Vistas in Sicily Part 5

Entering the town by the Garibaldi Gate--the liberator is even more frequently honored than the first King--we follow Garibaldi Street to the Piazza della Rivoluzione, in which a queer, old, bent, apparently half-intoxicated figure of the crowned Genius of Palermo marks the spot where the first revolutionists gathered twelve years before the Thousand captured the city. Near by in the Piazza della Croce dei Vespri is the monument in memory of the French ma.s.sacred in 1282, and buried here beneath a single marble column surmounted by a cross and surrounded by a railing of lances and halberds. At the corner of the square, built in a housewall, is a single fifteenth century column, marking the site of the palace in which Governor St. Remy, who was the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou at the time of the ma.s.sacre, lived and is said to have been besieged.

From the railroad station a broad street, the Via Lincoln, leads to the bay. Gualterio volunteered the information that the street, "la Via Lin-col-ni," was named for a "great Sicilian patriot who was shot long before we were born!" It would have been a pity to disillusion him and rob Sicily of so great a figure, so we kept a smiling silence.

Beside the bay is an exquisite little park with broad lawns, splendid trees and paths laid out like the spokes of a huge floral wheel; one of the most perfect gardens in Sicily. It is called Villa Giulia, in honor of Donna Giulia Guevara, wife of the viceroy, Marcantonio Colonna, who founded it in 1777. The gardener's little boy, a cherub of soft black eyes and winsome smile, afforded another striking proof of the beneficent effects of education upon the children. Announcing proudly that he was learning to be a gardener himself, he flitted from flower to flower like an amorous bee, fondling, smelling, praising each burgeon in turn, and naming the plants with a perfect flood of Latin botanical terminology.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The 'Poor Man's Promenade' stretches away toward Mte Zaffarano, dim and misty."]

It was in this lovely park that Goethe spent a great deal of time during a Sicilian sojourn in 1789, reading Homer and seeing the Villa's beauties with so sympathetic an eye, he wrote of it that it looked like fairyland and transported him into ancient times. His _Italienische Reise_ is particularly enthusiastic on Sicily, and he sums up the island's importance with a glowing tribute: "Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul--Sicily is the key to all."

In clear weather a large raised terrace at the southeast corner of the Villa affords a peep at distant aetna's h.o.a.ry crown. But if the weather be too hazy to see the t.i.tan, the nearer view compensates in great measure for the invisible volcano. To the southeast the "poor man's promenade" stretches away in a misty vista toward Monte Zaffarano. The fis.h.i.+ng boats tie up here, and the fishermen and their families make merry over their early suppers at open-air tables in the dusty, unpaved square that extends inland from the broad and level beach. In the other direction the broad Foro Italico or Marina, a handsome, tree-lined esplanade circ.u.mscribing the edge of the bay, with Monte Pellegrino rising ma.s.sive and dominant at the other end of the town, miles away, affords a striking contrast. This is the "rich man's promenade," and here, in summer, Fas.h.i.+on makes its evening _corso_. Half Palermo sits in its iron-bottomed chairs sipping at the ices and cool drinks for which the cafes are noted, and smoking countless _sigaretti_, while the other half rolls lazily by in its carriages of state.

From the Villa Giulia a line of old palaces marks the landward side of the Marina all the way down to the foot of the Corso, at its other extremity. Many of them belong to n.o.bles whose names are woven deep into some of Sicily's most important history. Down near the Porta Felice--the Happy Gate--a little wooden pavilion juts boldly out into the sea, a combination library and tearoom, whose presiding genius is an English gentlewoman, charming of speech and manners. No pleasanter way of resting after a hard day's work sightseeing can be found than to sit here over cups of steaming Ceylon, while the sea s.h.i.+mmers an iridescent opal, ruffled with streaky little ripples of protest for the approaching night. And afterward what more fitting than to reenter Eden by the Happy Gate--the Porta Felice--named as a memorial of the Lady Felice Orsini, wife of the Viceroy who built it. Happy Lady Felice, to have such a monument--and _porta felice_ in truth, looking one way out over the sparkling sea and the other upon the city beautiful.

