Vistas in Sicily

by Arthur Stanley Riggs

To the southwest of Selinus is the Punta di Granitola, where the Arabs landed in 827 A. D., Koran in one hand, sword in the other—the last African invaders to conquer the island, let us hope. Farther along, on both shore and railroad, is Mazzara, with a Norman cathedral and ruined castle; and straight northwest on a little promontory of its own is Marsala, better known for its sweet, rich wine than as the modern successor of Carthaginian Lilybaion. Though Marsala—the name is Arabic: Marsa Ali, Ali’s Harbor—was never possessed by the Greeks, its story is nevertheless vivid and varied. As the chief stronghold of Carthage, it played a vital part in the struggle for supremacy in this “barbarian corner” of the island. Pyrrhus besieged it in vain, and thirty years later Rome besieged it unsuccessfully for eight years in one of the most stubborn and remarkable campaigns in history. Afterward, during the Roman period, the city was known as “the most splendid,” and was made the capital of the western half of Sicily, Syracuse being the eastern capital. It became an important dockyard and naval station, whence the Roman campaigns against Africa were dispatched. Don John of Austria, too, sailed hence on his expeditions against the Turks.

It was into the harbor of Marsala on that memorable 11th of May, 1860, that the two little steamers Lombardo and Piemonte, which the revolutionists had shanghaied from the Rubattino Company up at Genoa the week before, sneaked to land Garibaldi and his red-shirt brigade. They got ashore safely, in spite of the Bourbons’ cruisers, and before they left for Calatafimi Garibaldi posted his now famous proclamation claiming Sicily for King Victor Emmanuele.

Of course there are a cathedral, Punic and Christian tombs, the remains of ancient walls and harbor works, latomie and so on, but to-day Marsala really spells only—Wine! The largest and most important establishments are those of the Englishmen Ingham and Woodhouse, and the Sicilian Florio of Palermo. But there are numerous others not so well known nor doing so large a business. The long, low, white bodegas are open to the inspection of visitors, and to those who have never seen them, the processes of blending and converting with the use of the “mother” wines, the mechanical bottling and corking, the labeling and packing departments, the endless rows of hogsheads and the strongly vinous atmosphere, all possess an attraction peculiarly their own. There is something of interest in every foot of each establishment. But—verbum sap! Beware the atmosphere, and the testing to which you are invited. In all the great wine-making countries it is considered a legitimate joke to befuddle the careless American whose enthusiasm outruns his prudence. One or two sips of the wine may be taken with dignity, but Marsala, like its Spanish cousin, Sherry, is a heady wine, and the rich, heavy air of the winery and wareroom alike bespeak caution on the part of the investigator, if a delightful memory is not to be spoiled by a pricking conscience.

Around the old harbor to the north of Marsala are extensive salt works, and between it and Trapani are about forty-five more, all worked by private capital, since Italy’s royal monopoly has not been extended to Sicily. Salt is one of the island’s most valuable exports, and the salt-pans down by the sea, at Trapani—the ancient Drepana of Carthaginian days—have made the city the most prosperous place, for its size, in the island. From a distance the heaps look as if an army of invading Saracens had pitched their tents upon the flats, and quaint windmills add a distinctly Dutch note to the scene. The heavy brine is pumped up into shallow excavations or “pans,” as the tanks are called. The hot Sicilian sunshine and the warm African breezes do the rest. When the water has evaporated, the pans are thickly coated with the crystals, which workmen shovel into glittering heaps and cover with tiles to protect them. There the salt waits, for either the refinery or for shipment in bulk as a crude product.

