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PALERMO[34]

BY WILL S. MONROE

While not one of the original Hellenic city-states, Palermo has a superb location on the northern shores of the central island of the central sea; its harbor is guarded by the two picturesque cliffs and the fertile plain that forms the "compagne" is hemmed in by a semicircular cord of rugged mountains. "Perhaps there are few spots upon the surface of the globe more beautiful than Palermo," writes Arthur Symonds. "The hills on either hand descend upon the sea with long-drawn delicately broken outlines, so delicately tinted with aerial hues at early dawn or beneath the blue light of a full moon the panorama seems to be some fabric of fancy, that must fade away, 'like shapes of clouds we form,' to nothing. Within the cradle of these hills, and close upon the tideless water, lies the city. Behind and around on every side stretches the famous Conco d'Oro, or golden shell, a plain of marvelous fertility, so called because of its richness and also because of its shape; for it tapers to a fine point where the mountains meet, and spreads abroad, where they diverge, like a cornucopia. The whole of this long vega is a garden, thick with olive-groves and orange trees, with orchards of nespole and palms and almonds, with fig-trees and locust-trees, with judas-trees that blush in spring, and with flowers as multitudinously brilliant as the fretwork of sunset clouds."

During the days of Phoenician and Carthagenian supremacy Palermo was a busy mart—a great clearing-house for the commerce of the island and that part of the Mediterranean. But during the days of the Saracens it became not only a very busy city but also a very beautiful city. The Arabian poets extolled its charms in terms that sound to us exceedingly extravagant. One of them wrote: "Oh how beautiful is the lakelet of the twin palms and the island where the spacious palace stands. The limpid waters of the double springs resemble liquid pearls, and their basin is a sea; you would say that the branches of the trees stretched down to see the fishes in the pool and smile at them. The great fishes in those clear waters, and the birds among the gardens tune their songs. The ripe oranges of the island are like fire that burns on boughs of emerald; the pale lemon reminds me of a lover who has passed the night in weeping for his absent darling. The two palms may be compared to lovers who have gained an inaccessible retreat against their enemies, or raise themselves erect in pride to confound the murmurs and the ill thoughts of jealous men. O palms of two lakelets of Palermo, ceaseless, undisturbed, and plenteous days for ever keep your freshness."

With the coming of the Normans Palermo enjoyed even greater prosperity than had been experienced under the liberal rule of the Saracens. This was the most brilliant period in the history of the city. The population was even more mixed than during Moslem supremacy. Besides the Greeks, Normans, Saracens, and Hebrews, there were commercial colonies of Slavs, Venetians, Lombardians, Catalans, and Pisans.

The most interesting public monuments at Palermo date from the Norman period; and while many of the buildings are strikingly Saracenic in character and recall similar structures erected by the Arabs in Spain, it will be remembered that the Normans brought no trained architects to the island, but employed the Arabs, Greeks, and Hebrews who had already been in the service of the Saracen emirs. But the Arab influence in architecture was dominant, and it survived well into the fourteenth century.

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GIRGENTI[35]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

The reported luxury of the Sikeliot cities in this age is, in the double-edged saying of Empedocles, connected with one of their noblest tastes. They built their houses as if they were going to live for ever. And if their houses, how much more their temples and other public buildings? In some of the Sikeliot cities, this was the most brilliant time of architectural splendor. At Syracuse indeed the greatest buildings which remain to tell their own story belong either to an earlier or to a later time. It is the theater alone, as in its first estate a probable work of the first HierÔn, which at all connects itself with our present time. But at Akragas[36] and at Selinous the greatest of the existing buildings belong to the days of republican freedom and independence. At Akragas what the tyrant began the democracy went on with. The series of temples that line the southern wall are due to an impulse which began under ThÊrÔn and went on to the days of the Carthaginian siege.

