Very bold and impressive grows the island scenery under the gradually broadening daylight. Tier on tier above him rise the bare, brown hill-slopes, spurs of the great mountain pyramid which he is approaching. These tumbled masses of the mountains, deepening here where the night shadow still lingers into downright black, and reddening there where they “take the morning” to the color of rusty iron, proclaim their volcanic character, to all who are familiar with the signs thereof, unmistakably enough. Just such a ferruginous face does Nature turn towards you as you drop down at twilight past the Isleta of Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria, or work your way from the eastern to the western coast of Teneriffe, round the spreading skirts of the Peak. Rock scenery of another character is visible on the left, among the Calabrian mountains, dwarfed somewhat by the nearer as well as loftier heights of the island opposite, but bearing no mean part in the composition of the land- and sea-scape, nevertheless. Mile after mile the view maintains its rugged beauty, and when at last the town and harbor of Messina rise in sight, and the fort of Castellaccio begins to fill the eye, to the exclusion of the natural ramparts of the hills, the traveller will be fain to admit that few islands in the world are approached through scenery so romantic and so well attuned to its historic associations.
There are those who find Messina disappointing, and there is no doubt that to quit the waters of a rock-embosomed strait for the harbor of a large commercial seaport possessing no special claim to beauty of situation, is to experience a certain effect of disenchantment. It would not be fair, however, to hold the town, as a town, responsible for this. It is only some such jewel as Naples or as Algiers that could vie with such a setting. Messina is not an Algiers or a Naples; it is only an honest, ancient, prosperous, active, fairly clean, and architecturally unimpressive town. The chief commercial center of Sicily, with upwards of eighty thousand inhabitants, a Cathedral, an Archbishop, and a University, it can afford, its inhabitants perhaps believe, to dispense with æsthetic attractions. But its spacious quays, its fine and curiously shaped port, the Harbor of the Sickle as it was called by the ancients when after it they named the city “Zancle,” have an interest of their own if they are without much claim to the picturesque; and the view from the Faro Grande on the curve of the Sickle, with the Sicilian mountains behind, the Calabrian rocks in front, and the Straits to the right and left of the spectator, is not to be despised.
Still, Messina is not likely to detain any pleasure-tourist long, especially with Taormina, the gem of the island, and one might almost say, indeed, of all Italy, awaiting him at only the distance of a railway journey of some sixty to a hundred miles. The line from Messina to Giardini, the station for Taormina, and the spot whence Garibaldi crossed to Calabria in the autumn of 1860, skirts the sea-coast, burrowing under headlands and spanning dry river-beds for a distance of thirty miles, amid the scenery which has been already viewed from the Straits, but which loses now from its too close neighborhood to the eye. The rock-built town of ancient Taormina is perched upon a steep and craggy bluff some four hundred feet above the railway line, and is approached by an extremely circuitous road of about three miles in length. Short cuts there are for the youthful, the impetuous, and the sound in wind; but even these fortunate persons might do worse than save their breath and restrain their impatience to reach their destination, if only for the sake of the varying panorama which unfolds itself as they ascend from level to level on their winding way. There can be no denying that Taormina stands nobly and confronts the Straits with a simple dignity that many greater and even higher cities might well envy. To see it from a favoring angle of the battlemented road, with the southern sunlight bathing its bright white walls and broken lines of housetops, with the tower of Sant’ Agostino traced against the cone of Etna, and the wall that skirts it almost trembling on the utmost verge of the cliff, while at the foot of the declivity the Straits trend southward in “tender, curving lines of creamy spray,” to see this is at least to admit that some short cuts are not worth taking, and that the bridle-path up the hillside might well be left to those animals for whose use it was constructed, and who are generally believed to prefer an abridgment of their journey to any conceivable enhancement of its picturesque attractions.
At Taormina one may linger long. The pure, inspiriting air of its lofty plateau, and the unequaled beauty of the prospect which it commands, would alone be sufficient to stay the hurried footsteps of even the most time-pressed of “globe-trotters”; but those who combine a love of scenery with a taste for archæology and the classical antique will find it indeed a difficult place to leave. For, a little way above the town, and in the center of an exquisite landscape stand the magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater, its auditorium, it is true, almost leveled with the plain, but more perfect as to the remains of its stage and proscenium than any other in Sicily, and, with one exception, in the world. But there is no need to be a scholar or an antiquarian to feel the extraordinary fascination of the spot. Nowhere among all the relics of bygone civilizations have Time and Nature dealt more piously with the work of man. Every spring and summer that have passed over those mouldering columns and shattered arches have left behind them their tribute of clasping creeper and clambering wild flower and softly draping moss. Boulder and plinth in common, the masonry alike of Nature and of man, have mellowed into the same exquisite harmony of greys and greens; and the eye seeks in vain to distinguish between the handiwork of the Great Mother and those monuments of her long-dead children which she has clothed with an immortality of her own.
