Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

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The museum of Palermo is a small but very interesting collection of statues and other sculpture, gathered chiefly, they say, from the ancient temples of Sicily, with a few objects bestowed out of the superfluities of Pompeii. In the lower room are some good bas-reliefs, to which a story is attached. They were discovered fifteen years ago at Selinuntium by some young Englishmen, the reward of four months' labour. Our guide, who had been also theirs, had warned them not to stay after the month of June, when malaria begins. They did stay. All (four) took the fever; one died of it in Palermo, and the survivors were deprived by the government—that is, by the king—of the spoils for which they had suffered so much and worked so hard. No one is permitted to excavate without royal license; excavation is, like Domitian's fish, res fisci. Even Mr Fagan, who was consul at Palermo, having made some interesting underground discoveries, was deprived of them. We saw here a fine Esculapius, in countenance and expression exceedingly like the Ecce Homo of Leonardo da Vinci, with all that god-like compassion which the great painter had imparted without any sacrifice of dignity. He holds a poppy-head, which we do not recollect on his statue or gems, and the Epidaurian snake is at his side. Up-stairs we saw specimens of fruits from Pompeii, barley, beans, the carob pod, pine kernels, as well as bread, sponge, linen: and the sponge was obviously such, and so was the linen. A bronze Hercules treading on the back of a stag, which he has overtaken and subdued, is justly considered as one of the most perfect bronzes discovered at Pompeii. A head of our Saviour, by Corregio, is exquisite in conception, and such as none but a person long familiar with the physiognomy of suffering could have accomplished. These are exceptions rather than specimens. The pictures, in general, are poor in interest; and a long gallery of casts of the chef-d'oeuvres of antiquity possessed by the capitals of Italy, Germany, England, and France, looks oddly here, and shows the poverty of a country which had been to the predatory proconsuls of Rome an inexhaustible repertory of the highest treasures of art. A VERRES REDIVIVUS would now find little to carry off but toys made of amber, lava snuff-boxes, and WODEHOUSE'S MARSALA—one of which he certainly would not guess the age of, and the other of which he would not drink.

That the vegetation of Palermo excels that of Naples, partly depends on the superior intelligence of the agriculturist, and partly upon soil and climate: the fruits here are not only more advanced, but finer in quality. We left a very meagre dessert of cherries beginning to ripen at Naples; the very next day, a superabundance of very fine and mature ones were to be had on all the stalls of Palermo. This must be the result of industry and care in a great measure; for on leaving that city, after a séjour of three weeks, for Messina, Catania, and Syracuse, although summer was much further advanced, we relapsed into miserably meagre supplies of what we had eaten in perfection in the capital; yet Syracuse and Catania are much warmer than Palermo.

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"A beautiful place this Segeste must be! One could undergo any thing to see it!" Such would be the probable exclamation of more than one reader looking over some landscape annual, embellished with perhaps a view of the celebrated temple and its surrounding scenery; but find yourself at any of the inexpressibly horrid inns of Alcamo or Calatafrini, (and these are the two principal stations between Palermo and Segeste—one with its 12,000, the other with its 18,000 inhabitants;) let us walk you down the main street of either, and if you don't wish yourself at Cheltenham, or some other unclassical place which never had a Latin name, we are much mistaken! The "Relievo dei Cavalli" at Alcamo offers no relief for you! The Magpie may prate on her sign-post about clean beds, for magpies can be made to say any thing; but pray do not construe the "Canova Divina" Divine Canova! He never executed any thing for the Red Lion of Calatafrini, whose "Canova" is a low wine-shop, full of wrangling Sicilian boors. Or will you place yourself under the Eagle's wing, seduced by its nuovi mobili e buon servizio? Oh, we obtest those broken window-panes whether it be not cruel to expose new furniture to such perils! For us we put up at the "Temple of Segeste," attracted rather by its name than by any promise or decoy it offers. Crabbe has given to the inns at Aldborough each its character: here all are equal in immundicity, and all equally without provisions. Some yellow beans lie soaking to soften them. There is salt-cod from the north, moist and putrid. There is no milk; eggs are few. The ham at the Pizzicarolo's is always bad, and the garlicked sausage repulsive. Nothing is painted or white-washed, let alone dusted, swept, or scoured. The walls have the appearance of having been pawed over by new relays of dirty fingers daily for ten years. This is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places out of Sicily, and we really do not know its pathology. You tread loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile art, certainly not of Etruscan form, which is invariably placed on the bolster of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian locanda is plainly out of question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:—

Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds, cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the Aphides, Alticæ, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to their stalks. Gramina læta after Virgil's own heart, were these. Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place which demanded another sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without a veil the Temple of Segeste, with one or two glimpses of which we had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty! This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here reigns alone—the only building far or near visible in the whole horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste—its theatre; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing about it at present, and must leave it in a parenthesis. To our left, at the distance of eight miles, this hill country of harmonious and graceful undulation ends in beetling cliffs, beneath which the sea, now full in view, lies sparkling in the morning sunshine. We shall never, never forget the impressions made upon us on first getting sight of Segeste! Pæstum we had seen, and thought that it exhausted all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple. Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of prey—temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Pæstum to be probably the most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for which a reader could certainly not be prepared by description. We gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable survivor of 2000 years, and of many empires—we felt the vast masses of its time-tried Doric, and even the wild flowers within its precincts, its pink valerians; its erba di vento, its scented wallflower. The whole scene kept our admiration long tasked, but untired. A smart shower compelled us to seek shelter under the shoulder of one of the grey entablatures: it soon passed away, leaving us a legacy of the richest fragrance, while a number of wild birds of the hawk kind, called "chaoli" from their shrill note, issued from their hiding-places, and gave us wild music as they scudded by!

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