Vistas in Sicily

Sicily is the rarest flower of the great midland sea. Built up on the North in a series of beetling cliffs, the island slopes gently down through mountain chains and undulating...

It was an easy and a delightful voyage, the steamer clean, the sea smooth. But if one is sea-fearing instead of sea-faring, he may go comfortably from Naples by train, via Reggi...

Perhaps the two main streets constitute the best monument the Spaniards have left behind them. They may not have cared for Sicily; but for themselves and their convenience and c...

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 galler...

At the brow of the hill is a terrace garden, the “Eden Restaurant”--where by all means you must take tea. The little establishment amuses rather than disappoints; and though it...

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 fourte...

On the landward side of the railroad undulate the hills in soft nuances of green, speckled and flecked with ever-changing light and shade. Farmhouses massively built of rough un...

Not so very many years ago this entire region was unsafe because of the brigands. Now one may go anywhere about Girgenti with perfect security. Nevertheless, a pair of Carabinie...

What a contrast between the harbor of to-day and that of twenty-three or four centuries ago, when not another city in the world could boast so great a port, so populous a harbor...

Its very size bears witness to the degradation of Syracuse under the Roman rule, when the citizens, no longer satisfied with “stage deaths” in the theater, or with the splendid...

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...

It is a pity the town has not more like her. The Taorminians display comparatively little of the simple geniality and charm of the Palermitans, little of their bright-faced inno...

Facing its own little piazza inside the wall, and just below the Corso, is the Cathedral, which has a fine fourteenth century Gothic side portal. Perhaps the service is fourteen...

But that was not the end. The _Palazzata_--aye, all Messina--was doomed to fall in the crowning misfortune of the centuries. The terrible earthquake predicted almost to the minu...

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 in...

With the beginning of history it appears in the possession of the Elymians, who claimed to be descendants of the Trojans. Twenty-five hundred feet in the air rises Eryx, to-day...

But no--at this very last instant a shout from the empty Place of the Four Winds a block away, stopped us. The heartiest send-off of all was yet to come. Roaring and spitting fi...