“PALACE” in Italian is a flexible and generic term, and the examples of “palaces” one sees in Sicily give an entirely new sense of the elasticity of the Italian language, and the freedom with which the people use it. Palazzo means really any building or structure of any sort where wealthy, a noble, or a royal family lives now, or ever has lived; and some of these structures are as remarkable for their disreputable appearance as others are for their beauty and richness, resembling nothing in the world so much as American tenement houses. One such is unforgettable—a dingy white, square, four-storied building with green shutters and a large central doorway, owned and occupied by a titled and wealthy family whose members move in the highest society throughout the island. The ground floor is taken up entirely by stables, the servants, and rats as large as kittens. The mezzanine floor above is given over to two insurance companies, whose signs cover a considerable part of their story. Above, the really noble family lives in stately fashion.

It was when idling up the Nile that we first met the older son of the family. Becoming friendly on desert and river, the Sicilian confided in me his desire for a northern alliance, readily admitting the difficulty of reconciling his fiery temper with that of any wife he might choose among his own people.

“I’d like an American,” he declared, shrugging, “but if I can’t get her, I’ll take an English girl. With cool northern blood in their veins, my children might well show the virtue and strength which has made you Anglo-Saxons what you are. You see, here in Palermo I am a wealthy man. I am ‘Your Grace,’ ‘Your Highness.’ But in New York or London or Paris I am only one of ‘those poor Sicilians.’ I should like to marry a wife whose income, together with mine, would enable us to live as becomes the nobility in those cities.”

I made as diplomatic a reply as possible, but I am very much afraid that the gentleman left me feeling that Americans are after all a cold and unappreciative people, though he did express a desire to continue the acquaintance in Palermo. When we reached that city, we learned from various sources of the aggravating inhospitality of the romancing nobility, one of whose favorite pleasantries consists of ardent solicitations to foreigners to call, and the presenting of cards which, upon scrutiny, are found to bear either no address or only the Italian legend for “General Delivery.”

Nevertheless, to our surprise, he called on us the morning after his return from an extended trip through the Holy Land, and learning that we intended to leave the next day, insisted that we drive out with him that afternoon. About three o’clock we were informed with great Éclat that “His Excellency the Egregious Lord X—” did us the honor to await us. Ready at the door to bow us out to the emblazoned barouche with its black-liveried coachman and lackey hovered an unsuspected congregation of obsequious hotel employÉs. Many of them we had never before seen; none of them had hitherto deigned to notice our daily peregrinations in Gualterio’s coach of state. But now that one of the dear nobility they reverence almost as much as in medieval times recognized us socially, we were quite plainly persons of consideration. Our splendor, however, was short-lived. We had time only for a swift visit to a handsome club with extensive grounds, to the CaffÈ Massimo for a taste of its famous green-almond ices, and to the Giardino Inglese for a glimpse at its botanic charms, for we had an engagement for tea at the American Consulate.

It had not taken us long to arrive at the conclusion that Consul Bishop was a very Bishop of Consuls, and it was due to his kindly interest and hints that we enjoyed considerable intimacy with the life of the people, and also had a good opportunity to see under actual conditions not only the delights of being a foreign representative of the United States, but also the drawbacks of such a position. Incidentally, it is, generally speaking, both wise and pleasant to introduce one’s self at the Consulate immediately on arriving in a foreign city where a stay of any length is contemplated. In case any untoward incident should arise later, such acquaintance with the consul would prove of inestimable advantage, and would save unpleasant and wearisome investigations of one’s right to American citizenship and his character. And if the consul prove, as is now generally the case, a man of parts and charm, the result will prove most happy for the visitor who desires to see and know the best the city can afford.

The royal residence in Palermo, rising from the Piazza Vittoria, the highest point in the city, is scarcely more remarkable than many of the private palazzi. Ordinary as Palace and Piazza are now, in medieval times this was the fortified citadel: a place of arms and chivalry, of turrets and bastions, of fortresslike buildings forming the defensive key to the city. But little have Time and the barbarous restorer left. First comes an arcaded court, then two flights of marble stairs, and then room after room, tastelessly over-decorated. One marvels at the dullness of royalties who could so slavishly consent to the stuffy vulgarity of these apartments, when before them was a model in the room declared to have been King Roger’s own. Its mosaics have faded not a whit in the long centuries; design and color hold soft and true to the walls, and this kingly chamber in its dignity and splendor shames the tawdry display of the monarchs who came after. Time spent in such rooms is wasted.

