Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

Fish, though plentiful and various, is not fine in any part of the Mediterranean; and as to thunny, one surfeit would put it out of the bill of fare for life. On the whole, though at Palermo and Naples the pauper starves not in the streets, the gourmand would be sadly at a loss in his requisition of delicacies and variety. Inferior bread, at a penny a pound, is here considered palatable by the sprinkling over of the crust with a small rich seed (jugulena) which has a flavour like the almond; it is also strewn, like our caraway seeds in biscuits, into the paste, and is largely cultivated for that single use. The capsici, somewhat similar in flavour to the pea, are detached from the radicles of a plant with a flower strikingly like the potatoe, and is used for a similar purpose to the jugulena.

This island was the granary of Athens before it nourished Rome; and wheat appears to have been first raised in Europe on the plains of eastern Sicily. In Cicero's time it returned eightfold; and to this day one grain yields its eightfold of increase; which, however, is by a small fraction less than our own, as given by M'Culloch in his "Dictionary of Commerce." We plucked some siligo, or bearded wheat, near Palermo, the beard of which was eight inches long, the ear contained sixty grains, eight being also in this instance the average increase; how many grains, then, must perish in the ground!

In Palermo, English gunpowder is sold by British sailors at the high price of from five to seven shillings per English pound; the "Polvere nostrale" of the Sicilians only fetches 1s. 8d.; yet such is the superiority of English gunpowder, that every one who has a passion for popping at sparrows, and other Italian sports, (complimented by the title of La caccia,) prefers the dear article. When they have killed off all the robins, and there is not a twitter in the whole country, they go to the river side and shoot gudgeons.

The Palermo donkey is the most obliging animal that ever wore long ears, and will carry you cheerfully four or five miles an hour without whip or other encouragement. The oxen, no longer white or cream-coloured, as in Tuscany, were originally importations from Barbary, (to which country the Sicilians are likewise indebted for the mulberry and silk-worm.) Their colour is brown. They rival the Umbrian breed in the herculean symmetry of their form, and in the possession of horns of more than Umbrian dimensions, rising more perpendicularly over the forehead than in that ancient race. The lizards here are such beautiful creatures, that it is worth while to bring one away, and, to pervert a quotation, "UNIUS Dominum sese fecisse LACERTAE." Some are all green, some mottled like a mosaic floor, others green and black on the upper side, and orange-coloured or red underneath. Of snakes, there is a Coluber niger from four to five feet in length, with a shining coat, and an eye not pleasant to watch even through glass; yet the peasants here put them into their Phrygian bonnets, and handle them with as much sang-froid as one would a walking-stick.

The coarse earthen vessels, pitchers, urns, &c., used by the peasants, are of the most beautiful shapes, often that of the ancient amphora; and at every cottage door by the road-side you meet with this vestige of the ancient arts of the country.

The plague which visited Palermo in 1624 swept away 20,000 inhabitants; Messina, in 1743, lost 40,000. The cholera, in 1837, destroyed 69,253 persons. The present population of the whole island is 1,950,000; the female exceeds the male by about three per cent, which is contrary to the general rule. It is said that nearly one-half the children received into the foundling hospital of Palermo die within the first year.

Formerly the barons of Sicily were rich and independent, like our English gentlemen; but they say that, since 1812, the king's whole pleasure and business, as before our Magna Charta times, have been to lower their importance. In that year a revolt was the consequence of an income-tax even of two per cent, for they were yet unbroken to the yoke; but now that he has saddled property with a deduction, said to be eventually equal to fifteen per cent, if not more; now that he doubles the impost on the native sulphur, which is therefore checked in its sale; now that he keeps an army of 80,000 men to play at soldiers with; now that he constitutes himself the only referee even in questions of commercial expediency, and a fortiori in all other cases, which he settles arbitrarily, or does not settle at all; now that he sees so little the signs of the times, that he will not let a professor go to a science-congress at Florence or Bologna without an express permission, and so ignorant as to have refused that permission for fear of a political bias; now that he diverts a nation's wealth from works of charity or usefulness, to keep a set of foreigners in his pay—they no doubt here remember in their prayers, with becoming gratitude, "the holy alliance," or, as we would call it, the mutual insurance company of the kings of Europe, of which Castlereagh and Metternich were the honorary secretaries.

