more indistinct; but the sky is _all stars_, and the water, save
where we break its smoothness, a perfect mirror. Wherever the paddles
play, there the sea foams up into yellow light and _gerbes_ of
amber-coloured fireballs, caught up by the wheels, and flung off in
our track, to float past with incredible rapidity. Men are talking
the language of Babel in the cabin; there is amateur singing and a
guitar on deck - _Orion_ is on his dolphin - adieu, Palermo!


APPROACH TO MESSINA.

The Italian morning presents a beautiful sight on deck to eyes weary
and sore with night, as night passes on board steamers. We pass along
a coast obviously of singular conformation, and to a geologist, we
suppose, full of interest. We encounter a herd of classical dolphins
out a-pleasuring. We ask about a pretty little town perched just
above the sea, and called _Giocosa_. By its side lies
_Tyndaris_ - classical enough if we spell it right. The snow on Etna
is as good as an inscription, and to be read at any distance; but
what a deception! they tell us it is thirty miles off, and it seems
to rise immediately from behind a ridge of hills close to the shore.
The snow cone rises in the midst of other cones, which would appear
equally high but for the difference of colour. _Patti_ is a
picturesque little _borgo_, on the hillside, celebrated in Sicily for
its manufacture of hardware. In the bay of _Melazzo_ are taken by far
the largest supplies of thunny in the whole Mediterranean. From the
embayed town so named you have the choice of a cross-road to Messina,
(twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the
celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose
one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the
first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the
awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to
breakfast - the meal which is associated with that particular hour of
the four-and-twenty to all well regulated _minds_ and _stomachs_ - it
consists here of thin _veneers_ of old mahogany-coloured thunny,
varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of
capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a
disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also
fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt
not the old result - _de conviva Corybanta videbis_. (Oh, for muffins
and dry toast!) Never mind, we shall soon be at Messina. And now we
approach a point from which the lofty Calabrian coast opposite, and
the flinty wall of the formidable Scylla, first present themselves,
but still as distant objects. In another half hour we are just
opposite the redoubtable rock; and here we turn abruptly at right
angles to our hitherto course, and find ourselves _within_ the
straits, from either side of which the English and the French so
often tried the effect of cannon upon each other. It is now what it
used to be - fishing ground. The Romans got their finest muræna from
the whirlpools of _Charybdis_.[17] The shark (_cane di mare_)
abounding here, would make bathing dangerous were the water smooth;
but the rapid whirlpools through which our steam-boat dashes on
disdainfully, would, at the same time, make it impossible to any
thing but a fish. A passenger assured us he had once seen a man lost
in the Vistula, who, from being a great swimmer, trusted imprudently
to his strength, and was sucked down by a vortex of far less
impetuosity, he thought, than this through which we were moving. From
this point till we arrived at Messina, as every body was ripe for
bathing, the whole conversation turned naturally on the Messina
shark, and his trick of snapping at people's legs carelessly left by
the owners dangling over the boat's side. We steam up the straits to
our anchorage in about three-fourths of an hour. The approach is
fine, very fine. A certain Greek, (count, he called himself,) a great
traveller, and we afterwards found not a small adventurer, increases
the interest of the approach, by telling us that the hills before us,
bubbling up like blisters on chalcedony, have a considerable
resemblance, though inferior in character, to those which embellish
the Bosphorus and the first view of Constantinople. Inferior, no
doubt, in the imposing accessories of mosque and minaret, and of
cypresses as big as obelisks, which, rising thickly on the heights,
give to the city of Constantinople an altogether peculiar and
inimitable charm. Messina is beautifully land-locked. The only
possible winds that can affect its port are the north-west and
south-east. In summer it is said to enjoy more sea breeze than any
other place on the Mediterranean. Our Greek friend, however, says
that Constantinople is in this respect not only superior to Messina,
but to any other place in the seas of Europe. Pity that the fellows
are Turks! We did not find much to interest us within the walls of
Messina. There was, to be sure, a fine collection of Sicilian birds,
amongst which we were surprised to see several of very exotic shape
and plumage. One long-legged fellow, dressed in a dirty white
Austrian uniform, with large web-feet, on which he seemed to rest
with great complacency, particularly arrested our attention. He stood
as high as the _Venus di Medici_, but by no means so gracefully, and
thrust his thick carved beak unceremoniously in your face. His card
of address was _Phoenicopterus antiquorum_. The ancients ate him, and
he looked as if he would break your nose if you disputed with him. A
very large finch, which we have seen for sale about the streets here
and elsewhere in Sicily, rejoices in the imposing name of _Fringilla
cocco thraustis_. He wears his black cravat like a bird of
pretension, as he evidently is. The puffin (_Puffinus Anglorum_) also
frequents these rocks, though a very long way from the Isle of Wight.
No! Messina, though very fine, is not equal to _Palermo_, with its
unrivaled _Marina_, compared to which Messina is poorly off indeed,
in her straggling dirty commerce-doing quay. We went out to see a
little garden, which contains half a dozen zare-trees and as many
beautiful birds in cages. We are disappointed at the poverty of our
dessert in this region of fruitfulness - a few bad oranges, some
miserable cherries, and that abomination the green almond. We
observe, for the first time, to-day folks eating in the streets the
crude contents of a little oval pod, which contains one or two very
large peas, twice the size of any others. These are the true _cicer_,
the proper Italian pea. Little bundles of them are tied up for sale
at all the fruit stalls, and men are seen all the day long eating
these raw peas, and offering them to each other as sugar-plums.

