EMILY LOWE
Unprotected Females in Sicily
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CHAPTER X.
CATANIA.
A TOWN'S "SIESTA" - LIVING FURIES - LOOKS AND DRESS OF THE CATANESE -
OU[R LETTERS OF INTRODUCT]ION - "DUENNA" - THE BARON AND THE TRADESMAN
- MORNING VISITORS - CURIOSITIES OF THE PLACE - THE MONASTERY - THE
MUSEUMS - THE RUINS - THE CATHEDRAL - BRUTAL SUPERSTITION.
It was "siesta" time between one and four o'clock, and but a few dark
"Manto's" glided through the lava streets. The inhabitants were hushed
in repose; awnings were drawn tight down over the bazaars and shops,
their entrances secured by barricaded doors; a Pompeian silence
reigned around. Through it rumbled the vehicle with noise like an
earthquake. A sleepy porter bore our bags to the Hotel AEtna, where,
after climbing three flights of crumbling stairs, any doubt as to the
present existence of the Furies was completely set at rest by the
appearance of the three hostesses, who, roused from their slumbers,
met us with streaming, grisly hair. They conducted us to an apartment
worse than any we had had inland, for which they asked double what
they decided to take, and quickly making up a bed with their awful
long nails, left us to future torments.
After a sound nap, which I recommend every one to take who has
travelled through the night, instead of setting off to explore a new
place without rest, which gives a dreadfully fagged feeling the
following day, we brushed up, and set out with our letters of
introduction. The remark of the first awakening lazzaroni we passed,
told that the English ladies' hats and feathers were uncommon in
Catania. He lazily asked, "Siete una ballerina, Signora?" ("Are you a
dancer, Signora?")
The streets have a decidedly handsome effect, particularly that with
the sea at one end and Mount AEtna at the other, and which seemed to
lead straight to the mountain, whose namesake it is. Two open squares
give a variety to the angular form of the principal thoroughfares; the
houses are festooned with balconies; towers and domes rise up in
abundance; but, on the slightest investigation, ruin peers through
everything. Lava does not retain plaster well, and the inhabitants
cover it with coats of blue, pink, and green, which, partially falling
off, leave hideous gaps, through which the original material seems by
comparison of a grimmer black. Here and there a smiling orange-garden
peeps through a grating or over a frittering wall, and looks so
eastern one cannot but be pleased. Crowds of carriages appear the
moment the siesta is over. They nearly all bear coronets, the majority
being, like those of the English barons, four large balls on red
velvet, and belonging to baronial families of rather a good order of
nobility (if there were not too many of them), which formed the
hereditary members of the Upper Chamber when the Parliament existed,
in which position they ranked above the princes, marquises, &c.
The ladies and gentlemen seated inside the carriages had, in the shape
of their attire, imitated the French as much as possible, merely
adding a variety of colour, in the same love of brilliancy which makes
them paint their houses; they drove in lines up and down, making Corso
in the streets, as there is no public drive outside the town: every
now and then, a young man, splendidly got up, with moustaches and
cigar in mouth, evidently a leader of Catanian ton, would dash down
the centre, driving his beautiful English horses. The ancient dress or
graceful Manto, a long black silk cloak thrown over the head, and
caught bewitchingly under one arm, is entirely now left to the wives
of the lower orders.
We had two letters, one to a nobleman's family, the other to a silk
merchant, who possessed a large manufactory, the principal "industry"
of the place; but, though celebrated, I must warn lady readers who are
within reach of any other against buying Sicilian silk; particularly
that twilled kind which, when of French make, never wears out, while
the Catanian, if sprinkled by a slight shower of rain, puckers all
over; the plain quality is thin, and has no gloss; it is sold in
quantity at Naples at a very cheap rate to the natives.
We thought we would take the letter to the Baron first, as we heard he
was a liberal-minded man, had been in England, of which his family
spoke the language, and had learned there some notions of the way in
which a gentleman ought to live; for the reader must know that abroad,
it is only the tiptop nobility, with immense fortunes, who approach in
the least to the style of the simple English gentry; when in more
northern Italy I have seen them puffing in all the pomp of their
titles, and thinking they were conferring an honour in mixing with
plain English commoners, I have inwardly laughed at how much more an
English girl thought of the attention of a real English gentleman, so
superior in finish and mind. The Baron's family had just returned in
an overpoweringly smart carriage of blue and silver; a handsome, and
tolerably clean marble staircase led up to the first story of the
palace where they resided; a livery servant showed us through a large
painted anteroom into a drawing-room, which was really fit to enter --
spacious and neatly furnished; it opened into another apartment, where
a table was laid for dinner so as one could rather fancy sitting down
to it: clean napkins and glasses being placed for each person. The
gentleman's daughters came very pleasantly forward, and spoke English
very well, one having just passed her honeymoon in London; the mother
was merely visible in the distance in a wrapper, evidently bustling
about the dinner; the son was a dandy, and not very willing to enter
into details as to how mules, guides, &c. could be got for AEtna; so we
inwardly decided to go to the silk merchant for the "practicals." The
young ladies presented us with sweet little mandarine oranges, the
first of the season, and exquisitely luscious; an inferior kind are
known ad Maltese oranges in England.
