Vistas in Sicily Part 11

XIV

LIGHTS AND SHADES

Fountains in Sicily occupy much the same place in the life of the people that the forum occupied in a Roman community of old. That is, the fountain and its piazza are the center for exchanging news and gossip, for recreation, for all the varied diversions the people have in common.

Taormina's princ.i.p.al fountain lies just outside the old wall, not far from the Porta Catania, the gate facing toward Catania. About the cool and dripping basin gather the graceful young peasant girls, balancing incredibly large and heavy amphorai of water upon their well poised heads; pretty, kittenish children and grimgaunt old rheumatic gossips; loutish waterboys in from the _piana_ with their great barrel-carts to take the ichor of the G.o.ds back home; and generally the background for all is a fringe of seedy, admiring youths, casting sheeps' eyes at the girls and wondering how long it will be until they can get married--or sail for America!

This particular fountain is crowned by the arms of Taormina, which consist of the twin castles of Mola and Taormina, and a mythological creature with the body of a bull, the tail of a fish and the head of a woman. Exactly what this beast is would tax the powers of the most ingenious of zoologists to explain--possibly a "nature-faker" could do it better.

From the Porta Catania the old town wall, perhaps twenty feet in height, rambles up the hillside in weird curves and abrupt angles, following the contour of the ground. Now that it is useless as a defense the thrifty Taorminians have built up a row of tiny houses which cling limpet fashion to the outside of the st.u.r.dy old masonry, through which windows have been driven that add greatly to its picturesqueness. Wonderful climbing bougainsvilleas and other vines have sprung up from the fertile soil and spread their graceful tendrils higher and higher until almost every window is smothered in a ma.s.s of tender greenery and blossom.

To see these picturesque cottages is to wish to end one's days in one, or at least to bring some of its perfume and beauty back home. Near by a steep _gradino_ is a floral waterfall. On the house-sides, festooning every post and projecting bit of masonry, brilliant flowers foam in pink spray, as from some perfumed fountain farther up the hill where roses distil their spicy fragrance from long, nodding branches.

Facing its own little piazza inside the wall, and just below the Corso, is the Cathedral, which has a fine fourteenth century Gothic side portal. Perhaps the service is fourteenth century, too. It is conducted by the parish priest, a withered old man of grim and ascetic aspect, who drones in out-of-key nasals through the ritual, his voice drowned out a good deal of the time by the wheezy old organ, played by the village cobbler. The choir consists of the verger and another man who appears and disappears like a jack-in-the-box; at no time are more than two men visible in the organ loft, but in their vigor they quite make up for lack of numbers or inspiration. On the opposite side of the choir rises what seems to be a larger and more imposing organ. It is really nothing but a huge stretcher of canvas on which an instrument is painted, evidently to impress visitors with the dignity and grandeur of this mountain church.

When we were at service the good padre was a.s.sisted in his ministrations by the verger--when he was not singing--who worked with a becoming sense of the dignity of his position, and by an impish little acolyte in flaming scarlet, who hopped about like a cricket. If ever there was a little rascal who deserved excommunication for his pranks, it was this juvenile mischief-maker, who swung his censer so as almost to choke the old priest, keeping a more watchful eye upon the strangers than upon his business, and scarcely stopping to crook an irreverent little knee as he pa.s.sed about in front of the altar. Once, stooping to rearrange the priest's robes, he did it with such a mischievous flirt, and such a droll gleam in the brown eyes fixed on us, that we half expected to be held up by a small highwayman after ma.s.s, and asked for a penny or two in token of the sacrilegious show we had been permitted to witness.

The elders of the town sit upon the long bench or dais of red porphyry where the archbishop would be enthroned should he visit Taormina. They are curious old men, gnarled, withered apples full of sun and wind-wrinkles, who wear the typical brown-gray-black shawl as a m.u.f.fler.

