A SAMPLE OF MARSALA.
Time was, long ago, when certain of us thought that Spain was the place where the then despised Marsala wine was made. Struggling to obtain the favour and recognition of the public, and held as a kind of humble cousin of sherry, cheaper to buy and meaner in all its conditions, Marsala had no honour in England some thirty years or so ago. Those who gave it gave it for need; and for the most part tried to pawn it off as its more aristocratic relation, thinking that no one would suspect the truth when that silver label, shaped like a vine-leaf with ‘Sherry’ cut out in Roman capitals in the centre, was hung round the neck of the heavy cut-glass bottle. And as sherry was certainly a Spanish wine, the false reasoning born of association of ideas made one think that Marsala also was a Spanish wine.
The way to Marsala from Palermo is exceedingly interesting. The country is beautiful with all the grand Sicilian beauty—broken foregrounds, noble mountain forms, the dark-blue sea, of which the splendour is enhanced by the gray green of the olives and the contrast of the golden hue given by the lemon-trees hanging thick with fruit. All the waysides along the railroad are rich in flowers, making the land look as if enamelled. Rugged capes and fertile plains, small smooth exquisite bays and inland mountains, orange-gardens and vineyards, fields of pale lilac flax, woods of beech and ilex, and rivers running down in song to the sea—there is not a feature of Southern scenery wanting on this lovely way. And the sea, where the white sails of passing ships gleam in the sunlight like the wings of birds, is as beautiful as the land, where here a ruined temple crowns a height, and there a modern mansion stands sheltered on the slopes. Among the beautiful things of the sea is the uninhabited rocky island called ‘The Island of Women’ (L’isola delle femmine). The legend is that in old times, when pirates abounded, the ‘Barbari’ used to seize such hapless Sicilian women as they found wandering by the shore, and lodge them on this island till they had finished their fighting on shore; when they would return and carry off their prey.
In time the beauty of the lovely road fades away, and the country becomes utterly uninteresting. Still, even when there is no more flowery charm and no more golden colour, there is always association, and the way up to Segesta and Solinunto, with the ruined temple visible on the crest of the mountain, brings before the mind the long train of glorious images by which the ancient history of Sicily is thronged. For we are skirting the base of Mount Eryx, now Monte Giuliano, whence Acestes the king came down to meet Æneas when he landed on his return from Carthage; and where Æneas—so they say—founded the town of Acesta, which afterwards became Egesta, and is now Segesta. And all the well-known story repeats itself. ‘Selinus rich in palms,’ and ‘the shallow waters of Lilybæum’ which were ‘left behind;’ the race, and the beauty of the contending youths; poor Dido’s sad story; the death and burial of Anchises, the father whom Æneas saved from burning Troy by carrying on his shoulders—it is all living and palpitating as in those youthful days when imagination touched the pages with light, and made the dead words breathe with love and sorrow and passion. It is worth coming here, if only to realise Virgil and his matchless poem! But we draw up at a station, and the present puts the past to flight—the real blots out the ideal born of imagination and poetry.
Armed carabinieri are at every station. This is not usual either in Sicily or elsewhere in Italy, where soldiers keep order at the stations, but are not so numerous nor so heavily armed as these. The district about Trapani, however, in which we are, has not a good name; and the government knows what it is about when it takes extra measures of precaution for the safety of travellers. That it does take these extra measures insures the safety of the wayfarers. At Marsala itself, the whole train is taken possession of before it has well come to a stand, and long before the passengers have got out. The crowd swarms into all three classes indiscriminately; and there is much rough pushing and hustling, but no actual brutality. Still, it is sufficiently like the return of ’Arry from a Crystal Palace fête to be unpleasant; though for all that, the Italian ’Arry is a good-natured soul, with no malice in him. What he wants in malice, however, he makes up in garlic. There has been an Easter-week procession here—it is ‘Holy Thursday’—and all the neighbourhood has sent its young men, each township and village its quota, till they have come in their hundreds, and have to be taken back again the best way they can.
Near Marsala is one of the three promontories which give Sicily its name of Trinacria—Cape Lilybeo, the very Lilybæum whose ‘shallows blind,’ ‘dangerous through their hidden rocks,’ caused Æneas to land on the ‘unlucky shore’ of Drepanum. Here in calm weather you can see the remains of houses beneath the sea, as at Pozzuoli, near Naples. But the point of the whole visit is the wine-stores of Ingham—the largest and most important of all the Marsala wine-factories. These stores seem to be interminable; and the perspective of arches, from each side of which branch out these huge above-ground cellars, is a sight at once strange and picturesque. The balio or inclosure wherein the whole concern stands—storehouses, workshops, dwelling-house, garden, fields, &c.—is really like a fair-sized estate. To ‘walk in the grounds’ is quite enough exercise for any moderate-minded pedestrian. The oldest two stores date from 1812, and are the parents of all that have come after. They are picturesque little places now, covered with glossy dark-green ivy and flame-coloured bougainvillia; but, like the fathers and mothers of prosperous families, they are set aside as comparatively useless in the presence of their stalwart children.