In the midst of all the gloomy despotism, beautiful even as imagination can paint it, is Palermo beautiful! One eminent advantage it possesses over Naples itself—its vicinity presents more "drives;" and all the drives here might contest the name given to one of them, which is called "Giro delle Grazie," (the Ring or Mall of the Graces.) It has a Marina of unrivaled beauty, to which the noblesse and the citizens repair and form a promenade of elegant equipages. A fine pavement for foot passengers is considerately raised three or four feet above the carriage road; so that the walking population have nothing to annoy them. The sea is immediately below both, and you see the little rock-encircled bays animated with groups of those sturdy fishermen with bare legs; which you admire in Claude and Salvator, throwing before them, with admirable precision, their épervier net, whose fine wrought meshes sometimes hang, veil-like, between you and the ruddy sunset, or plashing, as they fall nightly into the smooth sea, contribute the pleasure of an agreeable sound to the magic of the scenery. Some take the air on donkeys, which go at a great rate; some are mounted on Spanish mules, all mixed together freely amidst handsome and numerous equipages; and the whole is backed by a fine row of houses opposite the sea, built after the fashion of our terraces and crescents at watering-places. And finally, that blue æquor, as it now deserves to be termed, studded over with thunny boats and coasting craft with the haze latine sail, that we should be sorry to trust in British hands, is walled in by cliffs so bold, so rugged, and standing out so beautifully in relief, that for a moment we cannot choose but envy the citizen of Panormus. But we may not tarry even here; we have more things to see, and every day is getting hotter than the last.

JOURNEY TO SEGESTE

Leaving Palermo early, we pass Monreale in our way to the Doric columns of Segeste, and find ourselves, before the heat of day has reached its greatest intensity, at a considerable elevation above the plain on which the capital stands, amidst mountains which, except in the difference of their vegetation, remind us not a little of the configuration of certain wild parts of the Highlands, where Ben Croachin flings his dark shadow across Loch Awe. Indeed, we were thinking of this old and favourite fishing haunt with much complacency, when two men suddenly came forth from behind the bristly aloes and the impenetrable cactus—ill-looking fellows were they; but, moved by the kindest intentions for our safety, they offer to conduct us through the remainder of the defile. This service our hired attendant from Palermo declined, and we push on unmolested to Partenico, our halting-place during the heat of the day. It is a town of some extent, large enough to afford two fountains of a certain pretension, but execrably dirty within. Twelve thousand inhabitants has Partenico, and five churches. Out of its five locandas, who shall declare the worst? Of that in which we had first taken refuge, (as, in a snow-storm on the Alps, any roof is Paradise,) we were obliged to quit the shelter, and walk at noon, at midsummer, and in Sicily, a good mile up a main street, which, beginning in habitations of the dimensions of our almshouses, ends in a few huts intolerably revolting, about which troops of naked children defy vermin, and encrust themselves in filth. At one door we could not help observing that worst form of scabies, the gale à grosses bulles; so we had got, it appeared, from Scylla into Charybdis, and were in the very preserves of Sicilian itch, and we prognosticate it will spread before the month expires wherever human skin is to be found for its entertainment. Partenico lies in a scorching plain full of malaria. Having passed the three stifling hours of the day here, we proceed on our journey to Alcamo, a town of considerable size, which looks remarkably well from the plain at the distance of four miles—an impression immediately removed on passing its high rampart gate. Glad to escape the miseries with which it threatens the détenu, we pass out at the other end, and zigzag down a hill of great beauty, and commanding such views of sea and land as it would be quite absurd to write about. Already a double row of aloë, planted at intervals, marks what is to be your course afar off, and is a faithful guide till it lands you in a Sicilian plain. This is the highest epithet with which any plain can be qualified. This is indeed the month for Sicily. The goddess of flowers now wears a morning dress of the newest spring fashion; beautifully made up is that dress, nor has she worn it long enough for it to be sullied ever so little, or to require the washing of a shower. A delicate pink and a rich red are the colours which prevail in the tasteful pattern of her voluminous drapery; and as she advances on you with a light and noiseless step, over a carpet which all the looms of Paris or of Persia could not imitate, scattering bouquets of colours the most happily contrasted, and impregnating the air with the most grateful fragrance, we at once acknowledge her beautiful impersonation in that "monument of Grecian art," the Farnese Flora, of which we have brought the fresh recollection from the museum of Naples.