VII

AROUND THE ISLAND

Fascination and Palermo are synonymous; the subtle charm of the city works into one's very blood. Day after day and week after week roll by, until with a start of surprise that is akin to consternation one realizes that unless he has a year to devote to the island he must seek fresh vistas soon or leave Sicily, having seen nothing but the capital.

Regretting is as vain as it is foolish. The only thing to do is to go!

Until you do, you have no idea of what the _tessere_--those amazing little bargain books--do for the Sicilians. Not only do they bring foreigners with money to spend, but natives of every cla.s.s and station, unable to travel at other seasons of the year, flock to the ticket window with the _tessere_ in their hands; and many of them who ordinarily would travel third cla.s.s make a _festa_ of their trips by buying first-cla.s.s accommodations with the aid of the rebate.

There is no Pullman system in Sicily. The first arrivals at the station take the best seats, and hold them against all comers. If you do not like cheap tobacco, and do like air, it is a good plan to reach the station early. All this we learned by experience; so we were ready to leave Palermo some time before the train was, and secured a little stateroom called a _berlina_, in the front of the car, whence an un.o.bstructed view on both sides is to be had.

Scarcely is the capital left behind than it is completely forgotten in the astonis.h.i.+ng floral display that flashes past--an unending motion-picture in vivid colors. For miles the track runs close beside the sea between deep floral hedges. Crimson geraniums from five to eight feet in height blazing with color, pink wild roses, sweet-scented white locust blossoms, spiky p.r.i.c.kly pear, the yellow striped spears of the agave, and pink and lavender morning glories vining among and over them all give one the impression of being hurled through a giant hot-house.

But here is no cultivation. Sicilian Nature, with prodigal lavishness, is alone responsible for the brilliant pageant. At the feet of the taller plants burgeon scarlet poppies, low, earth-nestling lavender cactus blossoms, and legions of dazzling b.u.t.tercups. More poppies among the gra.s.s and grain contrast with whole acres of heavy-headed deep crimson clover, in which the hungry cattle wade to their knees.

On the landward side of the railroad undulate the hills in soft nuances of green, speckled and flecked with ever-changing light and shade.

Farmhouses ma.s.sively built of rough unshaped stone, because the stone is there and mortar is cheap and the labor costs nothing, stand at long intervals among the golden grain square and squat, each with a heavy Normanesque battlemented tower. The poorer houses barely show their roofs or towers above the dense groves of lemon or orange. Sometimes part of a white wall appears through the bushy tree foliage, which is varied by occasional wide stretches of vines on low, far-reaching trellises, over which stands a slim-bodied palm, an alert, lonely sentinel.

The sea s.h.i.+mmers like gla.s.s in the gay sunlight, and even from the rapidly moving train the bottom is visible, sometimes ten or fifteen feet below the surface. White stones and deep purple patches of weed lie like pearls and amethysts imbedded in the heart of the cool emerald.

Tiny reefs, far from their islets, and big, jagged rocks show their teeth at the ragged coast line through fringes of snowy foam. Ever s.h.i.+fting car-window prospects float by on the wing, and before you can fairly appreciate one, you pa.s.s another.

Around a curve, the train dashes into a big fis.h.i.+ng village, a st.u.r.dy hamlet of nets and boats, of men in bare legs and knitted caps with ta.s.sels, of houses packed together on the side of a steep hill, struggling upward like lame sheep; a town of tiles and whitewash huddled together under the protection of a dozen stalwart-steepled belfries--Termini Imerese, busiest of Sicily's provincial towns, famous for its macaroni. Here were the celebrated hot springs of Himera, where, legend says, Hercules bathed after his great wrestling match with King Eryx. It is said that the water from these springs gives the macaroni its characteristic flavor. And here Agathocles, the Peter the Cruel of Greek Sicily, was born.

