The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

Twenty miles farther southwards along the coast lie the town and baths of Aci Reale, a pleasant resort in the “cure” season, but to others than invalids more interesting in its associations with Theocritus and Ovid, with “Homer the Handel of Epos, and Handel the Homer of song;” in a word, with Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, and the much-enduring Ulysses. Aci Castello, a couple of miles or so down the coast, is, to be precise, the exact spot which is associated with these very old-world histories, though Polyphemus’s sheep-run probably extended far along the coast in both directions, and the legend of the giant’s defeat and discomfiture by the hero of the Odyssey is preserved in the nomenclature of the rocky chain which juts out at this point from the Sicilian shore. The Scogli dei Ciclopi are a fine group of basaltic rocks, the biggest of them some two hundred feet in height and two thousand feet in circumference, no doubt “the stone far greater than the first” with which Polyphemus took his shot at the retreating Wanderer, and which “all but struck the end of the rudder.” It is a capital “half-brick” for a giant to “heave” at a stranger, whether the Cyclops did, in fact, heave it or not; and, together with its six companions, it stands out bravely and with fine sculpturesque effect against the horizon. A few miles farther on is Catania, the second city in population and importance of Sicily, but, except for one advantage which would give distinction to the least interesting of places, by no means the second in respect of beauty. As a town, indeed, it is commonplace. Its bay, though of ample proportions, has no particular grace of contour; and even the clustering masts in its busy harbor scarcely avail to break the monotony of that strip of houses on the flat seaboard, which, apart from its surroundings, is all that constitutes Catania. But with Etna brooding over it day and night, and the town lying outstretched and nestling between the two vast arms which the giant thrusts out towards the sea on each side, Catania could not look wholly prosaic and uninteresting even if she tried.

We must again return to the mountain, for Etna, it must be remembered, is a persistent feature, is the persistent feature of the landscape along nearly the whole eastern coast of Sicily from Punta di Faro to the Cape of Santa Croce, if not to the promontory of Syracuse. Its omnipresence becomes overawing as one hour of travel succeeds another and the great mountain is as near as ever. For miles upon miles by this southward course it haunts the traveller like a reproving conscience. Each successive stage on his journey gives him only a different and not apparently more distant view. Its height, ten thousand feet, although, of course, considerable, seems hardly sufficient to account for this perpetual and unabating prominence, which, however, is partly to be explained by the outward trend taken by the sea-coast after we pass Catania, and becoming more and more marked during the journey from that city to Syracuse. There could be no better plan of operations for one who wishes to view the great mountain thoroughly, continuously, protractedly, and at its best, than to await a favorable afternoon, and then to take the journey in question by railway, so timing it as to reach the tongue of Santa Croce about sunset. From Catania to Lentini the traveller has Etna, wherever visible, on his right; at Lentini the line of railway takes a sharp turn to the left, and, striking the coast at Agnone, hugs it all along the northern shore of the promontory, terminating with Cape Santa Croce, upon approaching which point it doubles back upon itself, to follow the “re-entering angle” of the cape, and then, once more turning to the left, runs nearly due southward along the coast to Syracuse. Throughout the twenty miles or so from Lentini to Augusta, beneath the promontory of Santa Croce, Etna lies on the traveller’s left, with the broad blue bay fringed for part of the way by a mile-wide margin of gleaming sand between him and it. Then the great volcanic cone, all its twenty miles from summit to sea-coast foreshortened into nothingness by distance, seems to be rising from the very sea; its long-cooled lava streams might almost be mingling with the very waters of the bay. As the rays of the westering sun strike from across the island upon silver-gray sand and blue-purple sea and russet-iron mountain slopes, one’s first impulse is to exclaim with Wordsworth, in vastly differing circumstances, that “earth hath not anything to show more fair.” But it has. For he who can prolong his view of the mountain until after the sun has actually sunk will find that even the sight he has just witnessed can be surpassed. He must wait for the moment when the silver has gone out of the sand, and the purple of the sea has changed to gray, and the russet of Etna’s lava slopes is deepening into black; for that is also the moment when the pink flush of the departed sunset catches its peak and closes the symphony of color with a chord more exquisitely sweet than all.