The Erba Bianca is a plant like southernwood, presenting a curious hoar-frosted appearance as its leaves are stirred by the wind. The Rozzolo a vento is an ambitious plant, which grows beyond its strength, snaps short upon its overburdened stalk, and is borne away by any zephyr, however light. Large crops of oats are already cut; and oxen of the Barbary breed, brown and coal-black, are already dragging the simple aboriginal plough over the land. Some of these fine cattle (to whom we are strangers, as they are to us) stood gazing at us in the plain, their white horns glancing in the sun; others, recumbent and ruminating, exhibit antlers which, as we have said before, surpass the Umbrian cattle in their elk-like length and imposing majesty. Arrived at the bottom of our long hill, we pass a beautiful stream called Fiume freddo, whose source we track across the plain by banks crowned with Cactus and Tamarisk. Looking back with regret towards Alcamo, we see trains of mules, which still transact the internal commerce of the country, with large packsaddles on their backs; and when a halt takes place, these animals during their drivers' dinner obtain their own ready-found meal, and browse away on three courses of vegetables and a dessert.

SICILIAN INNS

"A beautiful place this Segeste must be! One could undergo any thing to see it!" Such would be the probable exclamation of more than one reader looking over some landscape annual, embellished with perhaps a view of the celebrated temple and its surrounding scenery; but find yourself at any of the inexpressibly horrid inns of Alcamo or Calatafrini, (and these are the two principal stations between Palermo and Segeste—one with its 12,000, the other with its 18,000 inhabitants;) let us walk you down the main street of either, and if you don't wish yourself at Cheltenham, or some other unclassical place which never had a Latin name, we are much mistaken! The "Relievo dei Cavalli" at Alcamo offers no relief for you! The Magpie may prate on her sign-post about clean beds, for magpies can be made to say any thing; but pray do not construe the "Canova Divina" Divine Canova! He never executed any thing for the Red Lion of Calatafrini, whose "Canova" is a low wine-shop, full of wrangling Sicilian boors. Or will you place yourself under the Eagle's wing, seduced by its nuovi mobili e buon servizio? Oh, we obtest those broken window-panes whether it be not cruel to expose new furniture to such perils! For us we put up at the "Temple of Segeste," attracted rather by its name than by any promise or decoy it offers. Crabbe has given to the inns at Aldborough each its character: here all are equal in immundicity, and all equally without provisions. Some yellow beans lie soaking to soften them. There is salt-cod from the north, moist and putrid. There is no milk; eggs are few. The ham at the Pizzicarolo's is always bad, and the garlicked sausage repulsive. Nothing is painted or white-washed, let alone dusted, swept, or scoured. The walls have the appearance of having been pawed over by new relays of dirty fingers daily for ten years. This is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places out of Sicily, and we really do not know its pathology. You tread loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile art, certainly not of Etruscan form, which is invariably placed on the bolster of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian locanda is plainly out of question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:—

"Lodged for the night, O Muse! begin
To sing the true Sicilian inn,
Where the sad choice of six foul cells
The least exacting traveller quells
(Though crawling things, not yet in sight,
Are waiting for the shadowy night,
To issue forth when all is quiet,
And on your feverish pulses riot;)
Where one wood shutter scrapes the ground,
By crusts, stale-bones, and garbage bound;
Where unmolested spiders toil
Behind the mirror's mildew'd foil;
Where the cheap crucifix of lead
Hangs o'er the iron tressel'd bed;
Where the huge bolt will scarcely keep
Its promise to confiding sleep,
Till you have forced it to its goal
In the bored brick-work's crumbling hole;
Where, in loose flakes, the white-wash peeling
From the bare joints of rotten ceiling,
Give token sure of vermin's bower,
And swarms of bugs that bide their hour!
Though bands of fierce musquittos boom
Their threatening bugles round the room,
To bed! Ere wingless creatures crawl
Across your path from yonder wall,
And slipper'd feet unheeding tread
We know not what! To bed! to bed!
What can those horrid sounds portend?
Some waylaid traveller near his end,
From ghastly gash in mortal strife,
Or blow of bandit's blood-stained knife?
No! no! They're bawling to the Virgin,
Like victim under hands of surgeon!
From lamp-lit daub, proceeds the cry
Of that unearthly litany!
And now a train of mules goes by!

