Vistas in Sicily Part 1

Vistas in Sicily.

by Arthur Stanley Riggs.

INTRODUCTION

Sicily is the rarest flower of the great midland sea. Built up on the North in a series of beetling cliffs, the island slopes gently down through mountain chains and undulating plains to the golden Southern sh.o.r.e. An enormous triangle it is, spiny with lofty peaks--aetna towers more than ten thousand feet in the air--spangled with flowering meads and dells where Nature loads the air with fragrance; pierced with infernal caverns, whence choking workers extract a large part of the world's sulphur from the palaces of the former G.o.ds of the nether world; and fringed about on every side with the lace-like foam of opal waves.

It is rich in beauty and desolation, rich in song and story, rich in architecture, splendid and varied.

To understand the beauty and charm of Sicily, however, it is essential to know something of the island's picturesque and vivid story. We Americans are rarely familiar with it. Strange as it may seem, considering Sicily's importance through many centuries, its consecutive history still remains to be written. Books there are, to be sure, but none attempts to cover more than a portion of one of the most intense chronicles in the world. Thucydides, in his "Peloponessian War," tells in glowing phrases of the debacle that wiped out the Attic forces and left Sicily supreme. Later still, in the ante-Christian era Diodorus, a native of the island, prepared a flowing story of the Sicily he knew. It has been one of our chief sources of information ever since. In modern times the historians Grote and Curtius have included in their histories of Greece such parts of the Sicilian narrative as are germane to their work; and the English historian Freeman, in a monumental unfinished work, has left us a minutely detailed account of Sicily from prehistoric times to the reign of Agathocles. The Italian Amari, to go yet farther, handles the Saracen period with care and skill, and Gally Knight tells briefly of the dashing Normans and their fanciful architecture. But of the later periods almost nothing of lasting value has been written.

Moreover, the books of travel dealing with Sicily are few in comparison with those which tell of other lands, and not many Americans discover, unaided, the paradise they omit from their itineraries.

The most usual mistake made regarding Sicily is that it is a little island, vaguely located in imagination somewhere near Italy and peopled by Italians--its inhabitants, Black Handers, organ-grinders, scissors-men, ditch-diggers and the rest, _mala gente_ all. Sicily is near Italy--two miles away, in fact--and it is full of Italians, in the sense that they are Italian subjects. But by heredity, by instinct, by everything that pertains to racial culture and development, they are far from being Italians yet. The explanation is a simple one. By consulting the map you see that the triangle--with an area of some ten thousand square miles--is not only in the center of the Mediterranean from East to West, but that it is also a great stepping-stone between Europe and Africa. In ancient days, when all the civilized world bordered the Mediterranean, the geographical position of Sicily gave the island an especial political character and importance. And naturally, while it remained the very center of the civilized world, it was a rich prize to be fought for by each Nation which rose to power.

Tradition--as usual--peoples the land first with G.o.ds, both beneficent and malign, and then with giants to whom Homer refers in the Odyssey: Laistrygones, Cyclops, Lotophagi. After these "poetic monsters" came the Sikans, Sikels and Elymians, genuine peoples, who may be called the prehistoric natives as distinguished from the historic foreigners. Of the three the Sikels, undoubtedly blood-brothers to the pioneers of Rome and Tuscany, are the most interesting; and a legend has it that they drifted on rafts from the Italian mainland across the channel now called the Strait of Messina, about 1100 B. C. They were permanent and important enough to give the island the name Sikelia, which is still current in our modified form, Sicily.

The first of the historic foreigners to enter were the Phnicians, the Canaanites of the Old Testament, who lived in Tyre and Sidon and the other cities that lay in the narrow strip of lowland between Mt. Lebanon and the Mediterranean. They spoke Hebrew, as the Israelites did, but their worship was the foul and b.l.o.o.d.y service of Baal and Ashtaroth.

