Part 6

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!

VI

THE PLAIN OF PANORMOS

A short distance outside the Porta Sant’Ágata--one of the southern gates--on the edge of the rolling Conca d’Oro, is the Campo di Santo Spirito or cemetery, a lovely greensward full of curious tombs and graves and vaults. Its chapel is old and bare, a relic of the Cistercian monastery established on the same spot in 1173 by Archbishop Walter of the Mill, the English mentor of King William the Good. Doubtless the Archbishop had much to do with the King’s goodness, since his father was William the Bad. When the church was restored in 1882, the greatest care was taken to preserve at least the spirit of the prelate’s design, with the result that among these Sicilian graves under the matchless blue of the Sicilian sky there stands an English church of the Middle Ages. Close beside it on the 31st of March, 1282, just at the tap of the bell for evening prayer, began the terrible massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, while in the city near by the great bell of San Giovanni boomed out the knell of all the Frenchmen in the island and the downfall of the heartless House of Anjou. Many of the French who perished in that orgy of slaughter have been buried here.

This massacre has often been declared a premeditated rising, but it was really a popular spontaneous outbreak which began at the vesper hour on Easter Tuesday. The church of the Santo Spirito was then a favorite place for worship, and the people on this occasion were moving quietly between it and the city when some two hundred Frenchmen appeared among them, and alarmed the natives greatly by their more than usually offensive remarks and bearing. In the throng was an attractive young Sicilian woman with her lover. Unprovoked, a French soldier addressed an insulting remark to her. Her escort naturally resented this, and instantly all the bitter ignominy and the wrongs the patient islanders had endured at the hands of their French oppressors boiled over. Though practically unarmed, the Sicilians attacked the French so fearlessly that of the two hundred present, not a single one escaped. The church bells sounded a wild alarm, and yelling “_Morte ai francesi!_ Death to the French!” the blood-maddened mob streamed back into town, killing on sight, storming palaces and houses, and dispatching even those Sicilians known or suspected to have friendly relations with the Angevins. Brief as the struggle in Palermo was, no less than two thousand French perished; and the brand the Palermitans had kindled swept its fiery way through the island until every Frenchman was either dead or a fugitive. And though the War of the Vespers that followed this summary vengeance lasted for years, the rule of the House of Anjou was over so far as Sicily was concerned.

Farther out from the city the beautiful precincts of the old Minorite monastery and church of Santa Maria di Gesù ramble along the steep side of one of those emerald hills that bound the Conca d’Oro. Long pebbled paths lead up from the gate through cool green vistas dotted with stately trees and headstones; and, with a pride which is the more curious in a Minorite--whose pledges are of humility and poverty--the monk who lets one in explains that this cemetery has never been used by any except the wealthiest of Palermo’s noble families. Many of the graves are decorated with huge wreaths of artificial flowers in dishpan-like tin cases, glass-covered and frequently containing faded photographs of the deceased, the men appearing very stiff and uncomfortable in their best clothes, tall collars, and derby hats. Some of the “pans” are a yard in diameter by about eight inches deep, the wreaths draped with plentiful streamers of black upon which are stamped in gold letters suitable inscriptions and the names of the departed.

The monks were chanting sleepily in a choir gallery as we entered the sacristy of the little church, to examine some interesting unfinished cartoons upon the walls for frescoes never executed--our guide an amazing friendly young brother whose face was a replica of Giotto’s unforgettable fresco of Dante in the Florence Bargello. Fra Giacomo, he called himself; and his interest in the world generally, his simple attitude of dangerous curiosity in everything not connected with the cloistered life, made us think of Hichens’ sorry hero--if hero he could be called!--in the “Garden of Allah.” Neither he, nor any of the other monks with whom we came into contact anywhere in either Sicily or Italy, had the spiritual austerity that is so marked a characteristic of the Spanish monk; nothing at all of the bearing or atmosphere that instantly stamps a man as either genuinely consecrated or fanatic--according to the eye with which he is seen.

This lack of spirituality came out strongly when, wholly ignoring the service going on, Fra Giacomo dragged a confessional with a dreadful clatter across the tiled floor to serve as a camera-stand from which he insisted that I photograph the poor, bare little altar with its tawdry image beneath in a glass case. At each outburst of the rasping din, the monks aloft--seemingly quite undismayed by the sacrilege--kindly sang with greater zeal that they might not hear our profane noises.