"One wretch comes whooping up the street
For whooping's sake! And now they beat
Drum after drum for market mass,
Each day's transactions on the place!
All things that go, or stay, or come,
They herald forth by tuck of drum.
Day dawns! a tinkling tuneless bell,
Whate'er it be, has news to tell.
Then twenty more begin to strike
In noisy discord, all alike;—
Convents and churches, chapels, shrines,
In quick succession break the lines.
Till every gong in town, at last
Its tongue hath loos'd, and sleep is past.
So much for nights! New days begin,
Which land you in another Inn.
O! he that means to see Girgenti
Or Syracuse!—needs patience plenty!"

Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds, cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the Aphides, Alticæ, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to their stalks. Gramina læta after Virgil's own heart, were these. Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place which demanded another sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without a veil the Temple of Segeste, with one or two glimpses of which we had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty! This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here reigns alone—the only building far or near visible in the whole horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste—its theatre; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing about it at present, and must leave it in a parenthesis. To our left, at the distance of eight miles, this hill country of harmonious and graceful undulation ends in beetling cliffs, beneath which the sea, now full in view, lies sparkling in the morning sunshine. We shall never, never forget the impressions made upon us on first getting sight of Segeste! Pæstum we had seen, and thought that it exhausted all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple. Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of prey—temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Pæstum to be probably the most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for which a reader could certainly not be prepared by description. We gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable survivor of 2000 years, and of many empires—we felt the vast masses of its time-tried Doric, and even the wild flowers within its precincts, its pink valerians; its erba di vento, its scented wallflower. The whole scene kept our admiration long tasked, but untired. A smart shower compelled us to seek shelter under the shoulder of one of the grey entablatures: it soon passed away, leaving us a legacy of the richest fragrance, while a number of wild birds of the hawk kind, called "chaoli" from their shrill note, issued from their hiding-places, and gave us wild music as they scudded by!

A few bits of wall scattered over the corn-fields are all that now remains of the dwellings of the men who built this temple for their city, and who, by its splendour, deluded the Athenians into a belief of greater wealth than they possessed.

Our ascent to the theatre, the day after, proved to be a very steep one, of half an hour on mule-back; in making which, we scared two of those prodigious birds, the ospreys, who, having reconnoitred us, forthwith began to wheel in larger and larger sweeps, and at last made off for the sea. We found the interior of the theatre occupied by an audience ready for our arrival; it consisted of innummerable hawks, the chaoli just mentioned, which began to scream at our intrusion. The ospreys soon returned, and were plainly only waiting our departure to subside upon their solitary domain. We would not be a soft-billed bird for something in this neighbourhood; no song would save them from the hawks' supper. Having luxuriated on the 24th of May for full four hours in this enchanting neighbourhood, we were sorry to return to our inn—and such an inn! We departed abruptly, and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall. Thucydides[13 - Vide THUCYDIDES, Book iv. chap. 15.] relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that the Trojans after losing Troy went first to Sicily, and founded there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first Greek colony was Naxos, also in Sicily, Greeks and Trojans (strange coincidence!) must have met again on new ground after the Iliad was all acted and done with, like a tale that is told.

On our return towards Palermo, one of our party having a touch of ague, we crossed the street to the apothecary, (at Calatafrini, our night's halt,) and smelling about his musty galenicals, amidst a large supply of malvas which were drying on his counter, the only wholesome-looking thing amidst his stores, we asked if he had any quinine. "Sicuro!" and he presented us with a white powder having a slightly bitter taste, which, together with an ounce of green tea, to be dispensed in pinches of five grains on extraordinary occasions, comes, he says, from the East. On our observing that the quinine, if such at all, was adulterated, and that this was too bad in a country of malaria, where it was the poor man's only protection, he looked angry; but we rose in the esteem of peasants in the shop, who said to each other—"Ed ha ragione il Signor." Wanting a little soda, we were presented with sub-carbonate of potash as the nearest approach to it—a substitution which suggested to us a classical recollection from Theocritus; namely, that in this same Sicily, 2000 years ago, a Syracusan husband is rated by his dame for sending her soda for her washing in place of potash, the very converse of what our old drug-vender intended to have washed our inside withal.

