Vistas in Sicily Part 9

Image and pedestal weigh several tons, and about three hundred men robed in white, st.u.r.dy 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 ident.i.ty 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 s.h.i.+p 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 aetna. The finest view of him to be had from the city is from the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San Niccol, 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 Niccol you see not only aetna, 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 aetna 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 aetna--Mongibello--standing superbly alone, lord of all this eastern section of Sicily, rising from the sea without foothills or approach.

To-day the t.i.tan 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, aetna 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 preeminently the home of the nether G.o.ds, and aetna 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 aetna 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 h.e.l.l within finds exit in steam and vapors.

Having experienced the doubtful delights of climbing smaller Vesuvius--it is less than half aetna's height--we decided that aetna 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 t.i.tan 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, Adern, 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 G.o.d, 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 Circ.u.metnea--not only encircles the mountain, as its t.i.tle indicates, but also climbs up along the slopes, reaching an alt.i.tude 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 aetna 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 t.i.tle.

The most picturesque of these aetnean towns is Randazzo, an interesting place where the women throw voluminous white shawls over their heads when they go to ma.s.s. 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 n.o.ble structure from whose walls project the sharp iron spikes where the ancient Dukes impaled the heads of criminals they executed! During July and August aetna 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 t.i.tanic 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 n.o.ble 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 ash.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sionately. 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 aetna 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 employes 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 _aperitif_ at a nearby _caffe_, and we started at last in leisurely fas.h.i.+on--five minutes behind time.

The station is Giardini-Taormina, at the sea level; and Giardini, though theoretically Taormina's "harbor," is only a little fis.h.i.+ng village. Yet here twenty-five centuries ago the first of Sicily's deliverers, the n.o.ble 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 n.o.body 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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 aetna; 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_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The red and tan ruin of the Greek Theater ... But it is aetna that makes Taormina."]

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 Marechal 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, p.r.i.c.kly 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 preempted 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 n.o.ble predecessors. The very unexpectedness with which delicate bits of ruin appear const.i.tutes 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 n.o.ble 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 sh.o.r.e 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 G.o.d 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 amus.e.m.e.nt of tyrants. To satisfy a pa.s.sing 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 impa.s.sioned 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!