CHAPTER XXII
PROVENCE
Maniace
New Year’s Day found us at Palermo where my husband was enchanted at being presented with a little pottle of freshly gathered wild strawberries; a week later we traversed the island to Taormina, whence he wrote to Mrs. Janvier:
Monte Venere, Taormina,
25th Jan., 1901.
... Today it was too warm to work contentedly indoors even upon our little terrace with its superb views over Etna and the Ionian Sea—so at 9 a.m. Elizabeth and I, with a young painter-friend came up here to a divine spot on the slopes of the steep and grand-shouldered Hill of Venus, bringing with us our writing and sketching materials and also fruit and wine and light luncheon. It is now about 3 p.m. and we have lain here for hours in the glorious warmth and cloudless sunglow—undisturbed by any sounds save the soft sighing of the sea far below, the fluttering of a young goatherd with his black flock on a steep across a near ravine, and the occasional passing of a muleteer or of a mountaineer with his wine-panier’d donkeys. A vast sweep of sea is before us and beneath. To the left, under the almond boughs, are the broad straits which divide Sicily from Calabria—in front, the limitless reach of the Greek sea—to the right, below, the craggy heights and Monte Acropoli of Taormina—and, beyond, the vast slope of snow-clad Etna....
I have just been reading (for the hundredth time) in Theocritus. How doubly lovely he is, read on the spot. That young shepherd fluting away to his goats at this moment might be Daphnis himself. Three books are never far from here: Theocritus, the Greek Anthology, and the Homeric Hymns. I loved them before: now they are in my blood.