BY ITALIAN SEAS ERNEST C.PEIXOTTO WfetUi^ (ZUo*4.*t-. fuUJT 4UZL* /f*r Ragusa from a Suburb of Ploce BY ITALIAN SEAS BY ERNEST C. PEIXOTTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR B^T'lf'^'i NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MCMVI Copyright 1906, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published, October, 1908. THE DE VINNE PRESS TO MY WIFE CONTENTS THE ITALIAN RIVIERA— i. The Riviera di Ponente 3 ii. Genoa IS hi. The Riviera di Levante 28 A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO 45 DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST— I. FlTJME to Metkovich 65 ii. mostar 95 iii. Ragusa and Cattaro 106 CATTARO TO NAPLES— A TRANSITION ... 121 GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS 131 SICILY— i. Easter Tide 155 ii. Caretti and Marionetti 177 IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA 193 IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL 213 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Ragusa from the Suburb of Ploce Frontispiece PACH A Villa with its Gay Approach 5 The Wayside Shrine 9 A Quaint Arcaded Market-square facing 10 A Ligurian Fisherman facing 12 Court of the Palazzo dell' Universita, Genoa . facing 14 A Lantern 19 Fountain in the Palazzo Podesta, 21 Chimney-piece of the Sala di Rarita Romane, Palazzo Doria facing 22 Garden of the Palazzo Doria 25 The Church Door, Nervi 29 Cypresses by the Sea SO Garlic and Onions facing 30 Rapallo 32 A Group of Lacemakers 34 A Hill-side Chapel 36 A Religious Procession 40 San Fruttuoso 43 Painted Sails Glowing with Suns and Crosses .... 49 A Campiello near San Rocco, Venice 51 The Arsenal Gate 52 A Chioggia Canal 54 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE In Less Frequented Canals 56 A Madonna on a Palace Wall 59 The Broad Lagoons 61 Arbe — an Island Town 69 The Porta Terra Firma, Zara 74 Portico of Diocletian's Palace, Spalato . . . facing 78 The Old Quay and South Wall of Diocletian's Palace, Spalato 79 Entrance to the Mausoleum, Spalato .... facing 80 The Ulica Zvonika, Spalato 81 Cathedral Portal, Trau 89 Peasants at Makarska 91 A Corner of the Market 97 The Saric Mosque, Mostar 99 Each shop contains a squatting Turk or two .... 101 Mostar from the Narenta facing 104 In the Val d'Ombla 108 Mincetta Tower, Ragusa facing 108 The Market-place, Ragusa 109 The Stradone and Guard-house, Ragusa Ill Vestibule of the Rector's Palace, Ragusa . . . facing 112 Piazza Massari, Bari 125 Pace the fields in lordly avenues 129 A Peddler 135 Donna Gracia Filling the Lamps facing 136 What a bustle in the great thoroughfare ! . . . facing 138 Here is a Christmas street indeed! .... facing 140 A Donkey Cart 141 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Two sampognari played their pipes 147 There he saw a wondrous scene facing 148 A Goatherd 151 The Cloisters at Monreale 156 Pulpit, Capella Palatina, Palermo 159 Taormina facing 160 Fountain of the Minotaur, Taormina 161 Procession on Holy Thursday facing 162 The Badia Vecchia 164 Perched on the steep hill-sides 169 The Easter Dance facing 174 A Sicilian Cart 179 Water-carrier 181 Pulchinella facing 186 A Marionette Knight 189 A Sicilian Marionette-show facing 190 Valetta, Malta facing 196 A Maltese Fishing-smack 198 Lady Wearing the Faldetta 201 Bedouins 217 Mosque of Sidi-ben-Ziad, Tunis facing 220 Before the Great Mosque, Tunis facing 222 No noise accompanies the slippered feet 224 Little shops but six feet square facing 226 A Woman of Quality 229 PREFACE This book has been called "By Italian Seas," though to-day several of the countries pictured therein are politically not part of Italy. But they are bound to Italy by the strongest bonds. Dalmatia, though Austrian, was for so long a time under the domina tion of Venice that its art, its civilization, and even its language are essentially Italian. Malta, though English, was a cosmopolitan island, like Sicily, be longing first to one power, then to another, and to none so much as to the Knights of Malta, whose most powerful auberge was that of Italy and Provence. Tunis was Europeanized by Italians, with whom the French protectorate is still a standing grievance and a source of national resentment. The papers contained in this book have been treated from the standpoint of a love of nature, PREFACE being but a record of the charm that he found in seeking spots and sensations away from the beaten tourist track. He desires to express his keen in debtedness to his wife for the stimulus of her con stant companionship, and for her happy collabora tion in the making of this book, four of whose papers — "A Summer in a Sandolo," "Mostar," "Giuseppe's Christmas," and "In the Bey's Capital" — originally appeared in the magazines under her signature. XIV THE ITALIAN RIVIERA THE ITALIAN RIVIERA THE RIVIERA DI PONENTE THOUGH appreciated for some years by English and German travelers, to Amer icans the Italian Riviera is still almost an undiscovered country. By the Italian Riviera I do not mean San Remo and Bordighera, for they, of course, are known and more or less frequented, but I mean the rest of the coast down to Spezia, which usually remains a blank to us as we speed along on the night express from Nice to Florence or Rome. Even if the journey is taken by daylight we gain but a scant idea of its beauty, for in the finest parts the railroad is but a tiresome succession of tunnels — villages suddenly appearing like phantoms in the night; hurried glimpses of houses clustered round a pointed belfry, or ranged along a dazzling pebbly beach; shady hill-slopes and precipices plunging in to the sea — only to be swallowed up in the darkness [3] BY ITALIAN SEAS of a second tunnel. The little retreats along this lovely coast must be sought out, for again from the car window all the towns look quite alike, turning their unprepossessing backs toward the railroad track, and hiding their picturesque features for those who would know them better. Yet it is a country quite as charming as the other and better known Riviera, endowed by nature with all the gifts that make the little stretch of territory between Cannes and Mentone the rendezvous of the leisure classes of Europe, and bring special trains de luxe from London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. There is the same beautiful Medi terranean — deep blue, crested with whitecaps or opalescent in the evening glow; there are the same bold headlands, grown with pines and cedars, the same rill-run valleys, with even quainter villages hidden within their depths; there are the same de lightful walks under olive-trees and along the craggy cliffs. The winter and spring climate is even milder than that of Nice, for the Apennines shut off the cold north winds, and leave the little towns at their bases basking in a flood of almost summer sunshine. There [4] A Villa with its Gay Approach BY ITALIAN SEAS is a little more rain than on the Cote-d'Azur, but, to make amends for it, no mistral and no dust. For those of us to whom the word Riviera is a syn onym for luxurious hotels, swell gowns, and well- appointed carriages — what the French call "high life"— the Italian coast will have a lesser charm. But this absence of luxury and elegance is but an added attraction to those who are fond of the "quiet life." Nature is more untrammelled, less encroached upon at every step by pretentious villas and huge cosmo politan hotels. From Mentone but a short trip takes us to Bor dighera, lying only two or three miles beyond the frontier, and it is well worth the nuisance of passing the custom-house at Ventimiglia to enjoy the view from the walls of