PALERMO is chimneyless. Hovels and palaces alike have no fires, except for cooking, and among the poorer classes very little of that is done at home, the people being steady patrons of the cucine economice, or “economical kitchens,” especially of those in the vicinity of the great public markets.

Anxious to see these typical aspects of city life in tabloid form, we had our own dinner early one evening, and told Gualterio to take us through the poorer quarters, to show us the people getting their suppers, both at home and in the old market. Obeying literally, he drove us through countless piccoli vicoli or narrow alleys, dark little canyon-like slits between the houses.

Strange shadowy forms flitted about under our horse’s very feet; black doorways gave yawning glimpses of deeper gloom beyond, lighted only by a tiny candle; here and there we passed vague silhouettes—a hungry man standing, hat on, before a table or sideboard gulping down his meager dinner, or a woman, Rembrandt-like, knitting, mending, reading, or amusing a child, in soft relief against the murk of the interior. Sharp cries from the driver warned away the children sitting in the street, so narrow that the wheels of our carriage scraped the house walls on both sides while going through; women knitting slipped their chairs momentarily back into the doorways in order to let us pass. Street lamps at long intervals twinkled feebly, and after six or eight such streets were traversed we emerged into the glare and brilliance of the slightly depressed Piazza Caraccioli, home of the Fiera Vecchia or Old Market.

Halting the victoria on one side of the square, we wandered about on foot among a bedlam more picturesque than, and fully as noisy as, the Easter Market. To describe the scene adequately is impossible—no one who has not seen it can gather more than the vaguest idea from any printed description of this vivid cross-section of lower class Sicilian customs.

Dazzling light and pitchy darkness alternate sharply, with no intermediate nuances of softer shadow, and the hurrying people rush hither and yon like so many busy ants. Adding to the confusion of the scene, the peddler and vendor shout out their wares: “Water!” “Olives!” “Artichokes!” “Fish!” A chorus of lesser cries swell into diapason invitations to buy all manner of things one does not wish and can not possibly use, and there is much good natured chaff for the forestieri. Men, women and children by the score are everywhere, some eating where they stand, some carrying food home.

Small pails of gleaming charcoal bear upon their heads great kettles of boiling artichokes. Steam and aroma from the cooking meats and vegetables; the smoke of lamps, candles and torches and burning fat and grease in the frying pans; escaping gases from the ranges in the “economical kitchens,” from the charcoal fires, and from the coal stoves; the innumerable smells of fresh vegetables, meat, fish, both salt and fresh, cut flowers and goats, with an additional tang of cheap wine, gushing from big casks into pails and bottles in the open shops, mingle in a composite odor by no means as unpleasant as might be thought.

The whole scene is a delight to the eye. Here is a good sized wine shop, its front entirely open, showing two rows of casks and an imposing array of copper bright as the sun; yonder a vegetable store completely covered with onions suspended in long strings, bunches and wreaths, decorated fancifully with green leaves and little rosettes which afford a background of decidedly striking type for an image of the Holy Bambino, itself of onion color, and barely discernible among the rustling strings of bulbs over the door.

“Vendors of fried entrails ... squat beside their baskets.”
“Vendors of fried entrails ... squat beside their baskets.”

“The people are steady patrons of the Economical Kitchens.”
“The people are steady patrons of the Economical Kitchens.”

Beside us a tiny restaurant, its front all gas-range, yawns enticingly, while opposite glows the fiery eye of an artichokeman’s tiny charcoal fire. Vendors of fried entrails and stomachs squat beside their frying pans and baskets, perforated ladles in their hands, exactly like our frankfurter men; while water-men with their highly colored stands full of clinking glasses swing along, bellowing cheerfully.

Great gaudy signs in blue, red and yellow proclaim the prices of empty eggs, strung on threads, or impaled upon wooden spearlets, and stuck up over the front of a shop. Evidently the Palermitan distinguishes as we do between “eggs,” “fresh eggs” and “strictly fresh eggs,” for the price varies considerably. However, the careful buyer we watched trusted not in signs or portents, but weighing each egg carefully as he bought, placed a dozen or more of the fragile things in his coat pockets despite the throng. Why a purchaser never comes home with an omelet in his clothes is a mystery, for we found it exceedingly difficult to work our way through the crowd. Yet, when I questioned the egg-seller he declared that no one ever broke an egg.