A few miles east of Termini the railroad leaves the sh.o.r.e, and turning southward enters the valley of the Torto, to begin climbing the rugged backbone of Sicily; the watershed between the ancient African and Tyrrhenian Seas. We might be in another country and clime, so different is the scenery as we puff on southward, the way bordered on either hand by the ruins of medieval castles and by little mountain towns still living in the Bronze Age. Near Lercara, forty-eight miles from Palermo, the sulphur mining district begins, where the mephitic gases from the smelting furnaces have poisoned and stunted vegetation and herbage, giving everything a ghastly mummified look, besides polluting the keen mountain air with an unmistakable brimstone flavor.

At Aragona-Caldare Girgenti first appears, seven miles away, surely "a city set upon a hill that cannot be hid." Yet to-day it is no more like the ancient Greek Akragas, founded twenty-five centuries ago, than the dried sponge is like the live one. All that is left of this richest and most splendid of Sicilian metropoli is huddled within the confines of its former acropolis, high on the top of the hill. The greater city, which spread clear down to the temples that fringe the abrupt southern edge of the plateau, has vanished completely, and the bright homes of the G.o.ds, crumbled into mellow ruin, stand alone beside the shattered wall, in the midst of the everlasting beauty of hill and plain.

In its palmy days--which began after the battle of Himera and lasted until the Carthaginian siege--Akragas was so wealthy and so filled with splendor that the record is almost incredible. The Akragantines' flasks and body-sc.r.a.pers, for use in the baths, were of gold and silver, their beds of ivory, their feasts and celebrations magnificent. At the wedding of the daughter of Antisthenes, one of the two leading citizens, there were eight hundred chariots in the wedding procession, every single citizen was feasted, and the whole city seemed ablaze from the smoke and flame of the innumerable bonfires. Even more noted was the hospitality of Gellias. His slaves stood always at every gate of the city, to bid all who came thither welcome as his guests. Once, indeed, he even entertained--clothed, lodged and fed--five hundred cavalrymen and their horses. And, as Freeman says, these men, Antisthenes and Gellias alike, were neither tyrants nor lords nor oligarchs, but simple citizens of the democracy.

The main source of the city's wealth was her trade with Carthage, especially in the grape and the olive, neither of which grew in Africa at that time. Evidently, though, the grapes were not all sent to Carthage, for Timaeus tells us that a house in the city was nicknamed the "Trireme" because some young men of fas.h.i.+on got very drunk there one night, and imagining they were in a reeling, rolling s.h.i.+p at sea, began throwing the furniture overboard to lighten the laboring craft. When the generals of the Commonwealth came rus.h.i.+ng in to quiet things down, the drunken boys mistook them for G.o.ds of the raging sea, and prayed them to calm the storm!

Empedocles, one of Akragas's most famous sons, laments that his fellow townsmen "gave themselves to delights as if they would die to-morrow, while they built their houses as if they were going to live forever."

Little did these luxury-loving folk think that the very barbarians whose trade was so enriching them would at last grow envious and s.n.a.t.c.h back by force the wealth they had built up for their neighbors. Empedocles, by the way, is one of the most picturesque characters in the whole story of Sicily. A political leader and an engineer who did wonders for the sanitation of the city, he refused supreme control when he might have had it, and proclaimed himself a sort of primitive socialist early in his career. But later in life he seems entirely to have forgotten his previous socialistic theories. Dressed in a purple robe with a golden girdle, brazen shoes, and a Delphic wreath for his thick hair, he wandered from city to city proclaiming himself, in the words of one of his own poems, the _Katharmoi_, "An immortal G.o.d, and no longer a mortal man."

Nearly a sixth of Sicily's sulphur is exported from Porto Empedocle, Girgenti's ancient haven, six miles distant. From the station platform one sees all around reddish-yellow and gray hills covered with small dumps and pierced with scores of drives, dotted with little shanties and p.r.i.c.klied over with chimneys where the miners are delving and smelting.