The Roman Catholic religion patronises painting oddly here; not a cart but is adorned with some sacred subject. Every wretched vehicle that totters under an unmerciful load, with one poor donkey to draw six men, has its picture of Souls in Purgatory, who seem putting their hands and heads out of the flames, and vainly calling on the ruffians inside to stop. We read Viva la Divina Providenza, in flaming characters on the front board of a carriole, while the whip is goading the poor starved brute who drags it; for these barbarians in the rear of European civilization, plainly are of opinion that a cart with a sacred device shall not break down, though its owner commit every species of cruelty.

The next day found us again installed at our old quarters in Palermo, where, during our brief remaining stay, we visit a conchologist, before which event we had no notion that Sicily was so rich in shells. Two sides of a moderately large room are entirely devoted to his collection. Here we saw a piece of wood nearly destroyed by the Teredo navalis, or sailor's bore, who seems more active and industrious here than elsewhere, and seldom allows himself to be taken whole. Out of hundreds of specimens, three or four perfect ones were all that this collector could ever manage to extract, the molluscous wood-destroyer being very soft and fragile. His length is about three inches, his thickness that of a small quill; he lodges in a shell of extreme tenuity, and the secretion which he ejects is, it seems, the agent which destroys the wood, and pushes on bit by bit the winding tunnel. But his doings are nothing to the working of another wafer-shelled bivalve, whose tiny habitations are so thickly imbedded in the body of a nodule of flint as to render its exterior like a sieve, diducit scopulos aceto. What solvent can the chemist prepare in his laboratory comparable to one which, while it dissolves silex, neither harms the insect nor injures its shell. Amongst the fossils we notice cockles as big as ostrich eggs, clam-shells twice the size of the largest of our Sussex coast, and those of oysters which rival soup-plates. We had indeed once before met with them of equal size in the lime-beds at Corneto. Judging by the oysters, there must indeed have been giants in those days. But this collection was chiefly remarkable for its curious fossil remains of animals from Monte Grifone. In this same Monte Grifone, which we went to visit, is one of the largest of the caves of bones of which so many have been discovered—bones of various kinds, some of small, some of very large animals, mixed together pell-mell, and constituting a fossil paste of scarcely any thing besides. None of the geologists, in attempting to explain these deposits, sufficiently enter into the question of the origin of the enormous quantity, and close juxtaposition, of such heterogeneous specimens.

By eight o'clock we are on board the Palermo steamer, which is to convey us hence to Messina. The baked deck, which has been saturated with the sun's heat all day, is now cooling to a more moderate warmth, and soothing would be the scene but for the noise of women and children. Large liquid stars twinkle here and there, like so many moons on a reduced scale, over the sea, and the night is wholly delightful! A bell rings, which diminishes our numbers, and somewhat clears our deck. The boats which carry off the last loiterers are gone, shaking phosphorus from their gills, and leaving a train of it in their tails; and the many-windowed Pharos of the harbour has all its panes lit up, and twinkles after its own fashion. Round the bay an interrupted crescent of flickering light is reflected in the water, strongest in the middle, where the town is thickest, and runs back; and far behind all lights comes the clear outline of the darkly defined mountain rising over the city. Our own lantern also is up, the authorities have disappeared, Monte Pelegrino begins to change its position, we are in motion, and a mighty light we are making under us, as our leviathan, turning round her head and snuffing the sea, begins to wind out of the harbour. A few minutes more, and the luminous tracery of the receding town becomes more and more indistinct; but the sky is all stars, and the water, save where we break its smoothness, a perfect mirror. Wherever the paddles play, there the sea foams up into yellow light and gerbes of amber-coloured fireballs, caught up by the wheels, and flung off in our track, to float past with incredible rapidity. Men are talking the language of Babel in the cabin; there is amateur singing and a guitar on deck—Orion is on his dolphin—adieu, Palermo!

APPROACH TO MESSINA