Vistas in Sicily Part 13

The road up the hill to Solunto is magnificently paved even yet with the great irregular smooth blocks the Romans put to such excellent purpose on their military highways, curving to take advantage of every angle in the abrupt hillside, winding among thickets of p.r.i.c.kly pear, and past little irrigation ducts among lemon groves which murmur with a susurrant echo of the little channels that flow down Granada's long slope. Neatly piled beside the upper reaches of the road on either hand are dismembered columns, statues, fragments of pilasters, cornices, and blocks of marble. The ruins of the city itself are unsatisfying and meager--a single wide street lined with the foundations of some buildings of undiscernible age, half a dozen streets, similarly desolated, crossing it at almost right angles, a single three-cornered structure set up by an archaeologist and called, for want of a better t.i.tle, the Gymnasium, and here and there some bit of mosaic pavement or wall decoration.

Indeed, no one knew the exact site of Soluntum, which vanished ages ago, until in 1825 a peasant scratching about on the hillside unearthed splendid marble candelabra whose richness indicated their Roman origin, and small statues of Jupiter and Isis. Soluntum was found, and the archaeologists proceeded to uncover it. It reminds one strongly of Pompeii, though much less of interest has been discovered in it. But Solunto has a view, a transcendent panorama before which even a fountain pen falters.

At the foot of the hill, Gualterio--he had come out from Palermo for the _festa_--put me into a pa.s.sing jaunting car and sent me on my way to the villas of Bagheria, the most interesting of which is the property of Prince Palagonia. On either side of the gate are two queer old gnomes mounted upon marble pedestals and dressed in fantastic adaptations of Saracenic costume; the head gardener's wife a.s.sured me that these trolls are so terrible they frighten away not only trespa.s.sers, but "any other evil spirit" who dares to come that way. She crossed herself devoutly when she mentioned the names of certain malicious spirits who, she said, would be only too glad to molest Bagheria but for the forethought of the Prince.

The hollow wall about the rather ragged garden is wide enough in places to be used as dwellings for the servants. Courageous indeed must they be to rest under the shapes that decorate the wall, as weird a collection of zoological nightmares as ever were carved in stone by an insane sculptor at the hest of an insane patron. Black with age and the weather, grotesque pipers, trolls, knights, gentlemen, ladies, elves, monkeys, dragons, hunchbacks, cats, roosters, things intended to be representations of evil spirits, a miscellaneous scattering of angels and cherubs, a virgin or two, and the Prince's patron saint, stand, jump, walk, fly, or poise on one foot.

A heavy wind had played havoc with some of the figures a few days before my visit. "_Ecc'!_" exclaimed the gardener's wife, pointing ahead.

On the wall a most pious madonna, her hands crossed over her faded blue breast, gazed sadly down upon a dancer standing upon her head and buried almost to her shoulders in the mucky earth. How horrified the staid Virgin must have been when the worldling flew down the wind and poised upside down!

"Frightful, isn't it?" asked my guide.

"Oh, _spaventosa_! When are you going to put her back on the wall?" I inquired.

She shook her head sadly. "I do not know. Maybe never. The Prince is not rich enough now to bother about raising fallen ladies!"

There are other unoccupied villas in Bagheria of the same kind, with the same sort of "devil-scarers," but I preferred the live performers to the dead ones--the _festa_ waited. '_Festa di San Giu_,' the natives called it; but the railroad announcements in the stations stated that it was a town fair in honor of San Giuseppe. Bagheria itself is not a particularly attractive town, though clean and well-kept, and its nineteen or twenty thousand inhabitants do their best to decorate themselves and their buildings in honor of the saint, while thousands of merrymakers flock in from Palermo and all the country round.

At one side of the Corso two workmen were nailing pinwheels, serpents, set pieces and other explosives to a set of frames for a _castello di fuoco_ (fire-castle), at the same time puffing on long, thin Italian cigars. As I came along, one of the men knocked the ashes of cigar upon a pile of small saucissions, and nodded a cheerful greeting.