the old town. The most beautiful portion of the French Riviera is spread out before us in a panorama of surpassing loveliness. Below, in the richly detailed foreground, lies the new town of Bordighera — a brilliant array of hotels and palm- gardens, telling bright against the deep-blue sea— a blue so dense that it puts the sky itself to shame; then the wide curve of the shore as it sweeps past Ventimiglia to where Mentone lies white on the edge [6] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA of the water at the foot of lofty mountains. Farther off Monte Carlo and Monaco blaze like jewels in the sunlight ; in the extreme distance the Cap d Antibes cuts a last dim line against the horizon where sea and sky merge in a pearly haze. High above it all tower the snow peaks of the Maritime Alps, clean cut in the clear transparence of the Mediter ranean air. The gardens of Bordighera are beautiful. Palm- trees flourish in the greatest profusion, but do not equal those of San Remo in individual beauty, and this for a peculiar reason. It seems that when the obelisk was being erected in front of St. Peter's at Rome, the Pope ordered that no one should speak during the ceremony, under penalty of death. In the impressive silence the creaking of the hoisting- tackle was distinctly audible, and it was seen that the tremendous weight was about to break the hawsers. Amid general dismay, one Bresca, a sea- captain, disobeying all orders, cried out, "Pour water on the ropes!" and a catastrophe was averted. In stead of being punished for his disobedience, he ob tained as a reward that Bordighera, his native town, should supply the palm leaves at Easter to St. [7] BY ITALIAN SEAS Peter's. So for this reason, and to this day, the trees are bound up in sacking and twine that the leaves may blanch and grow straight and long. San Remo is the best known of the resorts on the Italian Riviera. Its new town consists of a group of palatial hotels and villas set in superb gardens; a gay business street with most attractive shops ; and a promenade by the sea, unhappily marred by the proximity of the railroad. The old town, perched high upon a hill, is quite the crookedest old town that one would wish to see — its streets a bewildering labyrinth, twisting, turning, and doubling on themselves, and often so steep as to be laid out in steps. Dark little shops are poked into every corner. White screens over the doors, tipped to .catch the light, somewhat lessen the- gloom within, where carpenters, green-grocers, bakers, and tailors ply their trades. The door lintels are often of carved slate, fashioned into the queerest shapes of birds and beasts, or the emblazoned arms of former occupants. And high up on the hill-top, where a blade of grass never peeps from between the close-laid paving-stones, the "moo" of a cow comes strangely from behind a closed door. Grape-vines [8] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA of extraordinary vigor emerge from cracks between the cobbles, and, clinging for support to the roughly built walls, climb four or five stories without a leaf, finally to blossom forth over a graceful pergola on the roof. For here on the roof-tops are the only at tempts at garden ing that are to be ^, ;:.'--. i:- seen, and here on sultry summer evenings the peo ple come to inhale a breath of fresh air and enjoy a peep at their few potted geraniums and carnations, mingled with chicken coops and dovecotes. From San, Remo down to Genoa the pic turesque coast y Can only be ap- The Wayside Shrine [9] BY ITALIAN SEAS preciated from the highway — an ideal road either for motoring or driving. From Albenga to Savona the gayly colored villages succeed each other in rapid succession, each with its note of individual charm — a graceful campanile, a quaint arcaded market- square, a group of stately cypresses clustered near a high church door, a villa with its gay approach of stairs and statued niches, a campo santo whose ter raced granite crosses and white guardian angels turn their pale faces seaward! And when the cliff s recede into more open plains, charming vistas meet the eye — valleys shut in by hill sides thickly wooded with pungent pines and olive- trees; abrupt little knolls crowned by ancient fort resses, where fascinating villages straggle up under the protection of some moated castle or of a watch- tower built to guard against the Saracens; high arched bridges spanning rushing torrents, foaming over broad, stony beds, with, far in the distance, glimpses of the snowy crests of the lofty Apennines. On this part of the coast there are but few places adapted for a long stay. A number of the pretty towns are frequented by the Italians in summer for the sea-bathing, but these spots are too exposed for [ 10 ] A Quaint Arcaded Market-square THE ITALIAN RIVIERA the real Riviera season. Alassio and Pegli are the only two practicable for foreigners, the former being much favored by the English, who have built many villas thereabouts, and in winter throng the Grand Hotel. The beach, soft as a velvet carpet, nearly two miles in length, is one of the finest in Italy, even rivalling the famous sands at Viareggio and the Lido. [11] II GENOA MEDITERRANEAN ports have a fascina tion all their own. The blue sky, and the water bluer still, with its wonderful purity and depth; the gay colors of the smaller craft; the stevedores in their bright sashes; the quaint old- fashioned rigs of the fishing boats, and the varied colors of the merchandise upon the docks, constitute a foreground of unusual attractiveness, quite differ ent in key from the murky grays and denser atmo spheric effects of more northern seaport towns. Then, too, nowhere else in European waters has the shipping so varied a setting. Notre Dame de la Garde, perched upon its hill-top, with its great spire pointing like a ringer heavenward, looks down on the docks of Marseilles; a truly medieval pic turesqueness backs the wharves at Cette ; Naples has Vesuvius; Palermo the Conca d'Oro; Catania snow capped Etna; Syracuse its classic background, while the ports of the south coast teem with Arab Hfe and color, and the ships carry, as it were, a whiff of these varied scenes from port to port, depositing the [12] A Ligurian Fisherman THE ITALIAN RIVIERA aroma of the Orient with the figs of Smyrna and the dates from Tunis, and returning to the Arab the shoes and shirts of the Occident so alien to the re mainder of his garb. No one who has looked out for the first time on Genoa's congested port will ever forget this primary impression — this mingling of Orient and Occident along her busy wharves. Nor will he forget the noble curve of her broad quays with their closely- huddled mass of shipping. How the multi-colored steamer-funnels shine midst masts and spars ! How the switch-engines shriek as they back and puff and push their long escorts of cars up and down the docks, unloading here a pile of barrels, there a load of boxes or a mountain of bales! How animated the stevedores and sailormen, who, did one not know his Italy, would seem in a perpetual quarrel, so vehement is their manner, so wild their gesticula tions! To me, Genoa is always a city to linger m, to a superlative degree filled with life and color. Viewed from a boat in the harbor, it piles up so nobly in its broad amphitheatre; house upon house, palace upon palace, garden upon garden; churches, [13] BY ITALIAN SEAS spires and monuments ascending in such a magni ficent ensemble that the eye is quite delighted with the dazzling effect of it all, then glances higher still to behold the snowy summits of the Apennines, one above another, peeping