Below them, on the throne's lowest step, squat several of the oldest women in the town. Over this seat a large and imposing shield bearing the arms of Taormina is supported by a time-stained oaken eagle, who leers with side-c.o.c.ked head and an expression of inebriate gravity in his partly closed eyes. He seems more a gargoyle, a grotesque, than a strictly appropriate bit of ecclesiastical decoration.

Some of the peasant girls in the congregation are very lovely--perfect young Madonnas; sloe-eyed, raven-haired; with exquisite features and coloring, and distinctly Greek profiles. But they are not all dark; there is also the florid blonde type the Latin peoples so greatly admire, though it cannot bear comparison with the other. All of them dress with a taste and a restraint hardly to be expected among mountain folk only a few degrees removed from the primitive. Here and there a fawn-like maid has thrown a Roman scarf with broad orange bands lightly over her hair, its vivid colors in pleasing contrast with her simple dark blue dress, piped with white, and the usual black silk ap.r.o.n that distinguishes her as of a prosperous family.

About through the throng in the nave the worshipers' children run freely to and fro, laughing, crying, talking, calling to one another. Some gather in little colonies on a step of the door at the foot of the church and eye the scene with baby solemnity; and even when the Host is elevated, some dainty nymph of three or four may unconcernedly clatter higgledy-piggledy across the tiles in hobnailed shoon that wake the ancient echoes, crying at the top of her small voice: "Papa! Papa!" to an old farmer entering the door.

There is an indescribably moving something in the spectacle these poor folk present as they sit and stand and kneel and make the responses with the utter devotion of ignorance and superst.i.tion. Still, the outside can not be forgotten, even in the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and as the big bell up in the campanile booms the hour clear and mellow through the sound of voice and instrument, the world, the flesh and the devil stir the worshipers with a restless little movement of anxiety to get back into the sunshine again.

The eagle over the bishop's throne would appear to greater advantage in the funerals to be met on the Corso, conducted by the Fraternity of the Misericordia, which originated in Florence so many centuries ago. Weird indeed is one of these processions, as it ambles leisurely along through the heavy dust, often stirred by a light sirocco which flaps the robes and sends the incense smoke eddying upward in sacerdotal wreaths.

Tragedy and farce clasp hands in the pitiful _cortege_. The boy members of the Guild amuse themselves and shock the beholder by pulling their ghastly masks awry, contorting their faces into uncouth grimaces, and winking portentously through the large eyeholes. The men are scarcely better--even the pall-bearers laugh, joke, turn freely to pa.s.s a word with some acquaintance in the street or up in a window, and tilt the casket so recklessly that the cross and crown on top slip about and all but fall off. Their white frocks are too short, and from beneath the skirts protrude very baggy trouser-legs, dirty socks, or even a few inches of bare leg thrust hastily into shoes donned for the nonce, and left with strings dangling in the dust. Inquisitive goats and uncertain chickens get in the way and are either lifted to one side, carried along and petted for a few moments, or gently pushed out of the way with a kindly foot.

Strange indeed was a double funeral we saw one sultry afternoon. At the head marched the ancient Guild, bearing a curious double cross, perhaps eight feet high and apparently very heavy. Nailed to its upper limb--askew, of course--was a small light cross. Behind the men walked eighteen little girls in ordinary street dress, and after them six older girls in black, marching in couples, each pair carrying a large floral wreath. The middle pair bore their wreath with an air that did not distinguish the others, since it surrounded a framed picture of the dead man. Directly behind the picture came a priest, his hands clasped over a missal which he held firmly against his well-fed stomach.

After the living, the dead--the first of the coffins was a tiny one of flaming pink, stolidly handled by four st.u.r.dy lads of the Guild, who took as much interest in it and the proceedings as though they were bearing a crate of lemons to market. Immediately behind, four unusually tall Guildmen bore the man's coffin, large and black, with a cross and a silver crown resting upon it. On either side trudged the womenfolk of the family, one in each file carrying a smoking plate of incense that nearly choked her, while two files of friends brought up the rear of the procession proper, followed by the usual rabble.

