CATANIA is the second city of the island in importance, and has a far reaching trade in oil and wine, sulphur and grain and almonds, and the other products of the rich and fertile plain at whose edge it stands guard. It is a city of humdrum, a town which, like Milan, reminds one strongly of some American manufacturing center with a large foreign population, and surely nothing could be further from presenting an historic visage at first sight. Yet its history is a picturesque and vivid tapestry of which the main threads have always been the heroic spirit and enterprise of its people.

Settled in 729 B. C.—when the city by the Tiber was only a quarter of a century old—Kataneion or Katane in the sixth century became famous for a reformer and lawgiver named Charondas, some of whose enactments were decidedly original. Divorce he made simple.... Either husband or wife could put away the other for sufficient cause; but neither could remarry with anyone younger than the person divorced! And Charondas died by one of his own laws, which forbade men to come armed into the General Assembly. The story goes that he had been out in the hills hunting robbers: when he came back the Assembly was in an uproar, and he hurried in to quiet things. Instantly a member saw his sword, and cried: “Charondas, you break your own law!”

“By Zeus!” he replied, “I will not set aside my law—I will confirm it!” and he plunged the sword into his breast.

Long afterward, in B. C., 476, the emulous Tyrant Hieron juggled with the city’s name and its people, depopulating it and then recolonizing it with new settlers and giving it another name. Are the sober Catanians who pass us to-day descended from the old citizens who came back into their own when the Tyrant died? Or are this trolley-car conductor, this gayly uniformed hall-porter, sons of the Hieronic colonists? And this very street on which we study the Catanians of to-day—was it the ancient way leading toward Ætna, for whom the city was renamed?

The chief reason for Catania’s modern appearance is—it is modern! Destroyed so many times, now in part, again entirely, by Ætna, it is more or less new, a veritable phoenix of Sicilian cities. Suspended from the ceiling of our room in the hotel was the very newest thing, a huge chandelier garnished with exceedingly new and shiny electric light fixtures. But alas! when we attempted to illuminate, we found the chandelier a hollow delusion. When the porter came, he smiled with the indulgence of superior knowledge.

“The chandelier is not intended for lighting. That would be extra—electricity is very expensive!” So we had to be content with the feeble gleam of one honest tallow dip in a room almost as big as a whole floor in a New York mansion.

As to antiquities, Catania has its share—a Greek Theater, a Roman amphitheater, a forum, baths, a nymphÆum, and aqueduct, and so on. Most of them, thanks to Ætna’s past activity, are now subterranean and but partly excavated—indeed, almost forgotten. But Catania does better by her celebrities. Tisias of Himera, locally nicknamed Stesichorus because of his genius in perfecting the lyric chorus of the Greek drama presented in the Theater some fourteen hundred years ago, has had a large and handsome square named in his honor, as well as the street leading straight from the heart of the town toward the mountain.

In the Piazza Stesicoro stands a monument to Catania’s favorite son, Bellini the composer, born here in 1802 and brought back in 1867 from Paris, where he died. A more effective monument is the Villa Bellini, the city’s handsome, hilly public park. Myriad steep paths of clean yellow and white pebbles carefully set on edge in mortar, picked out in black and white scrollwork, and edged with solid walls of variegated flowers, lead up to two fine knolls, on one of which is a trim little belvedere flanked by flowerbeds. On the other is a large bandstand. Between the two Ætna hangs motionless on the horizon, more like the mirrored reflection of a volcano than a real mountain, his feet clothed in the foliage of vineyard and forest, his head capped with snows that almost never melt, gleaming in the sunshine like a giant’s silvery hair.

Another charming little park is the Flora della Marina, a narrow strip of garden and greensward along the Bay. As you come through an arch of the railway viaduct, it bursts upon you with the same effect that a strip of brilliant Persian embroidery would have upon a somber coat, and you exclaim with pleasure at the inviting lawns and starry beds of bright colored flowers. Here and there idles an immaculate and lynx-eyed customs guard in sailor’s uniform. From the ship’s mast in the center floats the gaudy Italian tricolor; and in the background is a sailors’ home from which tarry old shellbacks stump out to sit dreaming on the benches that give upon the Bay.