over each other's shoulders as it were, ranged round like giants, like gods eter nally young who throw down glances of pity at the puny work of human hands. Nor does the fascination cease when one plunges into the narrow streets. Walk, for instance, under the arcade that skirts the quay. What a smell of tar and pitch and the salt breath of the sea! Ship- chandlers put forth rusty iron rings, belaying-pins and capstan bars, spars, blocks and tackle and links of great mooring-chains to block up the passage ways. Seamen's berretti and dread-nought coats, thick, checkered leggings and crimson sashes flap in the draughty doorways. The shops breathe damp and mold like the depths of an ill-ventilated ship overflowing with sea-biscuit and ship's stores. The people, too, are of the sea-dog type: wrinkled, long-nosed, square- jawed, with bushy brows and salient blue chins, like very old pirates on the stage, their sinister expression even further accentuated by [14] Court of the Palazzo dell' Universita, Genoa THE ITALIAN RIVIERA the quaint sort of Phrygian cap that they wear, blood- red in color and tilted at the most rakish angle or jammed down to the eyes. Italians of other provinces have always distrusted the Genovesi, and charged them with falsehood and superstition. The Ligurian, they say, has ever been known as a buccaneer and freebooter. Was not good Christopher Columbus, born in the dingy house under the shadow of this very same arcade, the nephew of a pirate? Yet if you would see a sympathetic picture, go some evening at twilight to the tiny square down by the waterfront, where a mariner's Virgin, crowned with a silver diadem, looks down from a niche of cockle-shells, and there, by the light of a green ship's lantern, watch the httle knots of sailors gather to take leave of wife and children and to say a prayer before they embark for the three-months' coral fish ing off the coast of Sardinia or on the far-away African main. . . . As you leave the water-side to thread the alleys that they call streets, dark and musty in winter, but in summer a cool retreat from the sun's hot rays, what strange dingy shops you see and what curious wares exposed for sale! Here are stored all the [15] BY ITALIAN SEAS oddities of the Genoese kitchen: bottled pine-nuts for flavoring stews and sweets, dead birds (and for shame be it said, song-birds at that) to be cooked in the polenta; tagliatelli, capellini, fine as hairs, ravioli, filled with forced meat and lasagne ruffled like flounces. Here, too, are comforts for the house wife; the sacks of pine cones for lighting fires, wooden tomboli and bobbins for the lacemakers and great shawls of gaily printed chintz to be worn on holidays. Nowhere else, except perhaps in Naples, have I seen such arrays of washing as in these side- streets. Not that the Genoese are over-cleanly. But the congested life of these tall dwelling-houses, com bined with the total absence of back-yards, owing to the city's limited site, make the air fairly vibrant with flapping fines of many-colored garments. What a transformation to emerge from the gloom of these characteristic lanes into, for instance, the brilliancy of the Piazza Fontane Morose ! How the sun sparkles on the broad lava paving-stones, on the cabs with their anxious drivers lined in a row, on the lemonade venders under their parasols and on the gaily colored front of the Palazzo Pallavicini! What a vista as the eye glances up the Via Garibaldi, [16] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA once Via Nuova, and its double row of palaces ! In voluntarily one exclaims with Madame de Stael: "It must have been built for a Congress of Kings !" In it, narrow as it is, and in its prolongation, the Via Nuovissima, lived practically all the great Genoese nobility: the Fieschi, Grimaldi, Balbi, Brignole- Sale and their multiple connections. In it were hatched the countless plots and counter plots between Doge and anti-Doge, Guelph and Ghibelline. And when the nobles were finally tired of striving to cut each other's throats, they strove to outdo each other in the magnitude and magnificence of their palaces and to outshine each other in the luxury of their living, one of them, a Spinola, suc ceeding to such an extent that the Genoese dialect still retains the word spinolare, a princely host, a dis penser of costly wines. Essentially a commercial people, the Genoese, who strove for gain in temporal rather than intel lectual things, had never taken an active part in the renaissance of art in Italy and they can claim the credit of no artist of real distinction. When their great prosperity came and their art sense first found expression, it showed the faults to be expected. [17] BY ITALIAN SEAS The wealthy nobles selected the most showy artists of the time to execute their commissions, calling Pierino del Vaga from Rome to decorate the Pa lazzo Doria, Montorsoli to execute the stucchi in San Matteo and Bianco to border their court-yards with his stately colonnades. But it was Galeazzo Alessi, fresh from the in fluence of Michael Angelo, who left the strongest impress upon the appearance of the city and in fif teen years gave it the character that it retains to day. What Bramante did for Rome, Palladio for Vicenza, Sanmicheli for Verona, Sansovino for Venice, Alessi did for Genoa. The fourteen palaces of the Via Nuova are mostly by him. Each palace stands alone, separated from its neighbor by a narrow street and though, in their undisguised pomp and love of ornament, they are open to the criticism that applies to most edifices of their period, they display such wealth of imagination and so stately and majestic a frontage as to atone for all defects. Those on the south side, the Gambaro, Cataldi, Serra and Rosso are perched high over the lower part of the city and command superb views of the [18] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA A Lantern Gulf. Making the most of their opportunity, the architects have placed the main apartments on the upper floors (regardless of countless stairs), where series of magnificent drawing-rooms open upon broad ter races and orangeries, hanging gar dens, as it were, perched between sea and sky. The palaces of the north side, on the contrary, back against still higher hill-slopes. The ground floors are immense open atria, surrounded by superb colonnades and enriched with stuccoes, statues and painted decoration. The blank cliff -side at the back has been made a special feature of these courts and decorated with every artifice of the Renaissance: fountains, niches, grot toes, or grotesque caryatides, quaint fooleries that give endless pleasure as one glimpses them through the spacious street portals. In sumptuous galleries on upper floors still hang rich tapestries and masterpieces of all the later Italian schools. There are the suave grays of Del Sarto, the rich browns of Ribera, the crimsons of II [19] BY ITALIAN SEAS Veronese; there are ceilings painted by the once famous local artists, Carlone, Parodi, Cambiaso, De- ferrari and above all there are quantities of family portraits by Van Dyck who seems to have been specially petted by the Genoese nobility. Commis sions must have flowed in too fast, however, for too many of these portraits show a hurried hand and a desire to please a not too critical patron, much as the modern French portrait-painter executes his commissions in New York to-day. Many of these noble homes are still occupied by the old families; others have passed into the hands of the municipality and have become cold and offi cial, used as museums wherein to show Paganini's violin and fac-similes of