THE ignorance and illiteracy to which reference has already been made are the chief misfortunes of the Sicilians. Since schools are few and far between, little girls are taught only to sew, knit and cook. The boys, more unfortunate, receive little or no instruction at all—there is work for them as soon as they are old enough, and they are useful in the fields and about the stables and goatpens at six or eight. The children of wealthy or noble families seem to be regarded as superior beings who have to learn practically nothing, and who accordingly go through life unworried by knowing anything. A few years ago an English lady undertook to make Taormina over single handed, and though the town still has a long and thorny road to travel, the results the Hill School has accomplished in helping the people to help themselves have surpassed all anticipations, and prove that even with both heredity and environment against them, the people are willing to learn and to work when shown how.
Within one of the dark doorways along the Corso is a typically Taorminian institution, a knitting school where little tots sit demurely knitting, crocheting or embroidering with faces as expressionless as the visages of so many trained kittens. The “lady principal” comes forward graciously to welcome visitors in her tiny domain, and readily grants permission to make photographs. But the room is lighted only from the front door, and the little heads and bodies are so difficult to keep in repose for even a few seconds that photography is speedily abandoned for an inspection of the work of the pupils, babies of from three upward, except that occasionally an older girl takes a “post graduate course” in fine embroidering. They click away industriously as their visitors pass along the line, and some do not even glance up, so thoroughly have they been drilled by the schoolmistress. Each juvenile knitter uses two long needles and wears a belt with a little leather plastron, in which the butt-end of the stationary needle rests, to protect the thinly clad little body from the prick of the sharp steel instrument.
When we visited the school, I asked the teacher how much she charged for tuition.
“Ten cents a month each,” was her grave reply. “It is much for some to pay.”
“Does that pay you?”
She waved her hand at the circle of twenty-five pupils. “It does!”
The food of the people is intended to support life rather than gratify the palate. And though the little ones, like normal children anywhere in the world, are gifted with a sweet tooth, their desire for dolci is very, very seldom gratified. So when you loiter about the door of the little school, be sure to have a bag of sweet cakes with you—the bakers along the Corso all sell them. The “lady principal” will gladly permit you to distribute the glistening, white-iced treasures, and you will be amply repaid in watching the pupils—the daintiness with which they accept and hold the proffered delicacies, the timid “Graz’, Signora! Graz’!” of each, the perfect restraint of eager eyes and mouths.
A very important personage in this little mountain town is Signor Atenasio Pancrazio, banker, steamship agent, postal messenger, and storekeeper; and curious indeed are his business methods. On four days which we noticed especially because of a desire to get at some of Signor Atenasio’s money, he opened his bank-store at the somewhat irregular and unusual hours of eleven-thirty, a quarter before nine, noon, and twenty minutes past three. And then, to make the hours appear still less like a matter of sordid business for gain, the gentleman threw wide his doors on a Sunday morning and kept open shop, bank and house until long after everybody but the ubiquitous tourist had gone to bed.
Banker though he is, the good gentleman has ideas above mere money-making, and if you are content to sit at his feet in the big, dim counting-room—which smells of cheese and wine, of garlic and rubber-stamp ink—you can learn much about the Sicilian problem, which is as perplexing to the Italian Government as the Irish bogy is to Downing Street. When absentee landlordism is combined with ignorance and poverty, it makes a problem indeed.