, Giuseppe Garibaldi, after completing his work in Sicily, embarked here for Reggio di Calabria to continue his campaign of liberation on the Italian mainland. Nowadays nobody stops to look at Giardini twice, since far above, on the great cliffs against which it nestles, lies the favorite beauty spot of Sicily, the haunt of artist and traveler the year around.

If you so much as look doubtfully at the rickety old landaus that meet the train, a driver will pile your luggage into one, almost push you in after it, and cracking his whip, start slowly up the road, a long, gentle ascent built in great sweeping curves. Splendid views unveil themselves at every foot of the way. Below lies the sea, ranging from transparent, broken-edged emerald at the beach, to fathomless azure in the depths, and a dull, dusty, almost colorless void at the horizon. It is streaked with wind-paths, flecked with tiny whitecaps, dotted with fishing boats flitting about like white bats, while far up the Strait where Italy seems to reach over and embrace its lovely sister, it is easy to imagine Scylla and Charybdis reaching out hungry, gleaming hands for the hapless voyagers rashly passing between. It is hard to think of anything else than the Argonauts, even amid the beauty of wild and cultivated flowers, vegetation clinging tenaciously to the face of the cliffs, or growing in luxuriance upon terraces in lovely banked and esplanaded gardens. Picturesque villas of every type range all the way from the usual bare, square, white hut-style to artists’ abominations in all manner of castellated, battlemented, machicolated forms.

A turn in the road opens a matchless vista of Ætna; another,--and squarely in front glimmers the red and tan ruin of the Greek Theater, perched high upon the jutting crest of a mound from which the spectators of the play had magnificent views to amuse them in case they tired of the work of the chorus. Standing on tiptoe at the very edges of precipitous acclivities big, pleasant looking hotels peer down with staring window-eyes, very attractive, but a trifle suggestive of what might happen should the edge of some particular precipice crumble off.

If you have been staying all along the way at the usual Swiss hotels with their familiar Franco-German cooking, why not try a genuinely Sicilian hostelry for once! Such quarters are to be found on the main street, in a hotel which wanders up and down the hillside in an ungainly series of overlapping stories and queer detached turrets and belvederes. From the street, the entrance looks very much like a black hole in the wall. It is exactly the same as the door of a little carpenter shop alongside, with the single exception of an inscription in faded paint: _Ristorante_.

The greatest charm of the place is a garden, which rambles about partly on the level, partly down steep little banks, and then, in the rear, rolls up to a stone wall beyond which is one of the milky white roads of the country. It is crammed with the wildest sort of tangled climbing roses, tiny things the rich color of a Maréchal Niel but no bigger than a ten-cent piece; large red, yellow, pink and white roses; splendid geraniums, orange trees, lemons, medlars, almonds, stubby agaves, prickly pear, pink-flowered climbing cactus, and wonder of wonders, even a pair of apple trees! Ivy, numerous other vines and brilliant convolvulus riot about them all, while down the center runs a path under lemon-arches half smothered in rose bloom.

Beside this walk is a trellis bower covered with thousands of the tiny yellow roses, and furnished with a marble-topped table and an iron chair--an ideal literary workshop. But alas! the village tinsmith evidently shared my prejudice in its favor. When I came out prepared to work he had already preëmpted it for his mechanical workshop, and was filling the air with clatter and the noxious fumes of smoldering charcoal as he knocked together watering-pots to keep the garden green.

There are so many means of communication between the wings and the dining-room that it is very easy to lose one’s self. Beware the kitchen stair especially, where a large, plump, elderly, and exceedingly dignified goat often blocks the way. Try to push her gently aside, and you are astonished to find how heavy and strong a goat is. Take her firmly by her stump of a tail and one horn, to hoist her bodily, and the proverbial pig under the stile could make no more distressing noise. Among those who hear is the cook. Full of apologies, and unheeding terrific protests, she grabs at the animal’s beard and a horn or leg, and literally yanks her inside. But the moment she lets go, Signora Goat bounces out again as though on the end of a rubber band.