From Cape Santa Croce to Syracuse the route declines a little perhaps in interest. The great volcano which has filled the eye throughout the journey is now less favorably placed for the view, and sometimes, as when the railway skirts the Bay of Megara in a due southward direction, is altogether out of sight. Nor does the approach to Syracuse quite prepare one for the pathetic charm of this most interesting of the great, dead, half-deserted cities of the ancient world, or even for the singular beauty of its surroundings. You have to enter the inhabited quarter itself, and to take up your abode on that mere sherd and fragment of old Greek Syracuse, the Island of Ortygia, to which the present town is confined (or rather, you have to begin by doing this, and then to sally forth on a long walk of exploration round the contorni, to trace the line of the ancient fortifications, and to map out as best you may the four other quarters, each far larger than Ortygia, which, long since given over to orange-gardens and scattered villas and farmhouses, were once no doubt well-peopled districts of the ancient city), ere you begin either to discover its elements of material beauty or to feel anything of its spiritual magic. It is hard to believe that this decayed and apparently still decaying little island town was once the largest of the Hellenic cities, twenty miles, according to Strabo, in circumference, and even in the time of Cicero containing in one of its now deserted quarters “a very large Forum, most beautiful porticoes, a highly decorated Town Hall, a most spacious Senate House, and a superb Temple of Jupiter Olympius.” A spoiler more insatiable than Verres has, alas! carried off all these wonders of art and architecture, and of most of them not even a trace of the foundations remains. Of the magnificent Forum a single unfluted column appears to be the solitary relic. The porticoes, the Town Hall, the Senate House, the Temple of the Olympian Jove are irrecoverable even by the most active architectural imagination. But the west wall of the district which contained these treasures is still partially traceable, and in the adjoining quarter of the ancient city we find ourselves in its richest region both of the archæological and the picturesque.

For here is the famous Latomia del Paradiso, quarry, prison, guard-house, and burial-place of the Syracusan Greek, and the yet more famous Theater, inferior to that of Taormina in the completeness of the stage and proscenium, but containing the most perfectly preserved auditorium in the world. The entrance to the Latomia, that gigantic, ear-shaped orifice hewn out of the limestone cliff, and leading into a vast whispering-chamber, the acoustic properties of which have caused it to be identified with the (historic or legendary) Ear of Dionysius, has a strange, wild impressiveness of its own. But in beauty though not in grandeur it is excelled by another abandoned limestone quarry in the neighborhood, which has been converted by its owner into an orangery. This lies midway between the Latomia del Paradiso and the Quarry of the Cappuccini, and is in truth a lovely retreat. Over it broods the perfect stillness that never seems so deep as in those deserted places which have once been haunts of busy life. It is rich in the spiritual charm of natural beauty and the sensuous luxury of sub-tropical culture: close at hand the green and gold of orange trees, in the middle distance the solemn plumes of the cypresses, and farther still the dazzling white walls of the limestone which the blue sky bends down to meet.

To pass from the quarries to the remains of the Greek Theater hard by is in some measure to exchange the delight of the eye for the subtler pleasures of mental association. Not that the concentric curves of these moldering and moss-lined stone benches are without their appeal to the senses. On the contrary, they are beautiful in themselves, and, like all architectural ruins, than which no animate things in nature more perfectly illustrate the scientific doctrine of “adaptation to environment,” they harmonize deliciously in line and tone with their natural surroundings. Yet to most people, and especially so to those of the contemplative habit, the Greek Theater at Syracuse, like the Amphitheaters of Rome and Verona, will be most impressive at moments when the senses are least active and the imagination busiest. It is when we abstract the mind from the existing conditions of the ruin; it is when we “restore” it by those processes of mental architecture which can never blunder into Vandalism; it is when we re-people its silent, time-worn benches with the eager, thronging life of twenty centuries ago, that there is most of magic in its spell. And here surely imagination has not too arduous a task, so powerfully is it assisted by the wonderful completeness of these remains. More than forty tiers of seats shaped out of the natural limestone of the rock can still be quite distinctly traced; and though their marble facings have of course long moldered into dust, whole cunei of them are still practically as uninjured by time, still as fit for the use for which they were intended, as when the Syracusans of the great age of Attic Drama flocked hither to hear the tragedies of that poet whom they so deeply reverenced that to be able to recite his verse was an accomplishment rewarded in the prisoners who possessed it by liberation from bondage. To the lover of classical antiquity Syracuse will furnish “moments” in abundance; but at no other spot either in Ortygia itself or in these suburbs of the modern city, not at the Fountain of Arethusa on the brink of the great port; not in the Temple of Minerva, now the Cathedral, with its Doric columns embedded in the ignominy of plaster; not in that wildest and grandest of those ancient Syracusan quarries, the Latomia dei Cappuccini, where the ill-fated remnant of the routed army of Nicias is supposed to have expiated in forced labor the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, will he find it so easy to rebuild the ruined past as here on this desolate plateau, with these perfect monuments of the immortal Attic stage around him, and at his feet the town, the harbor, the promontory of Plemmyrium, the blue waters of the Ionian Sea.