Of the greatest among them, the temple of Olympian Zeus, this is literally true. There can be little doubt that it was begun as one of the thank-offerings after the victory of Himera, and it is certain that at the coming of Hannibal and HamilkÔn it was still so far imperfect that the roof was not yet added. It was therefore in building during a time of more than seventy years, years which take in the whole of the brilliant days of Akragantine freedom and well-being.

To the same period also belong the other temples in the lower city, temples which abide above ground either standing or in ruins, while the older temples in the akropolis have to be looked for underneath buildings of later ages. It was a grand conception to line the southern wall, the wall most open to the attacks of mortal enemies, with this wonderful series of holy places of the divine protectors of the city. It was a conception due, we may believe, in the first instance, to ThÊrÔn, but which the democracy fully entered into and carried out. The two best preserved of the range stand to the east; one indeed occupies the southeastern corner of the fortified enclosure.

Next in order to the west comes the temple which bears a name not unlikely, but altogether impossible and unmeaning, the so-called temple of Concord. No reasonable guess can be made at its pagan dedication; in the fifteenth century of our era it followed the far earlier precedent of the temples in the akropolis. It became the church of Saint Gregory, not of any of the great pontiffs and doctors of the Church, but of the local bishop whose full description as Saint Gregory of the Turnips can hardly be written without a smile. The peristyle was walled up, and arches were cut through the walls of the cella, exactly as in the great church of Syracuse. Saint Gregory of Girgenti plays no such part in the world's history as was played by the Panagia of Syracuse; we may therefore be more inclined to extend some mercy to the Bourbon king who set free the columns as we now see them. When he had gone so far, one might even wish that he had gone on to wall up the arches. In each of the former states of the building there was a solid wall somewhere to give shelter from the blasts which sweep round this exposed spot. As the building now stands, it is, after the Athenian house of Theseus and Saint George, the best preserved Greek temple in being. Like its fellow to the east, it is a building of moderate size, of the middle stage of Doric, with columns less massive than those of Syracuse and Corinth, less slender than those of Nemea.

Again to the west stood a temple of greater size, nearly ranging in scale with the Athenian Parthenon, which is assigned, with far more of likelihood than the other names, to HÊraklÊs. Save one patched-up column standing amid the general ruin, it has, in the language of the prophet, become heaps. All that is left is a mass of huge stones, among which we can see the mighty columns, fallen, each in its place, overthrown, it is clear, by no hand of man but by those powers of the nether world whose sway is felt in every corner of Sicilian soil.

These three temples form a continuous range along the eastern part of the southern wall of the city. To the west of them, parted from them by a gate, which, in Roman times at least, bore, as at Constantinople and Spalato, the name of Golden, rose the mightiest work of Akragantine splendor and devotion, the great Olympieion itself. Of this gigantic building, the vastest Greek temple in Europe, we happily have somewhat full descriptions from men who had looked at it, if not in the days of its full glory, yet at least when it was a house standing up, and not a ruin. As it now lies, a few fragments of wall still standing amid confused heaps of fallen stones, of broken columns and capitals, no building kindles a more earnest desire to see it as it stood in the days of its perfection.

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SEGESTE[37]

BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The temple of Segeste was never finished; the ground around it was never even leveled; the space only being smoothed on which the peristyle was to stand. For, in several places, the steps are from nine to ten feet in the ground, and there is no hill near, from which the stone or mold could have fallen. Besides, the stones lie in their natural position, and no ruins are found near them.

The columns are all standing; two which had fallen, have very recently been raised again. How far the columns rested on a socle is hard to say; and without an engraving it is difficult to give an idea of their present state. At some points it would seem as if the pillars rested on the fourth step. In that case to enter the temple you would have to go down a step. In other places, however, the uppermost step is cut through, and then it looks as if the columns had rested on bases; and then again these spaces have been filled up, and so we have once more the first case. An architect is necessary to determine this point.

