by Grant Allen
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 throu
gh 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.
The Palazzo Reale may doubtless too be remembered by him, as affording him the point of view from which he has obtained his first idea of the unrivaled situation of Palermo. From the flat roof of the Observatory, fitted up in the tower of S. Ninfa, a noble panorama lies stretched around us. The spectator is standing midway between Amphitrite and the Golden Shell that she once cast in sport upon the shore. Behind him lies the Conca d’Oro, with the range of mountains against which it rests, Grifone and Cuccio, and the Billieni Hills, and the road to Monreale winding up the valley past La Rocca; in front lies the noble curve of the gulf, from Cape Mongerbino to the port, the bold outlines of Monte Pellegrino, the Bay of Mondello still farther to the left, and Capo di Gallo completing the coast-line with its promontory dimly peering through the haze. Palermo, however, does not perhaps unveil the full beauty of its situation elsewhere than down at the sea’s edge, with the city nestling in the curve behind one and Pellegrino rising across the waters in front.
But the environs of the city, which are of peculiar interest and attraction, invite us, and first among these is Monreale, at a few miles’ distance, a suburb to which the traveller ascends by a road commanding at every turn some new and striking prospect of the bay. On one hand as he leaves the town, lies the Capuchin Monastery, attractive with its catacombs of mummified ex-citizens of Palermo to the lover of the gruesome rather than of the picturesque. Farther on is the pretty Villa Tasca, then La Rocca, whence by a winding road of very ancient construction we climb the royal mount crowned by the famous Cathedral and Benedictine Abbey of Monreale. Here more mosaics, as has been said, as fine in quality and in even greater abundance than those which decorate the interior of the Cappella Palatina; they cover, it is said, an area of seventy thousand four hundred square feet. From the Cathedral we pass into the beautiful cloisters, and thence into the fragrant orange-garden, from which another delightful view of the valley towards Palermo is obtained. San Martino, the site of a suppressed Benedictine monastery, is the next spot of interest. A steep path branching off to the right from Monreale leads to a deserted fort, named Il Castellaccio, from which the road descends as far as S. Martino, whence a pleasant journey back to Palermo is made through the picturesque valley of Bocca di Falco.
The desire to climb a beautiful mountain is as strong as if climbing it were not as effectual a way of hiding its beauties as it would be to sit upon its picture; and Monte Pellegrino, sleeping in the sunshine, and displaying the noble lines of what must surely be one of the most picturesque mountains in the world, is likely enough to lure the traveller to its summit. That mass of gray limestone, which takes such an exquisite flush under the red rays of the evening, is not difficult to climb. The zigzag path which mounts its sides is plainly visible from the town, and though steep at first, it grows gradually easier of ascent on the upper slopes of the mountain. Pellegrino was originally an island, and is still separated by the plain of the Conca d’Oro from the other mountains near the coast. Down to a few centuries ago it was clothed with underwood, and in much earlier times it grew corn for the soldiers of Hamilcar Barca, who occupied it in the first Punic War. Under an overhanging rock on its summit is the Grotto of Sta. Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, the maiden whom tradition records to have made this her pious retreat several centuries ago, and the discovery of whose remains in 1664 had the effect of instantaneously staying the ravages of the plague by which Palermo was just then being desolated. The grotto has since been converted, as under the circumstances was only fitting, into a church, to which many pilgrimages are undertaken by the devout. A steep path beyond the chapel leads to the survey station on the mountain top, from which a far-stretching view is commanded. The cone of Etna, over eighty miles off as the crow flies, can be seen from here, and still farther to the north, among the Liparæan group, the everlasting furnaces of Stromboli and Vulcano. There is a steeper descent of the mountain towards the southwest, and either by this or by retracing our original route we regain the road, which skirts the base of the mountain on the west, and, at four miles’ distance from the gate of the town, conducts to one of the most charmingly situated retreats that monarch ever constructed for himself, the royal villa-chateau of La Favorita, erected by Ferdinand IV. (Ferdinand I. of the Two Sicilies), otherwise not the least uncomfortable of the series of uncomfortable princes whom the Bourbons gave to the South Italian peoples.
Great as are the attractions of Palermo, they will hardly avail to detain the visitor during the rest of his stay in Sicily. For him who wishes to see Trinacria thoroughly, and who has already made the acquaintance of Messina and Syracuse, of Catania and Girgenti, the capital forms the most convenient of head-quarters from which to visit whatever places of interest remain to be seen in the western and southwestern corner of the island. For it is hence that, in the natural order of things, he would start for Marsala (famous as the landing-place of “the Thousand,” under Garibaldi, in 1860, and the commencement of that memorable march which ended in a few weeks in the overthrow of the Bourbon rule) and Trapani (from drepanon), another sickle-shaped town, dear to the Virgilian student as the site of the games instituted by Æneas to the memory of the aged Anchises, who died at Eryx, a poetically appropriate spot for a lover of Aphrodite to end his days in. The town of the goddess on the top of Monte San Giuliano, the ancient Eryx, is fast sinking to decay. Degenerate descendants, or successors would perhaps be more correct, of her ancient worshippers prefer the plain at its foot, and year by year migrations take place thither which threaten to number this immemorial settlement of pagan antiquity among the dead cities of the past, and to leave its grass-grown streets and moldering cathedral alone with the sea and sky. There are no remains of the world-famed shrine of Venus Erycina now save a few traces of its foundation and an ancient reservoir, once a fountain dedicated to the goddess. One need not linger on San Giuliano longer than is needful to survey the mighty maritime panorama which surrounds the spectator, and to note Cape Bon in Africa rising faintly out of the southward haze.
For Selinunto has to be seen, and Segesta, famous both for the grandeur and interest of their Greek remains. From Castelvetrano station, on the return route, it is but a short eight miles to the ruins of Selinus, the westernmost of the Hellenic settlements of Sicily, a city with a history of little more than two centuries of active life, and of upwards of two thousand years of desolation. Pammilus of Megara founded it, so says legend, in the seventh century B. C. In the fifth century of that era the Carthaginians destroyed it. Ever since that day it has remained deserted except as a hiding-place for the early Christians in the days of their persecution, and as a stronghold of the Mohammedans in their resistance to King Roger. Yet in its short life of some two hundred and twenty years it became, for some unknown reason of popular sanctity, the site of no fewer than seven temples, four of them among the largest ever known to have existed. Most of them survive, it is true, only in the condition of prostrate fragments, for it is supposed that earthquake and not time has been their worst foe, and the largest of them, dedicated to Hercules, or as some hold, to Appollo, was undoubtedly never finished at all. Its length, including steps, reaches the extraordinary figure of three hundred and seventy-one feet; its width, including steps, is a hundred and seventy-seven feet; while its columns would have soared when completed to the stupendous height of fifty-three feet. It dates from the fifth century B. C., and it was probably the appearance of the swarthy Carthaginian invaders which in
terrupted the masons at their work. It now lies a colossal heap of mighty, prostrate, broken columns, their flutings worn nearly smooth by time and weather, and of plinths shaped and rounded by the same agencies into the similitude of gigantic mountain boulders.