ALONG the northern coast from Messina westward to Palermo, almost every foot of the way has some historic interest. High among the precipitous cliffs above the present station of Rometta, the Christians held out against the invading Saracens—who had entered the island in 827—until 965. Rometta was the last place to fall. A little farther along the rocky shore Sextus Pompey was annihilated by Agrippa in the battle of Naulochus in B. C. 36. Milazzo, sixteen miles from Messina, is the site of ancient MylÆ, Messina’s first colony, which had a stirring time of it through all the centuries. The last big event in her history was Garibaldi’s victory over the Neapolitans, freeing the city from the hated Bourbon rule.

The train runs over fiumare after fiumare—riverbeds dry in Summer, rushing torrents in Winter—and vineyards stretch beside the track in vast expanses of low, bushy vines, ripe with promise. Then, with a shriek, the engine drags us in a cindery cloud of smoke through the promontory on which stood Tyndaris, the Greek colony founded by Dionysius I. The town stood nine hundred feet above the black hole into which we plunge. What would be the sensations of this swash-buckling Greek could he see the rock to-day, with the trains, black worms darting through the solid rock he never dreamed of penetrating! More tunnels follow fast, then another cape, and a stretch of glad, open, smiling country that makes one think of the orchards at home.

Picturesque towns, groves of oleanders, battered old Roman bridges and medieval castles in which life is still of the Dark Ages, flit by rapidly until Caronia is reached. Here, nearly 2,600 years ago, a Sikel settlement called KalÉ AktÉ—Beautiful Shore—was made under an ambitious leader named Ducetius, who hoped to save the remnant of his people who were still free in the interior, from absorption by the Greeks. A single defeat, however, crushed this native rising, and all hope of Sikel independence vanished in 444 with the death of Ducetius. “Beautiful Shore” withered away until to-day Calacte is a commonplace Sicilian town with even a commonplace name, and only its memories to save it from utter insignificance.

CefalÙ, across the fields from a car-window of the fast Palermo express.
CefalÙ, across the fields from a car-window of the fast Palermo express.

And then we come to CefalÙ, a town whose reputation depends on its dirt, its beggars, and its Cathedral. And there is no excuse for either dirt or mendicants, since it is a thriving commercial and manufacturing city with ample resources to keep itself clean, and purged of begging pests. The name tells its location—KephalÉ, in Greek, meant head; that is, promontory in this case, and the old Sikel city occupied the crest of the big jutting headland thrusting straight out into the sea and rising over 1,200 feet in height. On this elevation—seventy minutes now of stiff climbing it takes to reach it, over boulders and the detritus of centuries—the Sikels built them a safe city, and swept it about with massive battlemented walls, carried clear down to the sea. Parts of them are still in very good condition; no doubt through the centuries they have been restored again and again.

The “Head” is bald now—a snowy pate with only a sprinkling of grass—and but one building of uncertain age remains to testify to the different races that have ruled upon this lofty spot. After its acquisition by the Greeks it was important as their western outpost on the northern shore of the island. The one small ruin still standing seems to be that of a Sikel building, of unique structure and great interest. The huge irregular stones in part of it indicate its original appearance, while all about them the decently cut and shaped blocks show an Hellenic restoration. From this height the view is all-embracing—Pellegrino towering above Palermo forty miles to the west; the gaunt black fire peaks of most of the Lipari Islands—once the windy isles of Æolus—straight out to sea in the northeast; and behind us fertile stretches of rolling country checkered with farms and vineyards; town after town set upon impossible rugged peaks, mountains whose tops tear ragged holes in the mist clouds.

In the near distance is the Punto della Caldara, where the shrewd and wily sons of Tyre and Sidon, full of the instinct of commerce, not combat, beached their frail craft and sat down at the feet of the Sikel natives for barter, within easy eyeshot of this eyrie. No doubt from the battlements the natives peered down with less of an eye for the splendid view than for the marketplace of the swarthy, black-bearded Canaanites; and thither they were lured by tempting displays of the royal purple of Tyre, the gold of distant Tarshish far to the west, and the glass and ornaments and statuettes that the Phoenician tempters knew how to make and to market so much better than their uncouth selves.

As we came down from the desolate heights, it began to rain. Within a few hundred yards of the town we passed the house of an old contadino who sat calmly inside his jute-walled goatpen meditating. In the kitchen door stood his brawny wife, feeding the unkempt, shrewish looking old goat with soup full of green onions from her husband’s bowl, and diverting herself betimes by lashing the gentle philosopher vigorously, after the fashion of Mrs. Caudle.