The sides have twelve columns, not reckoning the corner ones; the back and front six, including them. The rollers on which the stones were moved along, still lie around you on the steps. They have been left in order to indicate that the temple was unfinished. But the strongest evidence of this fact is the floor. In some spots (along the sides) the pavement is laid down; in the middle, however, the red limestone rock still projects higher than the level of the floor as partially laid; the flooring, therefore, can not ever have been finished. There is also no trace of an inner temple. Still less can the temple have ever been overlaid with stucco; but that it was intended to do so, we may infer from the fact that the abaci of the capitals have projecting points probably for the purpose of holding the plaster. The whole is built of a limestone, very similar to the travertine; only it is now much fretted. The restoration which was carried on in 1781, has done much good to the building. The cutting of the stone, with which the parts have been reconnected, is simple, but beautiful.

The site of the temple is singular; at the highest end of a broad and long valley, it stands on an isolated hill. Surrounded, however, on all sides by cliffs, it commands a very distant and extensive view of the land, but takes in only just a corner of the sea. The district reposes in a sort of melancholy fertility—every where well cultivated, but scarce a dwelling to be seen. Flowering thistles were swarming with countless butterflies, wild fennel stood here from eight to nine feet high, dry and withered of the last year's growth, but so rich and in such seeming order that one might almost take it to be an old nursery-ground. A shrill wind whistled through the columns as if through a wood, and screaming birds of prey hovered around the pediments.

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TAORMINA[38]

BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

When you have ascended to the top of the wall of rocks [at Taormina], which rise precipitously at no great distance from the sea, you find two peaks, connected by a semicircle. Whatever shape this may have had originally from Nature has been helped by the hand of man, which has formed out of it an amphitheater for spectators. Walls and other buildings have furnished the necessary passages and rooms. Right across, at the foot of the semicircular range of seats, the scene was built, and by this means the two rocks were joined together, and a most enormous work of nature and art combined.

Now, sitting down at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did any audience, in any theater, have before it such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air—farther on the city lies below you; and altho its buildings are all of modern date, still similar ones, no doubt, stood of old on the same site. After this the eye falls on the whole of the long ridge of Ætna, then on the left it catches a view of the sea-shore, as far as Catania, and even Syracuse, and then the wide and extensive view is closed by the immense smoking volcano, but not horribly, for the atmosphere, with its softening effect, makes it look more distinct, and milder than it really is.

If now you turn from this view toward the passage running at the back of the spectators, you have on the left the whole wall of the rocks between which and the sea runs the road to Messina. And then again you behold vast groups of rocky ridges in the sea itself, with the coast of Calabria in the far distance, which only a fixt and attentive gaze can distinguish from the clouds which rise rapidly from it.

We descended toward the theater, and tarried awhile among its ruins, on which an accomplished architect would do well to employ, at least on paper, his talent of restoration. After this I attempted to make a way for myself through the gardens to the city. But I soon learned by experience what an impenetrable bulwark is formed by a hedge of agaves planted close together. You can see through their interlacing leaves, and you think, therefore, it will be easy to force a way through them; but the prickles on their leaves are very sensible obstacles. If you step on these colossal leaves, in the hope that they will bear you, they break off suddenly; and so, instead of getting out, you fall into the arms of the next plant. When, however, at last we had wound our way out of the labyrinth, we found but little to enjoy in the city; tho from the neighboring country we felt it impossible to part before sunset. Infinitely beautiful was it to observe this region, of which every point had its interest, gradually enveloped in darkness.

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MOUNT ÆTNA[39]

BY WILL S. MONROE

By the ancients Ætna was supposed to be the prison of the mighty chained giant Typhon, the flames proceeding from his breath and the noises from his groans; and when he turned over earthquakes shook the island. Many of the myths of the Greek poets were associated with the slopes of Ætna, such as Demeter, torch in hand, seeking Persephone, Acis and Galatea, Polyphemus and the Cyclops.

Ætna was once a volcano in the Mediterranean and in the course of ages it completely filled the surrounding sea with its lava. A remarkable feature of the mountain is the large number of minor cones on its sides—some seven hundred in all. Most of these subsidiary cones are from three to six thousand feet in height and they make themselves most strongly felt during periods of great activity. The summit merely serves as a vent through which the vapors and gases make their escape. The natural boundaries of Ætna are the Alcantara and Simeto rivers on the north, west, and south, and the sea on the east.