From the monastery a zig-zag path leads to the very top of the hill, where two once highly venerated female saints had an altar and a hermitage on a fine bit of bluff overlooking the Conca d’Oro. Here the country unfolds below like a huge military map, the roads written with white ink, the sea in sapphire, the Conca d’Oro in emerald and topaz, and the city in agate. Far in the distance, beyond Palermo, Monte Pellegrino looms soft and vague, its square shoulders half hidden in bluish haze, with the sea fading so delicately into the sky that often the horizon line is lost. Nestling among the lemons in the foreground are large chimneys, the sign visible of an irrigation system nearly a thousand years old, of Saracenic origin. Hills and plain alike murmur with flowing water, for wherever the Arab went he turned barrens into gardens, planted and tended and improved, and devised irrigation systems so complete and permanent that--considering his resources and the times--our own watering schemes in the West seem puerile and scattering. To-day in the Conca d’Oro about an hundred steam engines pump up water from artesian wells and subterranean rivers, while conduits and water-wheels utilize every drop that issues from the springs. So fertile is the soil that this irrigation has increased the yield from seven to one hundred and fifty dollars an acre.

There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the Gesù, some subtle ether of sympathy, perhaps, that makes the visitor’s presence on the hill known to all the children round. At any rate, they pop out of the earth, and as you come down from the hermitage at the very top of the step to the main buildings, you are pretty certain to hear a scratching noise on the low stone wall at one side of the road. Naturally you look over. At the cleft upper end of a long pole a spray of lemon blossoms scrapes along the rough wall; at the lower end, some twenty-five feet below in a grove, an attractive child clamors to you for “_Due soldi mangiare_--Two cents, to eat!”

As we were leaving the monastery, “Dante’s” interest in worldly affairs came out strongly once more. Pointing to my camera, he asked plaintively: “Have you a plate left for me?”

I let him choose his own pose and his own background. With the skill of an artist he selected a stone step flanked by lofty cypresses, and taking out his breviary immediately lost himself in meditation which required some imagination to consider holy. The photograph made, he spoke again, his wistful expression intensified.

“Now will you please register the package? Many tourists have been here and taken pictures, several of myself. They all promised to send me copies. I know they did so,” he sighed regretfully, with a charity which would have been ludicrous had it not been so childishly unaffected and sincere, “but I never got a single one. Oh, but the mails are bad here!”

Genial Gualterio, for all his eagerness to serve us to our best advantage, could not forget his own advantage once in a while, and cheerily singing on his box, drove us far out of our way, at last drawing rein before the mouth of a large cavern which appeared to be full of very dirty children whose hands were full of very dirty bones. On the other side of the road lay a pool covered with green slime. I was getting out with my camera when Gualterio stopped me abruptly. “Oh, no, _signore_, there is nothing worth examining; but I thought you might like to see the Giants’ Cave, which is full of old fossils, and the Mar’ Dolc’!”

No visitor is likely to be thirsty enough to drink of the “sweet water” that reminds him of Gunga Din and his goatskin bag. It is to be hoped, moreover, that the slimy pool is only the overflow of the Mare Dolce (Sweet Water), most famous of the Conca d’Oro’s innumerable springs. Neither is one likely to speculate in bones of doubtful authenticity. So the only thing to do under the circumstances is to be just as cheerful as the cabman, and drive back to the ruins of the old Saracen-Norman stronghold of La Favara, whose splendor was famous during the Middle Ages, for there Frederick II, greatest of all kings of Sicily, held royal court. The brilliant court has vanished, and the castle itself is a crumbling wreck, a mere dank stable and storehouse, dark and ill smelling. Yet merely to see it recalls Frederick’s striking personality and character. And it is to be remembered that he was not merely Emperor of Germany and King of Sicily, but King of Italy, Sardinia, Apulia, Burgundy and for a while of Jerusalem. His connection with that city and with the Sixth Crusade forms one of the most picturesque and pleasant incidents of that fierce and warlike age. Speaking Arabic fluently--besides several other languages--he was able, through sheer force of character and winning personality, to negotiate treaty after treaty with the Saracens peacefully, winning the Holy City itself without striking a blow, and remaining its king for a decade during which peace instead of bloodshed was the rule. His army even contained a picked body of Saracen troops which he made his personal bodyguard. There was nothing, in fact, in either the intellectual or the political life of his age which this man, described by the Latin chroniclers as _stupor mundi_, “wonder of the world,” failed to grasp and master thoroughly. And in all the whirl of his incessant activities at home and abroad he found time to be a poet and scholar, to encourage learning in all its branches, and, most important of all, to articulate and reduce to written form the crude Italian speech of the day.