Apart, however, from the indescribable charm of its immediate surroundings, the plateau of the theater must fix itself in the memory of all who have entered Sicily by way of Messina as having afforded them their first “clear” view of Etna, their first opportunity, that is to say, of looking at the majestic mountain unintercepted at any point of its outline or mass by objects on a lower level. The whole panorama indeed from this point is magnificent. To the left, in the foreground, rise the heights of Castiglione from the valley of the Alcantara; while, as the eye moves round the prospect from left to right, it lights in succession on the hermitage of S. Maria della Rocca, the Castle of Taormina, the overhanding hill of Mola, and Monte Venere towering above it. But, dominating the whole landscape, and irresistibly recalling to itself the gaze which wanders for a moment to the nearer chain of mountains or the blue Calabrian hills across the Strait, arises the never-to-be-forgotten pyramid of Etna, a mountain unrivaled in its combination of majesty and grace, in the soft symmetry of its “line,” and the stern contrast between its lava-scarred sides, with their associations of throe and torture, and the eternal peace of its snow-crowned head. It will be seen at a closer view from Catania, and, best of all, on the journey from that place to Syracuse; but the first good sight of it from Taormina, at any rate when weather and season have been favorable, is pretty sure to become an abiding memory.
Twenty miles farther southwards along the coast lie the town and baths of Aci Reale, a pleasant resort in the “cure” season, but to others than invalids more interesting in its associations with Theocritus and Ovid, with “Homer the Handel of Epos, and Handel the Homer of song;” in a word, with Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, and the much-enduring Ulysses. Aci Castello, a couple of miles or so down the coast, is, to be precise, the exact spot which is associated with these very old-world histories, though Polyphemus’s sheep-run probably extended far along the coast in both directions, and the legend of the giant’s defeat and discomfiture by the hero of the Odyssey is preserved in the nomenclature of the rocky chain which juts out at this point from the Sicilian shore. The Scogli dei Ciclopi are a fine group of basaltic rocks, the biggest of them some two hundred feet in height and two thousand feet in circumference, no doubt “the stone far greater than the first” with which Polyphemus took his shot at the retreating Wanderer, and which “all but struck the end of the rudder.” It is a capital “half-brick” for a giant to “heave” at a stranger, whether the Cyclops did, in fact, heave it or not; and, together with its six companions, it stands out bravely and with fine sculpturesque effect against the horizon. A few miles farther on is Catania, the second city in population and importance of Sicily, but, except for one advantage which would give distinction to the least interesting of places, by no means the second in respect of beauty. As a town, indeed, it is commonplace. Its bay, though of ample proportions, has no particular grace of contour; and even the clustering masts in its busy harbor scarcely avail to break the monotony of that strip of houses on the flat seaboard, which, apart from its surroundings, is all that constitutes Catania. But with Etna brooding over it day and night, and the town lying outstretched and nestling between the two vast arms which the giant thrusts out towards the sea on each side, Catania could not look wholly prosaic and uninteresting even if she tried.