"What's the matter?" he called, as I sprang back. "Did something bite you?"

"No," I replied, steadily walking backward. "But aren't those fireworks?"

"Certainly!"

Stalls with cakes, sweet bread-sticks, candies, preserved watermelon seeds, nuts, fruit of various sorts, and indigestion-breeding pastry filled the streets. Around them the people flocked in their wonderful Sunday clothes. Others, gray-headed and sedate, sat in couples on the curbs, the men, generally fat, tinkling on ridiculously tiny mandolins, while their wives sang, and the crowds in the cafes and on the sidewalks clapped time or danced with feet, hands and heads, though all the while sitting still. One wineshop, little more than a cellar, had twelve heaps of not overly clean straw spread upon the damp stones.

"Does the ill.u.s.trious foreign _Signore_ require a bed?" asked the proprietor with a grinning bow. "Most cheap, sir, and excellent, only two _soldi_--for all night. Eleven are already taken. Behold the property!" and he pointed to various lumpy bundles of clothes, and large bandanna handkerchiefs tied at the corners, undoubtedly containing food.

The owners of these bundles had made sure of their beds by stuffing their property into the straw. Thanking the genial Boniface, I declined his invitation and pa.s.sed on.

At San Giuseppe the people, with cheery indifference, had turned the yard of the house of prayer into a den of thieves. Gambling of every sort known to the Sicilian peasantry was going on, and two games were running full blast, one on each side of the main entrance. There were the familiar _p't.i.ts ch'vaux_; lotto on a black rubber sheet bearing numbers; the old familiar sh.e.l.l game, and a sort of crude roulette.

Surrounding these stalls, of which there were nineteen on the sloping piazza between the church and the street, were hundreds of boys and young men, mostly lads of ten to twelve years. Their average play was one _soldo_ or penny, the minimum bet half a _soldo_, and the high four _soldi_.

The facade of the church was covered with hundreds of oil-cups in rows.

Inside, the whitewashed walls were hung, for the nonce, with a bewildering jumble of strips of gaudy colored cloth, pendant from the gallery, fringed and criss-crossed with gold lines like cheap wall paper. The image of San Giu' (Saint Joseph), mounted upon a large float, waited at one side of the nave ready to go out on the men's shoulders just at dusk for the procession, and around it stood eighteen candles, some of them six inches in diameter and no less than six feet in height.

On the front of the float hung votive offerings, paintings in smudgy oils on cardboard, one showing the death of Benedetto Giuseppe, at the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin.

Children with carts and poles and rubber b.a.l.l.s played about while old men and women knelt praying on the stone floor, and young girls strolled about in giggling pairs. Four hundred or more guttering candles filled the church with smoke and falling flakes of soot, and "all the world"

eddied in and out comfortably and contentedly, unawed by their church or their saint, making a comrade of holy Giuseppe and at peace with the whole of Creation, including even the foreign interloper with the camera, who sat to one side and watched as they made merry.

XVII

THE WESTERN Sh.o.r.e

Going westward from Palermo, the railroad cuts inland behind Monte Pellegrino, crossing the Conca d'Oro past many villas, and does not again touch the coast until, ten miles away, it reaches Sferracavallo, whose main street is so atrociously paved as to give the town its merited name--Unshoe-a-Horse. The line then skirts the sh.o.r.e for some distance, and the early morning scenes on the water to the right are more than lovely. Fishermen flit about in their white-winged boats or toil at launching the heavy craft. The waterfront of every village is a hive of industry. One picturesque and striking scene after another flits by until, at the end of an hour or so, we come out at Cinisi-Terrasini on the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Castellammare, a tremendous, sparkling expanse belted in by a fillet of gleaming white sand. From the bay, orchards and grain fields roll upward to the hills that pyramid, one upon another, into mountains dim and blue in the misty distance.

