Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844 - Various - Страница 5

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.

The vegetables here are of immense growth. The fennel root (and there is no better test of your whereabouts in Italy) is nearly twice as large as at Naples, and weighs, accordingly, nearly double. The cauliflowers are quite colossal; and they have a blue cabbage so big that your arms will scarcely embrace it. We question, however, whether this hypertrophy of fruit or vegetables improves their flavour; give us English vegetables—ay, and English fruit. Though Smyrna's fig is eaten throughout Europe, and Roman brocoli be without a rival; though the cherry and the Japan medlar flourish only at Palermo, and the cactus of Catania can be eaten nowhere else; what country town in England is not better off on the whole, if quality alone be considered? But we have one terrible drawback; for whom are these fruits of the earth produced? Our prices are enormous, and our supply scanty; could we forget this, and the artichoke, the asparagus, the peas and beans of London and Paris, are rarely elsewhere so fine. To our palates the gooseberry and the black currant are a sufficient indemnity to Britain for the grape, merely regarded as a fruit to eat. Pine-apples, those "illustrious foreigners," are so successfully petted at home, that they will scarcely condescend now to flourish out of England. Nectarines refuse to ripen, and apricots to have any taste elsewhere. Our pears and apples are better, and of more various excellence, than any in the world. And we really prefer our very figs, grown on a fine prebendal wall in the close of Winchester, or under Pococke's window in a canon's garden at chilly Oxford. Thus has the kitchen-garden refreshed our patriotism, and made us half ashamed of our long forgetfulness of home. But there are good things abroad too for poor men; the rich may live any where. An enormous salad, crisp, cold, white, and of delicious flavour, for a halfpenny; olive oil, for fourpence a pound, to dress it with; and wine for fourpence a gallon to make it disagree with you;12 fuel for almost nothing, and bread for little, are not small advantages to frugal housekeepers; but, when dispensed by a despotic government, where one must read those revolting words motu proprio at the head of every edict, let us go back to our carrots and potatoes, our Peels and our income-tax, our fogs and our frost. The country mouse came to a right conclusion, and did not like the fragments of the feast with the cat in the cupboard—

Fish, though plentiful and various, is not fine in any part of the Mediterranean; and as to thunny, one surfeit would put it out of the bill of fare for life. On the whole, though at Palermo and Naples the pauper starves not in the streets, the gourmand would be sadly at a loss in his requisition of delicacies and variety. Inferior bread, at a penny a pound, is here considered palatable by the sprinkling over of the crust with a small rich seed (jugulena) which has a flavour like the almond; it is also strewn, like our caraway seeds in biscuits, into the paste, and is largely cultivated for that single use. The capsici, somewhat similar in flavour to the pea, are detached from the radicles of a plant with a flower strikingly like the potatoe, and is used for a similar purpose to the jugulena.

This island was the granary of Athens before it nourished Rome; and wheat appears to have been first raised in Europe on the plains of eastern Sicily. In Cicero's time it returned eightfold; and to this day one grain yields its eightfold of increase; which, however, is by a small fraction less than our own, as given by M'Culloch in his "Dictionary of Commerce." We plucked some siligo, or bearded wheat, near Palermo, the beard of which was eight inches long, the ear contained sixty grains, eight being also in this instance the average increase; how many grains, then, must perish in the ground!

In Palermo, English gunpowder is sold by British sailors at the high price of from five to seven shillings per English pound; the "Polvere nostrale" of the Sicilians only fetches 1s. 8d.; yet such is the superiority of English gunpowder, that every one who has a passion for popping at sparrows, and other Italian sports, (complimented by the title of La caccia,) prefers the dear article. When they have killed off all the robins, and there is not a twitter in the whole country, they go to the river side and shoot gudgeons.

