At the foot of the hill, Gualterio—he had come out from Palermo for the festa—put me into a passing jaunting car and sent me on my way to the villas of Bagheria, the most interesting of which is the property of Prince Palagonia. On either side of the gate are two queer old gnomes mounted upon marble pedestals and dressed in fantastic adaptations of Saracenic costume; the head gardener’s wife assured me that these trolls are so terrible they frighten away not only trespassers, but “any other evil spirit” who dares to come that way. She crossed herself devoutly when she mentioned the names of certain malicious spirits who, she said, would be only too glad to molest Bagheria but for the forethought of the Prince.
The hollow wall about the rather ragged garden is wide enough in places to be used as dwellings for the servants. Courageous indeed must they be to rest under the shapes that decorate the wall, as weird a collection of zoological nightmares as ever were carved in stone by an insane sculptor at the hest of an insane patron. Black with age and the weather, grotesque pipers, trolls, knights, gentlemen, ladies, elves, monkeys, dragons, hunchbacks, cats, roosters, things intended to be representations of evil spirits, a miscellaneous scattering of angels and cherubs, a virgin or two, and the Prince’s patron saint, stand, jump, walk, fly, or poise on one foot.
A heavy wind had played havoc with some of the figures a few days before my visit. “Ecc’!” exclaimed the gardener’s wife, pointing ahead.
On the wall a most pious madonna, her hands crossed over her faded blue breast, gazed sadly down upon a dancer standing upon her head and buried almost to her shoulders in the mucky earth. How horrified the staid Virgin must have been when the worldling flew down the wind and poised upside down!
“Frightful, isn’t it?” asked my guide.
“Oh, spaventosa! When are you going to put her back on the wall?” I inquired.
She shook her head sadly. “I do not know. Maybe never. The Prince is not rich enough now to bother about raising fallen ladies!”
There are other unoccupied villas in Bagheria of the same kind, with the same sort of “devil-scarers,” but I preferred the live performers to the dead ones—the festa waited. ‘Festa di San Giu,’ the natives called it; but the railroad announcements in the stations stated that it was a town fair in honor of San Giuseppe. Bagheria itself is not a particularly attractive town, though clean and well-kept, and its nineteen or twenty thousand inhabitants do their best to decorate themselves and their buildings in honor of the saint, while thousands of merrymakers flock in from Palermo and all the country round.
At one side of the Corso two workmen were nailing pinwheels, serpents, set pieces and other explosives to a set of frames for a castello di fuoco (fire-castle), at the same time puffing on long, thin Italian cigars. As I came along, one of the men knocked the ashes of cigar upon a pile of small saucissions, and nodded a cheerful greeting.
“What’s the matter?” he called, as I sprang back. “Did something bite you?”