Columbus's letters, while others still are occupied by leading banks, great steamship companies and big corporations. In these latter, it seems strange indeed to catch glimpses of files of clerks and secretaries seated in the rooms where once the Durazzi, the Cataldi and the Balbi danced with ladies magnificent in brocaded bodices, in Venetian lace or gowns of green shot with gold, as Van Dyck portrays them in the galleries up above. [20] Fountain in the Palazzo Podesta BY ITALIAN SEAS While on the subject of pictures, it would seem of interest to note another feature of these Genoese palaces— a feature quite peculiar to themselves: their external color decoration. To be sure, colored house- fronts are not uncommon in Italy, but nowhere else, that I know of, do they attain the development and allure of these Genoese facades. So fashionable did they become in the seventeenth century that an im portant group of artists took up this work as a specialty. Luca Cambiaso — an artist of the Caracci order, fond of violent foreshortenings and wind swept draperies — was soon recognized as the leader of this school. In his time he must have enjoyed a wide celebrity, for he left evidence of his skill on most of the city's important buildings, notably on the Palazzo Pallavicini, where his baroque columns and niches and distorted but grandiose pagan deities may still be admired. His style has been copied even to the present day in and about the city and all along the Genoese Riviera. These dwellings of Liguria and especially the larger apartment-houses are for the most part merely huge rectangular boxes, pierced with rows of windows, equally spaced and devoid of all orna- [22] Vvi»>V^ Chimney-piece of the Sala di Rarita Romane, Palazzo Doria THE ITALIAN RIVIERA ment. But the tricks of the house-painter's art transform them into veritable palazzini. The base ments imitate rustica; the bare window frames are adorned with pilasters, corbels and pediments; the wall spaces between, display garlands, trophies of arms, armor or musical instruments. The north sides of buildings, usually devoid of casements, — for windows without sun only bring dampness into these houses, where fires are unknown — are embel lished with false doors and windows whence hang gaily colored carpets or peer painted faces, and even, when sufficient space could be found, extensive landscapes have been depicted— mountains, palm- trees and lakes. The coloring is usually weE-chosen, neither too gray nor too glaring primary colors, but soft shades of green, violet, garnet or lavender, and the decorative effect of it all in this land of sun shine is not to be denied, toned and stained as it is by weather and dampness into the irridescent har mony of ancient tapestries or of Gozzoli's frescoes in Pisa's Campo Santo. Other houses, more pretentious, display rows of figures in Gothic niches, effigies of Italy's great men; Cicero elbowing Boccaccio, Columbus pairing [23] BY ITALIAN SEAS off with Petrarch, Galileo and Macchiavelli, Dante and Rossini, but never omitting the hero and par ticular favorite of all Liguria, Andrea Doria. What George Washington is to the United States, Andrea Doria is to the Genoese coast, — padre della patria, father of his country. Though his ancestors occupied high place in Genoa's history, — it was Lamba Doria who defeated the Venetians at Curzola taking a hundred of their galleys and maintaining Genoese supremacy in the Mediter ranean — it remained for the great Andrea to rid his country of all her foes both foreign and domestic, and to endow her with a constitution that lasted for centuries. Down in the dingy Salita di San Matteo one can find a little square surrounded by Doria palaces whose facades are covered with inscriptions lauding the virtues and courage of this family. In the httle Gothic church hard by, Lamba reposes near the great Andrea, whose rusty sword hangs above the high altar. But the Genoese republic did not deem these striped palaces adequate to the renown of her great est son and she built him a palace more worthy of his glory as its fulsome inscription still records. Pie- [24] r , / 7 ' ~* 'r~r ife . • ' ."-> * r~-' *-*?•«; ¦¦'?*&¦ t A'S $ Garden of the Palazzo Doria BY ITALIAN SEAS rino del Vaga's frescoes still glow upon its walls framed with stuccoes by Montorsoli. The great rooms still remain their royal spaciousness; the gar den, its giant Neptune driving his ehariot sur rounded by Dorian eagles; the colonnades sleep in the sunshine, overgrown with moss and creepers. Up in the Sala di Rarita Romane hangs that quaint old portrait of Andrea painted when he was ninety. What a queer old figure he makes in his high-backed chair studded with brass nails; how keenly his eyes glance out from under his bushy brows; how nervously his lean fingers clutch the chair-arm! Opposite him, his cat sits upon a table regarding him with inscrutable eye. The family is still one of the most important in Italy. Who does not remember the Palazzo Doria in the Corso — one of the noblest palaces in Rome — containing, among its manifold art treasures, one of Velasquez's masterpieces, the portrait of Innocent X, himself a Pamphili-Doria. The Villa Pamphili-Do- ria is one of the noblest Roman country seats and the same branch of the family occupies the old pa- lazzo in the Circo Agonale. Adjoining this latter [26] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA palace stands the Church of Saint Agnes, for cen turies the Doria's place of worship. Last winter, on the feast day of its patron-saint, I sat close to the rail listening to the singing of the Papal choir which had come from St. Peter's espe cially for this important service. But a few yards from me, on a dais at the left of the high altar, sat Cardinal Vanutelli in gorgeous vestments of cloth of gold and beside him on a lower throne a man dressed in the costume of a guardia nobile of His Holiness. What a picture he made with his fine dark eyes and pointed beard, with his white ruff and sable cloak and hose, with cuffs and jabot of rarest point lace and his long rapier hanging at his side ! I knew him in an instant ; for all the world one of Van Dyck's Doria portraits stepped from its an cient frame. [27] Ill THE RIVIERA DI LEVANTE TO my mind, the prettiest places on the Italian Riviera — or, for that matter, on either Riviera — are beyond Genoa, southward on the Ri viera di Levante. Only seven miles out lies Nervi, one of the most protected spots on the whole coast ; in fact, so warm, even in winter, as to be rather enervating. The vegetation is quite tropical — groves of oranges and dehcate lemon-trees, loquats, camellias, and olean ders bloom everywhere in the open air. Owing to the limited site, however, there is a paucity of pleas ant walks, and a greater drawback lies in the pres ence of many invalids, especially Germans. In win ter hundreds of the Kaiser's subjects throng the sea promenade, a beautiful walk along the rocky coast, warmed to summer heat by the reflection of the sun upon the sea; and here, even in January and Feb ruary, it is common to see ladies in light tulle gowns and men in tennis flannels walking under the shade of gauzy parasols. [28] The Church Door, Nervi BY ITALIAN SEAS From Nervi to the promontory of Porto Fino the highway follows for the most part the ancient Via Aurelia, a military road connecting Rome with her Spanish possessions. Beyond Sori the great cliffs of the Monte Fino outline them selves in their imposing beauty, sparsely dotted near the water's edge with fisher men's huts — tiny white specks against the dark slopes of the mountain. At Recco the road