Vistas in Sicily

by Arthur Stanley Riggs

Ætna appears again soon after the entrance to the valley of the Dittaino is passed, and beckons with such insistence that the train hesitates only a moment—at the station for Valguarnera Assoro—right before the railway restaurant. It is a tumbledown little shack with a big sign: Ristorante G. Galliano. If you are on good enough terms with the Signor Conductor, he may wait long enough for you to have a sip of the excellent country wine and a taste of the “beautiful goat” the redoubtable Galliano purveys to such as can pay his very modest price. A few miles farther on is the station for Agira, which occupies the site of one of the very oldest Sikelian cities, lying back from the railroad, up in the hills. Later it was the birthplace of the historian Diodorus, who gives a picturesque account of his native village.

Half an hour later the railway emerges from the hills upon the plain of Catania—so productive of grain that from the very beginnings of local history it has been known as the granary of Sicily—and leaving the main line at Bicocca, puts Catania and the great volcano behind, heading southward for Syracuse. Fine crops appear around the famous Lake Lentini, Sicily’s largest inland body of water, varying from about nine to twelve miles in circumference, according to the season. It is a dreary tarn, looking so like a big mud puddle or a meadow overflowed by stagnant salt water that it is easy to credit the tales of the mephitic vapors and exhalations and fevers which have made it the scourge of the neighborhood.

Evidently the Sicilian railroads provide no drinking water for the employés in wayside stations, for as we stopped the combination telegraph operator, baggage smasher, ticket agent and general utility man ran out to the locomotive and tapped the brass faucet in the tender for a drink. There is a big water-wheel a few miles farther on, arranged exactly like an Egyptian sakiyeh, and no doubt a survival of the Moorish wheel installed in that very well centuries ago. The apparatus is very simple. A horizontal wheel is geared loosely into a vertical one by big, clumsy wooden teeth. Over it projects an arm to which some patient draft animal is hitched. A long grass rope carrying an endless series of pottery jars or buckets completes the outfit by running over the vertical wheel, and all the water that does not splash back into the well flows into an irrigating pool and the ditches. The mule who worked this particular wheel acted as if he too were a Moorish survival, unaccustomed to modern inventions. Anyway, he tried to bolt when the engine shrieked. His plunging blindfold gallop sent the water flying in all directions, giving his peasant master a much-needed bath and earning the poor beast a beating, the blows of which could be distinctly heard as the train sped on. Around a curve Mt. Ætna appears again in all its majesty, filling up the entire background, looming more than twice as large as familiar Vesuvius. Its lower slopes are green and the upper reaches snow covered, split like a sore lip, with dark curves, queer bumps and sharp little corners of uplifted skin. Above them poises the soft black, slightly indented cone, canopied by a ridiculous tuft of cottony smoke no bigger than a handful at such a distance.

Agnone is a hedge of yellow daisies, a deep pasture full of reddish brown kine, a farmhouse of stone with thatched shelters for the animals in the midst of rich cultivated lands. A mile away gleams the sea, a dull turquoise green flecked with windy ripples and dotted here and yon with white—“Silver sails come out of the west.” The tall timothy on both sides of the track, and other fields planted with oats and spiky cactus, seem mere picturesque settings for countless fiery poppies. Sheep by the hundred bolt in terror from the wild shrieks of the locomotive, preferring to run straight ahead on the track as long as they can possibly keep out of the way of the engine. Bold headlands here and there lower their stubborn crests for a few yards to give the flying train instantaneous vistas of wet sand gleaming far below, like blades of golden sickles edged with silver filigree.

In rapid succession these rugged scenes slip behind, and we run along the shore past salt farms and their windmills; then a boldly jutting island, brave with forts and churches, rising out of the sea like Venice—Augusta the picturesque, modern survivor of Xiphonia, scene of many a fierce battle and bloody conquest.