It is time, however, to resume our journey and to make for that hardly less interesting or less beautifully situated town of Sicily which is usually the next halting-place of the traveller. The route to Girgenti from Syracuse is the most circuitous piece of railway communication in the island. To reach our destination it is necessary to retrace our steps almost the whole way back to Catania. At Bicocca, a few miles distant from that city, the line branches off into the interior of the country for a distance of some fifty or sixty miles, when it is once more deflected, and then descends in a southwesterly direction towards the coast. At a few miles from the sea, within easy reach of its harbor, Porto Empedocle, lies Girgenti. The day’s journey will have been an interesting one. Throughout its westward course the line, after traversing the fertile Plain of Catania, the rich grain-bearing district which made Sicily the granary of the Roman world, ascends gradually into a mountainous region and plunges between Calascibetta and Castrogiovanni into a tortuous ravine, above which rise towering the two last-named heights. The latter of the two is planted on the site of the plain of Enna, the scene of the earliest abduction recorded in history. Flowers no longer flourish in the same abundance on the meads from which Persephone was carried off by the Dark King of Hades; but the spot is still fair and fertile, truly a “green navel of the isle,” the central Omphalos from which the eye ranges northward, eastward, and south-westward over each expanse of Trinacria’s triple sea. But those who do not care to arrest their journey for the sake of sacrificing to Demeter, or of enjoying the finest, in the sense of the most extensive, view in Sicily, may yet admire the noble situation of the rock-built town of Castrogiovanni, looking down upon the railway from its beetling crag.

Girgenti, the City of Temples, the richest of all places in the world save one in monuments of Pagan worship, conceals its character effectually enough from him who enters it from the north. Within the precincts of the existing city there is little sign to be seen of its archæological treasures, and, to tell the truth, it has but few attractions of its own. Agrigentum, according to Pindar “the most beautiful city of mortals,” will not so strike a modern beholder; but that, no doubt, is because, like Syracuse and other famous seats of ancient art and religious reverence, it has shrunk to dimensions so contracted as to leave all the riches of those stately edifices to which it owed the fame of its beauty far outside its present boundaries. Nothing, therefore, need detain the traveller in the town itself (unless, indeed, he would snatch a brief visit to the later-built cathedral, remarkable for nothing but the famous marble sarcophagus with its relief of the Myth of Hippolytus), and he will do well to mount the Rupe Atenea without delay. The view, however, in every direction is magnificent, the town to the right of the spectator and behind him, the sea in front, and the rolling, ruin-dotted plain between. From this point Girgenti itself looks imposing enough with the irregular masses of its roofs and towers silhouetted against the sky. But it is the seaward view which arrests and detains the eye. Hill summit or hotel window, it matters little what or where your point of observation is, you have but to look from the environs of Girgenti towards Porto Empedocle, a few miles to the south, and you bring within your field of vision a space of a few dozen acres in extent which one may reasonably suppose to have no counterpart in any area of like dimensions on the face of the globe. It is a garden of moldering shrines, a positive orchard of shattered porticoes and broken column-shafts, and huge pillars prostrate at the foot of their enormous plinths. You can count and identify and name them all even from where you stand. Ceres and Proserpine, Juno Lacinia, Concord, Hercules, Æsculapius, Jupiter Olympius, Castor and Pollux, all are visible at once, all recognizable and numerable from east to west in their order as above. It is a land of ruined temples, and, to all appearance, of nothing else. One can just succeed, indeed, in tracing the coils of the railway as it winds like a black snake towards Porto Empedocle, but save that there are no signs of life. One descries no wagon upon the roads, no horse in the furrows, no laborer among the vines. Girgenti itself, with its hum and clatter, lies behind you; no glimpse of life or motion is visible on the quays of the port. All seems as desolate as those gray and moldering fanes of the discrowned gods, a solitude which only changes in character without deepening in intensity as the eye travels across the foam-fringed coast-line out on the sailless sea. There is a strange beauty in this silent Pantheon of dead deities, this landscape which might almost seem to be still echoing the last wail of the dying Pan; and it is a beauty of death and desolation to which the like of nature, here especially abounding, contributes not a little by contrast. For nowhere in Sicily is the country-side more lavishly enriched by the olive. Its contorted stem and quivering, silvery foliage are everywhere. Olives climb the hill-slopes in straggling files; olives cluster in twos and threes and larger groups upon the level plain; olives trace themselves against the broken walls of the temples, and one catches the flicker of their branches in the sunlight that streams through the roofless peristyles. From Rupe Atenea out across the plain to where the eye lights upon the white loops of the road to Porto Empedocle one might almost say that every object which is not a temple or a fragment of a temple is an olive tree.