At Partinico we desert the sh.o.r.e and sweep in a ragged loop inland to pause a moment at the town--it has a far reaching trade in oil and wine--before darting back sh.o.r.eward again, unable to resist the fascination of Father Neptune. Close to the water's edge another town, Balestrate, sprawls along sh.o.r.e among the dunes, over which grows a savage luxuriance of reeds and gra.s.ses, among which, on an occasional acre, wrested from barrenness, is a hut of thatch and a hardy family of hard working peasants. Can these be the descendants of the Sikans and Sikels who so long ago vanished from the earth; and are these huts anything like the primitive dwellings in which those still more primitive folk loved and bred and died? Certainly except for using iron tools and smoking tobacco, they seem to have little advantage over their progenitors. Paying back-breaking taxes and furnishing conscripts to-day is almost as bad as being at the mercy of a Greek tyrant with his demands for money and men.

At the head of the bay, three miles before the railroad reaches the town of Castellammare, once the seaport of Elymian Segesta, it turns southward, and ascends the valley of the Fiume San Bartolommeo. Its princ.i.p.al tributary is the Fiume Freddo (Cold Stream), once the Krimisos, near which a wonderful battle was fought between the Carthaginians, and the Greeks under Timoleon the Deliverer. So alarmed was Carthage by his prowess and activity that for the first time the Sacred Band, the picked Home Guard, was sent over to Sicily. Near the Krimisos, Timoleon, undaunted by the desperate odds, hurled his eleven thousand Greeks against the 70,000 barbarians. Just before the conflict the Greeks met a mule train laden with _selinon_, or wild celery, the plant used at funerals. What omen could have been worse? Panic hovered in the air. But Timoleon's wit was quick and sure. Gayly he made a wreath of the plant and crowned himself, with the remark that it was the crown used at the Isthmian Games. With a shout of relief officers and men followed his example, and confidence mounted high as the host marched on. In the battle that followed, the very G.o.ds of h.e.l.las fought for the Deliverer, Zeus the Thunderer darkening the heavens and hurling his fiery bolts. Rain and hail quenched the ardor of the Carthaginians; the thunder deafened and the lightning blinded them--the whole storm drove straight in their faces. And the Greeks, marching forward steadily under the divine aegis, cut the Punic host to pieces, annihilated the Sacred Band.

History repeated itself May 15, 1860, when, on the hills of Calatafimi, again a deliverer of the people, this time Giuseppe Garibaldi, crushed a foreign enemy and oppressor. Many an army had marched and camped and fought among these hills and vales, and the powdery dust of the milk-white roads had puffed up from the feet of Elymian and Phnician, Greek and Roman legions. But never before had a victory meant so much to civilization as the success of the badly armed but desperately determined and immortal Thousand who followed the gray-haired sailor-hero. And history repeated itself yet again when Garibaldi, like Timoleon, refused everything for himself, counting it honor enough to serve Sicily so well.

While it is possible to drive from Castellammare to all the points of interest in the vicinity, and they are many, it is better to go on by the train to the station Alcamo-Calatafimi. Neither town is near the railway station, but either _diligenzia_ or carriage is to be had for the ride--four miles to Alcamo, an old Saracenic town which still keeps a certain oriental tang, or about six miles in the other direction to Calatafimi. Almost straight north, along the high-road to Castellammare, are the ruins of Segesta, a spot full of tragic memories.

Segesta--Egesta it was then--one of the two great Elymian cities, trafficked with Carthage, with Sicilian Greeks, with Athens, with anyone, in a word, as suited her purpose at the moment; but somehow she usually came to grief through these very alliances. Indeed, it was her continual bickering with Greek Selinus, her distant neighbor on the southern sh.o.r.e, that first brought the meddling Athenians to Sicily, and so indirectly caused the great war between Athens and Syracuse. To-day there is not an Elymian ruin left in the city; all that remains of the ill-starred metropolis is Greek and Roman.