King Roger’s eleventh century Cathedral has been so restored, because of the earthquakes that have wrecked it time after time, that it is simply a huge, composite modern structure. It contains the tombs of various members of the royal house of AragÓn, who generally resided here while the powerful baronial families were really ruling in Palermo the capital. In 1445 King Alphonso the Generous founded the first Sicilian university here, and for a long time Catania was the literary center of the island. The handsome new university building, however, dates back only to 1818.

Sicily has always been rather finicky about its saints, and Agatha of Catania, Lucy of Syracuse and Rosalie of Palermo are only three among many venerated virgin patronesses. Saint Agatha was executed by the Roman prÆtor Quintianus, and has a chapel in the Cathedral containing relics and jewels and a gilded silver statue said to contain her head. In any event, the figure is highly revered, and every year, in February, is carried in procession from church to church throughout the city. Image and pedestal weigh several tons, and about three hundred men robed in white, sturdy fellows all, have to shoulder the fifty-foot beams to lift it. Even with so many bearers, the procession moves forward only a few feet at a time, and it takes two or three days to complete the ceremony.

Holy day spells holiday to the Latin, and his religious ecstasy finds outlet in blazing fireworks, whoops of joyous enthusiasm, streets jammed to suffocation. Windows and housetops as well as the streets are packed with an eager, childish throng bubbling over with mercurial spirits. One of the queerest features of this celebration, which goes back to time immemorial, is a privilege allowed the usually demure and sedate women. A young Catanian told me with great relish that on festival nights the women veil heavily, completely hiding their faces with the exception of the left eye. With that they may work such havoc as they can. Even the bearers of the sacred image return the sly winks and coquettish glances of the flirts whose identity is so perfectly concealed.

In the Piazza Duomo before the Cathedral, is a queer old lava elephant, mounted upon a florid pedestal, bearing upon his saddle an Egyptian obelisk. He looks down upon the noisy trolley cars circling about his feet with an amused expression, as if ridiculing such foolish modern means of conveyance. So old is he that no one knows when he was made, nor why, though legend says the artist was the necromancer Heliodorus—surely a man talented enough to fly through the air from Constantinople to Catania to escape his persecutors, was capable of executing even this weird beast!

Amber of a most unusual quality is a feature of Catania. Nearly every store has some of it, in the rough, and made up into beautiful beads, brooches, smokers’ articles, combs and ornaments of various sorts, though it is not nearly so plentiful to-day as it was twenty years or so ago. The merchants shake their heads over the future of this now high priced commodity, for the best beds have been completely exhausted, and the divers have greater difficulty every year in finding enough. Deeper in color than the usual clear or clouded variety, this amber is a rich marmalade color, with hues ranging from black and dark brown in the cheaper grades through all the ochres and umbers to pure yellow of different tones. The choicest pieces look as if the clear amber had been dipped in oil or vaseline, giving it a distinct bluish tint, observable, the dealers claim, in no other amber in the world—the same tinge that is to be seen upon water when oil is spilled upon it; and the amount of blue, and its brilliancy, determine the value of the product.

In some of the pieces are perfectly preserved mosquitoes, looking exactly like bottled specimens in the museums.

“How old are they?” I asked one dealer.

The Catanian shrugged his despair of figures. “Oh! They were old already when Homer sailed his ship in here on the way back to Troy. They must be five hundred years old at least, Signore!”

After all, it is neither history, modern character, nor amber that makes Catania, but Ætna. The finest view of him to be had from the city is from the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San NiccolÒ, or San Benedetto, on the western edge of the town. Its church, the largest in Sicily and interesting in itself, contains one of the finest pipe organs on the island, an immense instrument with five keyboards. When we asked how soon the next service would be held—I consulted my watch as I spoke—the custodian smiled. “Gia! You will have a long time to wait for the next service. It is played once a year, Signore. No more. A very fine organist, the best in Italy, comes down from Naples and plays. He has just been here!”

Since 1866 the monastery has been used as a barrack and school, museum and library. On the roof rises the large dome of the Observatory. Connected with it, and really of much greater practical importance, is an underground laboratory and experiment station full of seismographs and other instruments of the finest precision for the study and recording of earthquakes. To anyone interested in vulcanological phenomena, this deepset cavern and its curious apparatus make one of the most fascinating objects of interest in Sicily—yes, in the world.