In 1129 King Roger was returning from the Italian mainland—whither he had gone to whip into docility sundry recalcitrants among his unruly barons—when his vessel was overtaken by a violent storm of the sort that so often lashes the Mediterranean into fury. The King, greatly alarmed, vowed a fine church in honor of the Christ and the Twelve Apostles if he and all his company were permitted to land unharmed. The ship made CefalÙ head, and everyone came ashore safely. Two years later King Roger fulfilled his vow, by establishing a town at the foot of the cliff, and beginning to rear the most magnificent sanctuary that had been built in Sicily since the Greeks constructed their massive Doric temples.

Tremendous and massive are the only words that fit this building, and the enormous hewn stones upon which the faÇade rests seem to indicate that here must once have stood some ancient fortification which offered the Norman architects a permanent base upon which to build their shrine. The twin spires, the play of the interlacing arches, the round-headed portal—it is especially worthy of notice, by the way—all spell the cool and coherent genius of the northern French architect. Indeed, it is, like King Roger himself, of the Norman brood, but thoroughly adapted to its Sicilian environment.

Within, one realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow. What miracles were wrought by these hard-living, hard-fighting, hard-worshiping souls who took their religion with such mighty seriousness that it became an integral part of themselves and their daily lives! The main body of the Cathedral is plain white and generally barren. But no pen can describe in detail the blazing mosaics in the tribune without heaping color upon color, design upon design. The colors of the pictures were executed by artists who were almost tone impressionists, so delicate are the soft shades they used to set off the more primitive hues of the borders.

From the floor of the chancel the flying ribs of the roof seem sections of delicate enameled work. The farther away one stands the more perfect the illusion becomes, to the point where the designs lose their identity. Indeed, no master jeweler could produce a more harmonious effect with his intricate interweaving of colors and blending of tones. But the crowning wonder of the Cathedral—as in the Cathedral of Monreale and the Cappella Palatina—is the enormous mosaic bust of the Christ which fills the vault of the tribune. Built up like its fellows of the brilliant bits of colored glass that adorn the rest of the apse, it seems a portrait of encrusted gems, a human conception of the Godhead that flashes inspiration from myriad delicate facets.

“One realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow in this magnificent Cathedral.”
“One realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow in this magnificent Cathedral.”

Nevertheless, CefalÙ Cathedral fails to impress the beholder as do the other two in which there is not a jarring or inconsistent note from pave to rooftree. Here in CefalÙ the bare and dingy plaster walls of the main body—adorned with dubious figures of saints of both sexes, covered with dirt and cobwebs and minus certain of their limbs—make a contrast so glaring as to strike dismay to the most appreciative spirit.

Old as the Cathedral is, the beach at CefalÙ is strewn with curious craft that seem even more ancient: queer old feluccas, cask-like smacks with barrel bows and truncated sterns swept by huge tillers, bottle-nosed xebecs with staring painted eyes for hawse-holes and central sideboards in lieu of keels. And nowhere else in the island are the different types of the forefathers more numerous and distinct: here a distinctly Semitic type, with the swart face, black beard and piercing eyes of the Phoenicians; here a pure Greek face worthy of the sculptor; there a burnt-up son of the desert, and yonder a Roman beside a Gaul. Busy and prosperous they seem, for all their dirt and indifference to squalor and evil smells; and moreover, contented. Their fishing smacks bring in tons of herring which by euphemy go out of CefalÙ in cans of oil as the best sardines. The chief industries of the town, after the selling of clothes and notions, seemed to be the manufacture and sale of cheap perfumes and footgear, so far as I could see.

From CefalÙ westward the railway runs beside acres upon acres of artichokes and whole fields of crimson sumac, while the “donkey ears” of the prickly pear form spiky hedges and great pin cushions everywhere. For these are the Campi Felici, the Happy Fields of Fertility, whose fruitful farms give back rich returns for the labor spent upon them, and which murmur always with the creaking music of huge wooden wheels over which run the endless strings of irrigating buckets introduced ages ago by the Arabs. Another of their importations is manna. On the slopes of Angels’ Peak—otherwise Gibilmanna, or Manna Mountain—these trees still grow, as they did in Africa and Araby, and the people gather considerable quantities of their exudations of gum.