The superb temple, alike a monument to Greek genius and the devotion of the people, rises from a lofty plateau--a glowing golden shrine upon an altar all of green, embayed by watchful, h.o.a.ry mountains. Only the ma.s.siveness of a Doric structure could so perfectly chime in with the grandeur of Nature, so fittingly command the immense and silent though turbulent landscape that rolls away from its feet. Revelation inspired its location, and genius erected it--to stand lovelier and more marvelous still after the lapse of ages than when there was a city near by to detract from its majestic solitude.

The Greeks, with their unerring artistic sense, always built their theaters in positions commanding magnificent views, and the little theater here at Segesta, though only about half the size of the one at Syracuse, looks out upon the sea, many miles away, and a magnificent panorama of hills and forests on either side. Of the town only a few very scanty bits of ruined houses have been uncovered.

One of the most lurid episodes in the city's history occurred when the tyrant Agathocles--he feigned to be a merry soul, though really a butcher at heart, with ma.s.sacre as his chief diversion!--tortured and slaughtered ten thousand of the inhabitants, sold all the likely looking boys and girls as slaves, repeopled the city with colonists of his own, and called it Dikaiopolis, the City of Righteousness! Indeed, Agathocles was in many respects the most picturesque despot Sicily ever produced, and his career reads like a modern romantic novel. Born a potter, he entered the army, was banished, recalled to Syracuse, married a wealthy widow there, frustrated plot after plot against his life, engaged in wholesale murders, established himself as a full fledged tyrant, and made war against Carthage in her own territory--the first time the arrogant daughter of Phnicia had ever been tracked to her lair by an enemy. Raising himself by treachery and ma.s.sacre upon a throne of his enemies' skulls, Agathocles made himself master of all Sicily, and for seventeen years more held his power intact, butcher and trickster to the end, yet somehow managing always to retain the good will of the ma.s.ses.

From Calatafimi the train goes on southward past ancient Halicyae, a big town arrogantly perched upon a height, gemmed with a castle, to Castelvetrano, where we leave it for the ruins of Selinus on the sh.o.r.e, seven miles away. The trip is made either by carriage or on horseback, as you may prefer. The acropolis, the pulsing heart of Selinus, is an empty sh.e.l.l. Beneath our feet the historic pave over which rumbled the springless chariots of Phnician and Greek, lies buried in crumbling debris; the fallen temples, the vast hillocks of ruin beyond, tell mutely how great and how glorious must the city have been before Hannibal the destroyer poured forth his savage wrath upon it; and in street and plain the _selinon_, or wild celery, which named the city, still thrusts upward to the same sun that warmed the early settlers.

On the hill east of the acropolis rise the ruins of the three largest temples, colossal structures, but not a fragment of any other kind.

These stupendous edifices, even in their desolation, are among the most inspiring of Sicilian monuments; especially when we remember that at no time was the city first or even second among the Greek communities. And from these temples of Selinus were taken the wonderful metopes--now in the Palermo Museum--that so graphically ill.u.s.trate the progress of Greek-Sicilian temple sculpture. Here on the eastern hill the Selinutines were busy raising to Phbus Apollo his greatest fane when the invader came, and, dropping their tools, the workmen hastened to their doom. The structure was 371 feet long, 177 wide--so tremendous that upon its base were erected forty-six giant columns, almost fifty-eight feet high and twelve feet thick! It seems almost impossible that so vast, so tremendously solid a structure should collapse like an eggsh.e.l.l; and yet the seismic shock that evidently destroyed it tossed those huge walls and columns lightly aside, voiding at a single stroke the work of the builders who planned like genii and executed like t.i.tans. How was it, we wonder, that Selinus offended the mighty earth G.o.ds as well as the G.o.d of war? And how long was it before they shook the earth to its very vitals and completed the work of destruction the barbarian had begun?

That the Carthaginians cut off the temple builders at their work is proven by a visit to the quarries, some distance inland. From the necropolis, west of the river, the road winds in, and before the quarries are reached we pa.s.s block after block of the shaped stones abandoned in transport to the temples. In the great pits themselves one may look on, almost as if time had been annihilated, at the various stages of the work--there are some huge blocks from eight to ten feet long and eight feet thick, corresponding exactly with the column drums of the temple marked G on the plans for the use of visitors, and without doubt intended for that edifice. It is an object lesson one cannot soon forget, of the blighting breath of war, a tragedy without words that is inexpressibly moving.