By far the most interesting of the ruins from the archæologist’s point of view is that of the Temple of Concord, which, indeed, is one of the best-preserved in existence, thanks, curiously enough, to the religious Philistinism which in the Middle Ages converted it into a Christian church. It was certainly not in the spirit of its tutelary goddess that it was so transformed: nothing, no doubt, was farther from the thoughts of those who thus appropriated the shrine of Concord than to illustrate the doctrine of the unity of religion. But art and archæology, if not romance, have good reason to thank them that they “took over” the building on any grounds, for it is, of course, to this circumstance that we owe its perfect condition of preservation, and the fact that all the details of the Doric style as applied to religious architecture can be studied in this temple while so much of so many of its companion fanes has crumbled into indistinguishable ruin. Concordia has remained virtually intact through long centuries under the homely title of “the Church of St. Gregory of the Turnips,” and it rears its stately façade before the spectator in consequence with architrave complete, a magnificent hexastyle of thirty-four columns, its lateral files of thirteen shafts apiece receding in noble lines of perspective. Juno Lacinia, or Juno Lucinda (for it may have been either as the “Lacinian Goddess” or as the Goddess of Childbed that Juno was worshipped here), an older fane than Concordia, though the style had not yet entered on its decline when the latter temple was built, is to be seen hard by, a majestic and touching ruin. It dates from the fifth century B. C., and is therefore Doric of the best period. Earthquakes, it seems, have co-operated with time in the work of destruction, and though twenty-five whole pillars are left standing, the façade, alas! is represented only by a fragment of architrave. More extensive still have been the ravages inflicted on the Temple of Hercules by his one unconquerable foe. This great and famous shrine, much venerated of old by the Agrigentines, and containing that statue of the god which the indefatigable “collector” Verres vainly endeavored to loot, is now little more than a heap of tumbled masonry, with one broken column-shaft alone still standing at one extremity of its site. But it is among the remains of the ancient sanctuary of Zeus, all unfinished, though that edifice was left by its too ambitious designers, that we get the best idea of the stupendous scale on which those old-world religious architects and masons worked. The ruin itself has suffered cruelly from the hand of man; so much so, indeed, that little more than the ground plan of the temple is to be traced by the lines of column bases, vast masses of its stone having been removed from its site to be used in the construction of the Mole. But enough remains to show the gigantic scale on which the work was planned and partially carried out. The pillars which once stood upon those bases were twenty feet in circumference, or more than two yards in diameter and each of their flutings forms a niche big enough to contain a man! Yon Caryatid, who has been carefully and skillfully pieced together from the fragments doubtless of many Caryatids, and who now lies, hands under head, supine and staring at the blue sky above him, is more than four times the average height of a man. From the crown of his bowed head to his stony soles he measures twenty-five feet, and to watch a tourist sitting by or on him and gazing on Girgenti in the distance is to be visited by a touch of that feeling of the irony of human things to which Shelley gives expression in his “Ozymandias.”