The most luxurious fertility characterizes the gradual slopes near the base, the decomposed volcanic soil being almost entirely covered with olives, figs, grapes, and prickly pears. Higher up is the timber zone. Formerly there was a dense forest belt between the zone of cultivated land and the tore of cinders and snow; but the work of forest extermination was almost completed during the reign of the Spanish Bourbons. One may still find scattered oak, ilex, chestnut, and pine interspersed with ferns and aromatic herbs. Chestnut trees of surprizing growth are found on the lower slopes. "The Chestnut Tree of the Hundred Horses," for which the slopes of Ætna are famous, is not a single tree but a group of several distinct trunks together forming a circle, under whose spreading branches a hundred horses might find shelter.

Above the wooded zone Ætna is covered with miniature cones thrown up by different eruptions and regions of dreary plateau covered with scoriae and ashes and buried under snow a part of the year. While the upper portions of the volcano are covered with snow the greater portion of the year, Ætna does not reach the limit of perpetual snow, and the heat which is emitted from its sides prevents the formation of glaciers in the hollows. One might expect that the quantities of snow and rain which fall on the summit would give rise to numerous streams. But the small stones and cinders absorb the moisture, and springs are found only on the lower slopes. The cinders, however, retain sufficient moisture to support a rich vegetation wherever the surface of the lava is not too compact to be penetrated by roots. The surface of the more recent lava streams is not, as might be supposed, smooth and level, but full of yawning holes and rents.

The regularity of the gradual slopes is broken on the eastern side by the Valle del Bove, a vast amphitheater more than three thousand feet in depth, three miles in width, and covering an area of ten square miles. The bottom of the valley is dotted with craters which rise in gigantic steps; and, when Ætna is in a state of eruption, these craters pour forth fiery cascades of lava. The Monte Centenari rise from the Valle del Bove to an elevation of 6,026 feet. At the head of the valley is the Torre del Filosofo at an altitude of 9,570 feet. This is the reputed site of the observatory of Empedocles, the poet and philosopher, who is fabled to have thrown himself into the crater of Ætna to immortalize his name.

The lower slopes of Ætna—after the basin of Palermo—include the most densely populated parts of Sicily. More than half a million people live on the slopes of a mountain that might be expected to inspire terror. "Towns succeed towns along its base like pearls in a necklace, and when a stream of lava effects a breach in the chain of human habitations, it is closed up again as soon as the lava has had time to cool." As soon as the lava has decomposed, the soil produces an excellent yield and this tempts the farmer and the fruit grower to take chances. Speaking of the dual effect of Ætna, Freeman says: "He has been mighty to destroy, but he has also been mighty to create and render fruitful. If his fiery streams have swept away cities and covered fields, they have given the cities a new material for their buildings and the fields a new soil rich above all others."

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SYRACUSE[40]

BY RUFUS B. RICHARDSON

The ruins of Syracuse are not to the casual observer very imposing. But even these ruins have great interest for the archeologist. There is, for example, an old temple near the northern end of Ortygia, for the most part embedded in the buildings of the modern city, yet with its east end cleared and showing several entire columns with a part of the architrave upon them. And what a surprize here awaits one who thinks of a Doric temple as built on a stereotyped plan! Instead of the thirteen columns on the long sides which one is apt to look for as going with a six-column front, here are eighteen or nineteen, it is not yet quite certain which. The columns stand less than their diameter apart, and the abaci are so broad that they nearly touch.

