The “Cathedral” is a building to make the heart ache. Poor and ignorant though they are, the people strive with cheap, garish colors and hideous decorations to please the Deity as well as to give their lowly church the air of a rich-folks’ Cathedral. What grips one most is to be found in the sacristy. Tied tightly to the arm of a much betinseled Mary Magdalen is a beautiful and amazingly thick braid of human hair. What is the tragedy behind the oblation? What poor little girl from Mola came cowering and repentant to the feet of the saint and fastened the simple ex-voto in broken-hearted gratitude to the arm of her who wept over the sacred feet and wiped them with her hair? Is it a local tragedy or one from across the unfathomable seas? The verger pretends he does not know. Yet as you wander through the unkempt streets of the deserted village, you cannot help looking curiously about for any woman whose head shows the trace of the votive shears.
Many a time throughout Italy we had been tormented by filthy beggars on the steps of the cathedrals; but it was reserved for Mola to show us a pig who owned to being a pig in such a place! As we came out a huge, lean razorback grunted in savage disapproval, lurched to his feet, and trotted heavily off down a side street.
If the ascent to Mola is difficult, what can be said of the coming down? You stretch muscles you never knew you had, all the corns in the world seem to have concentrated upon your luckless feet, and you pitch and roll and toss like a mastless ship in a cross-sea.
After that Mola trip the most energetic traveler is apt to go to bed very early, and so for the first time hears the night noises of Taormina. The town makes quite a clatter on its way to bed—the click! click! click! of hobnailed heels on the lava pavement, the light chatter and songs of the children, which for all their occasional gayety have an elusive element of the tragic in them, the fluting of some little shepherd, and the tired bray of a home-going donkey glad the day’s work is over. And every half-hour the bell-baiting! Would that Poe had heard these Sicilian bells before he wrote his tintinnabulating rhyme. Beaten, not rung, they clamor with the maddening insistence of fiends until the ear rebels and no longer notices their angry tumult. One tradition has it that there is not a bell-clapper in the island, for the returning French took the iron tongues away after the Massacre of the Vespers, to keep the people from ringing alarms. But the ingenious Sicilian found that he could make much more noise with a hammer, and though six hundred years and more have rolled by, he is still so tickled with the racket that he seems each time to be trying to break all previous records. A more plausible story is that the clappers were taken away by the Neapolitans as recently as the day of Garibaldi’s arrival with his thousand red-shirts in 1860.
Save for the bell-baiting only, silence reigns from about ten until two. Then the first donkey’s tiny little overburdened feet come ticking down the Corso, the whack of his rider’s stick and an occasional gruff adjuration to the patient little mouse-colored beast recurring in a regular work-motif. Slowly the light begins to come. A sleepy ringer bangs out fifty irregular notes from his bell, hesitates a moment as though not quite certain of his count, and adds one last vigorous clang for good measure. Chanticleer first awakes the echoes, in strenuous rivalry with stentorian peacocks. Again silence reigns for half an hour or so. Then Taormina turns in bed, stirs luxuriously, yawns, and “gets busy.”
Along the Corso donkeys bearing slim wine-casks and great tins of goats’ milk patter past at a smart pace; vegetable hawkers from the piana shout their wares into open doorways; cats and chickens side by side strike out into the daylight from the obscurity of their shelters, stretching and flapping comfortably. Children, standing like models of Justice, scales and weights in hand, call their merchandise, weigh and measure with preternatural gravity, or eye older hucksters sharply as the latter use their own scales to weight out a “penorth” of this or a “haporth” of that.
These street views are keenly interesting, but after all it is Ætna that makes Taormina an artist’s paradise. Travelers and artists alike come for a brief glimpse or a sketch of Ætna, return again and again, or perchance find the fascination of hoary crown and delicate lights and shades so irresistible they settle down in the volcano’s shadow and remain for years, proclaiming Taormina to be the rarest beauty spot in creation.
One of the American artists who came twenty years ago and has never been able to tear himself away from the thrall of the great cold peak, shows his studies of its moods, a great stack of marvelous water colors made at dawn, at noon, at sunset, at every hour of day and night, with every whimsical effect cloud or sun or shadow could give as he sat at his easel in a white-walled garden with the perpetually beautiful before him as a model. Perhaps the most remarkable contrasts are from a perfectly moonlight night to a clear dawn the next morning. All night the moon, sailing in solemn round overhead, tints the peak’s snowy shoulders with a faint greenish tinge that makes it the wraith of a volcano. A little before four o’clock, slowly, tenderly, moon and pallid stars dwindle into spookish reflections of themselves as the sky lightens, the velvet blue of the night puckers into gelid gray, changes into pale turquoise through which majestically sail a vast fleet of enormous fluffy clouds, while Ætna rises dark and forbidding from the piana below.