A man with a pretentious stand like the American quick lunch counters stood behind a narrow smoking counter full of hidden fire, bearing a frying pan on top. On his left a bowl of strong shredded cheese faced other dishes of butter and rolls. He was a very popular caterer, too, for while we stood watching him a number of customers came up, giving an order in the peasant dialect which we could not understand, and the proprietor with a deft turn of his hand split a roll, covered it liberally with a rich thick layer of shredded cheese looking like toothpicks, placed upon that a few scraps of the meat he was cooking below, and deluging the whole with a spoonful or two of boiling grease, served up the tit-bit to his eager customer. In Sicily the butchers sell the offal and entrails of slaughtered animals, which in America are turned over the soap manufacturers or thrown away. The kitchen-man who buys them cuts up the stuff, boils it in its own fat, and sells it in the reeking buns at a penny apiece. The sturdy Sicilian seems to enjoy and thrive on this horrible mess, and even the children come toddling up to clamor for their share.

Macaroni of all sorts, curled, fluted, twisted, frilled, chopped into squares and lead pencil lengths, woven, braided into shapes numberless, decorates several of the stalls. Other booths sell candles; others, shoes; still others, nothing but cheese. Cobblers are everywhere, although it seems impossible—in a town where so many people go barefoot—that one-tenth of the shoemakers, who work from six o’clock in the morning until nearly midnight, can find anything to do. Notwithstanding this external poverty, however, there are in the houses of the very poorest in practically every section of the town sewing-machines, whose tireless treadles throb and pulse by day and far into the night, the seamstress bending over her work lighted only by the spasmodic flickerings of a little candle.

Tiring after an hour or so of the bustle and confusion and glare, we set off again. In and out we wound, as in a dream, peopling the streets with imaginary rascals ready to rob or kidnap, until at last in a small open square we came to the brilliantly lighted wineshop and cafÉ of Sainte Rosalie, whose proprietor, himself partly French, thus Gallicizes the name of the town’s patron saint, and at the same time adds distinction to his cafÉ in the eyes of lower class Palermo. We stopped curiously, and the proprietor, immediately forgetting his patrons, invited us to get out and inspect the place.

Filling almost one entire side of the large front room is a huge stove built of mortar-covered brickwork, upon which bubbled a couple of cauldrons, one full of goats’ stomach, the other containing scraps of something or other. Both smelled good—but how they looked! Opposite the stove hung meat which had been fresh that morning; piles of vegetables completely filled up the counter and various tables. All the coppers and cooking utensils were spotless, and marvelous to relate, there is a real chimney, and running water, both hot and cold. Sometimes you see a house which has a genuine iron cooking stove—but it stands in the parlor and the stovepipe is thrust conveniently out into the street above the closed lower half of the front door.

The cafÉ is divided into two parts by an arch, and no curtains being hung, the diners can see perfectly how their food is being cooked. Leading us through into the Sala di pranzo, the proprietor, with a sweeping bow, waved us into two chairs at a table beside two native couples who were taking their belated suppers. The peasants greeted us frankly and pleasantly, the women smiling, and the men doffing their caps with a hearty “Buona sera, signori!”

Not knowing exactly what was expected of us, we ordered vino e pasta, supposing we would receive some sour, fiery fluid, and the bad Sicilian bread. Instead there was set before us a large flagon of reddish-brown, rather heavy dessert wine, a little too sweet to be palatable to Americans, but nevertheless delicious. Clean though coarse napkins and glasses accompanied it, and delicious almond sweet-cakes in far greater quantity than we could eat. The price of this refreshment was so ridiculously small that we wondered at first whether Boniface had not made a mistake.

Our trip through the market and the piccoli vicoli thus pleasantly finished, I told Gualterio to take us to the theater.

That anyone would be willing to miss a minute of pleasure he must pay for was incomprehensible to his simple mind. Draining his beaker at a gulp, he nearly dropped the glass in astonishment. “Ma—signore! É troppo tard’! Ora si finisc’ il prim’ atto!” he exclaimed. “It is too late! The first act is surely over!”

“The Holy Bambino ... barely discernible among the rustling strings of onions over the door.”
“The Holy Bambino ... barely discernible among the rustling strings of onions over the door.”

”Oh, I did not mean the fine theaters where the rich people go, but a little theater, a theater of the people—where you go when you have an evening to yourself.”

A curious expression came over his face, but making sure that we knew what we were talking about, he drove rapidly to the door of a dirty and dilapidated looking house in a small side court. Though we did not expect marionette shows to be given in a very splendid auditorium, we were scarcely prepared for this, rather hesitating to enter.

The door was divided, the lower half closed, the upper open. Inside hung a short, flapping black curtain, while about the door loitered a little group of street urchins who dodged up when the doorkeeper’s back was turned, to peep eagerly into the slit of brilliance that revealed the stage between the upper edge of the half-door and the bottom of the curtain.

As we, too, peeped, Gualterio whispered that here was a theater whose audience numbered the very poorest and the humblest in the city, adding apologetically: “Perhaps it is too poor for Excellency. I have been here and enjoyed the performance, but Excellency is accustomed to the fine theaters, and the Signora may not like this very well.”