The Palermo donkey is the most obliging animal that ever wore long ears, and will carry you cheerfully four or five miles an hour without whip or other encouragement. The oxen, no longer white or cream-coloured, as in Tuscany, were originally importations from Barbary, (to which country the Sicilians are likewise indebted for the mulberry and silk-worm.) Their colour is brown. They rival the Umbrian breed in the herculean symmetry of their form, and in the possession of horns of more than Umbrian dimensions, rising more perpendicularly over the forehead than in that ancient race. The lizards here are such beautiful creatures, that it is worth while to bring one away, and, to pervert a quotation, "UNIUS Dominum sese fecisse LACERTAE." Some are all green, some mottled like a mosaic floor, others green and black on the upper side, and orange-coloured or red underneath. Of snakes, there is a Coluber niger from four to five feet in length, with a shining coat, and an eye not pleasant to watch even through glass; yet the peasants here put them into their Phrygian bonnets, and handle them with as much sang-froid as one would a walking-stick.

The coarse earthen vessels, pitchers, urns, &c., used by the peasants, are of the most beautiful shapes, often that of the ancient amphora; and at every cottage door by the road-side you meet with this vestige of the ancient arts of the country.

The plague which visited Palermo in 1624 swept away 20,000 inhabitants; Messina, in 1743, lost 40,000. The cholera, in 1837, destroyed 69,253 persons. The present population of the whole island is 1,950,000; the female exceeds the male by about three per cent, which is contrary to the general rule. It is said that nearly one-half the children received into the foundling hospital of Palermo die within the first year.

Formerly the barons of Sicily were rich and independent, like our English gentlemen; but they say that, since 1812, the king's whole pleasure and business, as before our Magna Charta times, have been to lower their importance. In that year a revolt was the consequence of an income-tax even of two per cent, for they were yet unbroken to the yoke; but now that he has saddled property with a deduction, said to be eventually equal to fifteen per cent, if not more; now that he doubles the impost on the native sulphur, which is therefore checked in its sale; now that he keeps an army of 80,000 men to play at soldiers with; now that he constitutes himself the only referee even in questions of commercial expediency, and a fortiori in all other cases, which he settles arbitrarily, or does not settle at all; now that he sees so little the signs of the times, that he will not let a professor go to a science-congress at Florence or Bologna without an express permission, and so ignorant as to have refused that permission for fear of a political bias; now that he diverts a nation's wealth from works of charity or usefulness, to keep a set of foreigners in his pay—they no doubt here remember in their prayers, with becoming gratitude, "the holy alliance," or, as we would call it, the mutual insurance company of the kings of Europe, of which Castlereagh and Metternich were the honorary secretaries.

In the midst of all the gloomy despotism, beautiful even as imagination can paint it, is Palermo beautiful! One eminent advantage it possesses over Naples itself—its vicinity presents more "drives;" and all the drives here might contest the name given to one of them, which is called "Giro delle Grazie," (the Ring or Mall of the Graces.) It has a Marina of unrivaled beauty, to which the noblesse and the citizens repair and form a promenade of elegant equipages. A fine pavement for foot passengers is considerately raised three or four feet above the carriage road; so that the walking population have nothing to annoy them. The sea is immediately below both, and you see the little rock-encircled bays animated with groups of those sturdy fishermen with bare legs; which you admire in Claude and Salvator, throwing before them, with admirable precision, their épervier net, whose fine wrought meshes sometimes hang, veil-like, between you and the ruddy sunset, or plashing, as they fall nightly into the smooth sea, contribute the pleasure of an agreeable sound to the magic of the scenery. Some take the air on donkeys, which go at a great rate; some are mounted on Spanish mules, all mixed together freely amidst handsome and numerous equipages; and the whole is backed by a fine row of houses opposite the sea, built after the fashion of our terraces and crescents at watering-places. And finally, that blue æquor, as it now deserves to be termed, studded over with thunny boats and coasting craft with the haze latine sail, that we should be sorry to trust in British hands, is walled in by cliffs so bold, so rugged, and standing out so beautifully in relief, that for a moment we cannot choose but envy the citizen of Panormus. But we may not tarry even here; we have more things to see, and every day is getting hotter than the last.