The Cappella Palatina, or royal chapel, is a tiny temple richly embellished with marvelous mosaics, but so smothered by the encroachments of the formless Palace that half its beauty is lost for lack of light. It is not even a structure by itself, but a part of the main building, which King Roger added about 1132 in honor of Saint Peter, to whom he dedicated it. Perhaps, because of its position, or perhaps by design, the nave and aisles were left almost unlighted; but seventy-five feet above, the architect pierced the dome with eight apertures, to flood apse and chancel with a glorious nimbus of sunshine, which finds a fit mirror in gleaming walls inlaid with golden glass.

“The Cappella Palatina ... a tiny temple richly embellished with marvelous mosaics.”
“The Cappella Palatina ... a tiny temple richly embellished with marvelous mosaics.”

The illumination is, however, confined entirely to the choir save for an hour or so in the morning, when the sidewalks glow with the genius of their artist creators—and fade as one watches into shadowy old tapestry. At first it is a darkly mysterious place, indistinctly peopled by spectral figures on every side. Then slowly, as the eyes habituate themselves to the gloom, out from the mellow background lean strong, stern figures. Saints and angels pray, plead, wing their way across the walls; patriarchs and prophets act out the stirring chronicles of the Old Testament and New. High above the choir and tribune, halved by the circumambient light, a majestic, supramundane figure, cross-crowned with the diadem of supreme sacrifice, holds forth the Book upon whose snowy page blazes the royal message in golden letters that need no flame of fire to bid them shine—’??? e?? t? f?? t?? ??s??: “I am the Light of the world.”

The single-mindedness of medieval artists is always astonishing. Anything from the Bible was apparently meet for the walls of this sumptuous house of prayer, which, instead of being a mere bit of florid decorative architecture belonging to the King, is a vivid pictorial history. Very realistic is the scene at Lazarus’ tomb, where a man, with head turned away, holds his nose with one hand as he tilts the tightly swaddled body to an upright position. A little farther along, on the same wall, the artist represented Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist in a dark stream which flows past in snow white ripples. John is sheltered by a section of bright olive-green wall, and at their feet cherub heads peep through the wavelets. All the figures, though very stiff and formal, as might be expected of work in such intractable material, are admirably done, and the faces in particular are expressively stern and reposeful.

Restoration has not harmed the chapel, and both it and its decorations and furniture remain intact—the magnificent mosaic pulpit, in the Lombard style; the giant candelabrum beside it, about fifteen feet high, a superb piece of pure Byzantine sculpture with a wealth of mythological details, which strikes a strange pagan note in this Christian church; and the stalactite ceiling, carved wood of the best period of Saracenic workmanship, much after the style of the ceilings of the Alhambra at Granada. The Saracen glorified it with magnificent star-shaped coffers, geometrical designs, Cufic lettering—his religion allowed him no image of anything in heaven above or the earth beneath—and the less prescribed Norman placed his saints and virgins in the divisions of the stars. Yet the work was done with such rare skill—so thoroughly were the Saracens artists first and Mohammedans afterward—that nowhere is there a clash of motive or execution. It fills one with the delight of the East, the subtle perception of masses of color shaded and mellowed by time.

That, unfortunately, cannot be said of Palermo’s other royal residence, the little Summer palace of La Favorita, built by the Bourbon King Ferdinand IV under the shoulder of Monte Pellegrino, and evidently his conception of a Chinese nobleman’s residence. Striking a jangling note of color in the landscape, it stands boldly forth a great rubricated initial upon the green and gold of the smiling Conca d’Oro. Surely there never was such another freak of royal fancy! In their search for the bizarre, King Ferdinand’s architects and decorators succeeded in cramming into one architectural nightmare the styles of a dozen realms and epochs; and the result is a queer hodge-podge of no artistic value, but of mirth-provoking interest to the traveler. Only Mr. Kipling’s famous phrase can describe it—“A sort of a giddy harumfrodite!”