[Footnote 17: "Virroni muræna datur, quo maxima venit Gurgite de
Siculo: nam dum se continet Auster, Contemnunt mediam tem eraria lina
Charybdim." JUVENAL, _Sat._ v. 99.]

In the Corso we see a kind of temporary theatre, the deal sides of
which are gaudily lined with Catania silk, and on its stage a whole
_dramatis personæ_ of sacred puppets. It is lighted by tapers of very
taper dimensions, and its _stalle_ are to be let for a humble
consideration to the faithful or the curious. It turns out to be a
religious spectacle, supported on the voluntary system - but there is
something for your money. A vast quantity of light framework, to
which fireworks, chiefly of the detonating kind, are attached, are
already going off, and folk are watching till it be completed. Then
the evening's entertainment will begin, and a miser indeed must he
be, or beyond measure resourceless, who refuses halfpence for such
choice festivities. Desirous to make out the particular
representation, we get over the fence in order to examine the figures
of the drama on a nearer view. A smartly dressed saint in a court
suit, but whom mitre and crosier determine to be a bishop, kneels to
a figure in spangles, a virgin as fond of fine clothes as the Greek
Panageia; while on the other side, with one or two priests in his
train, is seen a crowd in civil costume. A paper cloud above,
surrounded by glories of glass and tinsel, is supported by two solid
cherubs equal to the occasion, and presents to the intelligent a
representation of - we know not what! Fire-works here divide the
public with the drum - to one or other all advertisement in Sicily is
committed. A sale of fish and flesh, theatric entertainments,
processions, and church invitations, are all by tuck of drum, or by
squib and cracker. How did they get on before the invention of
gunpowder? If a new coffeehouse is established, a couple of drums
start it advantageously, and beat like a recruiting party up and down
the street, to the dismay of all _Forestieri_. The drum tells you
when the thunny is at a discount, and _fire-works_ are let off at
_fish stalls_ when customers are slack.

An old tower, five miles off, is called the telegraph. People go
there for the panorama at the expense of three horses and two hours;
but you are repaid by two sea views, either of which had been
sufficient. Messina, its harbour, the straits, the opposite coast of
Calabria, Scylla, and _Rhegium_, (famed for its bergamot,) are on the
immediate shore, and a most striking chain of hills for the
background, which, at a greater distance, have for their background
the imposing range of the _Abruzzi_. The Æolian islands rise out of
the sea in the happiest positions for effect. _Stromboli_ on the
extreme right detaches his grey wreath of smoke, which seems as if it
proceeded out of the water, (for Stromboli is very low,) staining for
a moment the clear firmament, which rivals it in depth of colour.
Some of the volcanic group are so nearly on a level with the water,
that they look like the backs of so many leviathans at a halt. The
sea itself lies, a waveless mirror, smooth, shining, slippery, and
treacherous as a serpent's back - "miseri quibus intentata _nites_,"
say we.


JOURNEY TO TAORMINA.