Ten miles down the line we come to the site of Himera. Here two of the greatest events in Greek history transpired, battles both, one a glorious victory, the other a frightful defeat and disaster. The good tyrant Theron of Akragas secured his vast number of able-bodied slaves here after the first battle, when in 480 B. C., with his son-in-law, the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse, he defeated the Carthaginians. It is said that Hamilcar himself took no part in the battle, but that all day he stood alone on a hilltop overlooking the fight, watching the Greeks driving back his picked troops. All day he prayed and sacrificed in vain, and at evening, his own army little more than a disorganized rabble streaming pellmell across the field, he threw himself into the altar fire as a supreme sacrifice to the bloody gods of Carthage. When Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal Gisgon, was sent over in another campaign against the Sicilian Greeks—this warfare was practically continuous—he wasted no time—though he destroyed Selinus by the way—but hurried to Himera, urged on by the spirit of filial vengeance. Baal and Ashtaroth were more gracious to him than they had been to his grandfather, and he wiped Himera from the map, literally leaving not one stone upon another in the fated city. At the end of the day he made his sacrifice to the gods—three thousand of the men of Himera, all who were left alive after the battle, on the very spot where the Shophet Hamilcar seventy-one years before had offered up himself.

What is the relation between street cries and criers? Do certain words or names necessarily draw to themselves vendors whose characters can be influenced by the sounds they utter in selling their wares; or do natures of a given sort instinctively select only those things whose names have a corresponding spirit to their own? Some Max Mueller can perhaps answer the question; but anyone can observe the facts. They apply especially to newsboys in the Latin countries. Passing Termini again—the hot springs of Himera—the papers were just out, and the voice of the little fellow at the window of the compartment with copies of The Hour was a long, musical drawl—“L’ Oh-oh-oh-oh—raaaa! L’ Oh-oh-oh-oh—raaa...!” Very different from this cry was that of the lad selling Life. He cried in a sharp staccato recitative, repeating very rapidly: “La Vita-Vita-Vita-Vit’-Vit’-Vit’!” Most lackadaisical of all was the older boy who had Sicilia. From scarcely opened lips and with dreamy eyes, he slowly intoned each syllable of the name, extending and amplifying and sweetening it, as a tender morsel of which he could not get enough, softening his c’s and making his l’s most liquid and mellifluous—“Seee-sheeeeee-lll-ly-aaaaah!”

About the time that the Phoenicians founded Panormos, their greatest city, in the bosom of the rich plain at the water’s edge, they also founded another city upon the crest of a lofty rock at the other side of the bay, and called it Solous, probably from the Hebrew or Phoenician word sela, meaning rock. It was a border fortress, a watch tower from which the Semitic traders could keep an eye on the ever encroaching Greeks. But when the heyday of Phoenician power was fading, the Soluntines invited the conquering Romans in, so the meager ruins to be seen are not the wreck of Phoenician Solous, but of the Roman Soluntum in which its identity was swallowed up. No greater contrast can be imagined than that which exists between these two cities—Palermo living, Solunto dead beyond any power to infuse life into its stony veins.

“Solous was ... a border fortress, a watch-tower from which to eye the encroaching Greeks.”
“Solous was ... a border fortress, a watch-tower from which to eye the encroaching Greeks.”

There are three ways to reach Solunto—that is its modern Italian name—by express train to the station for Bagheria; by accommodation to Santa Flavia, which is within five minutes’ walk of the AntichitÀ di Solunto; or by carriage from Palermo, a ten- or twelve-mile drive each way. Luncheon should be taken. If you enjoy a lively time, by all means go by express to Bagheria on a festa or feast-day. As you step from the station platform you are immediately the center of a howling mob of peasants and hackmen, all behaving like enraged lunatics and grabbing at you from every side. When this happened to me, I called into play all the football tactics I had ever learned, charged through the thickest of the mass, and pelted down the road in exceedingly undignified fashion, the whole pack yelling derisively at my heels.

As I trudged ahead, I heard the squeak of ungreased wheels, and was hailed by the driver of a skeleton stage capable of holding four uncomfortably—five were already in it.

“Hai—get in and ride!” he called cheerily. “Where are you going?”

“To Bagheria. I like walking!”

The driver laughed; so did his inconsiderate fares. “It is a very long walk by this road to Bagheria—all the way around Sicily!”

I stopped walking. He went on: “But if you want to go to Solunto, I’ll take you there for three lire. You can walk to Bagheria from there.”

“But your stage is too full now,” I objected.

“Never! Plenty of room. Come—I’ll take you for two lire, if you can’t afford to pay me three.”