On the sidings near the depot scores of flat cars are heaped high with huge pressed cakes of the sickly greenish-yellow sulphur, while the roadway leading to the freight-house is fulvid with powdered brimstone, and the atmosphere faintly suggests things infernal. In the city museum the antiquarian may study the tile stamps of the Roman period--Girgenti was Agrigentum then--for impressing the sulphur cakes before they solidified.

Outside the station every train draws a barking crowd of _facchini_ (porters) and hotel-runners, from whom you escape into an hotel omnibus.

We chose a tiny, rickety, low-roofed vehicle, which had developed rheumatism and gout in every complaining spring and joint. Delighted to secure the only first cla.s.s pa.s.sengers who had come on that express, the driver whipped up his three emaciated nags and we started on the long, circuitous, heart-breaking climb up the steep hills to the citadel above.

The bus was scarcely moving when a face appeared at the rear door, not of the usual hotel porter who rides behind, but of a Murillo cherub, brown-eyed and dark, with a lurking smile so ingenuous and charming that one must have been stony-hearted indeed not to succ.u.mb to the spell of his innocent sorcery.

The hotel on the Via Atenea--the only street in Girgenti worthy the name of a thoroughfare--proved a seedy, disreputable looking establishment, giving upon the narrow way in a black hole into which we plunged, to find a pair of winding, cold stone stairs in the rear up which we stumbled to the second story office. But the drawbacks of this inn--and there are better ones in town--were fortunately most of them on the outside. Our room was really comfortable, and the luncheon considerably better than we dared expect, though the dessert, in a dirty gla.s.s cake-dish, consisted of oranges, nespoli, or j.a.panese medlars, large raw broad-beans, and something that looked like celery but proved to be _finocchi_, or fennel, one of the staple foods of the people, apparently a natural source of concentrated paregoric.

When the porter announced that our landau was waiting after luncheon, we questioned the ability of the three mangy, half-starved horses--the same team which had brought us from the railway station--to drive all the afternoon over the amazingly steep and hilly roads; but a.s.sured that these very animals had been doing the same work for "twenty years or more" we started off congratulating ourselves on escaping the guides, unnecessary nuisances.

As we stepped out at the little antique Gothic church of San Niccola, the cherub suddenly appeared before us.

"h.e.l.lo! Where did you come from?" I inquired.

The lad only shook his head, but the coachman, whose face was all one broad grin, waved his whip at the rear of the carriage. "_A dietro_--On behind!"

It was true. For miles that child had clung to the rear axle in the choking dust for the sake of a little silver. With an air of modest a.s.surance he introduced himself--"Alfonso Caratozzo, _signore_. I am just twelve years old. For six years I have been the best guide in Girgenti, and all the grand foreign gentlemen are much pleased with me.

I can show you everything."

Alfonso's large claim was fully justified by his conduct of our affairs, his poetic appreciation not only of the beauties of the scenery but of his own dignity and importance as counselor and pilot of the _forestieri americani_--and no one who wishes a guide can do better than to inquire for Alfonso the Wise!

Never was the mixed civilization and pagan ancestry of the Sicilians of to-day brought more vividly to our attention than in this little church of San Niccola. The attractive girl custodian was a perfect young Saracen Sicilian, black-eyed and raven haired, with big gold and coral earrings. Beside her Alfonso, as purely Greek as she was Moorish, looked every inch a faun. The girl knew what stories she had to tell very well.

Alfonso, however, evidently bored by the history of ancient Akragas from the day of its founding, whispered: "Pay no attention to her, _signore_.

She tells this to everybody!"

Shades of Diodorus--what should she tell!

Near by stands a little Roman building dating from the second century B.