We must again return to the mountain, for Etna, it must be remembered, is a persistent feature, is the persistent feature of the landscape along nearly the whole eastern coast of Sicily from Punta di Faro to the Cape of Santa Croce, if not to the promontory of Syracuse. Its omnipresence becomes overawing as one hour of travel succeeds another and the great mountain is as near as ever. For miles upon miles by this southward course it haunts the traveller like a reproving conscience. Each successive stage on his journey gives him only a different and not apparently more distant view. Its height, ten thousand feet, although, of course, considerable, seems hardly sufficient to account for this perpetual and unabating prominence, which, however, is partly to be explained by the outward trend taken by the sea-coast after we pass Catania, and becoming more and more marked during the journey from that city to Syracuse. There could be no better plan of operations for one who wishes to view the great mountain thoroughly, continuously, protractedly, and at its best, than to await a favorable afternoon, and then to take the journey in question by railway, so timing it as to reach the tongue of Santa Croce about sunset. From Catania to Lentini the traveller has Etna, wherever visible, on his right; at Lentini the line of railway takes a sharp turn to the left, and, striking the coast at Agnone, hugs it all along the northern shore of the promontory, terminating with Cape Santa Croce, upon approaching which point it doubles back upon itself, to follow the “re-entering angle” of the cape, and then, once more turning to the left, runs nearly due southward along the coast to Syracuse. Throughout the twenty miles or so from Lentini to Augusta, beneath the promontory of Santa Croce, Etna lies on the traveller’s left, with the broad blue bay fringed for part of the way by a mile-wide margin of gleaming sand between him and it. Then the great volcanic cone, all its twenty miles from summit to sea-coast foreshortened into nothingness by distance, seems to be rising from the very sea; its long-cooled lava streams might almost be mingling with the very waters of the bay. As the rays of the westering sun strike from across the island upon silver-gray sand and blue-purple sea and russet-iron mountain slopes, one’s first impulse is to exclaim with Wordsworth, in vastly differing circumstances, that “earth hath not anything to show more fair.” But it has. For he who can prolong his view of the mountain until after the sun has actually sunk will find that even the sight he has just witnessed can be surpassed. He must wait for the moment when the silver has gone out of the sand, and the purple of the sea has changed to gray, and the russet of Etna’s lava slopes is deepening into black; for that is also the moment when the pink flush of the departed sunset catches its peak and closes the symphony of color with a chord more exquisitely sweet than all.
From Cape Santa Croce to Syracuse the route declines a little perhaps in interest. The great volcano which has filled the eye throughout the journey is now less favorably placed for the view, and sometimes, as when the railway skirts the Bay of Megara in a due southward direction, is altogether out of sight. Nor does the approach to Syracuse quite prepare one for the pathetic charm of this most interesting of the great, dead, half-deserted cities of the ancient world, or even for the singular beauty of its surroundings. You have to enter the inhabited quarter itself, and to take up your abode on that mere sherd and fragment of old Greek Syracuse, the Island of Ortygia, to which the present town is confined (or rather, you have to begin by doing this, and then to sally forth on a long walk of exploration round the contorni, to trace the line of the ancient fortifications, and to map out as best you may the four other quarters, each far larger than Ortygia, which, long since given over to orange-gardens and scattered villas and farmhouses, were once no doubt well-peopled districts of the ancient city), ere you begin either to discover its elements of material beauty or to feel anything of its spiritual magic. It is hard to believe that this decayed and apparently still decaying little island town was once the largest of the Hellenic cities, twenty miles, according to Strabo, in circumference, and even in the time of Cicero containing in one of its now deserted quarters “a very large Forum, most beautiful porticoes, a highly decorated Town Hall, a most spacious Senate House, and a superb Temple of Jupiter Olympius.” A spoiler more insatiable than Verres has, alas! carried off all these wonders of art and architecture, and of most of them not even a trace of the foundations remains. Of the magnificent Forum a single unfluted column appears to be the solitary relic. The porticoes, the Town Hall, the Senate House, the Temple of the Olympian Jove are irrecoverable even by the most active architectural imagination. But the west wall of the district which contained these treasures is still partially traceable, and in the adjoining quarter of the ancient city we find ourselves in its richest region both of the archæological and the picturesque.
For here is the famous Latomia del Paradiso, quarry, prison, guard-house, and burial-place of the Syracusan Greek, and the yet more famous Theater, inferior to that of Taormina in the completeness of the stage and proscenium, but containing the most perfectly preserved auditorium in the world. The entrance to the Latomia, that gigantic, ear-shaped orifice hewn out of the limestone cliff, and leading into a vast whispering-chamber, the acoustic properties of which have caused it to be identified with the (historic or legendary) Ear of Dionysius, has a strange, wild impressiveness of its own. But in beauty though not in grandeur it is excelled by another abandoned limestone quarry in the neighborhood, which has been converted by its owner into an orangery. This lies midway between the Latomia del Paradiso and the Quarry of the Cappuccini, and is in truth a lovely retreat. Over it broods the perfect stillness that never seems so deep as in those deserted places which have once been haunts of busy life. It is rich in the spiritual charm of natural beauty and the sensuous luxury of sub-tropical culture: close at hand the green and gold of orange trees, in the middle distance the solemn plumes of the cypresses, and farther still the dazzling white walls of the limestone which the blue sky bends down to meet.