ascends for three miles, until Ruta is reached, and looking back, we have a superb view of the whole Genoese Riviera, and of the Gulf of Genoa, dotted with steamers and sailing- craft making for and leaving the busy port. After threading a tunnel we descend a bit, and the Gulf of Rapallo soon opens before us. This little bay, in the shape of a horseshoe, has Porto Fino at one end and Sestri a Levante at the other. The [30] Cypresses by the Sea Garlic and Onions THE ITALIAN RIVIERA town of Rapallo lies in the innermost part of the curve, spreading itself a short distance back into the valleys, and straggling up the terraced hills that en circle it. A thirteenth-century castle, a miniature Chateau d'lf, standing on a weather-beaten rock, of which it seems to form an integral part, guards the little harbor, and is connected with the mainland only by a narrow stone causeway. For centuries the sea has washed its rough-laid stones, and in heavy weather dashed in spray almost to the battlements, yet the old fortress stands to-day as strong as when, hundreds of years ago, it defied the Saracen and the proud fleets of Pisa. The town is still a typical little Italian seaport, for the foreign invasion has as yet not even revolution ized its primitive shops, where seamen's berrette, gay kerchiefs, and bright calicoes monopolize the tiny show-windows. Twice a week the market-place is filled with a throng, bargaining and bartering with much talk and many a gesture. Down on the beach the fishermen mend their nets or stripe their gayly painted boats, while wives and daughters sit in the doorways making lace. A little removed from the town an embryonic gar- [31] j i THE ITALIAN RIVIERA den has been laid out, and around it has sprung up a group of new hotels, quiet and comfortable, one favored by the English, another by the Germans, and among the guests there are always a number of interesting personages. When we were there the Duchess of Cleveland lent the aristocratic note of her thin, striking face, and black hair combed down over her ears; there was an English general, over sixty, who walked morning, noon, and night, rain or shine, accompanied by his two slim slips of girls, who seemed to have rid themselves of every ounce of superfluous flesh by use of their slender walking-sticks; there were German "Herr Profes sors," spectacled, bearded, pompous, and several ar tists and army officers of the same nation ; while over at Santa Margherita, a mile or two away, an Aus trian princess had taken the entire Grand Hotel, an ancient palazzo, and we used to see her every morn ing — not young, golden-haired, and beautiful, as in the fairy-tale, but round of feature and of generous figure — driving with her maid of honor in a "sailor" hat, in a high-swung, old-fashioned carriage, drawn by a pair of ambling, pudgy horses. Besides the charms of Rapallo itself, the excursions [33] BY ITALIAN SEAS to be made from it are quite unlimited. Nine pretty valleys can be followed up into the-mountains — nine little valleys each with an objective feature at the end ; a picturesque old mill ; a fine double- arched Roman bridge ; a deserted convent ; a ruined Gothic church, L_ ivy-clad, nestled in a hollow of the hills. We met an English --_ clergyman — an octo- ¦ - V. genarian — who had known Rapallo for thirty years and had lived there fifteen, and A Group of Lacemakers he assured us that he had not yet explored all the beautiful walks and by-ways. We spent the winter there without having half exhausted its resources. One of our favorite rambles led out through the village, past a way-side chapel with a baroque belfry and terra-cotta cupids, to where a narrow rock-paved footway diverges from the main road. This path [34] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA leads up a secluded valley, most lovely after four o'clock, when the late winter sun throws long shad ows down the narrow defile, and now and again sends a warm flood of sunshine to play upon the soft green grass and light with streaks of gold the twisting olive branches. A rushing mountain stream speeds over rocky ledges as over time-worn marble steps, its foaming surface playing with the over hanging branches, or swinging in its haste around a moss-grown rock, then calming itself in a quiet pool, whose surface mirrors the long chaste stems and tapering fingers of the maidenhair. Deep and cool is ever the retreat of the maidenhair fern, found oftenest by the spray of a waterfall. And here one can he upon the flat rocks and watch the lazy frogs sunning themselves in the still water beneath. A few peasant houses dot the hill-sides even far up toward their summits, and in the early spring-time — the spring does come so early in this favored land — the honest women will tell you where to find the first wood- violets and crocuses and jonquils. Besides the byways there are the highways. There is the road to Chiavari, one of the most beautiful drives in Italy, along the edges of lofty precipices [35] BY ITALIAN SEAS dropping sheer off into the sea. As Zoagli is ap proached, the clackety-clack of heavy hand-looms is- A Hill-side Chapel sues from the little cottages by the roadside, and we learn that here the finest silk velvet is made by the peasants. We stop at one of these modest homes, [36] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA and opening the door, are cheerily greeted by a neat little woman, who bows us into a large room with whitewashed walls and red-tiled floor. Near the door stand a big four-post bedstead, two or three chairs, and farther off a bureau. The only orna ments are a row of tintypes over the mantel-piece— family portraits, mostly of awkward young soldiers in uniform. The half of the room opposite the entrance is en tirely occupied by a huge, roughly built loom, with its complicated maze of silken threads and bobbins and clumsy stone weights. We are shown how the shuttle is thrown backward and forward through the countless silken cords, how the woof is pushed into place by the heavy swinging bar, how the threads are cut over a brass wire with an odd-shaped knife, and then in a locked closet below the loom we see the fair folds of black silk velvet with red edging ready to be dehvered to the padrone. And through the little square-paned window the sun streams in a golden flood, and out of it there is a view over the great shimmering expanse of the sea that any king might envy. Another beautiful road, following the sea-shore, [37] BY ITALIAN SEAS sometimes wet by the breakers' spray, and again winding between high garden walls, leads from Ra pallo to San Michele di Pagana. Here in the old parish church, strangely enough, we found a "Cru cifixion" by Van Dyck — a black and gloomy canvas much injured by time. It is hard to picture the gay and handsome figure of the Flemish courtier, the pet of half the kings of Europe, housed in this far away Itahan town ; yet here in truth he stayed when Genoa's wealthy nobles, after inviting him to enjoy their hospitality and paint the wondrous portraits that still adorn their palaces, had driven him forth an exile. Here in little San Michele he found a refuge under the protection of the Orero, and for them he painted the "Crucifixion," introducing one of the family at the foot of the cross. And a little farther along the same road we meet another figure, who seems quite as alien to his sur roundings as the great Dutch painter himself. On a bleak and lonely rock the Convent of Cervara im prisoned Francis the Magnificent — the splendid king who built Blois and Chambord — the mighty monarch, patron of Itahan art, lover of gayety and sweet