From the dome of the church of San NiccolÒ you see not only Ætna, but the whole horizon. On all sides stretch the reddish-brown tiles of the city, the flat evenness and monotony broken here and there as spire or dome thrusts up through the red crust. Off to one side a prosperous little street ends abruptly in a ragged edged wall of lava some thirty or forty feet high, testifying mutely to the terrific activity that has characterized Ætna at intervals for hundreds of years. A little farther along desolation begins, and nothing is visible in that direction but a long brown spoor leading up the giant’s side—a cold stone river to-day, rough and scaly as an armadillo’s back, but once a fiery serpent whose glowing jaws opened to engulf at least part of the metropolis. On either side beyond the confines of the rebuilt town are vineyards and silver-gray olive groves, vegetable gardens and glowing plantations, full of warmth and color and contrast, and above all the hard china blue of the hot Sicilian sky.

Above everything towers the tremendous bulk of Ætna—Mongibello—standing superbly alone, lord of all this eastern section of Sicily, rising from the sea without foothills or approach. To-day the Titan sleeps, but in the eighty major awakenings recorded in historic times, he has wrought incalculable destruction. Lava has poured from those black lips in hissing floods, one of which covered forty square miles; earthquakes which have laid fifty cities in ruins at once have accompanied the fiery retchings of the monster; ashes and sulphur and stones by millions of tons have rained destruction upon the fertile countryside for miles around. Yet though he has wrought misery and death ruthlessly, Ætna is also a benefactor, for the soil he has made and fertilized bears crops of marvelous richness and abundance. Tradition from the beginning has made the crater the prison of a cyclops, whose struggles to free himself have caused the eruptions. Virgil sang of him; Empedocles; many another. Sicily to them was preËminently the home of the nether gods, and Ætna their most striking manifestation, a peak of mingled fire and snow. Indeed, it was not until Dante came that men were willing to believe anything less of Ætna than the supernatural.

The area of Sicily is some ten thousand square miles, and this greatest of European volcanoes occupies almost one-twentieth of it. It is nearly 11,000 feet high—the ascent is practicable only in Summer—and covered with more than two hundred smaller volcanoes or cones, huge safety-valves for the big boiler, through which the continual ebullition of the slumbering hell within finds exit in steam and vapors.

Having experienced the doubtful delights of climbing smaller Vesuvius—it is less than half Ætna’s height—we decided that Ætna was to be ours from a distance only, much as we regretted not to see the indescribably magnificent effect of sunrise from its peak. Many visitors are satisfied to make the shorter, easier trip up the Monti Rossi, “The Brothers,” two of the minor craters thrown up in 1669 on the side of the main peak. They rise to the not inconsiderable height of three thousand feet themselves, and the views from them are very fine. It is possible, moreover, to encircle the mountain by railway, and so to enjoy very satisfactory vistas of both volcano and countryside—vast ragged plains of lava like petrified sponges of red and black and gray, the dark, fertile soil the lava makes, rich with vineyards and fruit plantations, small “safety-valve” craters, often hissing threats, and farm-houses among the trees in this, the most thickly populated agricultural district in creation. A brief stop over at one or more of the towns along the line affords still further opportunity to see the Titan and his works.

All these towns are rich in history, and the most surprising and impossible echoes come ringing out of the past at the touch of a modern foot. For instance, AdernÒ, a comfortable town with a big, dilapidated Norman castle in it, stands on the spot where Dionysius I founded his city of Hadranum twenty-three hundred years ago. Near it once stood the Sikel temple of Hadranos. Instead of human guardians, more than a thousand great dogs protected this shrine of the fire god, and their fame spread all over the world. Fragments of this structure are still to be found in a private garden near the town.

The railroad—it is called CircumetnÉa—not only encircles the mountain, as its title indicates, but also climbs up along the slopes, reaching an altitude at one point 3,195 feet above the sea. This gives the traveler an opportunity to see two of the different zones or belts of vegetation on the volcano. Lowest of all is the cultivated zone, in which deciduous growths and the grapes of Ætna play a prominent part. Just above the tracks begins the second belt, known as the Regione Boscosa, or forest region, which reaches up nearly four thousand feet higher. This consists mainly of evergreen pines, of birches in its upper section, and of a few insignificant groves of oak. The third and topmost division, extending to the black lipped silent crater itself, is the sterile Deserta, where only the most stunted vegetation exists.