Taormina is bound to the green hillside by one long, curving white ribbon of a street, with flying tag-ends of alleys and byways. This Corso Vittorio Emmanuele is the artery that carries the thin but pulsing tide of the town’s affairs, a narrow, wind-swept chasm, but far from being a dull one. Traffic is brisk, and the tiny shops, whose dark interiors are scarcely more than visible, do a lively trade with the townsfolk and _contadini_. Here and there a curio store--Taormina lives and fattens on the gullible foreigner, be he collector, artist, or traveler only--displays a great stringful of pottery hung beside the door to tempt the unwary browsing antiquary with tangible memories of “the glory that was Greece.”

All about artistic decay is embayed by square, ugly, utilitarian buildings which the natives consider more practical than the exquisite finery of their noble predecessors. The very unexpectedness with which delicate bits of ruin appear constitutes one of the town’s greatest charms. Yet happy in its isolation is the Badia Vecchia, a bit of fine old crumbling, machicolated stone tower once the nunnery of Taormina, surrounded by a brilliant patch of lavender-flowered cactus among the trees on the irregular hillside above the town. Roofless and abandoned, it stands outlined in soft brown against the cobalt sky, its delicate windows still bordered by snowy marble diapering, its walls partly checkered in black lava and white marble, a noble Gothic picture, saturated with the atmosphere of Norman days.

A rugged, winding path leads up this hillside to the ancient castle, crowning a crag far above, though the usual route is by way of Mola. To-day the chief importance of the castle is as a platform for viewing the stirring panorama of shore and hills. Just beyond Giardini on a little promontory now covered by a luxuriant lemon plantation, those ardent pioneers under Theocles--it seems hardly fair to call them pirates, as some writers have done--established Naxos, the elder sister of all Greek colonies in Sicily, in 735 B.C. One thing of especial interest about Naxos is that outside its walls on what quickly became neutral ground, the colonists erected an altar and shrine to Apollo Archegetes, not merely the patron of Naxos, but the patron of all Hellenic Sicily. Hither all the Greeks could come in safety for a blessing ere departing on a journey, no matter what internecine strife might rage in the island. The athletes and patrons of the Olympic and Isthmian Games came here before sailing, to secure the favor of the god in their endeavors to wrest the laurel from their brethren of Greece.

Naxos, however, was short-lived compared with the other cities. In 476 B. C., the Tyrant Hieron of Syracuse, who might well be called “the juggler of colonies,” forcibly depopulated it and resettled its inhabitants in the city of Leontinoi. This seems to have been a favorite amusement of tyrants. To satisfy a passing whim, or as a means of punishment, the tyrant of the moment would calmly compel some unfortunate community to move in a hurry to a spot of his own choosing. However, there seem to have been people living in Naxos seventy-three years later, for we read that in 403 Dionysius destroyed it completely, and ever since it has existed only as a name, as the first milestone along the path of the superior incoming Greek civilization that made Sicily great.

The Taormina castle, by the way, is an excellent vantage point from which to pick out the places to which excursions may be made, and there are many very attractive ones--by boat, on foot, or on donkeyback, to Capo di Taormina and Capo di Sant’Andrea, where the coast is pock-marked with curious grottoes, to Monte Venere, to Monte Zirreto, and to many another local beauty spot.

In Sicily you must not believe everything you think you hear--and above all, you must not act rashly upon such an impression. When a Sicilian is feeling well, his “Good morning, sir!” sounds like “Spartacus to the gladiators.” When anyone addresses you as though murder were contemplated, with yourself as the victim, be easy. It is most likely to be a polite wish for a pleasant journey, delivered with characteristic Latin fervor and inflection. Our first morning in Taormina, a wild looking peasant beauty bearing upon her shapely head a huge dripping amphora, stopped us with uncouth gestures and a laugh so eldritch it startled us. Jerking her finger at _La Signora_, she poured forth a torrent of impassioned Sicilian dialect we failed to understand, though I thought she said we were folk unfit to be in Taormina and had better leave immediately.

Unpleasant thoughts of the _Maffiusi_--the _Mano Nera_ we loosely call them--swept through me. The girl’s utterance was so fierce, her expression so positively menacing, I wondered whether she might not be really an agent of the dreaded band. But before my combined annoyance and alarm led me into difficulties, two Taorminians came up and explained in Italian: “The _signorita_ is afraid your _Signora_ will lose her handkerchief. It is falling out of her belt.”