song. Here, after the battle under the walls [38] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA of Pavia, in a lonesome convent room, a prisoner of Charles the Fifth, he waited to take ship for Spain. Beyond Cervara the highway leads to Porto Fino, and ends there as if it were the end of the earth, for at an abrupt turning a scene almost reminiscent of Egypt— a few low houses, a tall palm-tree, and a strange church — completely blocks the road, whence a narrow little stair leads down and down between overhanging house walls to a considerable open space, giving on a small harbor and a bit of pebbly beach, where the fishing-smacks are drawn up. All about are brightly painted houses, and above them densely wooded hills of pudding-stone, hedging in this snug little haven, from which a single exit leads to the sea. High upon one of the bluffs stands the Villa Car narvon, where, a year before his accession to the im perial throne of Germany, Frederick William, then Crown-Prince, spent a winter in hopes of bettering his failing health. And the fishermen tell you in hushed voices that here, as he stood on the porch of this same villa, the dreaded White Lady of Hohen- zollern rose from the misty sea to warn him of his impending death; and dropping their voices to a [39] BY ITALIAN SEAS whisper, they tell that even now, on still, calm nights, the figure of the well-remembered royal guest walks the high terrace, white and silent, in the moonlight. He made many friends among the rude folk, and Porto Fino has named one of her lanes in his memory. Early one morning we cycled out from Rapallo to Porto Fino, and there bargained with two sturdy fishermen to row us out to San Fruttuoso. We took A Religious Procession [40] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA some cold luncheon with us, and had been careful to choose a calm day when the sea was hke a sheet of glass. A few strong strokes of the heavy oars and the stout boat shot round the end of the promontory that protects Porto Fino from the open sea. Though it was February, the sun was dancing on the water and the shade of a parasol was very acceptable. Soon the long sea front of the Monte Fino lined into view — a stupendous enfilade of precipices, tower ing out of the water like the huge round buttresses of some titanic castle. Not a spare ledge on which to set foot, not a bit of soil lodged in a chink where a shrub or tree could cling, one column succeeding another with almost architectural precision, eternally defying the force of the sea. For an hour we skirted these frowning cliffs, un til suddenly, as if by magic, the rocky walls parted and disclosed a tiny bay surrounded by mountains, with, at its farthermost extremity, a bit of beach. There, straddling on its wide arches, whose pillars dipped their feet into the very sea itself, stands the old Benedictine monastery of San Fruttuoso, cut ting marble-white against the rocky hill-side, its ghostly double mirrored in the still depths beneath. [41] , BY ITALIAN SEAS Across its plain facade the rich brown fishing-nets are spread to dry, and under its sheltering arches a few old boats are drawn up on the sand. A curious maze of passages and arches, rocky steps and steep inclines, leads from its bare old church to its dingy cloistered court, and in its very bowels to the tombs of the Doria, mouldering and dank. Since the twelfth century the mortal remains of Genoa's great est house have been brought to this place for burial — brought by sea in impressive state, on galleons hung with black and silver — carried to their final resting-place on the element whence their laurels grew, and on which their greatness was founded. And here, damp and lonely, the ancient Gothic tombs, ribbed in marble, black and white, moulder in the depths of this deserted convent, watched over and cared for only by a slovenly attendant, who for a few soldi turns the rusty key in the squeaky lock that we may read the proud boasts on the half -oblit erated inscriptions. Above, on an eminence, stands a solitary watch-tower, on whose battered front the great spread-eagle of the Doria can still be traced. Out in the sunshine, over the dancing sea, we ate our luncheon at a little trattoria, where bread and [42] THE ITALIAN RIVIERA wine and sausage can be procured, and at about two, as the wind had sprung up, we started homeward. San Fruttuoso And it was well for us that we did so, for soon the breeze freshened, whitecaps flecked the sea, and our two big boatmen bent low on their oars, with many a quick glance over their shoulders toward the punta, where the fishing-smacks were hurrying shoreward, tacking close up to the wind. Finally, hugging the cliffs, we neared the cape, [43] BY ITALIAN SEAS where the sea was now boiling in httle eddies. The four strong arms pulled with a will, but little progress did we make. Twice the ropes that bound the oars to the rough pins snapped short, and we lost the seaway we had gained. The wind was now a gale, and full against us, and the spray salted our lips at every breaker. For some time it looked as if we must be dashed upon the rocks, or at least must put back, but finally, and happily for us (for a night at San Fruttuoso was not a cheerful prospect) , we rounded the point and swung into the little bay of Porto Fino. On landing at the hotel we found a blazing fire of pine cones quickly kindled in the open chimney, and madame busily mixing a grog for us as we dried our clothes before the spluttering flames. The little touch of danger had certainly added a charm to the whole excursion. [44] A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO WE were living with two Italian ladies in a cinque-cento palace facing the Giudecca Canal. From our balcony, ruddy with scarlet geraniums and shaded by an orange-colored awning, we watched the coming and going of many craft — majestic steamers from the Orient; puffing military tugs towing barges of soldiers; fishing-smacks from Chioggia, their painted sails glowing with suns and crosses; clumsy tortoiselike freight-boats shining with tar ; and now and then a big ship under a tower ing spread of canvas, slowly drifting to an anchor age. Among these heavier vessels glided barcas and sable gondolas. And suddenly, skimming the water hke a gull, a tawny sandolo would dart past, dis tancing all her more dignified sisters. Doctors and business men use these light craft as the quickest means of getting about, and boys row them instead of the usual gondoliers. One day as I was admiring the doctor's boat that [47] BY ITALIAN SEAS had just shot out from the shadow of a low-arched bridge, Signorina told me that she knew where its double could be found, and a reliable piccolo to care for it. So the very same afternoon I had an interview with a strapping big Venetian, owner of the san dolo, who brought with him a short, square-set boy of fourteen, dressed in old trousers and a coat about nine sizes too large for him. A few words sealed the bargain that made me master of the boat. It was to be delivered next morning in perfect condi tion: fresh rugs, black leather cushions well padded, its steel prow polished, its wood-work oiled, and its prancing brass sea-horses brightly burnished. Then turning to the boy, who had never ceased twirling his old felt hat — fit companion to his fringed trousers, — I asked him what he expected a month. "A lira and a half a day," said he. I shook my head, and he quickly added, "That 's what I asked, but you can give me what you please." That settled the bargain, and Giovanni entered my service at once, with no other wardrobe than his win ter rags— though we