The driver laughed; so did his inconsiderate fares. “It is a very long walk by this road to Bagheria—all the way around Sicily!”
I stopped walking. He went on: “But if you want to go to Solunto, I’ll take you there for three lire. You can walk to Bagheria from there.”
“But your stage is too full now,” I objected.
“Never! Plenty of room. Come—I’ll take you for two lire, if you can’t afford to pay me three.”
Crowding uncomfortably together, the other occupants, decent young peasants, made room for me, and we creaked slowly on behind the half-starved horse whose best pace was a walk. Here a huge brown villa of the soap-box type deflected the road to one side; there fresh young vegetables sprouted thickly from clay pits which had all the seeming of prehistoric stone ruins; yonder a meadow full of drying brick and loose straw proclaimed the brickmaker at work. Turning and twisting, the road wandered on leisurely until we neared the Antichità di Solunto, the rest house where visitors may stop to eat luncheon and buy the sour red wine the custodian has for sale. A sudden ominous sagging of the rear of the stage made everyone seize something. But a cheery voice reassured us, and Gualterio’s beaming face peered in over the tailboard.
“I am here, signore!” he cried delightedly. “Behold, if you need me.”
I crawled out with some difficulty while everybody laughed but the driver, who was demanding four lire instead of two. Promptly Gualterio took command of the situation.
“You go on—I will pay him!” and he turned on the fellow with a fervid exposition of his complete ancestry of thieves and jailbirds, threw him two lire, and started him off again.
The road up the hill to Solunto is magnificently paved even yet with the great irregular smooth blocks the Romans put to such excellent purpose on their military highways, curving to take advantage of every angle in the abrupt hillside, winding among thickets of prickly pear, and past little irrigation ducts among lemon groves which murmur with a susurrant echo of the little channels that flow down Granada’s long slope. Neatly piled beside the upper reaches of the road on either hand are dismembered columns, statues, fragments of pilasters, cornices, and blocks of marble. The ruins of the city itself are unsatisfying and meager—a single wide street lined with the foundations of some buildings of undiscernible age, half a dozen streets, similarly desolated, crossing it at almost right angles, a single three-cornered structure set up by an archæologist and called, for want of a better title, the Gymnasium, and here and there some bit of mosaic pavement or wall decoration.
Indeed, no one knew the exact site of Soluntum, which vanished ages ago, until in 1825 a peasant scratching about on the hillside unearthed splendid marble candelabra whose richness indicated their Roman origin, and small statues of Jupiter and Isis. Soluntum was found, and the archæologists proceeded to uncover it. It reminds one strongly of Pompeii, though much less of interest has been discovered in it. But Solunto has a view, a transcendent panorama before which even a fountain pen falters.