So small is the inter-columnar space that archeologists incline to the belief that in this one Doric temple there were triglyphs only over the columns, and not also between them as in all other known cases. Everything about this temple stamps it as the oldest in Sicily. An inscription on the top step, in very archaic letters, much worn and difficult to read, contains the name of Apollo in the ancient form.... The inscription may, of course, be later than the temple; but it is in itself old enough to warrant the supposition that the temple was erected soon after the first Corinthian colonists established themselves in the island. While the inscription makes it reasonably certain that the temple belonged to Apollo, the god under whose guiding hand all these Dorians went out into these western seas, tradition, with strange perversity, has given it the name of "Temple of Diana." But it is all in the family.

Another temple ruin on the edge of the plateau, which begins about two miles south of the city, across the Anapos, one might also easily overlook in a casual survey, because it consists only of two columns without capitals, and a broad extent of the foundations from which the accumulated earth has been only partially removed. This was the famous temple of Olympian Zeus, built probably in the days of Hiero I., soon after the Persian war, but on the site of a temple still more venerable. One seeks a reason for the location of this holy place at such a distance from the city. Holm, the German historian of Sicily, argues with some plausibility that this was no mere suburb of Syracuse, but the original Syracuse itself. In the first place, the list of the citizens of Syracuse was kept here down at least to the time of the Athenian invasion. In the second place, tradition, which, when rightly consulted, tells so much, says that Archias, the founder of Syracuse, had two daughters, Ortygia and Syracusa, which may point to two coordinate settlements, Ortygia and Syracuse; the latter, which was on this temple plateau, being subsequently merged in the former, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, giving its name to the combined result.

Besides these temple ruins there are many more foundations that tell a more or less interesting story. Then there are remains of the ancient city that can never be ruined—for instance, the great stone quarries, pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the pitiless captors; the Greek theater cut out of the solid rock; the great altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also of solid rock. Then there is a mighty Hexapylon, which closed the fortifications of Dionysius at the northwest at the point where they challenged attack from the land side. With its sally-ports and rock-hewn passages, some capacious enough to quarter regiments of cavalry, showing holes cut in the projecting corners of rock, through which the hitch-reins of the horses were wont to be passed, and its great magazines, it stands a lasting memorial to the energy of a tyrant. But while this fortress is practically indestructible, an impregnable fortress is a dream incapable of realization. Marcellus and his stout Romans came in through these fortifications, not entirely, it is true, by their own might, but by the aid of traitors, against whom no walls are proof.

One of the stone quarries, the Latomia del Paradiso, has an added interest from its association with the tyrant who made himself hated as well as feared, while Gelon was only feared without being hated. An inner recess of the quarry is called the "Ear of Dionysius," and tradition says that at the inner end of this recess either he or his creatures sat and listened to the murmurs that the people uttered against him, and that these murmurs were requited with swift and fatal punishment. Certain it is that a whisper in this cave produces a wonderful resonance, and a pistol shot is like the roar of a cannon; but that people who had anything to say about the butcher should come up within ear-shot of him to utter it is not very likely. Historians are not quite sure that the connection of Dionysius with this recess is altogether mythical, but that he shaped it with the fell purpose above mentioned is not to be thought of, as the whole quarry is older than his time, and was probably, with the Latomia dei Cappuccini, a prison for the Athenians.

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MALTA[41]

BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

The city of Valetta, founded in 1566, by the grand master whose name it bears, is the capital of Malta. The city of La Sangle, and the city of Victoria, which occupy two points of land on the other side of the harbor of the Marse, together with the suburbs of Floriana and Burmola, complete the town; encircled by bastions, ramparts, counterscarps, forts, and fortifications, to an extent which renders siege impossible! If you follow one of the streets which surround the town, at each step that you take, you find yourself face to face with a cannon. Gibraltar itself does not bristle more completely with mouths of fire. The inconvenience of these extended works is, that they enclose a vast radius, and demand to defend them, in case of attack, an enormous garrison; always difficult to maintain at a distance from the mother country.

From the height of the ramparts, one sees in the distance the blue and transparent sea, broken into ripples by the breeze, and dotted with snowy sails. The scarlet sentinels are on guard from point to point, and the heat of the sun is so fierce upon the glacis, that a cloth stretched upon a frame and turning upon a pivot at the top of a pole, forms a shade for the soldiers, who, without this precaution, must inevitably be roasted on their posts....

