Exactly how long Rosalia maintained herself here in holy seclusion no one knows, but the date of her death seems to have been about 1170. In any event, she lay peacefully in oblivion until in 1624 some bones were discovered in the cavern. At that time a plague was raging, the city panic stricken, and when the bones were brought in to the Cathedral, the plague stopped. Such a coincidence was too striking to be ignored by the simple-minded, so Rosalia was canonized and appointed the patron of the city, because of her gracious intervention on behalf of the people against whose ancestors she had shaken off the dust of her feet.
Filled with that dramatic religious fervor which has found its expression in so many wonderful pilgrimages, from the Crusades to the present, all Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to worship before the niche in the grotto where she died. Miracle after miracle was performed; and to-day the whole city, whether religiously inclined or not, is devoted to its female saint, whose relics are believed to be preserved in a huge funerary urn surmounted by her statue, and kept in the treasury of the Cathedral. The monument, which is solid silver, weighs more than fourteen hundred pounds. Every year her festival is celebrated with great pomp, a huge car, fifty feet high and as big as a house, being dragged through the streets amid the acclamations of the faithful. The float is also brought out in solemn procession whenever her intercession is especially desired for the city.
No attention has been paid to the gratuitous information of a scientist that the saint’s relics are really only animal bones. The late Andrew D. White, in his “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology,” says: “When Professor Buckland, the eminent osteologist and geologist, discovered the relics of Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the slightest diminution of their miraculous power.” Certainly no Palermitan to-day would listen to any Goth who attempted to tell him such a story as this; and even to heretic Americans, the “scientific” attitude which delights in iconoclasm is hard to comprehend. Why should the scientist who claims that his only wish is to benefit humanity, take from the poor and miserable any belief that heals them, however idle or superstitious that faith may seem to him?
Eventually up on the mountain a chapel was constructed whose artificial wall meets the edges of the grotto, enclosing it completely. There is no roof to this outer section except over the front door; and the sunshine, falling upon the floor between entrance and choir, gives this open court the air of a pleasant vestibule roofed only by the azure, and throws into strong, shadowy relief the cavern beyond, with its candles twinkling in the dusk before the altars. A handsome black iron screen divides outer court from inner grotto; and both are paved with big, uneven stones worn to glassy slipperiness by the knees of the devout. The natural rock roof is weird and fantastic, covered with stalactic pendants, colored in all the shades of brown and green by the highly alkaline water that whispers perpetual requiem into myriad leaden gutters which carry it to the sides, and so preserve the decorations from destruction. Bent and twisted and angled, the gutters seem the branches of so many dead trees sprawling high among the jumbled rocks.
At the rear of the chapel is a handsome white marble and mosaic altar, and nearer the front, enclosed in a glass case under an elaborate and massive shrine of highly colored marbles, is the figure of the saint over which Goethe rhapsodized. By the light of a flickering taper thrust between the marble bars, little by little the image within takes shape in the gloom. The head and hands are marble, the robes gilt. She seems to sleep naturally, a young girl of eighteen or twenty, her head easily disposed upon the pillow, her lips just apart; exactly, as the great German expressed it, as if she might breathe and move at any moment. Upon her breast blaze the crimson jewels of the Cross of Savoy, presented by Queen Margharita herself, and innumerable other tokens, among them a huge golden heart, the gift of a Palermitan cardinal. Gold and silver watches, jeweled rings, loose precious stones, bracelets, necklaces, and other ornaments by the dozen lie about the glass casket or upon the gilded robes, which are exquisitely worked with lacelike tracery. And to one side is a gilt scepter fully five feet long.
Opposite, on the wall, a white marble slab marking the niche where the bones lay, bears the words:
VT QVO LOCO, ET SITV D. ROSALIAE SACRVM CORPVS
ADMIRABILI OPERE LAPIDEIS THESIS INSERTVM
ANNOS FERME CCCC DELITVERIT,
QVOD MAIORES NOSTROS LATVIT, NOBIS DIVINITVS INNOTVIT
POSTERI NON IGNORARENT:
IPSIVS EXPIRANTIO IMAGO VBI IACVERAT SITA EST:
ARA SUPERIMPOSTA ANNO IVBILAEI M DC XXV
From the grotto-chapel, past a group of goatherds’ houses and through their attendant flocks, it is only about a quarter-mile stumble to a jutting spur which forms the highest crag of the mountain. Perched there between the halves of a dismantled arcade of plaster columns, stands a colossal figure of Santa Rosalia, hundreds of feet above the sea. Lightning has beheaded the statue twice, and the two marble heads lie in a little hollow at the saint’s feet. After the second bolt from the heavens the Sicilians, who are not by any means a wealthy people, put on a third head—a cheap plaster one; and though many a fierce storm has raged about Pellegrino since then, not once has the lightning struck the statue—perhaps the plaster head is not worth destroying.
That all forestieri have money, so why shouldn’t they pay? is the logic of the Italian, and everywhere except in Sicily he carries it to the absurdities; and even in this blissful isle an individual sometimes forgets his geniality by turning highwayman for the nonce. A tatterdemalion goatherd, for instance, charged me sixteen cents for a milked-to-order pint of goat’s milk.