In the King’s suite, Japanese artisans may have decorated the bedchamber, some forgotten artist from hundred-gated Thebes the ceiling of the anteroom, and then with supreme disregard for these exotic effects, the royal humorist—if he were such!—must have turned over the beautifying of his dressing room to a commonplace decorator of modern times, and permitted him to do his worst.

The dining table, a huge circular affair, is the piÉce de rÉsistance of the whole palace. Nothing queerer—or more entirely up-to-date and practical—has ever made its appearance in the most recently constructed American houses. Standing upon a massive cylindrical shaft that runs straight through to the kitchen in the basement, the table is a sort of combination dumbwaiter-quicklunch counter. At each place a silver tray, imbedded in a small shaft, connects below with the main trunk, and these trays, operated automatically with the larger central charger, answer djinn-like by serving a whole course at once, smoking hot, when the royal host rubs the button at his place. Slow eaters might find it somewhat disconcerting to turn from conversation back to—an empty black hole before them! But perhaps King Ferdinand was not a joker.

Every room has some freakish combination peculiarly its own, some in Turkish, Arabic or Pompeiian motives, and one huge reception salon in hand-painted silk with Chinese mandarins in full ceremonial costume upon the walls. Above all are the luxurious smoking and lounging rooms, and of course, a wide, tiled veranda on each floor affording sweeping views on either hand.

To the Sicilian in his blissful ignorance, La Favorita appears a masterpiece, the people generally regarding the chÂteau with the reverence of simplicity. Indeed, poverty and ignorance are the mainsprings of life for a majority of the people. Nor is ignorance confined to the masses. A Sicilian doctor in Palermo, himself graduated from one of our greatest universities and therefore an exception to the rule, told me in all seriousness that a majority of the “society people” of the capital could read nothing more difficult than the daily papers. “They often forget how to spell their own names”—you don’t wonder much at that when you see some of the names!—“and their notions of first aid in sickness or injury are barbarous and medieval. When my wife and I first began to practise in Palermo, we tried to help the people with clubs and societies of a semi-educational nature. But we had to drop it all. You can’t begin education with the adults.”

This was recognized a century ago by one of the foremost patriots of Sicily, the Prince of Castlenuovo, who was one of the prime movers in lifting his island out of the medievalism of Ferdinand’s rÉgime. Out in this region of the suburbs—known as I Colli (The Tops), and dotted with splendid villas—and not far distant from Ferdinand’s Favorita, the Prince established a model farm, kitchen garden and dairy where the boys of both rich and poor families are taught by experts how to get the most out of the ground without having recourse to the antiquated methods of their forefathers. And if one may judge from the attitude of the young students and the eagerness with which they display their knowledge, the big Institute is still proving most successful.

The boy who showed us about said proudly that when he finished his schooling he was to be overseer of a big plantation up country, much like the one spreading around us. America had no attractions for him. In his own words: “My father has taught me to love Sicily very much, signore. He makes much money in his business in N’ova York. But I will be patriot. I stay here. I study. By and by I can help my poor country to grow rich!”

Gardens and boys are interesting, but the stockyards of the school are a revelation. Goats and kids, sheep and lambs, magnificent bulls and kine and soft-eyed, frisky little calves have each their separate yards, all immaculate; and in the neat brick addition to the cow-stables is a model piggery comfortably full of grunters, who seem to appreciate quarters where a fresh handkerchief dropped in an occupied pen can be recovered quite unsoiled. The school dairy is as complete as it is wholesome and clean; but you are not likely to go far outside until another phase of the milk industry appears—a donkey carrying large jute panniers full of goats’-milk potcheese, or ricotta fresca. The whey oozing from the bags and the donkey’s sweat gather a crust of dust over all. Don’t manifest a talkative interest—unless you wish to have the peasant merchant urge you to try “just a taste, signori!”