They were the boldest seafaring men in the world; the most cunning traders,--who came to barter the Tyrian purple, the gla.s.s, the gold jewelry, and the little images of their own manufacture with the rude and primitive peoples already in possession. The Mediterranean had no terrors for their little barques, and they established trading posts and even actual colonies all along its coasts; one even, Gades of Tarshish--the present Cadiz--faced the ocean itself, beyond the strait now called Gibraltar, where the Pillars of Hercules guard the entrance to the Mediterranean. Phnicia has left us no means of dating her settlements in Sicily, but we know that they were founded sometime between the coming of the Sikels in the twelfth century and the coming of the Greeks in the eighth.

The Greeks called these only rivals of theirs "barbarians," a name they applied to all who did not speak Greek. Yet this proved nothing as to their civilization, for at this early date the Phnicians were far advanced in the material arts over all Europeans, including the Greeks themselves, who learned of them. The most precious acquisition of all was the alphabet, from which every one of the forms of written speech now used in Europe has evolved. The Phnicians may not have invented it; they may merely have taken it from farther East along with their other material arts. But they were the distributors, the teachers, the popularizers, and as such we owe them an unpayable debt.

The real history of Sicily, as a land playing a considerable part in the affairs of the world, begins with this coming of the Greek, and it is to his presence that the story owes its peculiar and immutable charm. As early as the times of the Odyssey the Greeks had some vague notion of Sicily. Everyone who has read that marvelous poem remembers that the suitors of Penelope threatened to sell the disguised Odysseus to the Sikels; and old Laertes had a Sikelian slave woman. But no doubt the wily Phnician traders told stories calculated to frighten away adventurous explorers; so it was quite by accident that the news which brought about the initial settlement reached Greece.

Driven by storms upon Sicilian sh.o.r.es Theocles, an Ionian Greek, found himself late in the eighth century gazing from the deck of his tiny craft upon a strange land. This he explored a little before returning home and there reported it as a good country, with inhabitants it would be easy to conquer. The prospect tempted his fellow-countrymen. They were colonizers, not traders, and in the next hundred and forty years they occupied most of the coast of Sicily--Trinakria, Three Promontories, they called it--making of the island a second Greek world.

Indeed, the city of Syracuse, founded in 734 B. C. by Dorians from Corinth, eventually became the rival and peer of Athens in wisdom, beauty and strength.

Though the various independent cities of Sicily fought bitterly and continuously, their strife seemed only to develop genius and bring forth wonders in architecture, art and letters. The lofty purity of Greek civilization found its highest expression in magnificent temples which for grandeur and simplicity have never been excelled. To-day there are ruins of no less than twenty of these imposing houses of worship in Sicily, all of them of the same style, and many of colossal proportions.

The arts of the sculptor and of the numismatist are represented in the museums by metopes which tell graphically of the evolution of the Greek ideal in temple decoration, and by coins which for pure beauty and delicacy have no equals in even Greece itself.

A record of the ill.u.s.trious Greek litterateurs who came to Sicily as visitors, or to spend the rest of their lives, is a list of immortals: Simonides, Sappho, whom an enthusiastic contemporary called the "violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho"; Pindar, whose quaint lyrics give us much of our early Sicilian history; and aeschylus, immortal poet and playwright. Small wonder if with such inspiring examples in their midst native geniuses should have risen to great heights. Tisias of Himera is said to have set in order the lyric chorus, and so to have gained his name of Stesichorus. Epicharmus was the inventor of comedy, at least of the special Sicilian type. Some of his plays deal with mythology, many with cookery, and his comedy, "The Wedding of Hebe," furnishes epicures with a list of the Sicilian dainties of his day. Empedocles of Akragas, the most distinguished of Sicilian thinkers, became prominent as a physician and poet. Philistus, and the later Diodorus of Agyrium, were historians of the first rank.

The fame of Archimedes the mathematician is imperishable; and Theocritus, also of Syracuse, gave to the world the first bucolics and pastorals ever written--strains so sweet that the very ditties the wandering shepherds on the hills to this day pipe to their flocks are but parodies of the lilting songs he made centuries ago.