In 1040 that Byzantine would-be deliverer of Sicily, Giorgios Maniakes, attacked the Saracens outside Maletto. The Norwegian Prince—afterward King—Harald Hardradr, and a considerable body of his berserkers formed part of the Byzantine army; and the allied forces scored a decisive victory. A century and a quarter later a monastery was founded there, and in 1799, during the Bourbon period, Ferdinand IV gave the whole estate to Lord Nelson, creating him Duke of Bronte, a nearby town whose name means thunder. The Villa, as it is now called, is still the property of an Englishman, the Viscount Bridport, who also retains his local title.

The most picturesque of these Ætnean towns is Randazzo, an interesting place where the women throw voluminous white shawls over their heads when they go to mass. Although Randazzo is closer to the crater than any other town, it has always escaped destruction, and so is full of exceedingly interesting medieval remains—houses, a palace with an inscription in Latin so poor that a schoolboy might have written it, and a ducal castle now used as a prison. What an untoward fate for a noble structure from whose walls project the sharp iron spikes where the ancient Dukes impaled the heads of criminals they executed! During July and August Ætna may be ascended from Randazzo. The trip takes only about six hours, and the hotel proprietor will provide guides, mules and food for about seven dollars (American), for each climber.

Another echo of ancient days is the little Byzantine church at Malvagna, the only one of its kind in the island, by the way, that survived the Saracen invasion and conquest.

A delightful little excursion may be made from Catania by carriage and boat along the coast to the Scogli de’ Ciclopi. To the prosy geologists, who mess about with their little hammers, these tremendous boulders are no doubt merely evidences of titanic natural convulsions. But to the rest of mankind, with a love for blind old Homer, they are the stones poor clumsy Polyphemus hurled at escaping Ulysses and his intrepid companions. The stately hexameters of the Odyssey give the story a noble swing—the brawny Greek hero burning out the drunken giant’s eye with the blazing end of a pole; the escape in the chilly dawn clinging to the bellies of the cyclop’s sheep while he ran his huge hands over their backs; the launching of the little boat, and the daring mockery of the bewildered giant.

Blind and raging, crossed for the second time in his blighted life by puny beings he could crush with one hand, Polyphemus tore off the top of a small hill and threw it, missing the Greeks by a hair, but raising such a wave that their boat was almost washed ashore. Again Ulysses cried out upon him, and again the giant threw. And to this day the rocks tower out of the sea, one of them over two hundred feet above water and a couple of thousand feet in girth. Out of this giant’s missile the Italian authorities have made them a geodetic survey and hydrographic station. What would Homer—or Ulysses!—think if he could see the rocks to-day? Curiously enough, though the Odyssey particularizes regarding these two of the Scogli, or Rocks, it says nothing whatever as to the other five of the group.

Right here another picturesque legend dealing with Polyphemus develops. For miles along this shore, town after town has Aci prefixed to its name, as a reminder of the story of Galatea and Acis. Polyphemus—huge, gross, uncouth monster—had no attraction for the dainty nymph, but as so often happens in even the prosaic days of fact, his bulk did not keep him from loving Galatea passionately. So when—if one may be irreverently colloquial—the shepherd boy Acis “cut him out,” Polyphemus crushed him to death with stones in Galatea’s bower. Olympus heard her piteous mourning, and from the lifeblood of Acis sprang a crystal stream which imparted its life to the fields of Catania until jealous Ætna drank it up. But Acis lives in spite of the giant. Acireale, Acicastello, Aci San Antonio—how quaintly pagan and Christian myths mingle in the Latin countries!—and many another Aci perpetuate him.

Acireale, about ten miles from Catania on the main line of the railroad to Taormina, is a pleasant place to make a stay. Its mineral springs, the delightful views by sea and shore, the walks and drives in every direction through surroundings of the keenest interest and beauty, and, for those who are fond of the water, the little boat trips in the vicinity, make it a most agreeable spot in which to idle during the soft Sicilian Spring.