In going through the stores, one is struck not only with the number, but also with the enormous size of the wine-vats. Some are of huge proportions, not quite equalling the famous Tun of Heidelberg perhaps, but coming pretty close to it, and holding wine to the worth of an astounding figure. The value of one store alone comes up to a moderate fortune; and there are thirty in all. Once a boy went to sleep in one of those weird receptacles, and was not found till the next morning. The fumes had overpowered him, but he came out none the worse. Some of the wine given us to taste is fifty years old, and is delicious in proportion to its age and preciousness; and some of the finer sorts of younger date are unsurpassed in any wine-store extant. Then there is the huge vat of vino cotto or vino madre; and there is the distilling apparatus, which is very beautiful and dainty. The Custom House is jealous and exact. It seals up all with a letter-lock, waxen seals and silken threads; so that no tampering is possible with the retorts or the receivers. The cool obscurity of the cellars, where these immense vats are ranged like so many transformed giants, gives one a sense of restfulness and shelter; while out of doors, the sun, lying keen and bright on wall and pavement, casting shadows as sharply defined as if purple paper had been cut with a pair of scissors and thrown on the ground, has the sentiment of passionate vitality peculiar to Sicily. Men in coloured shirts, with blue or red sashes round their waists, add to the general picturesqueness of the scene; and the white wings of the pigeons shining like silver against the blue sky, complete a chord of colour to be seen only in the South—that fervid South where to live is sufficient enjoyment, and where artificial wants as we have them are neither known nor appreciated, being of the nature of encumbrances and superfluities. For what else is wanted than the sun and the sky, the fruits and the flowers, the charm and the glory of nature? Nevertheless, the material luxury of the North and West is invading the hitherto frugal and, in one way, ascetic South; and France and England both, are being imitated even so far as Marsala, where once the house was held as merely a place of refuge where tired Christians might sleep at noon and at night, but in nowise as a place of enjoyment worth the spending of thought or money to make beautiful.
From the vats full of their golden treasure to the casks in process of making, the transition is natural. Here, again, light and colour give a certain charm, making a novelty of that which is so well known at home. For cask-making in Marsala is very much the same as cask-making in England; and only the men, with very minor details in the method of manipulation, are different. It is the same drying of the wood, the same setting of the staves, the same hammering on of the hoops in regular succession of blows, and we fancy the same kind of white oak, of which the staves are made, shipped from America for England as well as for Marsala. Hans Christian Andersen might have written a sprightly sketch of the oak as it stood in its virgin forest, with grizzlies and panthers, pretty woodchunks and sweet wild birds all about, till it was cut down by the forester; packed into a raft and started down the Big River by the lumberman; brought over to Europe by the huge steamship; made into casks, and filled with the golden juice of grapes beneath the glorious sky of Sicily—the wine to be drunk at the marriage of the bride, the birth of the heir, the death of the master. The place where they clean the barrels, some in the old-fashioned way of hand-rocking, with chains inside; the sheds where they cut the hoops and make the bolts—the drill and the circular saw going through iron and wood like so much butter or cheese; those where they steam the barrels and those where they mark them—these, too, come into the day’s work of visiting and inspection; as well as the cooking-place and the dining-shed for the three hundred men employed.
These men are noticeably clean and smart in appearance; they are, too, as industrious as they look; for no loafers are allowed, and he who does not know how to work with a will soon receives his dismissal. The touch of English energy and English precision is plainly visible throughout—with one result, that, unlike Southern workmen, as generally found, these do not care to keep all the holidays which are so frequent in Roman Catholic countries. They work about ten and a half hours in the day; and each man is searched and numbered on coming in and going out.
The word Marsala recalls the time when the Saracens ruled the land, just as Mongibello for Etna, Gibbel Rossa at Palermo, and all Sicilian agricultural and irrigatory terms recall them. It is really Marsh-Allah, ‘the port of God.’ Round about our balio are many interesting things, principally the caves where, not so long ago, a murderer hid in perfect safety, and where in lawless times brigands and outcasts took refuge and found security. They are interminable, and it is impossible to visit them all; but our guide takes us through some of the most practicable, where we have occasion for a little gymnastic exercise here and there among the broken rocks and steep sharp pitches. An army of brigands might hide away here undetected and unseen. Fortunately, at this time there are none to hide. No organised band of brigands exists anywhere in Sicily, and the stranger is absolutely safe.
Besides these caves, there is a strange folly in the shape of a ballroom and banqueting-room cut out of the living rock. There are tables and the place for the musicians, benches and divisions, all made in the rock underground. These odd rooms have been used, and it is to be supposed enjoyed. When we see them, the only guests are black beetles, a couple of dirty little lads as unkempt as wild Highland cattle, and a half-maniacal shock-headed Dugald kind of creature, with an atmosphere of garlic, which makes us rejoice when we turn out once more into the fresh air blowing over the breezy flower-clad upland, with the blue sea in front and the bright sun overhead.