To the southwest of Selinus is the Punta di Granitola, where the Arabs landed in 827 A. D., Koran in one hand, sword in the other--the last African invaders to conquer the island, let us hope. Farther along, on both sh.o.r.e and railroad, is Mazzara, with a Norman cathedral and ruined castle; and straight northwest on a little promontory of its own is Marsala, better known for its sweet, rich wine than as the modern successor of Carthaginian Lilybaion. Though Marsala--the name is Arabic: Marsa Ali, Ali's Harbor--was never possessed by the Greeks, its story is nevertheless vivid and varied. As the chief stronghold of Carthage, it played a vital part in the struggle for supremacy in this "barbarian corner" of the island. Pyrrhus besieged it in vain, and thirty years later Rome besieged it unsuccessfully for eight years in one of the most stubborn and remarkable campaigns in history. Afterward, during the Roman period, the city was known as "the most splendid," and was made the capital of the western half of Sicily, Syracuse being the eastern capital. It became an important dockyard and naval station, whence the Roman campaigns against Africa were dispatched. Don John of Austria, too, sailed hence on his expeditions against the Turks.

It was into the harbor of Marsala on that memorable 11th of May, 1860, that the two little steamers _Lombardo_ and _Piemonte_, which the revolutionists had shanghaied from the Rubattino Company up at Genoa the week before, sneaked to land Garibaldi and his red-shirt brigade. They got ash.o.r.e safely, in spite of the Bourbons' cruisers, and before they left for Calatafimi Garibaldi posted his now famous proclamation claiming Sicily for King Victor Emmanuele.

Of course there are a cathedral, Punic and Christian tombs, the remains of ancient walls and harbor works, _latomie_ and so on, but to-day Marsala really spells only--Wine! The largest and most important establishments are those of the Englishmen Ingham and Woodhouse, and the Sicilian Florio of Palermo. But there are numerous others not so well known nor doing so large a business. The long, low, white bodegas are open to the inspection of visitors, and to those who have never seen them, the processes of blending and converting with the use of the "mother" wines, the mechanical bottling and corking, the labeling and packing departments, the endless rows of hogsheads and the strongly vinous atmosphere, all possess an attraction peculiarly their own. There is something of interest in every foot of each establishment.

But--_verb.u.m sap_! Beware the atmosphere, and the testing to which you are invited. In all the great wine-making countries it is considered a legitimate joke to befuddle the careless American whose enthusiasm outruns his prudence. One or two sips of the wine may be taken with dignity, but Marsala, like its Spanish cousin, Sherry, is a heady wine, and the rich, heavy air of the winery and wareroom alike bespeak caution on the part of the investigator, if a delightful memory is not to be spoiled by a p.r.i.c.king conscience.

Around the old harbor to the north of Marsala are extensive salt works, and between it and Trapani are about forty-five more, all worked by private capital, since Italy's royal monopoly has not been extended to Sicily. Salt is one of the island's most valuable exports, and the salt-pans down by the sea, at Trapani--the ancient Drepana of Carthaginian days--have made the city the most prosperous place, for its size, in the island. From a distance the heaps look as if an army of invading Saracens had pitched their tents upon the flats, and quaint windmills add a distinctly Dutch note to the scene. The heavy brine is pumped up into shallow excavations or "pans," as the tanks are called.

The hot Sicilian sunshine and the warm African breezes do the rest. When the water has evaporated, the pans are thickly coated with the crystals, which workmen shovel into glittering heaps and cover with tiles to protect them. There the salt waits, for either the refinery or for shipment in bulk as a crude product.