This family, and another we afterwards heard of, were the only two who
attempted to receive foreigners in Catania; the others all live in the
desperate Italian manner, and, as some possess fortunes of eight or
ten thousand per annum, with a tenth of which carriage, horses,
opera-box, and all reasonable pleasures can be procured, having no
occupation for the mind, they take to gambling with the remainder, as
at Palermo.
The merchant, despite his manufactory, kept a shop, the distinction
between wholesale and retail being very confused in Sicily. Mounting
to his apartment on the first floor, we found the door barricaded, as
if the entrance of a fortress; and there being no bell, our knuckles
were sorely tried in making an impression on its thick outside. The
sole result was a screaming inside, like a hag in a passion, and a
fearful bang of a distant door. We stood in despair on the stairs,
till a being likely to help us should come past; at length a man who
knew something of the inmates, by making a peculiar noise, got one of
them to the door; and after a long parley through the creaks as to
what we were, which he found difficult to explain, being completely
mystified himself, the iron hinges groaned backwards, and we were let
in by an elderly female acting Duenna to the merchant's pretty young
wife, who in her zeal kept her mistress barricaded up during the
husband's absence, and not knowing our voices, thought it more prudent
to leave us outside.
While the letter was sent to him, we were shown into a pretty
apartment with the first wooden floor we had seen for three months,
and whose fresh, white draperies and elegant pieces of furniture, just
put in order for the bride, showed how much in advance for luxuries
were the trading to the noble class, whose gaunt palaces require
uncomfortable old furniture in keeping with their size. The
te^te-a`-te^te with the two females was fortunately short, as their
screaming Sicilian twang was both fatiguing and incomprehensible; the
old duenna, whom we thought intolerably forward, taking all the words
out of her young mistress's mouth, and extra shrieking them herself;
her officiousness also was exactly what we afterwards saw ridiculed on
the Italian stage: in fact, with uneducated, that is, most Sicilians,
the servants, particularly the females, regularly take part in the
conversation, and on the slightest pretext, such as holding a shawl,
draw in a chair for the remainder of the visit. They ought to be very
much attached to their masters and mistresses, as they are certainly
"treated as one of the family."
The merchant soon appeared, a lively, intelligent man, and entered
with a sort of amused, doubting interest, into our AEtna plans;
promising to see after a carriage and guides, and so strongly
recommending a change for the night from Hotel AEtna to the "Corona,"
that we went to look at that house. An immense crowd of people, all
afflicted with ophthalmia, was on the stairs, and being received in
turn by a celebrated eye-doctor in the dining room. We preferred the
company of the Furies, who were only three in number; and finding
dinner had been prepared by them, requested the youngest and
best-looking, sister-in-law to the others, might wait upon us,
fancying she had a milder nature; till next morning, happening by mere
chance in the dark passage, to open the door of a room where she was
sitting receiving the adoration of a "Cavaliere," she sprung forward
in such a manner as to prove most satisfactorily that she also was
endowed with the full Fury nature.
Not having seen anything like a regular dinner since leaving Palermo,
the various little dishes of dressed pigeon, salad, sweets, &c. seemed
very nice; and as the Baron's son had heard that we had been to the
merchant's house, with quick Sicilian jealousy he immediately came to
call, and sat in attendance while we ate, assuring us he would see all
about carriages and conveyances; then wrote a letter of introduction
to a fine old naturalist, who resided on AEtna, and with whom my
readers must become better acquainted. In the meantime arrived the
merchant, with two Caputti; and the noble took his departure, though
longing to ask questions and compare notes with him about us.
Next morning, before rising, the following subjects came for our
inspection preparatory to ascending the mountain :-- amber of an ugly,
greasy yellow, cut into hearts, crosses, and other useful things; a
dozen pair of hairy stockings, which would have excoriated the legs of
an elephant; three puppy bull-dogs with newly-clipped ears; begging
friars, to whom we told the story of the Caltanisetta priest, and who,
notwithstanding, hung about till we left, obliging us to lock our
room-door every time we went in and out; a tray of antiquities of
broken delf; four guides to subterraneous ruins; and finally our
coachman, to say "last night's arrangement was off." This latter
circumstance was not an irreparable misfortune, as of course our
gentleman acquaintance had arrived a little after Aurora, accompanied
by yesterday's fellow-traveller besides; sending them in search of
another conveyance was a capital manner of getting them out of the way
till breakfast-time, when they returned as spectators for that meal;
and to occupy them a little further, we begged they would help to
manage the Furies. We had become completely inured to feeding before
an audience, and thought ourselves supremely fortunate in finding a
sort of saloon without beds, though I cannot call it a private room,
as a row of doors opened into it on each side, and large folding ones
from the passage; round which, though on the third story and in a
comparatively civilised town, a circle of miscellanies were collected
peeping.