Crowding uncomfortably together, the other occupants, decent young peasants, made room for me, and we creaked slowly on behind the half-starved horse whose best pace was a walk. Here a huge brown villa of the soap-box type deflected the road to one side; there fresh young vegetables sprouted thickly from clay pits which had all the seeming of prehistoric stone ruins; yonder a meadow full of drying brick and loose straw proclaimed the brickmaker at work. Turning and twisting, the road wandered on leisurely until we neared the AntichitÀ di Solunto, the rest house where visitors may stop to eat luncheon and buy the sour red wine the custodian has for sale. A sudden ominous sagging of the rear of the stage made everyone seize something. But a cheery voice reassured us, and Gualterio’s beaming face peered in over the tailboard.

“I am here, signore!” he cried delightedly. “Behold, if you need me.”

I crawled out with some difficulty while everybody laughed but the driver, who was demanding four lire instead of two. Promptly Gualterio took command of the situation.

“You go on—I will pay him!” and he turned on the fellow with a fervid exposition of his complete ancestry of thieves and jailbirds, threw him two lire, and started him off again.

The road up the hill to Solunto is magnificently paved even yet with the great irregular smooth blocks the Romans put to such excellent purpose on their military highways, curving to take advantage of every angle in the abrupt hillside, winding among thickets of prickly pear, and past little irrigation ducts among lemon groves which murmur with a susurrant echo of the little channels that flow down Granada’s long slope. Neatly piled beside the upper reaches of the road on either hand are dismembered columns, statues, fragments of pilasters, cornices, and blocks of marble. The ruins of the city itself are unsatisfying and meager—a single wide street lined with the foundations of some buildings of undiscernible age, half a dozen streets, similarly desolated, crossing it at almost right angles, a single three-cornered structure set up by an archÆologist and called, for want of a better title, the Gymnasium, and here and there some bit of mosaic pavement or wall decoration.

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

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

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

A heavy wind had played havoc with some of the figures a few days before my visit. “Ecc’!” exclaimed the gardener’s wife, pointing ahead.

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

“Frightful, isn’t it?” asked my guide.

“Oh, spaventosa! When are you going to put her back on the wall?” I inquired.

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

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

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

“What’s the matter?” he called, as I sprang back. “Did something bite you?”

“No,” I replied, steadily walking backward. “But aren’t those fireworks?”

“Certainly!”

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

“Does the illustrious foreign Signore require a bed?” asked the proprietor with a grinning bow. “Most cheap, sir, and excellent, only two soldi—for all night. Eleven are already taken. Behold the property!” and he pointed to various lumpy bundles of clothes, and large bandanna handkerchiefs tied at the corners, undoubtedly containing food. The owners of these bundles had made sure of their beds by stuffing their property into the straw. Thanking the genial Boniface, I declined his invitation and passed on.

At San Giuseppe the people, with cheery indifference, had turned the yard of the house of prayer into a den of thieves. Gambling of every sort known to the Sicilian peasantry was going on, and two games were running full blast, one on each side of the main entrance. There were the familiar p’tits ch’vaux; lotto on a black rubber sheet bearing numbers; the old familiar shell game, and a sort of crude roulette. Surrounding these stalls, of which there were nineteen on the sloping piazza between the church and the street, were hundreds of boys and young men, mostly lads of ten to twelve years. Their average play was one soldo or penny, the minimum bet half a soldo, and the high four soldi.

The faÇade of the church was covered with hundreds of oil-cups in rows. Inside, the whitewashed walls were hung, for the nonce, with a bewildering jumble of strips of gaudy colored cloth, pendant from the gallery, fringed and criss-crossed with gold lines like cheap wall paper. The image of San Giu’ (Saint Joseph), mounted upon a large float, waited at one side of the nave ready to go out on the men’s shoulders just at dusk for the procession, and around it stood eighteen candles, some of them six inches in diameter and no less than six feet in height. On the front of the float hung votive offerings, paintings in smudgy oils on cardboard, one showing the death of Benedetto Giuseppe, at the hand of an assassin.

Children with carts and poles and rubber balls played about while old men and women knelt praying on the stone floor, and young girls strolled about in giggling pairs. Four hundred or more guttering candles filled the church with smoke and falling flakes of soot, and “all the world” eddied in and out comfortably and contentedly, unawed by their church or their saint, making a comrade of holy Giuseppe and at peace with the whole of Creation, including even the foreign interloper with the camera, who sat to one side and watched as they made merry.