were then in the dog-days. Next morning the yellow sandolo, immaculately [48] Painted Sails Glowing with Suns and Crosses BY ITALIAN SEAS clean, swept up to our riva, with Giovanni, proud as an admiral, standing on the poppa, perfectly un conscious of the ridiculous figure he cut. I felt at once he could not row me about in such rags, for I had dreamed of him in spotless white, with broad sailor collar, and long blue ribbons dangling from his wide-brimmed straw hat. But certainly he could not be trusted to select this finery alone. So I bade him row me to the Rialto, adding, "for you must have a straw hat, a sash, and some thinner clothes." "Servo suo," was his dignified response. No de lighted smile, though I noticed that the sandolo flew. He chose the way through a rio where many gon doliers live ; and friends of his, leaning over the low parapet, greeted him with quiet bravos as we passed. I doubt not but that was the proudest moment of his young life ; for was he not rowing a "signore inglese!" We darted out into the Grand Canal, and in my admiration of his young strength I quite forgot what a funny figure he cut in his tatters. An omnibus steamer was coming directly toward us. The nose of the sandolo hesitated, trembled, then wavered, first to the right, then to the left. The little vaporetto loomed up big as a thousand-tonner, and [50] A Campiello near San Rocco, Venice BY ITALIAN SEAS Giovanni's oar still being undecided, the steamer al most ran us down. By some divine interposition we The Arsenal Gate managed to graze by her, and she left us bouncing in her foamy wake, the passengers calhng out warn ing reprovals. Giovanni's black eyes snapped; the perspiration coursed in shining rivulets down his smooth, round face, and turning, he shouted after the [52] A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO disappearing boat, "It 's all your fault," — which so amused me that I quite calmed down. We made the Rialto without further incident, though his landing was clumsy, which I willingly enough excused, as the boy was so "flustrated." Leaving the sandolo in charge of an old man, we set off, Giovanni bareheaded, through the crowded Merceria. Pushing our way through that narrow, busy street, I thought of a day centuries ago, when the Venetians, celebrating a great victory, hung the priceless canvases of Titian and Tintoretto and Pal ma along its entire length. Probably never before or after was such wealth of art displayed in a public thoroughfare. But I dismissed the thoughts of the noble past, and began prosaically to search in the small shops on either hand for a wide-brimmed straw hat. The un usual size of Giovanni's head made it a difficult task. We were obliged at length to content ourselves with a hat minus long ribbons; but Giovanni philosoph ically remarked, "That does n't matter, for is n't my sister a tailor? and she can make the ribbons long." Linen trousers were next found; but they needed shortening, which alteration, of course, the tailor sis- [53] -^s% te .j**Uiiii' |<: ,c:&«*-art C«b ^^ A Chioggia Canal A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO ter could make. Then we added a scarlet waist-scarf, and completed our purchases with some loose blue and white shirts of striped material. Giovanni proudly bore away his parcels, smiling contentedly under his new hat, and we set off toward home for the transformation scene. But he must have lost his wits completely, for we went headlong into every floating object on the Grand Canal, and very soon I learned the uses of our strong steel ram. At last we did manage to get into the narrow Rio San Trovaso, and I realized the sad truth that my boy lacked experience. On reaching home I told him he could keep the clothes, but that he could not be my poppe another hour. He pleaded his cause nobly, and assured me that every gondolier on the Grand Canal was at fault except himself; but I looked away from his big black eyes and held to my resolution. With Giovanni's failure my castles fell. But boys in Venice are as plentiful as the stones, and crop up as quickly as the heads of the Lernaean Hydra! Within two hours the choice became em barrassing; but at last I decided upon Domenico, the son of our fruitman at the corner. [55] BY ITALIAN SEAS To my delight Domenico proved thoroughly com petent — even having white clothes of his own and a new straw hat. On \ complimentinghim upon his neat appearance, he said: "And you see this hat? I 've just bought it from Giovanni for one lira fifty; non e caro, — vero?" And surely Gio vanni had not al lowed much sand to slip through the hour-glass ere he had disposed of my . n -. ., , In Less Frequented Canals gift, and possibly ^ now was puffing the fruits of his deal in cigarette smoke around the corner. Oh, these piccoli di Venezia! Then began those dreamy days spent sketching in less frequented canals, Domenico sitting on the [56] A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO poppa back of me, his bronzed face framed in his white open shirt. Or, curling himself up in the bot tom of the sandolo, he would sleep for hours, rocked by the passing of an occasional gondola or fruit- barge laden with luscious grapes and rosy-cheeked peaches and baskets of tomatoes piled high in scarlet pyramids. How deftly these venders manage their boats in the narrow waterways, often dropping the oar to push with their hands against the house walls ! And then squeezing round that last bend of the dingy Malcanton, what a flood of sunshine bursts upon their flaming freight, which, like a brand of fire, burns long trembling reflections into the dark water ! And in broader channels we drifted on limpid mirrors, in whose glassy surfaces each palace — a real coquette — sees its wondrous beauty doubled, — pal aces as rare in color as the rugs of Persia, faded by the wear of centuries. And I tried to picture them in their original splendor, and as I did so, thought of the horror of the lordly owners, coming back from over Styx, and seeing, emblazoned above their proud escutcheons, "Glass Manufactory" or, "Mosaic Works"! [57] BY ITALIAN SEAS When I suggested a pause, Domenico would run a short nail into a wall-chink and tie up in the shadow of a Gothic palace whose wide entrance- steps — dank and green— led to a mysteriously dusky interior, and the slimy, greenish walls recalled the story of that hapless signore who, stealing by night from his lady's bower, fell through a trap into a dark chamber, half under water, where he miserably died of cold and hunger, while his mistress in her tapes tried halls listened in vain for his coming. At other times, under low bridges, where reflected hghts of stirring waters rippled over rough-cut stones like lights on Pompeian glass, we rested and watched the play of sunlight down the watery streets — the gondolas, freighted with dark shadows, nosing under a Madonna, serene on a palace wall, 'mid bunches of wistaria. And under the bridge that leads to the Foscari gates the echoes of many cen turies roll back, and distinctly from among them comes the hollow tramp of horses overhead — a gal lant escort of young nobles leading forth a timid bride. The gorgeous pageant takes its way in triumph through the narrow lanes and over rattling wooden bridges and across the broad Piazza to the Ducal Palace in the full splendor of a perfect day, [ 58 ] ' j"iV>3l» MflSffiS A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO with champing and pawing of noble steeds and the blasts of many trumpets, the only time such sounds were heard in all Venetian history. But the trickling water from a passing oar recalls me to the silent Venice of to-day, and to the generations of Venetians who never have seen so much as even a pack- mule in their streets. On warm summer evenings we rowed to the Lido, and there cooled ourselves by a dip in the lazy sea. And afterwards upon a terrace we watched the violet tones die into the starlit night. After the heat of noonday, how re freshing to glide homeward with a gentle breeze fanning our faces and the moonlight dancing on the rippling water ! [59] .