I was glad I had not shouted for the police!

When I asked the girl, who could understand Italian perfectly, though she spoke none herself, if I might photograph her, she consented without a trace of her former ferocity and--with a self-respect unfortunately rare in Taormina--refused any gratuity, merely wishing us a torrential good day as she vanished up the black and smoky stairs of a stone hut on one of the side streets.

It is a pity the town has not more like her. The Taorminians display comparatively little of the simple geniality and charm of the Palermitans, little of their bright-faced innocence and heartiness. At first it is hard to understand why, since they are no less Sicilian than their fellows of the capital. But a slight acquaintance with them will convince the most casual observer that they have learned their own value only too well as replicas of Greek and Roman and Saracenic beauty. Consequently many of them have turned from simple hill folk into insincere, lazy, professional poseurs, alert for camera or pencil, and lost forever to the childlike graces that distinguish their brothers.

And not only are the people replicas of the past, but their native music is reminiscent also--pure Greek melodies that have floated down the river of time from the days when Bion and Theocritus rambled these same hills and wrote songs eternally young; Saracenic love-songs full of the wild spirit of desert and river, quavering and melancholic; passionate lyric romances suggestive of cavalier Norman days. But it is the Greek that, being the purest and simplest strain, has always prevailed. Every day little shepherd lads stir the terrific solitudes of wind-swept mountain steeps with wordless songs drawn as by magic from their reedy flutes, music shrilly sweet and unforgettable. And at dinner in the evening you may hear some little minstrel wandering up and down the Corso, fluting his heart out in the moonlight.

In your eagerness you peradventure hale him into the mysterious labyrinthine “Garden of the Moon” behind the hotel, where the silvery blue orb of a great arc-lamp glows among the interlacing almonds and medlars, and bid him play. But he is a shy, embarrassed Pan, stiff of finger, timid of lip until he forgets the listening bystanders. Then the magic pipe takes up again the silver strain. There is no hotel upon the mountainside, but only the melody, the moon-mellowed primeval forest, the slumbering forms of the little shepherd’s weary flock. The music ceases--the elfin charm is broken. Rudely over the fairy ring of your vision burst the ungentle voices of moderns in tailor-fashioned clothes, stiff boots and Paris hats, wearing no chaplets of ivy or acanthus upon ambrosial locks--and worst of all, some of them smoking cigarettes!

One such night I pleaded with the little minstrel, urged him by strange and magic names he never knew, to let me have his reed. Reluctantly, unsmiling, he gave it up, and as I write, it lies close by. But alas, no more it knows the Grecian strain--it will not sing for me!

XIII

SOME MOUNTAIN VISTAS

The ignorance and illiteracy to which reference has already been made are the chief misfortunes of the Sicilians. Since schools are few and far between, little girls are taught only to sew, knit and cook. The boys, more unfortunate, receive little or no instruction at all--there is work for them as soon as they are old enough, and they are useful in the fields and about the stables and goatpens at six or eight. The children of wealthy or noble families seem to be regarded as superior beings who have to learn practically nothing, and who accordingly go through life unworried by knowing anything. A few years ago an English lady undertook to make Taormina over single handed, and though the town still has a long and thorny road to travel, the results the Hill School has accomplished in helping the people to help themselves have surpassed all anticipations, and prove that even with both heredity and environment against them, the people are willing to learn and to work when shown how.

Within one of the dark doorways along the Corso is a typically Taorminian institution, a knitting school where little tots sit demurely knitting, crocheting or embroidering with faces as expressionless as the visages of so many trained kittens. The “lady principal” comes forward graciously to welcome visitors in her tiny domain, and readily grants permission to make photographs. But the room is lighted only from the front door, and the little heads and bodies are so difficult to keep in repose for even a few seconds that photography is speedily abandoned for an inspection of the work of the pupils, babies of from three upward, except that occasionally an older girl takes a “post graduate course” in fine embroidering. They click away industriously as their visitors pass along the line, and some do not even glance up, so thoroughly have they been drilled by the schoolmistress. Each juvenile knitter uses two long needles and wears a belt with a little leather plastron, in which the butt-end of the stationary needle rests, to protect the thinly clad little body from the prick of the sharp steel instrument.