C. Somehow it got the name of Oratory of Phalaris, though it certainly was not in existence in Phalaris's time. How strange that such a building and such an idea should be a.s.sociated with this most widely advertised of Greek tyrants! Of all the disputed stories told of him, that of the brazen bull is most widely known; and without his bull, Phalaris would be no more than an hundred obscure tyrants in other Greek cities. The legend declares that an artist named Perillos made a monstrous hollow brazen bull in whose shoulder was a door through which the victim could be thrust. When the fire underneath heated the diabolical invention, the cries of the sufferer, issuing through the nostrils, sounded like the roarings of the enraged animal. The tyrant, with a proper sense of humor, immediately tested the efficiency of the image upon its luckless inventor Perillos. In later times apologists denied these stories; but Pindar, writing within a century after the death of Phalaris, summed up Sicilian public opinion of that day very tersely in the lines:

_"Phalaris, with blood defiled,_ _His brazen bull, his torturing flame,_ _Hand o'er alike to evil fame_ _In every clime!"_

Very different indeed are his praises of Theron of Akragas, one of the greatest and best of the Greek tyrants, with whom he was contemporary.

The Second Olympian Ode is perhaps the most fulsome. Cary rendered it:

_"Theron for his conquering car_ _Shall spread a shout of triumph far and wide;_ _True to his friends, the people's pride;_ _Stay of Akragas and flower_ _Of many a n.o.ble ancestor;_ _They, long toils and perils past,_ _By the rivers built at last_ _Their sacred bower, and were an eye_ _To light the land of Sicily._ _And I will swear_ _That city none, though she enroll_ _A century past her radiant scroll,_ _Hath brought a mortal man to light_ _Whose heart with love more genial glows,_ _Whose hand with larger bounty flows,_ _Than Theron's._"

It was during the reign of Theron that the city, approaching the height of its prosperity and pride, joined forces with Gelon and the Syracusans in defeating Hamilcar's Carthaginians in a tremendous battle at Himera.

The victors took an immense number of the defeated soldiers captive, and Theron began to rush forward epoch making munic.i.p.al improvements. The slaves, being only human, could not last forever, and they were worked hard while their strength endured, toiling in the stone quarries, building the city wall, excavating a huge fishpond, and commencing the construction of the magnificent temples along the southern rampart.

"Tyrant," by the way, in that age of civilization, did not necessarily mean a brutal, oppressive or fire-breathing monster. Indeed, some of the tyrants were among the best rulers Greek Sicily ever had. As Freeman says, "tyrant" meant a forceful usurper, a man who raised himself to the supreme authority when kings and kings.h.i.+p were not only unlawful but were not even the fas.h.i.+on.

Of the six glorious temples--among the most brilliant achievements of the most brilliant period of Greek freedom in Sicily--only two remain standing, at the verge of the hill, limned in all their marvelous Greek severity and simplicity against the tender landscape. Overhead burns the cobalt sky of Sicily; around them burgeon crimson poppies, delicate b.u.t.tercups and spurge, and other flowers innumerable. Flute-voiced birds swing and sing in among the olives, in air languid with the perfume of the almond in bloom.--And in the clear sunlight of the South, the temples themselves glow with a golden radiance that must surely be a faint reflection of the fires of the immortal G.o.ds.

Models of Doric simplicity, these temples consisted only of a windowless shrine for the G.o.d, surrounded by an open colonnade, the whole covered by a gabled roof. Their design was at once the result of the climate and of Greek civilization. The religion was intimately connected with devotion to the State; hence the homes of the G.o.ds, who were both the patrons and companions of the people, were public buildings, their porticoes open to the daily life and commerce, the intercourse of the citizens.

The Greek religion was beautiful, rarely beautiful. But exclusive, mysterious? No! Its rites were simple--choral hymns, rhythmic dances, ceremonies executed by the citizens themselves. And the priests guarded no occult sciences, as did the Egyptians; kept to themselves no written hieroglyph unintelligible except to the initiate. They were laymen, married men with families, soldiers, merchants, men engaged in every walk of life.