Trapani itself is one of the cleanest towns in the island, as well as one of the most prosperous, and of course has its Via Garibaldi, which proves its fraternity with all other Sicilian cities. While there is nothing really great in it, in either architecture or art, the city is nevertheless full of minor interest, and various objects of art ranging all the way from pieces of the Middle Ages down to the present day statues of King Victor Emmanuele II and Garibaldi, neither of which is yet forty years old. One could while away many a pleasant day loitering among these things—the Cathedral, with its Crucifixion by Van Dyck, and splendid old carven seats in the choir; the quaint decorations of Sant’ Agostino, where the Knights Templars worshiped centuries ago; Lucca della Robbia’s marble-framed Madonna in the other church of Santa Maria di Gesù; the seventeenth century polychrome wooden statues by Trapani’s own sons in the Oratory of San Michele; the queer tower of the Spedadello down in the Ghetto, and so on. Equally pleasant it is to wander along the tree-shaded promenade at the water’s edge, or as far out as the Torre di Ligny, on the very tip of the “sickle” (drepana) that Trapani thrusts out into the sea.

Off shore, the picturesque Ægadian Isles rise like jewels from the sea. From the middle of the eighteenth to the last quarter of the nineteenth century they were owned by the noble Pallavicini family of Genoa. They are still private property, since in 1874 Signor Florio of Palermo, the steamship man and wine grower, added them to his multifarious interests and made them the headquarters of the most important tunny fishery in Sicily.

Trapani possesses the usual historical interest of intermittent conflict between the races that struggled for the possession of the island, but its legendary story is even more gripping. Virgil pictures the founding of the city by the hero Æneas and his Trojans after Troy had fallen, the death of the venerable Anchises, and the festival Æneas instituted in honor of his father’s uneasy spirit. The poet’s soaring imagination carried the hero on up the mist-shrouded mountain behind, to worship at the fane of his mother Venus. This cloudy peak was named after Eryx—son of Butes, the mighty wrestler—who challenged Hercules to a test of strength, and was vanquished by that worthy robber, who stopped while driving off Geryon’s stolen herds long enough to win the match and take the mountain as his prize.

With the beginning of history it appears in the possession of the Elymians, who claimed to be descendants of the Trojans. Twenty-five hundred feet in the air rises Eryx, to-day Monte San Giuliano, reached from Trapani by an interminably winding but easy road that twists and turns half a hundred times in its ascent. Up through the purple shadows of gulches, along the sharp edges of startling acclivities winds the trail, with halcyone fields of every brilliant flower and plant below, and great expanses waving with grain, green and gold with lemons and oranges, red with the fresh wounds of the plow. Hide-sandaled and heavily caped and hooded peasants, shepherds who seem to have stepped right out of Odyssey or Æneid, carrying classic water or wine flasks, greet us cheerily along the way. As we near the top the reason for these heavy garments becomes apparent in the lower temperature, for Eryx is a peak and a city of fog, often a little world by itself far above the earth, unseen by and unseeing city and plain below, looking down only on the tufted white of rolling mists. Cyclopean fragments of ancient walls and natural precipices blend into one another and into the present town walls, above steep approaches to the Gates of Trapani, of the Heralds, and of the Sword, the three entrances to all that exists of Eryx to-day, where less than three thousand souls live in that part of the town nearest the ruins of the temple, whose very altars long since crumbled into the dust of oblivion.

In the days when the Elymians were its masters, the mountain was sacred to a goddess who evidently had the same functions as the Roman Venus. What her Elymian name was we do not know; but since the Phœnicians called her Astarte, the Greeks Aphrodite and the Romans Venus, one after the other, we may feel sure that whatever her original name, she stood, as did those later goddesses identified with her, for love and beauty and sustenance. And though centuries have passed, and the altar before her whereon no blood was permitted to be spilt no longer bears the fire of sacrifice, the priestly ideal of woman still presides over this sacred rock so high among the mists. For here where the pagans worshiped their unknown goddess, to-day the Virgin gazes down upon the unchanging sacrifice of years, the hearts of men.

The town is rugged and irregular and personal to a degree that captivates the most hardened sightseer—crooked, narrow streets, full of quaint buildings rich in Eastern touches: here a latticed casement suggesting veiled women and mystery, yonder ajimez windows divided by delicate little columns, farther along an harmonious blending of the Norman and Moorish on sculptured pillar capital and gallery. The people are as captivating as the town—caped men stalking to and fro like comic opera brigands, women whose loveliness has made Eryx noted.