Among the splendid estates of I Colli, the Villa Sofia is one of the finest, and the genius of its creator, a wealthy Briton named Whitaker, shows what may be accomplished by perfect taste when man and Nature work together harmoniously to draw the most and best from the breast of the warm and generous earth. Villa, by the way, is almost as flexible a term in Italian as palace. It means not merely a house for summering, but grounds as well as mansion; and many of the houses quite equal the so-called palaces. Another estate worthy a visit is the Villa of the late Count Tasca—this is out Monreale way—who laid out the grounds as an experimental agricultural station, and who was one of the first men in Sicily to farm on a scientific basis. But he dearly loved royalty, too. On the “basement” door of the house a bronze tablet impressively records with a wealth of adjectives the fact that Queen (Dowager) Margharita once took luncheon here with the delighted owner, and that ever since the premises have had an added value and charm because of her Majesty’s visit.

Occupying the monastery of the suppressed and exiled Filippini monks, the Palermo Museum—a vivid epitomization of all Sicily’s various periods and renascences of art and culture—is given a distinct character of its own by the crumbling though palatial home housing it, worthier far to be called a palace than many of the palazzi of the nobility. You are apt to be disappointed on entering, however, when the courteous guardian of the gate informs you that you will be “permitted” to leave your cameras with the incumbrance clerk across the entrance hall. In vain you plead, catching sight of some of the untrammeled beauties of the first courtyard just beyond. But the guard is uncompromisingly honest; you enter in without so much as the moral support of a sunshade.

The little court is a veritable wild Eden. Flowering vines drip down over the edges of the walls and twist about the pillars; a single prickly pear rears its fat donkey-cars above the cornice and glories in the sunshine; great bursts of foliage clothe in green the joints of the corners. In the center of the courtyard a low stone fountain basin full of brilliant plants affords a picturesque foothold for a sixteenth century Triton drinking deep from a conch. And over on the left, just beyond the archway that gives an entrancing vista of the second court beyond, a tender vine wreathes completely about the tragic column topped with a cross of iron from the Piazza dei Vespri, in which it once stood to mark the spot where some of the French who fell in the massacre were buried.

Sidewalks and columns, cornice and roof are a museum in themselves, decorated with quaint bits of ancient and medieval architecture, some actually built in as parts of the cloister, others arranged in artistic abandon about the shade-dappled walks. But why puzzle out ancient inscriptions on crumbling marbles when the second court beckons, like a coquettish woman, from the stern lines of the archway? Shake off the persistent employÉ who offers to be your mentor, and pass through into a tropical palm garden where the luxuriance of the foliage almost hides the antiquities. No attempt has been made to curb the riotous propensities of the plants. Palm tree and shrub, flowers in beds and rows, vines and creepers give the brilliant court the air of a Spanish patio. But you have really come to see the antiquities, and gradually getting back your sense of proportion, you look about.

Directly before you is a queer, somewhat battered thing of dark stone, looking more like a bathtub than anything else. It proves to be a sarcophagus; one of the rare prehistoric Sikel monuments, of inestimable value in studying the customs and culture of the vanished people, whom the Greeks so effectually absorbed that the only trace we have of their mode of life is in a few such scattered pieces as this from the tombs, though even these are often of doubtful authenticity.

Papyrus reeds, descendants of the paper-plants imported into Sicily long centuries ago by some forgotten Arab, rear their puffball heads from the fountain, a little grove of living feather dusters. Who knows but that the thrifty Saracen caretaker may have used them to dust out his immaculate mosques and public baths?

So varied and comprehensive a collection as the Museum contains has required consummate skill and taste to arrange coherently, and throughout the entire building the director, Professor Salinas, has done his work so admirably that each group’s significance is fully apparent. In the various halls are quaint old pictures and triptyches so ugly that their very repulsiveness spells the perfect expression of the art of their time, marvelous coins which gave Sicily the reputation of leading the world in numismatics during the Greek era, and most important of all, the metopes.