The commercially minded Phnicians gave the Greek colonists little trouble, but when Phnicia's mighty African daughter--Carthage--grew up, she struggled long and hard for a permanent foothold upon the coveted isle. The crafty Carthaginians chose as the moment for their great effort the time when Xerxes the Persian, with forty-six Nations, was marching against Greece the mother-country, and Sicily could expect no a.s.sistance. But "Zeus was too strong for Baal," and both barbarian hosts went down to crushing defeat--some say on the same day--the Carthaginians at Sicilian Himera, the Persians at Salamis. Had it been otherwise, the very civilization of Europe would have been overthrown.

The Carthaginians, though defeated, were not beaten. They kept coming; and two hundred years later King Pyrrhus of Epirus had to come over from Greece to rescue Greek Sicily. As he left the island he remarked prophetically: "What a wrestling ground I leave for Rome and Carthage!"

Pyrrhus was right--the wrestling soon began in the first of the great Punic Wars, which ended with the utter defeat of Carthage. But while she was driven out, Rome came in to stay, and by 214 B. C. had swallowed up the whole island. Sicily was made the first Roman province, and experienced all the misfortunes of a "carpet-bag government." For centuries the peace made stable by Rome prevailed throughout the island, and the cities could no longer fly at each other's throats. But as the price of this enforced tranquillity, former great ruling centers like Arkagas and Syracuse began to dry up into almost nothing as provincial towns, intellectual advancement ceased, and during the whole thousand years of Roman administration, Sicily kept the downward path in every field of endeavor.

In this relaxed and enervated condition, the island fell an easy prey to the marauding Saracens; the condition of the Sicilians, worn down by oppression, explains their feeble resistance. Nothing could kindle a National feeling, and the conquest was marked by only a desultory struggle, in which the fervor of a few Christian devotees dared oppose the Muslim spirit of proselytism. In 965 it was all over. The Saracen had driven out the decadent Roman in the names of Allah and the Prophet, and established his own brilliant exotic civilization. Intellectual activity and agricultural development were fostered, and the Muslim regime, though it was not to have any such permanence as the Roman it displaced, nevertheless developed with a splendor and rapidity that shamed the backward Christians.

Last of all the great molders of Sicily came the Normans, knights who with their keen blades carved a slice out of the Byzantine Empire on the Italian mainland and, conquering the Sicilian Muslims, built up a kingdom for themselves. Sicily's period of greatest glory dawned with their conquest. They developed a splendid fabric of feudalism; and all the arts as well as the more usual graces of civilization stamped the new kingdom for their own. The very Italian language, as Dante himself acknowledges, had its feeble beginnings in the court of the Emperor Frederick II at Palermo. The power of Frederick, who was Emperor of Germany as well as King of Sicily, was a thorn in the sides of the Popes, who at this period claimed the right to dispose of all the crowns of earth. So after Frederick's death the Pope gave away the Sicilian crown to his own trusty defender, Count Charles of Anjou; and he, capturing the island from Frederick's son, Manfred, turned it over to the shameful misrule of his lieutenants. Sixteen years later, in 1282, the French paid dearly for their oppression in the terrible ma.s.sacre of the Sicilian Vespers, when they were exterminated throughout the island.

Then the Sicilians invited Don Pedro de Aragon, the son-in-law of Manfred, their last Norman king, to rule them; and the Aragonese dynasty, with varying fortunes, lasted until 1409, when it became extinct, and Sicily was attached to Spain and governed by Spanish viceroys. Never did a government care less for its subjects; and when the Spaniards evacuated at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they left the unhappy island almost dest.i.tute.

