Оглавление
Arthur Stanley Riggs. Vistas in Sicily
Vistas in Sicily
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Vistas in Sicily. I. DISCOVERY
II. PALERMO
III. A NIGHT OF DISSIPATION
IV. CATHEDRALS
V. PALACES AND PEOPLE
VI. THE PLAIN OF PANORMOS
VII. AROUND THE ISLAND
VIII. THE ROAD TO SYRACUSE
IX. THE HARBOR AND THE ANAPO
X. SYRACUSE, THE PENTAPOLIS
XI. CATANIA AND MOUNT ÆTNA
XII. TAORMINA
XIII. SOME MOUNTAIN VISTAS
XIV. LIGHTS AND SHADES
XV. THE CITY THAT WAS
XVI. THE NORTHERN SHORE
XVII. THE WESTERN SHORE
XVIII. ADDIO, SICILIA!
THE BEST BOOKS ON SICILY
INDEX
Отрывок из книги
Arthur Stanley Riggs
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Ripe and green fruit and blossoms are to be seen at the same time on the orange and lemon trees, and by April the scraggy old olive trees bend beneath the weight of their dull green fruit, just beginning to blush with purple. The air is full of the scent of myriad flowers, and the railway tracks, sometimes for miles, run between hedges of geraniums—six to eight feet high—whose pungent fragrance fills the flying trains. The summer climate is as mild and salubrious as that of the winter, for even in July and August the average is not more than seventy-seven or seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit; about the same as in our own Atlantic States. Occasionally, during one of the African siroccos that sometimes sweep across the island, the mercury rises to an hundred or so; but the sirocco is a rare occurrence, fully as apt to occur in mid-winter as in summer.
In a climate of this sort the jaded city-dweller, searching for health and rest, finds an ideal environment, and while the hotels are not the equals of the fashionable New York and London hostelries, they are comfortable and moderate in price; and many of them have splendid gardens attached, where one may have tea, or rest and wander at will among the scented bowers. One boasts a considerable aviary, and another, perched at the very edge of a precipitous crag, serves refreshments upon a stone promenade with the blue African Mediterranean right below, and the peaks of the Dark Continent faintly suggesting themselves through the mists of the horizon. Many of the best-known of these hostelries are located at historic spots, where history and imagination can conjure up the past vividly—aided, perhaps, by a too generous dinner. More than one traveler has fought the siege of Taormina all over again in his post-prandial dreams, and gone tumbling down the nine-hundred-foot slopes with the Greek tyrant, to wake up on the stony floor of his own bedroom!
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