We left Messina under a sky which no painter would or could attempt;
indeed, it would not have looked well on paper, or out of reality.
There are certain unusual, yet magnificent appearances in nature,
from which the artist conventionally abstains, not so much from the
impotence of art, as that the nearer his approach to success the
worse the picture. At one time the colours were like shot or clouded
silk, or the beautiful uncertainty of the Palamida of these shores,
or the matrix of opal; at another, the Pacific Ocean above, of which
the continuity is often for whole months _entire_, was broken into
gigantic continents and a Polynesia of rose-coloured islands that no
ships might approach; while in this nether world the middle of the
Calabro-Sicilian strait was occupied by a condensation of vapour,
(one could never profane them by the term of _sea-mist_ or _fog_,)
the most subtile and attenuated which ever came from the realms of
cloud-compelling Jove. This fleecy tissue pursued its deliberate
progress from coast to coast, like a cortege of cobwebs carrying a
deputation from the power-looms of _Arachne_ in _Italy_ to the rival
silk-looms at Catania. We pass the dry beds of mountain torrents at
every half mile, ugly gashes on a smooth road; and requiring too much
caution to leave one's attention to be engaged by many objects
altogether new and beautiful. The rich yellow of the _Cactus_, and
the red of the _Pomegranate_, and the most tender of all vegetable
greens, that of the young _mulberry_, together with a sweet
wilderness of unfamiliar plants, are not to be perfectly enjoyed on a
fourfooted animal that stumbles, or on a road full of pitfalls. We
shall only say that the _Cynara cardunculus_, (a singularly fine
thistle or _wild artichoke_;) the prickly uncultivated _love-apple_,
(a beautiful variety of the _Solanum_,) of which the decoction is not
infrequently employed in nephritic complaints; the _Ferula_, sighing
for occupation all along the sea-shore, and shaking its scourge as
the wind blows; the _Rhododendron_, in full blossom, planted amongst
the shingles; the _Thapsia gargarica_, with its silver umbel, looking
at a short distance like mica, (an appearance caused by the shining
white fringe of the capsule encasing its seed,) and many other
strange and beautiful things, were the constant attendants of our
march. We counted six or seven varieties of the spurge,
(_Euphorbium_,) each on its milky stem, and in passing through the
villages had _Carnations_ as large as _Dahlias_ flung at us by
sunburnt urchins posted at their several doors. The sandy shore for
many miles is beautifully notched in upon by tiny bays like basins,
on which boats lie motionless and baking in the sun, or oscillate
under a picturesque rock, immersed up to its shoulders in a green
_hyaloid_, which reflects their forms from a depth of many fathoms.
On more open stretches of the shore, long-drawn ripples of waves of
tiny dimension are overrunning and treading on one another's heels
for miles a-head, and tapping the anchored boat "with gentle blow."
The long-horned oxen already spoken of, toil along the seaside road
like the horses on our canal banks, and tug the heavy felucca towards
Messina - a service, however, sometimes executed by men harnessed to
the towing-cord, who, as they go, offend the Sicilian muses by sounds
and by words that have little indeed of the [Greek: Dôriz aoida]. The
gable ends of cottages often exhibit a very primitive windmill for
sawing wood within doors. It is a large wheel, to the spokes of which
flappers are adjusted, made of coarse matting, and so placed as to
profit by the ordinary sea breeze; and, while the _wind_ is thus
_sawing_ his planks for him, the carpenter, at his door, carries on
his craft. We pass below not a few fortresses abutting over the sea,
or perched on the mountain tops. Many of these are of English
construction, and date from the occupation of the island during the
French war: in a word, the whole of this Sicilian road is so
variously lovely, that if we did not know the _cornice_ between
_Nice_ and _Genoa_, we should say it was quite unrivaled, being at
once in lavish possession of all the grand, and most of the milder
elements of landscape composition. It is long since it became no
wonder to us that the greatest and in fact the only, real pastoral
poet should have been a Sicilian; but it is a marvel indeed, that,
having forgotten to bring his _Eclogues_ with us, we cannot, through
the whole of Sicily, find a copy of Theocitus for sale, though there
is a _Sicilian_ translation of him to be had at Palermo. As he
progresses thus delightfully, a long-wished for moment awaits the
traveller approaching towards _Giardini_ - turning round a far
projecting neck of land, _Etna_ is at last before him! A
disappointment, however, on the whole is Etna himself, thus
introduced. He looks far below his stature, and seems so _near_, that
we would have wagered to get upon his shoulders and pull his ears,
and return to the little town to dine; the ascent also, to the eye,
seems any thing but steep; nor can you easily be brought to believe
that such an expedition is from Giardini a three days' affair,
except, indeed, that yonder belt of snow in the midst of this
roasting sunshine, has its own interpretation, and cannot be
mistaken. Alas! In the midst of all our flowers there was, as there
always is, the _amari aliquid_ - it was occasioned here by the
_flies_. They had tasked our _improved_ capacity for bearing
annoyances ever since we first set foot in Sicily; but _here_ they
are perfectly incontrollable, stinging and buzzing at us without
mercy or truce, not to be driven off for a second, nor persuaded to
drown themselves on any consideration. Verily, the honey-pots of
Hybla itself seem to please these troublesome insects less than the
_flesh_-pots of Egypt.