When we visited the school, I asked the teacher how much she charged for tuition.

“Ten cents a month each,” was her grave reply. “It is much for some to pay.”

“Does that pay you?”

She waved her hand at the circle of twenty-five pupils. “It does!”

The food of the people is intended to support life rather than gratify the palate. And though the little ones, like normal children anywhere in the world, are gifted with a sweet tooth, their desire for _dolci_ is very, very seldom gratified. So when you loiter about the door of the little school, be sure to have a bag of sweet cakes with you--the bakers along the Corso all sell them. The “lady principal” will gladly permit you to distribute the glistening, white-iced treasures, and you will be amply repaid in watching the pupils--the daintiness with which they accept and hold the proffered delicacies, the timid “_Graz’, Signora! Graz’!_” of each, the perfect restraint of eager eyes and mouths.

A very important personage in this little mountain town is Signor Atenasio Pancrazio, banker, steamship agent, postal messenger, and storekeeper; and curious indeed are his business methods. On four days which we noticed especially because of a desire to get at some of Signor Atenasio’s money, he opened his bank-store at the somewhat irregular and unusual hours of eleven-thirty, a quarter before nine, noon, and twenty minutes past three. And then, to make the hours appear still less like a matter of sordid business for gain, the gentleman threw wide his doors on a Sunday morning and kept open shop, bank and house until long after everybody but the ubiquitous tourist had gone to bed.

Banker though he is, the good gentleman has ideas above mere money-making, and if you are content to sit at his feet in the big, dim counting-room--which smells of cheese and wine, of garlic and rubber-stamp ink--you can learn much about the Sicilian problem, which is as perplexing to the Italian Government as the Irish bogy is to Downing Street. When absentee landlordism is combined with ignorance and poverty, it makes a problem indeed.

The agricultural system is very old. It had its inception as long ago as the days when Pope Gregory the Great was one of the most important proprietors in the island, in the name and person of the Church. He was a good and careful landlord, but others are the opposite, and the system, always unjust, has degenerated. At the present time an estate is nominally managed on behalf of the owner by a factor, who most often re-rents it to someone else. This third person in turn, not wishing to cultivate it personally, leases it in small patches to the farmer at exorbitant rates, or to a fourth factor, who repeats the operation. Thus when the peasant finally comes into possession of his acres, he is paying so heavy a rental that it is practically impossible to do more than make his actual expenses.

Driven to desperation by such a condition and often in actual need, he has recourse to the money-lender, who loans readily--and collects with grim certainty, practically enslaving the wretched farmer. The usurers grow rich, but they hoard up their evil fortunes, keeping the money out of circulation, and the country is the poorer. Naturally the steamship office becomes the most important place in towns where discontent prevails. The companies have men ready to answer all questions, and more than willing to encourage the peasant to give up his hardly earned savings, providing he is physically sound. Indeed, they even send glib and persuasive agents about to drum up trade in likely districts by painting glowing pictures of the golden streets of America.

“Signor Atenasio,” I said, “you are a steamship agent yourself. Do you go about and make trade this way?”

“The holy Saint Pancratius forbid!” he exclaimed, piously calling upon his patron. But he spoiled the effect by adding instantly: “No, I do not have to. I get all the trade there is in Mola anyway. It is very little,” he shrugged, and turned the subject.

This Mola, the tiny town on the hilltop above Taormina, may be cited as a typical example of what taxes, lack of education, usury, and as a consequence, emigration, are doing for Sicily to-day. Though Mola lies only about a thousand feet higher up in the air than Taormina, it is ten times as far away by foot--and by foot you must go, “either your own or another donkey’s!” as one weary but none the less enthusiastic visitor put it on returning. The road--a good part of it is low stone steps, the round, flat pebbles set on edge in mortar--winds along the uncertain sides of the little valleys, and since not a single tree of any size shades it from an almost tropical sun at full power, it is sufficiently trying. Here and there a female beggar pops up most unexpectedly to demand an alms “for the love of the blessed Christ who walked thus to Calvary!”