Carven slabs from the temple friezes—what a story they tell of the primitive and ardent culture of the early Greeks perched upon their twin hills at Selinus, beside the sounding deep! One whole hall is lined with them, arranged symmetrically in series, speaking even to-day with the voice of that mystic lore which, to understand, reveals ancient Sicily. And though individual carvings excel them in precision and beauty, as a series denoting the exact progress of Greek Sicilian art from its crudest to its most perfected form, the metopes are unsurpassed.

Moreover, these metopes from the temples of Selinus recall a story so tragic, so amazing, that comparisons fail and mere words avail little to picture its horror. Selinus was still young, and the wealthy and expanding Selinuntines were still engaged in building their tremendous temples in 409 B.C. when Hannibal Gisgon with his Carthaginians fell upon the city with a ferocity that is even yet appalling in its details, butchering the inhabitants ruthlessly, and expunging the city from the book of the living. But Hannibal was in a hurry. He had no time to spare to destroy structures of such problematical value as unfinished temples, since he purposed to avenge the defeat and death of his grandfather, Hamilcar, at Himera on the north shore of the island. Giving the temples and the desolate city over to the owl and the locust, he hurried northward, flushed and confident. So it was that the partially completed homes of the bright gods remained until the shock of earthquake hurled them crashing down into chaos.

Centuries elapsed in the silence of desolation before the metopes, which Freeman so aptly calls “the choicest offerings Selinuntine piety could offer the immortal gods,” were picked carefully by the archÆologists from the ruins and ranged upon the plaster walls of the Museum, showing the evolution of the art from the weird, uncouth shapes of the earlier metopes to the finished later shapes of gods and heroes and men. Yet so rapid was the development of the sculptors that within a century the first metopes had become curiosities, and the later work so superior it is hard to realize it was produced in the same age. And one cannot but wonder what might have been the fullest flower of this strong, budding genius at Selinus, had not the insatiable African smitten it with his blighting breath of war.

One palace that has fallen upon evil days, after as picturesque a past as any building in the island can boast, is the lofty home of the Barons of the Chiaramonte. In the fourteenth century, during the Aragonese period, these and other nobles became so powerful that no systematic administration of Sicily by the government was possible, and the palace—usually called Lo Steri—is an excellent manifestation of the Chiaramonte power. Grim and stiff outside, it still preserves within something of the magnificence of the days when knights in armor clanked through its lofty halls and ladies in quaint headdresses and billowing skirts peeped through the folds of the arras and tapestries to watch the wheels of intrigue and government go round. Many a dark tale could these old halls tell. Andrew Chiaramonte, the last of his line to rule, was dragged hence to the block in 1392, and the palace became the court, with justice taking the place of chicanery. Later on the Spanish viceroys made it their official residence, and in 1600 it became the seat of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. In the inner courtyard is the private chapel, where no doubt many of the Inquisition’s bitter and fruitless tragedies had their inception. The whole structure smells of blood. To-day, as the Dogana, or Custom House, it is as useful as ever—and for the Sicilian importer no doubt still a palace of most unpleasant inquisition.

King William the Bad, King Roger’s son, and father of William II, the Good—who built the Cathedral of Monreale—called his favorite palace in Arabic La Zisa, the Beloved or the Splendid. It is of distinctly Moorish character—bare walls unrelieved by projecting decorations of any sort, with Oriental doorways, pointed-arch windows, and a heavy battlemented frieze. In King William I’s time the palace eunuchs were almost as powerful as they were at Constantinople, and most of the palace officials were Saracens, which is perhaps one reason for the architecture of the structure. William himself lived the idle, sensual life of a voluptuary, and toward the end of his reign, with Oriental indifference, shut himself up in his splendid house and refused any bad news.

It is not hard to see in the mutilated grandeur of the main hall why he fell a victim to the insidious charm of the East, for more than any other place in Palermo this chamber breathes of “Araby the blest.” The ceiling is a great stalactite vault: a little fountain still bubbles down over steps of mosaic; and it runs across the floor through square pools exactly as do those other similar fountains in the Alhambra at Granada. Only the frescoes on the walls are modern, replacing ancient panels of marble which once embellished the villa. No—there was one other modern touch: a flock of tiny white wax ducks, belonging to the caretaker’s little daughter, bobbing serenely about in the rippled pool!