XI
CATANIA AND MOUNT ÆTNA
CATANIA is the second city of the island in importance, and has a far reaching trade in oil and wine, sulphur and grain and almonds, and the other products of the rich and fertile plain at whose edge it stands guard. It is a city of humdrum, a town which, like Milan, reminds one strongly of some American manufacturing center with a large foreign population, and surely nothing could be further from presenting an historic visage at first sight. Yet its history is a picturesque and vivid tapestry of which the main threads have always been the heroic spirit and enterprise of its people.
Settled in 729 B. C.—when the city by the Tiber was only a quarter of a century old—Kataneion or Katane in the sixth century became famous for a reformer and lawgiver named Charondas, some of whose enactments were decidedly original. Divorce he made simple.... Either husband or wife could put away the other for sufficient cause; but neither could remarry with anyone younger than the person divorced! And Charondas died by one of his own laws, which forbade men to come armed into the General Assembly. The story goes that he had been out in the hills hunting robbers: when he came back the Assembly was in an uproar, and he hurried in to quiet things. Instantly a member saw his sword, and cried: “Charondas, you break your own law!”
“By Zeus!” he replied, “I will not set aside my law—I will confirm it!” and he plunged the sword into his breast.
Long afterward, in B. C., 476, the emulous Tyrant Hieron juggled with the city’s name and its people, depopulating it and then recolonizing it with new settlers and giving it another name. Are the sober Catanians who pass us to-day descended from the old citizens who came back into their own when the Tyrant died? Or are this trolley-car conductor, this gayly uniformed hall-porter, sons of the Hieronic colonists? And this very street on which we study the Catanians of to-day—was it the ancient way leading toward Ætna, for whom the city was renamed?
The chief reason for Catania’s modern appearance is—it is modern! Destroyed so many times, now in part, again entirely, by Ætna, it is more or less new, a veritable phœnix of Sicilian cities. Suspended from the ceiling of our room in the hotel was the very newest thing, a huge chandelier garnished with exceedingly new and shiny electric light fixtures. But alas! when we attempted to illuminate, we found the chandelier a hollow delusion. When the porter came, he smiled with the indulgence of superior knowledge.
“The chandelier is not intended for lighting. That would be extra—electricity is very expensive!” So we had to be content with the feeble gleam of one honest tallow dip in a room almost as big as a whole floor in a New York mansion.
As to antiquities, Catania has its share—a Greek Theater, a Roman amphitheater, a forum, baths, a nymphæum, and aqueduct, and so on. Most of them, thanks to Ætna’s past activity, are now subterranean and but partly excavated—indeed, almost forgotten. But Catania does better by her celebrities. Tisias of Himera, locally nicknamed Stesichorus because of his genius in perfecting the lyric chorus of the Greek drama presented in the Theater some fourteen hundred years ago, has had a large and handsome square named in his honor, as well as the street leading straight from the heart of the town toward the mountain.
In the Piazza Stesicoro stands a monument to Catania’s favorite son, Bellini the composer, born here in 1802 and brought back in 1867 from Paris, where he died. A more effective monument is the Villa Bellini, the city’s handsome, hilly public park. Myriad steep paths of clean yellow and white pebbles carefully set on edge in mortar, picked out in black and white scrollwork, and edged with solid walls of variegated flowers, lead up to two fine knolls, on one of which is a trim little belvedere flanked by flowerbeds. On the other is a large bandstand. Between the two Ætna hangs motionless on the horizon, more like the mirrored reflection of a volcano than a real mountain, his feet clothed in the foliage of vineyard and forest, his head capped with snows that almost never melt, gleaming in the sunshine like a giant’s silvery hair.
Another charming little park is the Flora della Marina, a narrow strip of garden and greensward along the Bay. As you come through an arch of the railway viaduct, it bursts upon you with the same effect that a strip of brilliant Persian embroidery would have upon a somber coat, and you exclaim with pleasure at the inviting lawns and starry beds of bright colored flowers. Here and there idles an immaculate and lynx-eyed customs guard in sailor’s uniform. From the ship’s mast in the center floats the gaudy Italian tricolor; and in the background is a sailors’ home from which tarry old shellbacks stump out to sit dreaming on the benches that give upon the Bay.