Sicily had long since ceased to be the center of the civilized world; and now, a mere appendage, she was tossed relentlessly from one sovereignty to another in the bitter struggle to maintain the balance of power. From this time onward her story is a complicated record in which France, Spain, Savoy, Austria, and even England herself are almost inextricably tangled. All this time, too, the common people, the backbone and life of the island, groaned under well nigh intolerable conditions. Gladstone, writing in 1851 of the Bourbon government, then ruling Sicily as a part of the Kingdom of Naples, said that its conduct was "an outrage upon religion, upon humanity, upon civilization and upon decency."

But in this, her darkest hour, Sicily was not forgotten. Her insistent appeals for help, and the blood she had poured out in continual protest against the vicious Bourbons, were too loud a cry for the liberty-loving and adventurous spirit of Giuseppe Garibaldi to ignore. With his immortal "Thousand" he answered, and became not merely the liberator of Sicily, but the hammer under whose forging blows the discordant states of the Italian peninsula were welded together into the new and coherent Italy. Thus at last a single man put the period to the island's troubled history, ended definitely her ambitions for individual greatness and made her an important part of a greater and more powerful whole.

So it is clear that there has never been a Sicilian nation, nor has there ever been even a Sicilian language; but every great race that dwells about the Mediterranean at some time has had a part in Sicily's story, and each race in its turn has left an indelible imprint upon language and customs, upon architecture and people. Here one sees a pure Greek face of cla.s.sic beauty; there a Saracen gazes calmly upon us out of features which could come only from the burning desert and the infinite starry night in the open; and yonder, a Roman, proud and silent, bends to toil the Romans of old never knew. On many a hill rises the matchless, mellow ruin of a Greek temple, lovely as anything Greece itself can show; and in the cities the architectonic genius and spirit of the races blend in structures dignified and ma.s.sive, or light and airy almost to the point of being fantastic.

This is Sicily to-day, the home of all beauty, the abiding place of a people as picturesque in character as they are in face and costume; and the sympathetic traveler, living the joy of the moment, as do the Sicilians themselves, comes into possession of much of the unforgettable charm and perfume of this island of delights.

_Vistas in Sicily_

I

DISCOVERY

Sicily in spring appeared to us like water in the desert. That we knew nothing of the island was a misfortune we shared in common with most Americans. Such vague ideas as we had were derived mainly from long-past schooldays of wearisome geography, and from newspaper accounts of the Mafia, whose members seemed always to be Sicilians. But when, after a stormy fortnight among the volcanic dust-clouds of a great Vesuvian eruption, we determined to escape that choking atmosphere, the royal Road to Rome chosen by the tourists--terrified by the belchings of the volcano--did not appeal to us. Instead, with some trepidation, as explorers entering a wild and dangerous unknown land, we decided upon Sicily. Our baggage packed and in the hallway, we came out to Gregorio, the cabman we had patronized through many a day of work and danger around Vesuvius.

"Where now, milords?" he smiled at us cheerily, noting the hand baggage.

"To the steamer, Gregorio--to Sicily."

"To Sicily!" he exclaimed, dropping his whip in sheer amazement. "_Santo Dio!_--why?"

The haze of volcanic cinders still hanging thickly over Naples was answer enough, with the added explanation: "We must breathe; we must rest."

"Yes, but--" His emotions choked him. Here was Naples deserted by the thousands of foreigners whom a few days of Vesuvian bellowings had frightened into abject panic. Cabs rusted at the street corners by scores; and now he, too, was to be idle. It was too much! Not even the promise of engagement upon our return could dispel the gloom that had wiped away his smile.

"_Gia!_" he grunted darkly, shaking his head. "If the _Signori_ ever return. Who knows, _per Baccho_! Sicilians are _mala gente_, brigands, murderers--"

It was too late to withdraw, notwithstanding Gregorio's cheerful prophecy, and he drove us to the wharf, a mournful figure drooping upon his box--and we sailed on Friday the 13th, at thirteen minutes past six!

