The road up the hill is a splendid piece of engineering as well as a picturesque and romantic highway. Who but Latins would construct at vast expense a road like this simply for the ease and comfort of pilgrims to a shrine no more illustrious than scores of others, and call it the Via al Santuario, the Way to the Sanctuary? Partly on the solid rock of the mountain, partly on graceful arched bridges or viaducts, it leaps upward in short, acute angles, now spanning the dry bed of a torrente, now edging its way along the precarious parapet of a crag. Large, smooth pebbles set on edge in mortar, divided and bordered by three lengthwise parallel strips of lava or some other equally durable stone and crossed by other strips every fifty feet or so, make it apparently as enduring as Pellegrino itself. On either side rises a low, thick stone wall, and every few hundred yards are white signposts with the name in black letters.
From the Piazza Falde—falde, in Italian, means flank, skirt—it leads upward in an easy ascent that continues for two or three hundred yards. But after the third turn, it takes a sudden inclination of twenty degrees or more out of the horizontal. That begins the real climb,—and the view. Palermo, the Conca d’Oro, the sea below, the mountains behind, appear and disappear with each turn, like the ever-changing film of a motion-picture.
The Japanese say there are “two kinds of fools: those who have never ascended Fuji-yama, and those who have ascended him twice.” The proverb applies here on Pellegrino perfectly. It is as great a mistake not to make the journey once as it would be needless to make it a second time, for no one can ever forget the picturesque climb up that zig-zag road on donkey-back. When the writer went up, everybody who saw the miniature procession laughed. We three, beast, boy and man, made a sight Cervantes would have smiled to see. Equipped with a stout club, the plump boy answered very well for Sancho Panza. With my camera case over my shoulder in lieu of a target, and my tripod-legs projecting at impossible angles, I did very well as Don Quijote. And the faithful burro was surely a replica in miniature of Rosinante, long ears flopping disconsolately back over her neck.
Instead of beating his beast as almost every other boy does when the animal balks at the steeper part of the ascent, “Sancho” ran lightly forward and began picking up wisps of the straw gleaners had dropped on their way down the mountain. When he had a handful, he held the bunch of fodder out temptingly, and yelled “Aaaaaa-ah-ah!” “Rosinante” snorted, sniffed suspiciously, and with a suddenness that almost slid “Don Quijote” over her haunches into the road, bolted forward for the tidbit. A mouthful at a time it was given to her, and thus the hardest part of the way was quickly passed over without a blow being struck.
“Do all the donkey-boys do this?” I asked, surprised at the humanity of the proceeding.
“Sancho’s” reply was disconcertingly frank. “Oh, no, Signore. I am the only one. I can’t afford to buy a new donkey, and if I wear this one out, how can I bring forestieri at Pellegrino? The other boys beat their donkeys—yes! But then, they can get new ones every little while!”
Once above the long series of viaducts that keep the road on an even plane of ascent over gullies and chasms, the way ceases to be so steep. On the rocky slopes, hardy Swiss cows graze among stones that seem incapable of yielding even thistles. When all the sparse grass is gone, with muzzle and hoofs the hard-working cows turn over boulders of considerable size and eagerly lick up the meager, pale blade or two of grass they conceal, finishing the attack by calmly devouring the fat little snails that cling to the moist earth and the under side of the big stones—I saw this myself. The cows have a hard time of it indeed, trudging out from the city every morning, grazing and rooting all day among the rocks, and then going down at night to be milked from door to door.
But the goats have an even harder time. Some are seen every day on the very apex of the mountain, mere black specks against the sky. They clamber up there opposite the telegraph and semaphore stations without a thought of the journeys they must make in the evening. On coming back into town with heavy bags, their owners drive them ruthlessly up four or five flights of stairs to give some lazy customer as little as half a pint of their strong, rich milk.
Near the top of this Via del Santuario is the roofless chapel of Croce, the Cross, which projects bastion-like from the jutting brow of the hill. Here every year a priest from the monastery on the heights, standing where he can see the whole splendid sweep of the Golden Shell below, a rippling sea of green and gold, returns thanks for its fertility during the past season, and beseeches heaven for a continuance of it for another year.
The chapel of Santa Rosalia is in the gloomy cavern to which the lovely maiden fled to escape the temptations of her uncle’s court in Palermo; a court full of the factitious splendor and richness of the East, with Saracens all about and an atmosphere which, to say the least, was probably not conducive to saintly meditation. She is a mysterious and interesting figure, this daughter of the mighty Duke Sinibaldo and niece of King William the Good. How could she ever have cast aside the ease and luxury of the elaborate civilization in which she had been reared, and come to this stalactite grotto, dripping and cold, where her companions were no lords and ladies in waiting, but only the bats and small mountain animals seeking shelter from inclement weather?