The next day begins inauspiciously for our ascent to Taormina; but
the attendants of the excursion are already making a great noise,
without which nothing can be done in either of the two Sicilies. A
supply of shabby donkeys are brought and mounted, and, once astride,
we begin to ascend, the poor beasts tottering under our weight, and
by their constant stumbling affording us little inclination to look
about. It takes about three-fourths of an hour of this donkey-riding
to reach the old notched wall of the town. Two Taorminian citizens at
this moment issue from under its arch, in their way down, and
guessing what we are, offer some indifferent coins which do not suit
us, but enable us to enter into conversation. We demand and obtain a
_cicerone_, of whom we are glad to get rid after three hours'
infliction of his stupidity and endurance of his ignorance, without
acquiring one idea, Greek, Roman, Norman, or Saracen, out of all his
erudition. After going through the whole tour with such a fellow for
a Hermes, we come at last upon the far-famed theatre, where we did
not want him. Here, however, a very intelligent attendant, supported
by the king of Naples on a suitable pension of five baiocchi a-day,
takes us out of the hands of the Philistine, and with a plan of the
ground to aid us, proceeds to give an intelligible, and, as appears
to us, a true explanation of the different parts of the huge
construction, in the area of which we stand delighted. He directed
our attention to a large arched tunnel, under and at right angles to
the pulpita, and we did not want direction to the thirty-six niches
placed at equal distances all round the ellipse, and just over the
lowest range of the CUNEI. All niches were, no doubt, for statues;
but these might also have been, it pleases some to suppose, for the
reverberation of applause; and they quote something about
_"Resonantia Vasa"_ from Macrobius, adding, that such niches were
once probably lined with brass. Of bolder speculatists, some believe
the _kennel_ to have been made with a similar intention. Others hold
that it may have been a concealed way for introducing lions and
tigers to the arena! Now, what if it were a _drain_ for the waters,
which, in bad weather, soon collect to a formidable height in such a
situation? Whether for voice, or wild beasts, or drainage, or none of
these objects, there it is. As to the first, we cannot help being
sceptical. Did it ever occur to an audience to wish the noise they
make _greater_, and contrive expedients for _making it so?_

We are here high up amidst the mountains, where, we are to remember,
as the ancients came not to spend, like ourselves, an idle hour, but
to consume most of the day, _shelter_ would be wanted. Two large
lateral spaces, or as it were, side chambers, have received this
destination at the hands of the antiquary, and have been supposed
lobbies for foul weather or for shade at noon. We were made to notice
by our guide, what we should else have overlooked, how the main
passage described above communicates with several smaller ones in its
progress, and that a small stair was a subsequent contrivance or
afterthought meant to relieve, on emergency, the overcharged large
one; its workmanship and style showed it plainly to have been added
when the edifice had already become _an antiquity_. This altogether
peculiar and most interesting building has also suffered still later
interpolations: a Saracenic frieze runs round the wall; so that the
hands of three widely different nations have been busy on the
mountain theatre, which received its _first audience_ twenty-five
centuries ago! The view obtained from this spot has often been
celebrated, and deserves to be. Such mountains we had often seen
before; such a sky is the usual privilege of Sicily; these indented
_bays_, which break so beautifully the line of the coast, had been an
object of our daily admiration; the hoary side of the majestic Etna,
and Naxos with its castellated isthmus, might be seen from _other_
elevated situations; and the acuminated tops of Mola, with its
Saracenic tower, were commanded by neighbouring sites - Taormina
_alone_, and for its _own_ sake, was the great and paramount object
in our eyes, and possessed us wholly! We had been following _Lyell_
half the day in antediluvian remains; but what are the bones of
_Ichthyosauri_ or _Megalotheria_ to this gigantic skeleton of Doric
antiquity, round which lie scattered the sepulchres of its ancient
audiences, Greek, Roman, and Oriental - tombs which had become already
an object of speculation, and been rifled for arms, vases, or gold
rings, before Great Britain had made the first steps beyond painted
barbarism!