The railway route from Girgenti to Palermo is less interesting than that from Catania to Girgenti. It runs pretty nearly due south and north across the island from shore to shore, through a country mountainous indeed, as is Sicily everywhere, but not marked by anything particularly striking in the way of highland scenery. At Termini we strike the northern coast, and the line branches off to the west. Another dozen miles or so brings us to Santa Flavia, whence it is but half an hour’s walk to the ruins of Soluntum, situated on the easternmost hill of the promontory of Catalfano. The coast-view from this point is striking, and on a clear day the headland of Cefalu, some twenty miles away to the eastward, is plainly visible. Ten more miles of “westing” and we approach Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a city better entered from the sea, to which it owes its beauty as it does its name.

To the traveller fresh from Girgenti and its venerable ruins, or from Syracuse with its classic charm, the first impressions of Palermo may very likely prove disappointing. Especially will they be so if he has come with a mind full of historic enthusiasm and a memory laden with the records of Greek colonization, Saracen dominion, and Norman conquest, and expecting to find himself face to face with the relics and remainder of at any rate the modern period of the three. For Palermo is emphatically what the guide-books are accustomed to describe as “a handsome modern city”; which means, as most people familiar with the Latin countries are but too well aware, a city as like any number of other Continental cities, built and inhabited by Latin admirers and devotees of Parisian “civilization,” as “two peas in a pod.” In the Sicilian capital the passion for the monotonous magnificence of the boulevard has been carried to an almost amusing pitch. Palermo may be regarded from this point of view as consisting of two most imposing boulevards of approximately equal length, each bisecting the city with scrupulous equality from east to west and from north to south, and intersecting each other in its exact center at the mathematically precise angle of ninety degrees. You stand at the Porta Felice, the water-gate of the city, with your back to the sea, and before you, straight as a die, stretches the handsome Via Vittorio Emanuele for a mile or more ahead. You traverse the handsome Via Vittorio Emanuele for half its length and you come to the Quattro Canti, a small octagonal piazza which boasts itself to be the very head of Palermo, and from this intersection of four cross-roads, you see stretching to right and left of you the equally handsome Via Macqueda. Walk down either of these two great thoroughfares, the Macqueda or the Vittorio Emanuele, and you will be equally satisfied with each; the only thing which may possibly mar your satisfaction will be your consciousness that you would be equally satisfied with the other, and, indeed, that it requires an effort of memory to recollect in which of the two you are. There is nothing to complain of in the architecture or decoration of the houses. All is correct, regular, and symmetrical in line, bright and cheerful in color, and, as a whole, absolutely wanting in individuality and charm.

It is, however, of course impossible to kill an ancient and interesting city altogether with boulevards. Palermo, like every other city, has its “bits,” to be found without much difficulty by anyone who will quit the beaten track of the two great thoroughfares and go a-questing for them himself. He may thus find enough here and there to remind him that he is living on the “silt” of three, nay, four civilizations, on a fourfold formation to which Greek and Roman, Saracen and Norman, have each contributed its successive layer. It need hardly be said that the latter has left the deepest traces of any. The Palazzo Reale, the first of the Palermitan sights to which the traveller is likely to bend his way, will afford the best illustration of this. Saracenic in origin, it has received successive additions from half-a-dozen Norman princes, from Robert Guiscard downwards, and its chapel, the Cappella Palatina, built by Roger II. in the early part of the twelfth century, is a gem of decorative art which would alone justify a journey to Sicily to behold. The purely architectural beauties of the interior are impressive enough, but the eye loses all sense of them among the wealth of their decoration. The stately files of Norman arches up the nave would in any other building arrest the gaze of the spectator, but in the Cappella Palatina one can think of nothing but mosaics. Mosaics are everywhere, from western door to eastern window, and from northern to southern transept wall. A full-length, life-sized saint in mosaic grandeur looks down upon you from every interval between the arches of the nave, and medallions of saints in mosaic, encircled with endless tracery and arabesque, form the inner face of every arch. Mosaic angels float with outstretched arms above the apse. A colossal Madonna and Bambino, overshadowed by a hovering Père Eternel, peer dimly forth in mosaic across the altar through the darkness of the chancel. The ground is golden throughout, and the somber richness of the effect is indescribable. In Palermo and its environs, in the Church of Martorana, and in the Cathedral of Monreale, no less than here, there is an abundance of that same decoration, and the mosaics of the latter of the two edifices above mentioned are held to be the finest of all; but it is by those of the Cappella Palatina, the first that he is likely to make the acquaintance of, that the visitor, not being an expert or connoisseur in this particular species of art-work, will perhaps be the most deeply impressed.