Trapani itself is one of the cleanest towns in the island, as well as one of the most prosperous, and of course has its Via Garibaldi, which proves its fraternity with all other Sicilian cities. While there is nothing really great in it, in either architecture or art, the city is nevertheless full of minor interest, and various objects of art ranging all the way from pieces of the Middle Ages down to the present day statues of King Victor Emmanuele II and Garibaldi, neither of which is yet forty years old. One could while away many a pleasant day loitering among these things--the Cathedral, with its Crucifixion by Van Dyck, and splendid old carven seats in the choir; the quaint decorations of Sant'

Agostino, where the Knights Templars worshiped centuries ago; Lucca della Robbia's marble-framed Madonna in the other church of Santa Maria di Gesu; the seventeenth century polychrome wooden statues by Trapani's own sons in the Oratory of San Michele; the queer tower of the Spedadello down in the Ghetto, and so on. Equally pleasant it is to wander along the tree-shaded promenade at the water's edge, or as far out as the Torre di Ligny, on the very tip of the "sickle" (_drepana_) that Trapani thrusts out into the sea.

Off sh.o.r.e, the picturesque aegadian Isles rise like jewels from the sea.

From the middle of the eighteenth to the last quarter of the nineteenth century they were owned by the n.o.ble Pallavicini family of Genoa. They are still private property, since in 1874 Signor Florio of Palermo, the steamship man and wine grower, added them to his multifarious interests and made them the headquarters of the most important tunny fishery in Sicily.

Trapani possesses the usual historical interest of intermittent conflict between the races that struggled for the possession of the island, but its legendary story is even more gripping. Virgil pictures the founding of the city by the hero aeneas and his Trojans after Troy had fallen, the death of the venerable Anchises, and the festival aeneas inst.i.tuted in honor of his father's uneasy spirit. The poet's soaring imagination carried the hero on up the mist-shrouded mountain behind, to worship at the fane of his mother Venus. This cloudy peak was named after Eryx--son of Butes, the mighty wrestler--who challenged Hercules to a test of strength, and was vanquished by that worthy robber, who stopped while driving off Geryon's stolen herds long enough to win the match and take the mountain as his prize.

With the beginning of history it appears in the possession of the Elymians, who claimed to be descendants of the Trojans. Twenty-five hundred feet in the air rises Eryx, to-day Monte San Giuliano, reached from Trapani by an interminably winding but easy road that twists and turns half a hundred times in its ascent. Up through the purple shadows of gulches, along the sharp edges of startling acclivities winds the trail, with halcyone fields of every brilliant flower and plant below, and great expanses waving with grain, green and gold with lemons and oranges, red with the fresh wounds of the plow. Hide-sandaled and heavily caped and hooded peasants, shepherds who seem to have stepped right out of Odyssey or aeneid, carrying cla.s.sic water or wine flasks, greet us cheerily along the way. As we near the top the reason for these heavy garments becomes apparent in the lower temperature, for Eryx is a peak and a city of fog, often a little world by itself far above the earth, unseen by and unseeing city and plain below, looking down only on the tufted white of rolling mists. Cyclopean fragments of ancient walls and natural precipices blend into one another and into the present town walls, above steep approaches to the Gates of Trapani, of the Heralds, and of the Sword, the three entrances to all that exists of Eryx to-day, where less than three thousand souls live in that part of the town nearest the ruins of the temple, whose very altars long since crumbled into the dust of oblivion.

In the days when the Elymians were its masters, the mountain was sacred to a G.o.ddess who evidently had the same functions as the Roman Venus.

What her Elymian name was we do not know; but since the Phnicians called her Astarte, the Greeks Aphrodite and the Romans Venus, one after the other, we may feel sure that whatever her original name, she stood, as did those later G.o.ddesses identified with her, for love and beauty and sustenance. And though centuries have pa.s.sed, and the altar before her whereon no blood was permitted to be spilt no longer bears the fire of sacrifice, the priestly ideal of woman still presides over this sacred rock so high among the mists. For here where the pagans worshiped their unknown G.o.ddess, to-day the Virgin gazes down upon the unchanging sacrifice of years, the hearts of men.