If you care for an experience out of the usual in this smiling island, stop on the Bagheria road at the church of San Giovanni dei Lebrosi or, as some Americans call it, “The Leprosy,” in the midst of a settlement of tanners. Here you are attended by three women, each flourishing a large key, all dirty and unkempt, and a barking, snapping, currish crowd of begging children. One of the three women unlocks the door of the alley at whose inner end the church stands. The stench is almost stupefying, the air thick with vapors. The second woman opens the door of the church, one of the oldest Norman structures in the island, now painfully restored with obtrusive brick and whitewash, and the third proves to be the keeper of the sacristy. Still another huge key now appears--this time in the hands of a surly man, who insists on showing you out another way, through an orange grove, though your carriage is in plain sight at the foot of the lane. These evil-looking children and caretakers are the most pertinacious and insolent you will encounter anywhere in the island. Has the fetid atmosphere anything to do with their crabbed humor?

In this plain of ancient Panormos, as both city and district were once known, there comes vividly to mind a curious battle scene. To-day we experiment with automobiles and aeroplanes as instruments of war: more than two thousand years ago disaster overtook the arms of Carthage because General Asdrubal placed his reliance in the then new-fangled elephant auxiliaries. Rome, for all she was conquering the world, trembled before these “great gray oxen,” as the legionaries called them.

However, the Consul Metellus, who commanded inside the city, directed his attention effectually first of all to these splendid targets moving ponderously and disdainfully up against him. Pain-maddened by a ceaseless shower of darts and arrows, the great beasts shook off their helpless drivers and charged furiously to and fro, trumpeting, goring, trampling, wild engines of destruction which did more mischief to the Carthaginians than to Rome; and before night fell over the field of slaughter, the Romans led captive more than half of the hundred and twenty once dreaded Titans that had been Asdrubal’s reliance, but which had cost him the battle.

Continuing toward the city along the road called the Corso dei Mille, over which Garibaldi and his immortal Thousand marched to victory, we pass close beside the old Ponte d’Ammiraglio, built some eight hundred years ago by King Roger’s Grand Admiral Giorgios Antiochenos. In those days it spanned the swift Fiume Oreto, but now the fickle water has chosen another bed, leaving the massive stone bridge high and dry, and looking very useless and absurd in an open field.

Entering the town by the Garibaldi Gate--the liberator is even more frequently honored than the first King--we follow Garibaldi Street to the Piazza della Rivoluzione, in which a queer, old, bent, apparently half-intoxicated figure of the crowned Genius of Palermo marks the spot where the first revolutionists gathered twelve years before the Thousand captured the city. Near by in the Piazza della Croce dei Vespri is the monument in memory of the French massacred in 1282, and buried here beneath a single marble column surmounted by a cross and surrounded by a railing of lances and halberds. At the corner of the square, built in a housewall, is a single fifteenth century column, marking the site of the palace in which Governor St. Remy, who was the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou at the time of the massacre, lived and is said to have been besieged.

From the railroad station a broad street, the Via Lincoln, leads to the bay. Gualterio volunteered the information that the street, “la Via Lin-col-ni,” was named for a “great Sicilian patriot who was shot long before we were born!” It would have been a pity to disillusion him and rob Sicily of so great a figure, so we kept a smiling silence.

Beside the bay is an exquisite little park with broad lawns, splendid trees and paths laid out like the spokes of a huge floral wheel; one of the most perfect gardens in Sicily. It is called Villa Giulia, in honor of Donna Giulia Guevara, wife of the viceroy, Marcantonio Colonna, who founded it in 1777. The gardener’s little boy, a cherub of soft black eyes and winsome smile, afforded another striking proof of the beneficent effects of education upon the children. Announcing proudly that he was learning to be a gardener himself, he flitted from flower to flower like an amorous bee, fondling, smelling, praising each burgeon in turn, and naming the plants with a perfect flood of Latin botanical terminology.