Through the heavy African air the cathedral bells tolled with an inexpressibly sad intonation as the little cavalcade pa.s.sed along the street. But even the relatives were compelled to laugh when from the rear, running at full speed, came a panting boy of about ten bearing the canonicals of the officiating priest. The robe flapped behind in most undignified fashion, one corner occasionally raising a little spurt of dust as it swept the stones; and every few steps the boy yelped an unintelligible sound, to bid the marchers slow down and let him catch up before the priest entered the cathedral.

However, the touch of the ridiculous that turns tears to laughter is never far away in Sicily. Turning into a side street, one of those little _gradini_ or flights of slippery stone steps which make up most of Taormina's lesser byways, and thinking only of the funeral, we were suddenly halted by two of the juvenile troubadours who lie in wait for strangers, or patrol the streets, seeking whom they may charm. They sprang out at our approach, struck tragic att.i.tudes, and began to shout out an old pirate song at the top of their thin little pipes. l.u.s.tily they sang, till the veins in their small foreheads bulged blue with the effort, screaming out the bloodthirsty words of the ancient ditty with gusto, and acting their parts like veterans. It was all so sudden, so utterly ludicrous, that we laughed until we cried. The moment we began to laugh, the larger boy frowned, stopped singing, and shaking his pudgy fist at us indignantly, announced: "I am a singer! A very good singer--you listen to me!"

No cosmopolitan tenor could have put more outraged dignity and temperament into a protest. But st.u.r.dily they began all over. Here and there we caught a phrase about a wicked captain who stole a lovely maiden from her doting parents and took her away on his rakish barque to rove the smiling seas. Before I could reward them a large boy, who had kept away the crowd during the singing of the infant highwaymen, touched me on the arm.

"_Signore_--you should pay me all. I...."

"Oh-ho! So you think you are their impresario, do you?" I demanded.

"_Sissignore! Si! Si!_" he exclaimed joyfully, not in the least understanding anything but that I seemed willing to play into his hands.

"Are you a relative of the great Hammerstein?" I asked.

"Probably, sir. I do not know. Does the gentleman live in Taormina?"

Just then an ancient crone, toothless, and gifted, if anyone ever was, with the "evil eye," pinched my arm with a vigor astonishing in so aged a creature, and shrilly demanded her gift. Annoyed, I asked her as gently as possible, while the crowd grinned in derision: "But what have you done that I should pay you?"

"Done!" she retorted. "Done! It is enough--am I not here?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "We were suddenly halted by two juvenile troubadours, seeking whom they might charm."]

Declining to pay for being pinched, we worked our way slowly through the tenacious rabble--which clamored for _soldi_--down into the courtyard of the hotel that was once a pious house of prayer and fasting, the gray and ancient Convento di San Domenico. Beyond the edge of the older town it poises its ma.s.sive stone bulk, whitewashed and scrupulously neat, on the ragged edge of the cliff: where fragrant roses climb all about and potted plants fringe the bal.u.s.trades on all sides with rich color. It is a joy to sit here and take tea, with the marvelous panorama of storied coast and slumbering sea directly beneath. San Domenico is as cold as it is lovely, and the guests are hardly to be envied their rooms, once the silent stone cells of the monks. They are, however, to be envied the charm of the great hall with its carven choir stalls and lecturn, and the beautiful flower-decked cloisters. But where the crumbling Byzantine arcades once echoed with the Vesper, the Matin and the Ave, now is heard only the laughter of the heedless tourist, the chatter of children, the swish of skirts, and the click of the camera-shutter.

From the stone bal.u.s.trades of the terrace, one gazes down upon slopes th.o.r.n.y with the spikes of the p.r.i.c.kly pear, toothed and spurred with many an ugly rock that must have been there when the intrepid tyrant, Dionysius I, led his storming party up the slopes one winter night in 394 B. C., and forced his way into the very marketplace, only to be repulsed by the heroic citizens and come tumbling down--literally, it is said--six hundred feet among the rocks and thorns of the snowy ascent.