Augusta was founded in a most picturesque way by Emperor Frederick II. The town of Centuripe up in the hills, having roused the imperial ire by its sedition, was effectually razed. Then Frederick punished its people still further by driving them all into this spot and commanding them to stay there and be good. Perhaps its stormy birth in a measure accounts for Augusta’s stormy history. The most spectacular affair it ever witnessed was the tremendous naval duel between the fleets of France and Holland in 1676, when Admiral Duquesne defeated the Dutch Admiral De Ruyter, who afterward died of his wounds in nearby Syracuse. Following the coast closely, we flit swiftly past the Hyblæan Hills, eager to stop for some of their historic honey, but relentlessly carried onward by the insensate iron horse, that knows not nor cares for the sweets that rival the product of Hymettus.

All the way from Augusta the track borders the shore of the Bay of Megara, where anchored Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus, the Athenian generals who came to attack Syracuse in 415 B. C. with a fleet so vast that men paled merely to see it whiten the horizon. But to-day, instead of the tents and sails of invading hosts, you see evaporating-tanks and windmills, and snowy piles of salt dotting the rugged shore in serried ranks. Rushing across the neck of the promontory of Thapsus—now called Magnisi—we skirt Trogilus Bay, where the conquering fleet of Marcellus the Roman lay two centuries after the Athenian débâcle, cross the old Dionysian wall, sweep around the bold headland, and stop at Syracuse.

Don’t be disappointed in Syracuse by what you see of the dirty little provincial town that yawns sleepily at you between the railroad station and your hotel. Suspend judgment until you reach the Greek Theater, and from the top row of seats carven into the eternal rock, look out over the gracious panorama below. Beyond the sparsely settled vineyards and groves covering what was once the Greater Syracuse, lies the city of to-day on Ortygia, an oyster-shell full-heaped with pearls, in a sapphire setting of twin harbors and glittering sands. The alchemy of golden sunshine transmutes whitewashed tenements into Greek palaces, fishing luggers into stately galleys of war, and prosaic modern peasants into the soldiers and citizens of a happier and more stirring day. And as you stand breathless with the wonder of it, history unfolds itself in memory, with something at every step to drive that history home, be it Sikel, Greek, Roman, Saracen or Norman. The ruins of the mighty fortress atop the inland hill breathe of the Age of Tyrants, and to follow the herculean walls of Dionysius around the deserted plateau fills one with awe and wonder anew, for the work seemingly has been performed by a race of giants. Below, yawning in the seacoast of Achradina, dim caverns invite the explorer’s rowboat. There are the Street of Tombs to search for relics—though most likely you will find only a few scattered bones; the Castello Maniaces on the tip of Ortygia, full of Byzantine memories; charming walks to and through the quarries, the famous Latomie; the astonishing catacombs and the Anapo trip. A score of other delightful excursions the visitor can take, providing he is not driven forward by the exigencies of a cut-and-dried itinerary, that wickedest and most specious of all excuses for not seeing enough of a country really to enjoy it!

The mother colony was founded in 734 B. C. on the little island of Ortygia, named for the quail the Greeks found there in great coveys. From its very beginning the benignant gods smiled upon Syracuse, and it prospered so rapidly that within seventy years it was founding colonies of its own. Under the tyrant Gelon, son-in-law of the great and good Theron of Akragas, and later practically co-ruler with him of all Greek Sicily, the era of Hellenic supremacy began, with Syracuse in the van of progress. Indeed, Syracuse was of such paramount importance that sometimes its history is mistaken for the history of Sicily. Tyrants good and bad rose and fell; democracy overthrew tyranny, and tyranny overthrew democracy. Demagogues—the word means literally “popular leaders”—rose to stir the people to action against the government or the tyrant—and sometimes threatened to become tyrants themselves. Seeing how easy it was to sway the rabble with hot words, men of every class began to practice public speaking; no young man’s education was complete without it; and oratory first became an art in Sicily.