As it is not necessary to start early for Nicolosi, the village twelve
miles up on AEtna, the traveller has time to visit the town, the
greatest charm of which will be to many, that it was Bellini's
birthplace, whose lovely "consumptive" melodies express all the
sensibility of a refined Sicilian mind. He died at the age of
twenty-nine, and must, as a child, have often sat listening to the
strains of the grand organ at the Benedictine monastery. The traveller
should go there before ten o'clock, when the monks, who are all
gentlemen of good family, are collecting for matins, and civilly
mentioning to one of them that he is a stranger, some of the finer
stops of the instrument, not generally used, will be pulled out, and
as it is one of the finest in the world, musician or not, he will be
gratified. Gentlemen are allowed to visit the interior of the
monastery, said to be a most comfortable place; ladies not; we were
obliged to be content with a distant peep at the garden, where the
monks proudly point out a dark stream of lava in the rock above, which
at the great eruption was on the point of overwhelming their vines and
orange groves; when, with a consideration extraordinary in a boiling
body, the lava, unwilling to annoy such capital fellows, divided and
made a circling wall around them. They are a branch of the Palermo
Benedictines, equally wealthy and good-tempered, as the reader shall
judge from one with whom we afterwards became acquainted; they are the
trustees of innumerable rich charities, which they do not always
dispense to the satisfaction of the would-be recipients: consequently
at the revolution were great sufferers, being dragged from under their
beds, where they had sheltered, and massacred by numbers.
But they, ere they died, had also taken advantage of the confusion to
effect a piece of rapine. A letter had been addressed to their
community by the Abbate Trimeno of Naples, who came to see them in the
year 1400, and which commenced in this fashion :-- "Ye Benedictines
now think of nought but dining, playing, courting: what would St.
Benedict say were he to descend and pay you a pastoral visit some
morning?" and so on. This exhortation had been read every day at
dinner to them for four centuries and a half, without in the least
altering the state of things, till they thought it high time to get
rid of such a waste of words, and, in the revolution struggle, threw
it into the fire.
The Catanese think a great deal of their antiquities; but, as they are
all subterranean, to those who can see Syracuse, Taormina, or
Girgenti, whose trophies are above ground, a visit to their own wine
cellar will be quite as satisfactory. We followed a woman with a
smoking torch through pools of water, round and about some mouldering
walls, of whose signification, had we not been to the former town, we
should not have had the most distant idea; but which go by the name of
the Grecian theatre; while a similar damp collection is called the
Roman amphitheatre. The Museo Biscari, founded by the Prince of that
name (who also built the aqueduct, was a benevolent, enlightened man,
and made every effort to become a public benefactor), is a scrappy
collection of small antiquities found in the island: the torso of Jove
is considered a fine specimen, certainly very ugly; the cicerone could
not give the least information about anything under his care, but
begged very perseveringly for more money, though well paid; showing he
had already dealt with the English. There is another museum, called
Gioeni, which, as we did not see, we fancied must be superior.
While waiting for the entrance of the first-named building to be
opened, we witnessed a scene which I really must beg my reader's
pardon for describing, and only do so to illustrate the manners of the
people, and the awful ignorance and superstition in which they are
buried, while troops of priests parade in the streets, and no
Protestant is allowed to give instruction. The shrieks of a cock in
the street near the opposite house forced us to look round -- to see
it plucked and opened while living! -- As soon as our faintness would
allow us to express horror, we were answered, "it was a work of
necessity, a child in that house being ill of a fever, which the spell
of this ceremony alone could cure!" The same "ceremony" is universal
all over the island.
Beneath the Cathedral, a showy edifice, there are cavities called
ancient baths, once adorned with frescoes, of which one fancies the
remains are visible: the marks of chariot wheels in the lava, as at
Pompeii, are really there. A curious old picture hangs in the
sacristy, showing the last destruction of Catania by AEtna in 1669,
which was preceded by total darkness. The flowing lava is
systematically running down in blood-red streams from a crater now
called Monte Rosso, close to Nicolosi, on the side of the volcano.
Arrived before Catania's walls, it had to rise more than sixty feet
high before it could pass over them, which at length it did; and in
the foreground, a group of monks with relics and the veil of the
patron saint of the town, hasten to embark in a galley waiting for
them. That veil and its wearer St. Agatha, were out of favour for a
long time after allowing their worshippers to be so cruelly
overwhelmed; now the Catanese have made it up with their patrons
again; for between eruptions and earthquakes, they have great need of
some one to take care of them, and Providence's is the last aid they
would think of invoking. Once the lava ran in a beautiful curve far
into the sea, forming a complete harbour; in a succeeding convulsion,
that disappeared, and a lava promontory may now be seen on the
opposite side, forming a good foreground to a sketch of AEtna. Nothing
will induce the inhabitants to change the position of their town, so
we may conclude a love of convulsions and eruptions is natural to
them; as soon as they take the very same destroying blocks to rebuild
with, and which, unlike those of Vesuvius, are of a hard, durable
nature.
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This digital version prepared by Martin Guy ,
october 2001.
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