The city of Valetta, altho built with regularity, and, so to speak, all in one "block," is not, therefore, the less picturesque. The decided slope of the ground neutralizes what the accurate lines of the street might otherwise have of monotony, and the town mounts by degrees and by terraces the hillside, which it forms into an amphitheater. The houses, built very high like those of Cadiz, terminate in flat roofs that their inhabitants may the better enjoy the sea view. They are all of white Maltese stone; a sort of sandstone easy to work, and with which, at small expense, one can indulge various caprices of sculpture and ornamentation. These rectilinear houses stand well, and have an air of grandeur, which they owe to the absence of (visible) roofs, cornices, and attics. They stand out sharply and squarely against the azure of the heavens, which their dazzling whiteness renders only the more intense; but that which chiefly gives them a character of originality is the projecting balcony hung upon each front; like the "moucharabys" of the East, or the "miradores" of Spain.

The palace of the grand masters—to-day the palace of the government—has nothing remarkable in the way of architecture. Its date is recent, and it responds but imperfectly to the idea one would form of the residence of Villiers de I'lle Adam, of Lavalette, and of their warlike ancestors. Nevertheless, it has a certain monumental air, and produces a fine effect upon the great Place, of which it forms one entire side. Two doorways, with rustic columns, break the uniformity of the long faÇade; while an immense balcony, supported by gigantic sculptured brackets, encircles the building at the level of the first floor, and gives to the edifice the stamp of Malta. This detail, so strictly local in its character, relieves what might be heavy and flat in this architecture; and this palace, otherwise vulgar, becomes thus original. The interior, which I visited, presents a range of vast halls and galleries, decorated with pictures representing battles by sea and land, sieges, and combats between Turkish galleys and the galleys of the "Religion." ...

To finish with the knights, I turned my steps toward the Church of St. John—the Pantheon of the Order. Its faÇade, with a triangular porch flanked by two towers terminating in stone belfries, having for ornament only four pillars, and pierced by a window and door, without sculpture or decoration, by no means prepares the traveler for the splendor within.

The first thing which arrests the sight is an immense arch, painted in fresco, which runs the whole length of the nave. This fresco, unhappily much deteriorated by time, is the work of Matteo Preti, called the Calabrese; one of those great second-rate masters, who, if they have less genius, have often more talent than the princes of the art. What there is of science, facility, spirit, expression, and abundant resource, in this colossal picture, is beyond description.

Each section of the arch contains a scene from the life of St. John, to whom the church is dedicated, and who was the patron of the Order. These sections are supported, at their descent, by groups of captives—Saracens, Turks, Christians, and others—half naked, or clad in the remains of shattered armor, and placed in positions of humiliation or constraint, who form a species of barbaric caryatides strikingly suited to the subject. All this part of the fresco is full of character, and has a force of coloring very rare in this species of picture. These solid and massive effects give additional strength to the lighter tone of the arch, and throw the skies into a relief and distance singularly profound. I know no similar work of equal grandeur except the ceiling by Fumiana in the Church of St. Pantaleone at Venice, representing the life, martyrdom, and apotheosis of that saint. But the style of the decadence makes itself less felt in the work of the Calabrese than in that of the Venetian. In recompense of this gigantic work, the artist had the honor, like Carravaggio, to be made a Knight of the Order.

The pavement of the church is composed of four hundred tombs of knights, incrusted with jasper, porphyry, verd-antique, and precious stones of various kinds, which should form the most splendid sepulchral mosaics conceivable. I say should form, because at the moment of my visit, the whole floor was covered with those immense mats, so constantly used for carpeting the southern churches—a usage which is explained by the absence of pews or chairs, and the habit of kneeling upon the floor to perform one's devotions. I regretted this exceedingly; but the crypt and the chapel contain enough sepulchral wealth to offer some atonement.

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