From Naples it was at the edge of sunset we sailed past the islands south. One is Procida, where Lamartine wrote Graziella; Capri, with its ancient Phœnician stairway, cut in solid rock. With deepening twilight, we passed such shore places as Sorrento, Torre del Greco. Then away for the open sea and the night.
The next morning when I opened my port-hole we were anchored in front of dazzling white and pink mountains of stone, wild-lined, lofty. This was Sicily. We anchored far out. Little pink and violet-blue boats, roughly and heavily made, came for us and our luggage.
When at length we landed, the glare of light on white chalk-soil was terrifying, and I recalled swiftly that one of Sicily’s other names is Island of the Sun. Suddenly the buildings of a very ancient world swept around me. The Greeks made settlements here almost a thousand years before the Birth of Christ.
Palermo is a large city. It has wide and spacious streets, bordered with palaces of beauty—proud palaces of the Houses of Aragon, Bourbon, Orleans, Guise. Solemn, dignified, magnificent. It was here the Bourbons came for their last wild fling at power. The city is almost as lovely as Venice, which is all I am able to say, the highest praise I know.
One reason that the architecture of Sicily is alluring, is because at one time or another, almost all great races have owned it, so all lovelinesses are united. And since it does not rain from May to October, the light was dazzling.
Civilizations reached heights. The Greeks settled it at a dizzy number of centuries before Christ. The Romans held it awhile; the Norsemen. Once it was a center of Moorish culture. And then there was French, Spanish, and Italian rule.
Roger of Sicily, of song and story, built fairy palaces, and then helped bring the learning of the Orient into Europe. He inspired and caused to be built three buildings which are wonders of beauty, among them Mon Reale whose interior is covered with pictures made of gold and precious marble mosaics.
Mon Reale is several miles from the city, on the side of one of the towering, treeless, forbidding, pink-hued mountains of rock. The road that led to it was suffocating, white with dust, and the sun made me know that Africa was only eighty miles away. Barefoot women bearing burdens on their heads the size of their bodies, and leading donkeys, toiled along beside us. Every moment the view grew more astonishing, and greater the dazzle of unshaded light. At our feet lay the famous Concha d’Oro, (Shell of Gold), the fruitful plain that frames Palermo, filled with groves of oranges, figs, palms, and the bright blue curve of the shore, with the giant pink mountains of rock that mark it at either end.
On the road to Mon Reale we visited Villa Tasca, a palace of rose-tinted marble. Its garden is famous. Out of the dust-white road into a paradise of flowers! Only oriental people, like the Arab, who have known the desert and thirst and the sun’s too direct heat, know how to make gardens. It was one of their perfected arts. And in these gardens they knew how to set pleasure places of unbelievable charm.
All the old gardens of the South, of Latin races, are among the richest enchantments. It takes centuries and wars and changing kings, caprice and madness, and love, to ripen gardens. Money and haste can not do it. A garden, in the finest acceptance of the term, will be impossible in our country for centuries. Even the flowers are lovelier in Latin gardens of the South, because they seem to be freighted with so many memories.