No wonder Dionysius hated Taormina after that! He disliked it before, and his little impromptu toboggan filled him with a tyrant's decision to even things with Taormina sooner or later. Four years afterward he kept his oath, in an outburst of savage fury that reduced the hamlet to ruins but failed to injure it permanently.

The moldering palace of the once mighty Dukes of Santo Stefano is also at this western end of the town. But all there is to see is a garden, tangled and sweet, a deep well whose carven curb speaks eloquently of the love of its former masters for the beautiful, and a barren earthen room under the palace, where dingy mosaics upon the stucco walls peep through the grime of ages. In one corner is a mortared pit about thirty inches deep and two feet in diameter. The caretaker is contemptuous at any failure to understand so simple a thing as an ancient bath, and displays the superior air of one who, however economical she may herself be in the use of such a luxury, is thoroughly versed in the theory of its employment by others of less Spartan virtue.

Beyond this--nothing! The key is in Palermo. With the characteristic fondness of Sicilians for separating buildings and their keys, the Duke leaves it in the capital, so the Greek and Roman marbles stripped ruthlessly from the Theater at the other end of town are usually invisible.

But though they may not be visible, the Theater from which they were taken is very much so. The Corso on the way is always a human and animal kaleidoscope. Here a man holds his grateful horse by the bridle while his wife lifts a black iron soup kettle to give the weary beast a drink of warm and nourishing soup made of bread, vegetables and goats' milk.

Yonder a demoralized old cat licks her kittens into shape on a shady doorstep while a venerable hen looks on and seems to have a proprietary interest in seeing the work properly performed. Cats and kittens and dogs lie jumbled together, in genial disregard of the usual enmities, suggesting the lion and the lamb parable.

Quaintly dressed peasants from the _piana_ stare at the visitor, and vendors of antiquities call lazily from their black little holes in the wall, advertising their strings of "ancient" pottery, that rattle ominously whenever a wisp of breeze playfully tugs at them. A carriage-full of tourists Baedekering through Sicily pa.s.ses literally on the jump, with craned necks and vociferous consultation of the fat little red books so essential to comfort in this land where no one is willing to confess that he really knows anything positively. Water-carts creak by, a huckster whose wares are not yet all sold bellows most musical of "_A-a-ar--ca--cio-o-o--fi-i-i-i!_" and from behind comes the mellow boom of the cathedral chimes knelling away the brilliant hour.

Artists with easels and sketching kits lumber heavily by on their way back from the Theater, the only great ruin of which Taormina can boast.

There is little now in the shattered playhouse to make alive its glories of Greek days, for as it stands it is largely a Roman ruin. The conquerors built amphitheaters throughout the island, but their theaters were in almost every instance merely enlargements or adaptations of older structures. Here in Taormina the building shows perfectly what the Romans did with the stage, which is in an almost perfect state of preservation. The playhouse, hewn in great part from the living rock, measures three hundred fifty-seven feet in its greatest diameter, while the diameter of the pit or orchestra is no less than one hundred and fifteen feet. The stage itself is quite narrow, with a vaulted channel or pa.s.sage underneath for the water, used in flooding the arena, for the naval combats that the degenerate Romans preferred to Greek drama.

Behind the stage the wall they built--of plain red brick instead of the costlier marble of early days--is still two stories high, and four of its granite Corinthian columns, with parts of the architrave, have been reerected to show the decorative scheme. Directly behind are the entrances upon the stage, one at the right, another at the left; and in the center a great ruinous breach in the wall where was once the third or central entrance. On each side are niches which contained statues, and in the side wall at each end of the stage are the _vestiaria_, the dressing-rooms of the actors. What is left of the auditorium proper--the superstructure added by the Romans is all gone--shows that the seats were divided into nine _cunei_, sections shaped like wedges; and so perfect were the acoustics that even yet, ruined though the structure is, the slightest word spoken upon the stage is distinctly audible at the very farthest extremity of the upper tier of seats.

