“Oh, Peripatetica! how could a fairy, lovely and enchanting, ever have become associated with this!”
Peripatetica had a fine newborn theory on her tongue’s tip, but ere she could voice it, a nervous hen above them suddenly decided there was no room on that road for two to pass on foot, and took to her wings with wild squawk and a lunge straight at Peripatetica’s face in an attempt to pass overhead. Peripatetica ducked and safely dodged all the succeeding hens whom the first dame’s hysteria instantly infected to like behaviour. By the time she caught her breath again in safety at the street’s level, the theory was lost, but another more interesting one was born to her as they proceeded.
“‘Street of Apollo Archagates,’—Jane, do you see meaning in that? The Greeks always put their greatest temples on the heights—Athens, Girgenti, Eryx, wherever there were hills the Great Shrine was on the Acropolis. Taormina must have been the Acropolis of those Naxos people—they certainly never stayed on the unprotected shore below without mounting to these heights. I believe Apollo’s temple stood up here, not below. Here they built it, dominating the city, shining far out to sea, a mark for miles to all their ships and to the sailormen worshipping Apollo, Protector of Commerce.”
“No one has ever suggested that,” said Jane.
“What if they haven’t? It’s just as apt to be true, though even tradition has left no trace of it now but the name of this dirty little street. I for one am going to believe it, and that was why the statue survived until the time of the Romans.”
And so it was that every step they took stirred up wraiths of myth and history. Even on the Street in the midst of all its humming bustle, rotund German tourists and donkeys, all the modern life would suddenly melt away, and they would resurrect old St. Elio, attired only in chains and his drawers, kneeling in front of the Catania gate, exhorting the Byzantine soldiers to cleanse themselves from their sins before destruction came from the Saracens then raging like mad wolves outside the devoted town’s walls, in a fury that it alone—save Rometta—of all Christian Sicily should still hold out against them. Then the air would fill with the screaming and strugglings of those old fierce eagle fights, and the donkey boys’ cries of “A-ah-ee!” would change to the fierce triumphant shouts of “Allah Akbar!” with which Ibrahim’s cruel soldiery finally broke in to massacre garrison and townsfolk.
Although Taormina sat apart on her mountain eyrie with no epoch-making events finding room on her perch to happen, the stream of all Sicily’s history, from first Greek settlement to the revolts of modern days against King Bomba’s tyranny, have surged around and through her. An American living in Taormina did a kindness to her native cook, for which in grateful return the cook insisted on presenting her a quantity of old coins, which her husband had turned up through the years in their little garden. Showing them to the Curator of a Museum, “Madame,” he said to the fortunate recipient of the gift, “you have a complete epitome of all Sicilian history in these coins.”
All the different races and dynasties dominating Sicily from her beginning, all the great cities that rose into local power were represented in these treasure troves from the silt of the centuries, dug by a peasant from the soil of one little garden.
It was the Greek theatre which first revealed the Sicily of their dreams to Peripatetica and Jane; consoling for the vague disappointment of those first days of dust and rain by the glamour of its presentment of the loveliness of nature and the majesty of the past.
Greek that wonderful ruin still essentially is, for all its Roman remodelling and incrusting of brick. Only the Greeks could have so lovingly and instinctively combined with nature and seized so harmoniously all nature’s fairest to enhance their own creation. The place, the setting, the spirit of it is Greek; what matter if the actual material shape now is Roman, with the Greek form only glimmering through like a body of the old statuesque beauty cramped and hidden under distorting modern dress? Not that the theatre’s Roman clothing is ugly—the warm red brick, contrasting with the creamy marble fragments, has an undeniable charm, Greek and Roman together. It is an exquisite ruin of human conceivings, contrived to have blue sea and curving shore and Ætna’s snowy cone as the background of the open stage arches, and in the foyer, the arcaded walk back and behind the top tiers of the auditorium, all the differing panorama of beauty of the northern coast line.