Читать книгу Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate - Nathaniel Parker Willis - Страница 10

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Island of Sicily—Palermo—Saracenic appearance of the town—Cathedral—The Marina—Viceroy Leopold—Monastery of the Capuchins—Celebrated Catacombs—Fanciful Gardens.

Frigate United States, June 25.—The mountain coast of Sicily lay piled up before us at the distance of ten or twelve miles, when I came on deck this morning. The quarter-master handed me the glass, and running my eye along the shore, I observed three or four low plains, extending between projecting spurs of the hills, studded thickly with country-houses, and bright with groves which I knew, by the deep glancing green, to be the orange. In a corner of the longest of these intervals, a sprinkling of white, looking in the distance like a bed of pearly shells on the edge of the sea, was pointed out as Palermo. With a steady glass its turrets and gardens became apparent, and its mole, bristling above the wall with masts; and, running in with a free wind, the character of our ship was soon recognised from the shore, and the flags of every vessel in the harbour ran up to the mast, the customary courtesy to a man-of-war entering port.

As the ship came to her anchorage, the view of the city was very captivating. The bend of the shore embraced our position, and the eastern half of the curve was a succession of gardens and palaces. A broad street extended along in front, crowded with people gazing at the frigates, and up one of the long avenues of the public gardens, we could distinguish the veiled women walking in groups, children playing, priests, soldiers, and all the motley frequenters of such places in this idle clime, enjoying the refreshing sea-breeze, upon whose wings we had come. I was impatient to get ashore, but between the health-officer and some other hindrances, it was evening before we set foot upon the pier.

With Captain Nicholson and the purser I walked up to the Toledo, as the still half-asleep tradesmen were opening their shops after the siesta. The oddity of the Palermitan style of building struck me forcibly. Of the two long streets, crossing each other at right angles and extending to the four gates of the city, the lower story of every house is a shop, of course. The second and third stories are ornamented with tricksy-looking iron balconies, in which the women sit at work universally, while from above projects, far over the street, a grated enclosure, like a long birdcage, from which look down girls and children (or, if it is a convent, the nuns), as if it were an airy prison to keep the household from the contact of the world. The whole air of Palermo is different from that of the towns upon the continent. The peculiarities are said to be Saracenic, and inscriptions in Arabic are still found upon the ancient buildings. The town is poetically called the concha d’oro, or “the golden shell.”

We walked on to the cathedral, followed by a troop of literally naked beggars, baked black in the sun, and more emaciated and diseased than any I have yet seen abroad. Their cries and gestures were painfully energetic. In the course of five minutes we had seen two or three hundred. They lay along the sidewalks, and upon the steps of the houses and churches, men, women, and children, nearly or quite naked, and as unnoticed by the inhabitants as the stones of the street.

Ten or twenty indolent-looking priests sat in the shade of the porch of the cathedral. The columns of the vestibule were curiously wrought, the capitals exceedingly rich with fretted leaf-work, and the ornaments of the front of the same wild-looking character as the buildings of the town. A hunchback scarce three feet high, came up and offered his services as a cicerone, and we entered the church. The antiquity of the interior was injured by the new white paint, covering every part except the more valuable decorations, but with its four splendid sarcophagi standing like separate buildings in the aisles, and covering the ashes of Ruggiero and his kinsmen; the eighty columns of Egyptian granite in the nave; the ciborio of entire lapis-lazuli with its lovely blue, and the mosaics, frescoes, and relievos about the altar, it could scarce fail of producing an effect of great richness. The floor was occupied by here and there a kneeling beggar, praying in his rags, and undisturbed even by the tempting neighbourhood of strangers. I stood long by an old man, who seemed hardly to have the strength to hold himself upon his knees. His eyes were fixed upon a lovely picture of the virgin, and his trembling hands loosed bead after bead as his prayer proceeded. I slipped a small piece of silver between his palm and the cross of his rosary, and without removing his eyes from the face of the holy mother, he implored an audible blessing upon me in a tone of the most earnest feeling. I have scarce been so moved within my recollection.

The equipages were beginning to roll toward the “Marina,” and the sea-breeze was felt even through the streets. We took a carriage and followed to the corso, where we counted near two hundred gay, well-appointed equipages, in the course of an hour, What a contrast to the wretchedness we had left behind! Driving up and down this half mile in front of the palaces on the sea, seemed quite a sufficient amusement for the indolent nobility of Palermo. They were named to us by their imposing titles as they passed, and we looked in vain into their dull unanimated faces for the chivalrous character of the once renowned knights of Sicily. Ladies and gentlemen sat alike silent, leaning back in their carriages in the elegant attitudes studied to such effect on this side of the water, and gazing for acquaintances among those passing on the opposite line.

Toward the dusk of the evening, an avant-courrier on horseback announced the approach of the viceroy Leopold, the brother of the King of Naples. He drove himself in an English hunting-wagon with two seats, and looked like a dandy whip of the first water from Regent Street. He is about twenty and quite handsome. His horses, fine English bays, flew up and down the short corso, passing and repassing every other minute, till we were weary of touching our hats and stopping till he had gone by. He noticed the uniform of our officers, and raised his hat with particular politeness to them.

As it grew dark, the carriages came to a stand around a small open gallery raised in the broadest part of the Marina. Rows of lamps, suspended from the roof, were lit, and a band of forty or fifty musicians appeared in the area, and played parts of the popular operas. We were told they performed every night from nine till twelve. Chairs were set around for the people on foot, ices circulated, and some ten or twelve thousand people enjoyed the music in a delicious moonlight, keeping perfect silence from the first note to the last. These heavenly nights of Italy are thus begun, and at twelve the people separate and go to visit, or lounge at home till morning, when the windows are closed, the cool night air shut in, and they sleep till evening comes again, literally “keeping the hours the stars do.” It is very certain that it is the only way to enjoy life in this enervating climate. The sun is the worst enemy to health, and life and spirits sink under its intensity. The English, who are the only people abroad in an Italian noon, are constant victims to it.