The way up to the topmost seats is through gra.s.s and weeds starred with tiny flowerets, mantling over the scars of Time. Sitting there where Greek and Roman and Saracen in turn have mused before, he is cold indeed who does not thrill to memory and to the marvelous panorama spread below: on the right, tier on tier of the eternal hills in warm brown, their crowns of Saracenic-looking castles lending a militant air to their own stern beauty; below them, a confused medley of roofs and spires, roads and wandering walls, Taormina; through the _scena_ one of the grandest vistas in all creation--aetna the giant holding heaven and earth apart, his feet in the mists of the low rolling farmlands, his mighty crest lost amid the clouds of the spring afternoon; and reaching away into infinity, the pa.s.sionless Ionian Sea of song and story, murmuring a susurrant requiem for the vanished glories of other days.

XV

THE CITY THAT WAS

From Taormina to Messina the train hurries along at what seems breakneck speed--through vine and olive yards; past broad shallow, dry _fiumi_, dusty in summer but heavily walled on both sides against the coming of the winter and spring freshets. Now the hills rise bold and sheer, as we dash into and out of innumerable little smoky tunnels, like a firefly flashing through tangled brush. High on one hillside an old cemetery looks down--an enormous file of dusty old pigeon-holes tossed out from a t.i.tan's office and abandoned among the greenery.

There comes a town; a queer, quaint, smelly little fishing village--Ali--whose distinct perfume wafts in through even closed windows. Every house in it possesses atmosphere, character, a certain uncouth distinction all its own. Farther on goats--a big herd of them--munch their way along the beach undisturbed by our noisy pa.s.sing, walking in the cool water up to their fetlocks, eating seaweed and wagging their cronish old heads over the salty feast. What must be the flavor of their milk! But the goats are forgotten as up the Strait from Reggio steams the great car-ferry _Scylla_, since six miles away along the sweeping curve of the Italian sh.o.r.e to the north, the ugly gaunt rock of Scylla herself crouches against the dun background of iron sh.o.r.e.

Scylla and Charybdis, those fabled monsters of early h.e.l.lenic legend, apparently had no terrors for the pirates of Kyme who, Thucydides tells us, planted the first nursling settlement of Zankle, later Messina, in one of the most splendid natural locations ever utilized by man--a long, narrow strip of flat sh.o.r.e along the Bay, where the mountains stand well back, and only the foothills come near the water. Before the town shimmers one of the finest harbors in the world, a big circular bay fenced in by a low and sandy strip curved like the sickle the Sicilian Greeks called Danklon or Zankle. The site was a natural emporium at the point where the East and the West meet and are one; an ideal location for a great strategic, commercial and social center.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Messina--"The City that Was!"]

It has always been a notable city. Now we see it in the scarlet page of history as the home of the pirate, the prey of the Carthaginian, the bandit stronghold of the Mamertine, the first glorious conquest of the dashing Norman; then glorying in the wealth the Crusades poured into its lap as the kings of the earth pa.s.sed by in their search after the impossible and unattainable. Now we hear of it as the prey of a despot, an absentee monarch; now as the favorite of a king who loaded it with privilege; now as the bulwark of all Sicily against incursion from the mainland when Charles of Anjou, after the Vespers, came down upon Messina like Byron's a.s.syrian. Every man became a soldier, every woman in the city--ladies accustomed to ease and luxury as well as their less fortunate sisters--a worker. A song still popular in Sicily runs:

_Deh com' egli e gran pietate_ _delle donne di Messina,_ _veggiendo iscapigliate,_ _portando pietre e calcina!_

"Oh, what a pity 'tis to see the ladies of Messina carrying stones and chalk!"