The eruptions of Etna have all been recorded. Thucydides mentions one
of them episodically in the Peloponesian war. From the cooled caldron
that simmers under all that snow, has proceeded all the lava that the
ancients worked into these their city walls. The houses of
Taurominium were built of and upon _lava_, which it requires a
thousand years to disintegrate. After dinner we walk to Naxos,
saluting the statue of the patron of a London parish, _St Pancras_,
on our way. He stands on the beach here, and claims, by inscription
on his pedestal, to have belonged to the apostolic times, St Peter
himself having, he says, appointed him to his bishopric. He is patron
of Taormina, where he has possessed himself of a Greek temple; and he
also protects the faithful of Giardini. Lucky in his _architects_ has
been St Pancras; for many of our readers are familiar with his very
elegant modern church in the New Road, modelled, if we have not
forgotten, on the Erechtheum, with its _Pandrosean Vestries_, its
upright tiles, and all the subordinate details of Athenian
architecture. We _met_ here the subject of many an ancient _bas
relief_ done into flesh and blood - a dozen men and boys tripping
along the road to the music of a bagpipe, one old _Silenus_ leading
the jocund throng, and the whole of them, as the music, such as it
was, inspired, leaping about and gesticulating with incredible
activity. It was a bacchanalian subject, which we had seen on many a
sarcophagus, only that the fellows here were not _quite_ naked, and
that we looked in vain for those nascent horns and tails by which the
children of Pan and Faunus ought to be identified. We always look out
for _natural history_. Walking in a narrow street, we saw a tortoise,
awake for the season, come crawling out to peep at the poultry; his
hybernation being over, he wants to be social, and the hens in
astonishment chuckle round him, and his tortoiseshell highness seems
pleased at their kind enquiries, and keeps bobbing his head in and
out of his _testudo_ in a very sentimental manner. Women who want his
shell for _combs_ do not frequent these parts, and so, unless a cart
pass over him as he returns home, he is in clover.

A bird frequents these parts with a blue chest, called _Passer
solitarius;_ he abounds in the rocky crevices. The notes of one,
which was shown to us in a cage, sounded sweetly; but, as he was
carnivorous, the weather was too hot for us to think of taking him
away. We saw two snakes put into the same box: the one, a viper,
presently killed the other, and much the larger of the two. Serpents,
then, like men, do _not_, as the _Satirist_ asserts, spare their
kind. We are disappointed at not finding any coins, nor any other
good _souvenirs_, to bring away with us. The height of Taormina is
sufficient to keep it from fever, which is very prevalent at Giardini
below. Its bay was once a great place for catching _mullet_ for the
Roman market. It seems to have been the _Torbay_ of Sicily. Some fish
love their ease, and rejoice not in turbulent waters. The _muræna_,
or lamprey, on the contrary, was sought in the very whirlpools of
_Charybdis_. The modern Roman, on his own side of Italy, has few
turbot, but very good ones are still taken off Ancona, in the
Adriatic, where the _spatium admirabile Rhombi_, as the reader will,
or ought to recollect, was taken and sent to Domitian at Albano by
_Procaccio_ or _Estafetta_. Juvenal complains that the Tyrrhene sea
was exhausted by the demand for fish, though there was no _Lent_ in
those times. If the Catholic clergy insist that there _was_, we beg
to object, that the keepers thereof were probably not in a condition
to compete with the _Apiciuses_ of the day, who bought fish for their
_bodies'_, and not for their SOULS' SAKE.


CATANIA.

Tum Catane nimium ardenti vicina Typhæo.

After a pleasant drive of twenty miles, we find ourselves at
_Aci-Reale_, where a street, called "Galatea," reminds us
unexpectedly of a very classical place called Dean's Yard, where we
once had doings with _Acis_, as he figures in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.