We drove this morning to the monastery of the Capuchins. Three or four of the brothers in long grey beards, and the heavy brown sackcloth cowls of the order tied round the waist with ropes, received us cordially, and took us through the cells and chapels. We had come to see the famous catacombs of the convent. A door was opened on the side of the main cloister, and we descended a long flight of stairs into the centre of three lofty vaults, lighted each by a window at the extremity of the ceiling. A more frightful scene never appalled the eye. The walls were lined with shallow niches, from which hung, leaning forward as if to fall upon the gazer, the dried bodies of monks in the full dress of their order. Their hands were crossed upon their breasts or hung at their sides, their faces were blackened and withered, and every one seemed to have preserved, in diabolical caricature, the very expression of life. The hair lay reddened and dry on the dusty skull, the teeth, perfect or imperfect, had grown brown in their open mouths, the nose had shrunk, the cheeks fallen in and cracked, and they looked more like living men cursed with some horrid plague, than the inanimate corpses they were. The name of each was pinned upon his cowl, with his age and the time of his death. Below in three or four tiers, lay long boxes painted fantastically, and containing, the monk told us, the remains of Sicilian nobles. Upon a long shelf above sat perhaps a hundred children of from one year to five, in little chairs worn with their use while in life, dressed in the gayest manner, with fanciful caps upon their little blackened heads, dolls in their hands, and in one or two instances, a stuffed dog or parrot lying in their laps. A more horribly ludicrous collection of little withered faces, shrunk into expression so entirely inconsistent with the gaiety of their dresses, could scarce be conceived. One of them had his arm tied up, holding a child’s whip in the act of striking, while the poor thing’s head had rotted and dropped upon its breast; and a leather cap fallen on one side, showed his bare skull, with the most comical expression of carelessness. We quite shocked the old monk with our laughter, but the scene was irresistible.

We went through several long galleries filled in the same manner, with the dead monks standing over the coffins of nobles, and children on the shelf above. There were three thousand bodies and upward in the place, monks and all. Some of them were very ancient. There was one, dated a century and a half back, whose tongue still hangs from his mouth. The friar took hold of it, and moved it up and down, rattling it against his teeth. It was like a piece of dried fish-skin, and as sharp and thin as a nail.

At the extremity of the last passage was a new vault appropriated to women. There were nine already lying on white pillows in the different recesses, who had died within the year, and among them a young girl, the daughter of a noble family of Palermo, stated in the inscription to have been a virgin of seventeen years. The monk said her twin-sister was the most beautiful woman of the city at this moment. She was laid upon her back, on a small shelf faced with a wire grating, dressed in white, with a large bouquet of artificial flowers on the centre of the body. Her hands and face were exposed, and the skin, which seemed to me scarcely dry, was covered with small black ants. I struck with my stick against the shelf, and startled by the concussion, the disgusting vermin poured from the mouth and nostrils in hundreds. How difficult it is to believe that the beauty we worship must come to this!

As we went toward the staircase, the friar showed us the deeper niches, in which the bodies were placed for the first six months. There were fortunately no fresh bodies in them at the time of our visit. The stench, for a week or two, he told us, was intolerable. They are suffered to get quite dry here, and then are disposed of according to their sex or profession. A rope passed round the middle, fastens the dead monk to his shallow niche, and there he stands till his bones rot from each other, sometimes for a century or more.

We hurried up the gloomy stairs, and giving the monk our gratuity, were passing out of the cloister to our carriage, when two of the brothers entered, bearing a sedan chair with the blinds closed. Our friend called us back, and opened the door. An old grey-headed woman sat bolt upright within, with a rope around her body and another around her neck, supporting her by two rings in the back of the sedan. She had died that morning, and was brought to be dried in the capuchin catacombs. The effect of the newly deceased body in a handsome silk dress and plaited cap was horrible.

We drove from the monastery to the gardens of a Sicilian prince, near by. I was agreeably disappointed to find the grounds laid out in the English taste, winding into secluded walks shaded with unclipped trees, and opening into glades of greensward cooled by fountains. We strolled on from one sweet spot to another, coming constantly upon little Grecian temples, ruins, broken aqueducts, aviaries, bowers furnished with curious seats and tables, bridges over streams, and labyrinths of shrubbery, ending in hermitages built curiously of cane. So far, the garden, though lovely, was like many others. On our return, the person who accompanied us began to surprise us with singular contrivances, fortunately selecting the coachman who had driven us as the subject of his experiments. In the middle of a long green alley he requested him to step forward a few paces, and, in an instant, streams of water poured upon him from the bushes around in every direction. There were seats in the arbours, the least pressure of which sent up a stream beneath the unwary visitor; steps to an ascent, which you no sooner touched than you were showered from an invisible source; and one small hermitage, which sent a jet d’eau into the face of a person lifting the latch. Nearly in the centre of the garden stood a pretty building, with an ascending staircase. At the first step, a friar in white, represented to the life in wax, opened the door, and fixed his eyes on the comer. At the next step, the door was violently shut. At the third, it was half opened again, and as the foot pressed the platform above, both doors flew wide open, and the old friar made room for the visitor to enter. Life itself could not have been more natural. The garden was full of similar tricks. We were hurried away by an engagement before we had seen them all, and stopping for a moment to look at a magnificent Egyptian Ibis, walking around in an aviary like a temple, we drove into town to dinner.