But whether it was because of lack of respect for either fateful numbers or h.o.a.ry nautical superst.i.tion, or because of skill upon the bridge, the swift and trim little _Galileo Galilei_ brought us pleasantly in the glorious dawn to Sicily, and an hour later Palermo--the capital--shimmered through the smoky mists veiling its Golden Sh.e.l.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of Sicily]

It was an easy and a delightful voyage, the steamer clean, the sea smooth. But if one is sea-fearing instead of sea-faring, he may go comfortably from Naples by train, via Reggio and the Strait of Messina, only two miles across by ferry. Or, if he be a sea-roving globe-trotter, he may take one of the numerous Mediterranean liners leaving New York the year round, and make the trip without a single change all the way to Palermo; and these vessels are so large and so steady that the trip is robbed of half its terrors to the most timid soul.

But if money is an object, it is better to go by way of Italy, where little commutation books for Sicilian travel, called _tessere_, are to be obtained. Each _tessera_ is a small pocket coupon-book sold in every large city, from Rome southward, from February to June. The books contain detachable coupons which ent.i.tle the holder to a discount ranging all the way from ten to seventy-five per cent in the cost of transportation, food, lodging, merchandise and amus.e.m.e.nts in the theaters. They cost ten _lire_ (two dollars) apiece; and it is necessary only to fill out a given leaf with the date, the names of the stations to and from which the holder wishes to travel, and to present it at the station to obtain the discount on accommodations in any cla.s.s desired on railway trains and steamers. A saving so large may be effected by its use that the transportation cost of the trip melts almost into insignificance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Palermo, "the Panormos of old ... looks straight out toward the rising sun."]

It seems too good to be true, but there is a reason for it. Count Florio, of the Florio-Rubattino Steamship Company, one of the most public-spirited men in Sicily, to popularize the island as a place of resort, to stimulate local travel in the best months of the year, and so to augment the revenues of both people and island, persuaded the Government to grant special rates on its railways by giving a sixty per cent discount on his own private steamers. Various large stores, theaters, cafes and hotels perceived the reason in his argument, and quickly followed his example. Moreover, as the Annual Sporting Reunion is held in Palermo during the late winter, it was felt--as proved to be the case--that inducements in the way of discounts on the cost of everything would considerably increase the patronage and make the annual games and races much more a feature of the island than ever before.

Curiously enough, for a people so fond of red tape, the Sicilians have not smothered the _tessere_ with senseless regulations. The concierge of your hotel can fill out and present the book for you when you wish to leave a city; the railroad ticket agent is not concerned with anything but your signature; and there are no difficulties about photographs as identification. But woe to the person who gives his tessera to a careless concierge! Half a dozen others may have done the same thing at the same time, and the _tessere_ have become mixed. Unless one wishes to forge the usually almost indecipherable Italian name on the little green leaves, no ticket is forthcoming, no matter how fluent the explanation given; and a new book becomes a necessity.

These winter and spring months are ideal for travel in this Mediterranean isle. In every age Sicily's climate has been sung as halcyone, and in the days when Cicero was quaestor under the Roman rule, he did not exaggerate greatly when he said that there is never a day when the sun does not smile at least once. Not even Mentone or the other resorts along the Riviera can boast of a warmer or more sensuous charm than Sicily. January, which is the worst and rainiest month of the Sicilian winter, is very like the first two weeks of May in the northern part of Europe; and a short time later, when travel begins to waken the island, the sun shines clear and hot, an overcoat is wholly unnecessary except in the evening.

Ripe and green fruit and blossoms are to be seen at the same time on the orange and lemon trees, and by April the scraggy old olive trees bend beneath the weight of their dull green fruit, just beginning to blush with purple. The air is full of the scent of myriad flowers, and the railway tracks, sometimes for miles, run between hedges of geraniums--six to eight feet high--whose pungent fragrance fills the flying trains. The summer climate is as mild and salubrious as that of the winter, for even in July and August the average is not more than seventy-seven or seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit; about the same as in our own Atlantic States. Occasionally, during one of the African siroccos that sometimes sweep across the island, the mercury rises to an hundred or so; but the sirocco is a rare occurrence, fully as apt to occur in mid-winter as in summer.