It was in this lovely park that Goethe spent a great deal of time during a Sicilian sojourn in 1789, reading Homer and seeing the Villa’s beauties with so sympathetic an eye, he wrote of it that it looked like fairyland and transported him into ancient times. His _Italienische Reise_ is particularly enthusiastic on Sicily, and he sums up the island’s importance with a glowing tribute: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul--Sicily is the key to all.”

In clear weather a large raised terrace at the southeast corner of the Villa affords a peep at distant Ætna’s hoary crown. But if the weather be too hazy to see the Titan, the nearer view compensates in great measure for the invisible volcano. To the southeast the “poor man’s promenade” stretches away in a misty vista toward Monte Zaffarano. The fishing boats tie up here, and the fishermen and their families make merry over their early suppers at open-air tables in the dusty, unpaved square that extends inland from the broad and level beach. In the other direction the broad Foro Italico or Marina, a handsome, tree-lined esplanade circumscribing the edge of the bay, with Monte Pellegrino rising massive and dominant at the other end of the town, miles away, affords a striking contrast. This is the “rich man’s promenade,” and here, in summer, Fashion makes its evening _corso_. Half Palermo sits in its iron-bottomed chairs sipping at the ices and cool drinks for which the cafés are noted, and smoking countless _sigaretti_, while the other half rolls lazily by in its carriages of state.

From the Villa Giulia a line of old palaces marks the landward side of the Marina all the way down to the foot of the Corso, at its other extremity. Many of them belong to nobles whose names are woven deep into some of Sicily’s most important history. Down near the Porta Felice--the Happy Gate--a little wooden pavilion juts boldly out into the sea, a combination library and tearoom, whose presiding genius is an English gentlewoman, charming of speech and manners. No pleasanter way of resting after a hard day’s work sightseeing can be found than to sit here over cups of steaming Ceylon, while the sea shimmers an iridescent opal, ruffled with streaky little ripples of protest for the approaching night. And afterward what more fitting than to reënter Eden by the Happy Gate--the Porta Felice--named as a memorial of the Lady Felice Orsini, wife of the Viceroy who built it. Happy Lady Felice, to have such a monument--and _porta felice_ in truth, looking one way out over the sparkling sea and the other upon the city beautiful.

VII

AROUND THE ISLAND

Fascination and Palermo are synonymous; the subtle charm of the city works into one’s very blood. Day after day and week after week roll by, until with a start of surprise that is akin to consternation one realizes that unless he has a year to devote to the island he must seek fresh vistas soon or leave Sicily, having seen nothing but the capital. Regretting is as vain as it is foolish. The only thing to do is to go!

Until you do, you have no idea of what the _tessere_--those amazing little bargain books--do for the Sicilians. Not only do they bring foreigners with money to spend, but natives of every class and station, unable to travel at other seasons of the year, flock to the ticket window with the _tessere_ in their hands; and many of them who ordinarily would travel third class make a _festa_ of their trips by buying first-class accommodations with the aid of the rebate.

There is no Pullman system in Sicily. The first arrivals at the station take the best seats, and hold them against all comers. If you do not like cheap tobacco, and do like air, it is a good plan to reach the station early. All this we learned by experience; so we were ready to leave Palermo some time before the train was, and secured a little stateroom called a _berlina_, in the front of the car, whence an unobstructed view on both sides is to be had.

Scarcely is the capital left behind than it is completely forgotten in the astonishing floral display that flashes past--an unending motion-picture in vivid colors. For miles the track runs close beside the sea between deep floral hedges. Crimson geraniums from five to eight feet in height blazing with color, pink wild roses, sweet-scented white locust blossoms, spiky prickly pear, the yellow striped spears of the agave, and pink and lavender morning glories vining among and over them all give one the impression of being hurled through a giant hot-house. But here is no cultivation. Sicilian Nature, with prodigal lavishness, is alone responsible for the brilliant pageant. At the feet of the taller plants burgeon scarlet poppies, low, earth-nestling lavender cactus blossoms, and legions of dazzling buttercups. More poppies among the grass and grain contrast with whole acres of heavy-headed deep crimson clover, in which the hungry cattle wade to their knees.