On the contrary, that was exactly the sort of theater we did wish to see. The glimpse we got through the open door of the auditorium however, was not reassuring; and furthermore there was not a woman present. I knew all about the custom of the Sicilian theaters, which announce two different sorts of plays—“To-night for men;” “This is a play for ladies.” Naturally, seeing no sign of the more particular sex, I jumped at the conclusion that this must be a man’s night. But disturbed by our conversation outside, the doorkeeper-proprietor and at least half of the audience politely arose and insisted that we should enter. With some misgivings we did so, paying two cents apiece for seats. Afterward I learned that the impresario had charged us exactly double what anyone else paid.

The seats consisted of a few hard wooden benches without any backs, and the one reserved place in the entire theater—which was a room perhaps thirty feet square with two galleries some five feet above the floor on both sides—was a single broken-backed kitchen chair perched upon one of the benches in the middle of the house. The only well dressed man in the room, who occupied it, gallantly sprang down at once, and with a delightfully courtly bow and smile assisted the protesting Signora to his place. The audience numbered about forty or fifty fisherman, peddlers, a cabman or two and a miscellaneous collection of as jovial looking pirates as ever scuttled a ship or slit a throat. But for all their appearance, they behaved exactly like American opera-goers, and the stir that our entrance made set every tongue chattering at a lively pace.

The stage stretched across the end of the pit at a height of perhaps three or four feet above the floor, and on a rack of some kind at the left of the place where the footlights should have been, was a quantity of wilted green vegetables. Thinking of what happens to inferior actors in the rural districts here, I inquired with some anxiety if the vegetables had been laid aside for that purpose. But the man to whom I spoke, missing the joke entirely, replied with the utmost simplicity: “Oh, no, Giuseppe laid his pack there because it was too big to place between the seats.”

How homelike it would seem to the weary street hawker in New York, could he but stop at the theater on his way home, and occasion no remark by leaving his left-over stock in trade at the feet of the actors for the time being.

As soon as La Signora was ensconced upon her uncertain “reserved seat,” the men who sat beside me on either hand began to explain the play in what they probably considered words of one syllable. The fancily dressed young man at my right seemed impatient at the remarks of my white-haired left-hand neighbor, who smelled strongly of tar, and whose sixty years and showerbath dialect made him both attractive and unintelligible to me. Both men talked at once and at high speed. In the meantime everyone else all over the house was talking cheerfully; and the play was proceeding as calmly as though there were no interruption. Between the two explanations, neither of which I could understand, I had considerable difficulty in catching the words of the play, which was being read by a gentleman whose lungs must have been rubber and whose throat brass. He stood back of the proscenium somewhere and bellowed or whispered in fine frenzy at every dramatic point, as the marionettes performed their astonishing evolutions.

The puppets were handsome armored figures about three feet high, clothed in glittering plate and chain armor, accoutered cap-À-pie, their shields properly blazoned and their surcoats faithful models of the garments worn by the ancient knights. Marching, filing and counter-filing, they made addresses to the accompaniment of stiff, clattering gestures, fought duels of deadly outcome with clashing weapons and rasping wires in the glare of half a dozen smoky oil lamps, and moved about easily, manipulated by the expert hands of operators who were standing in the wings. Every little while a human hand would burst into view, grotesquely gigantic compared with the puppet whose fate was in its keeping.

The Politeama Garibaldi, one of Palermo’s two greatest theaters.
The Politeama Garibaldi, one of Palermo’s two greatest theaters.

The play was one of the familiar favorites, representing the endeavors of invading Moors to convert Christian Sicilians to Mohammedanism, but the author was somewhat mixed in his history. Beside the Sicilians and Moors he worked in Frenchmen, and before the play was over, the story was that of a struggle between the two Christian nations, the Mohammedans obviously forgotten. The wicked, wicked Frenchmen were, of course, defeated, and their bloody schemes met with the noisy condemnation of the little crowd, while their opponents, the ancestors of these same street boys and hucksters and fishermen, won as hearty approval.

In the interval between the fourth and the last acts I had a chance to inquire of my neighbors why there were no women present. Both men regarded me with astonishment, and the younger answered first.

“Women? Women in the theater? Why, the theater is not good for them. I never bring my woman!”

Evidently a foreign woman was different, and none of the audience seemed to regard it as strange that one should be among them. As we came out into the fresh night air, Gualterio was apologetically solicitous, a little nervous as to the success of his experiment in bringing us to this particular theater. But our manifest satisfaction with our night of dissipation speedily reassured him, and all the way back to the hotel he sang canzone to his chunky little Arab out of pure joy and thankfulness.