$*#/>' % A Madonna on a Palace Wall BY ITALIAN SEAS During the tranquil autumn days— those days be fore the death of summer — we visited the surround ing islands. Striking through the main artery of the Giudecca, where saffron sails of fishing-smacks flaunt their rich colors, and festoons of purple nets — rich laces of the fisher-folk — swing from mast to mast, we come out into open water. A pearly white ness bathes the broad lagoons, uniting sea and sky — the sea a smooth enamel, the sky veiled like a bride's pale face. Little islands dotted with trees float miragelike on the glassy waters. A campanile and the hulls of far-off barges lend the only darker note. Every day we rippled the reflections of Don Carlos's golden fleurs-de-lis. My Domenico could not understand why Don Carlos — so handsome a prince and really King of Spain — (should the Carl- ists have full sway)— lived so quietly, with a red parrot perched on his passetto, and an old major- domo in blue jeans sitting at his palace entrance. And often, as we passed, the long-tailed bird screeched after us. But I noticed she preserved a respectful silence if her lordly master was entering his gondola. [60] A SUMMER IN A SANDOLO Domenico's idea of kings meant brave uniforms and flying flags, and tapestries hanging from palace windows. And so one day, when news came that' Italy's King and Queen were really coming to Venice (the first time since their accession to the throne), Domenico was beside himself with joy. ^ UMI^ClL"; * naSe-' Sit!"" The Broad Lagoons The afternoon of their arrival, in spotless white, he appeared at our riva at three, though the royal party was not expected until six. So immaculate was the sandolo that I wished their Majesties would visit Venice more frequently. Finally, in a double line of embarcations crowded with an eager throng, we took our places on the Grand Canal. Every bal cony was decked with flags and rugs and costly brocades; every window was peopled with a group of heads. [61] BY ITALIAN SEAS Just as the sun's last rays were gilding the mellow palace fronts a glorious burst of color shot down the Grand Canal— a glow of tints that no pen can describe. A dozen bissone, boats of great size, each manned by a score of men, headed the brilliant cortege. One bore upon its prow Fame blowing her golden trum pet; another, Neptune, trident in hand, on his silver shell; and still another, Flora scattering her blos soms. Some of the oarsmen were robed as Phoeni cians, others as Egyptians, while a crew of young Romeos rowed another boat, dragging in their wake yards of crimson velvet. Canopies of damask and cloth of gold sheltered the city's dignitaries. And in this festive group moved a sombre gondola manned by four gondoliers in liveries of red and black. As it passed, the bands played and people waved their hats, for in it sat the King and Queen — he in gen eral's uniform, she in white. Behind them in com pact masses followed the countless gondolas of Venice's nobility in gala dress, escorting the youth ful couple to the Royal Palace. [62] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST l FIUME TO METKOVICH ON a crisp evening early in October our two gondoliers rowed us out over the Giudecca Canal toward a steamer lying off the Dogana. The sun was just setting in a bank of purple clouds. Long mare's-tails — signs of wind— streaked fiery and golden across patches of amber sky and mirrored their hot tints in the water. A stiff breeze whipped a froth from the choppy sea and the waves merrily lapped our gondola's prow as the men bent low on their oars against the incoming tide. A little knot of boats huddled about the steamer's side, oc cupants and gondoliers shouting themselves hoarse in their efforts to get aboard; an extra pull or two, a lunge of the long, black boat and our poppe caught a rope and we scrambled up the ladder. The craft on which we found ourselves lay white [65] BY ITALIAN SEAS and graceful as a swan upon the water, her masts rakishly atilt, her promenade deck polished like an inlaid floor, her appointments so luxurious that, had it not been for the fellow-passengers about us — Austrians, for the most part— we might have fancied ourselves on a private yacht. As we hung over the rail, the. dying glow of the sunset made way for the twinkling stars. For the last time we listened to the singers in the barca below us wafting up the well-known strains of "La Bella Venezia" and "Ah, Maria, Mari." The Doge's palace gleamed like a pale opal, the foliated pinnacles of San Marco, canopied and peopled with saints pierced the sapphire sky — the very stars were dimmed by the magic of that wondrous square. The strains of the Piazzetta band floated in agitated cadences across the water, where flickered tiny hghts, hke fire-flies — lanterns of uneasy gondolas. Three deep blasts of the whistle, a creaking of the anchor-chains, and the regular thud of the propeller tells us we are off for Fiume. The Salute's dome fades into the night, the bright lights of the Piazza burst into view, then veil them selves behind the Ducal palace, the Riva degli Schia- [66] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST voni unfolds its sparkling length, the arc-lights of the Lido double themselves in the lagoon — then dark ness, black and inky, broken only by an occasional lantern on the breakwater or a brilliant gleam from the search-light of the customs-boat following like a nautilus, first on one side of us, then on the other. The last light is passed and we plunge in the teeth of a strong head wind into the open sea. . . . The bright sails of a Chioggia fishing-boat flash by the port-hole; the dancing sea is strangely near. It is no dream. Outside day is just whitening in the east and the purple Istrian mountains glide by grotesquely distorted by water-drops on the convex glass. As I go on deck Fiume looms into sight, gray and misty in the morning light, its blue smoke set tling on the house-tops. We spend an hour or two wandering about the bright new Austrian streets, and in the byways of old Fiume, and among the fishing-craft clustered under shady sycamores along the quay; then board another steamer and this time are fairly off for Dalmatia. Dalmatia is a country so easy of access, yet so little traveled — reached in a day from Venice, or Trieste, [67] BY ITALIAN SEAS yet such a new, fresh field for the tourist, so un touched by the onward march of the past hundred years. It is a country of transition. In it the Occi dent touches the Orient and almost mingles with it. Its coast, hiclining toward Italy, has imbibed Latin influence, but once over the mountain wall the Orient begins — Turkey, with all its ignorance and super stition. In its marts Italians of the coast — the "Bo- doli" — meet Turks, and Servians, and other Slavs in turbaned fez and flowing trousers. Dalmatia is a long, thin strip of territory, border ing the east coast of the Adriatic — its northern ex tremity on a parallel with Genoa, its southernmost point opposite Rome. Like most countries bathed by the Mediterranean, it presents an arid front to the sea. Bald mountains lift their heads from the water's edge; bleak islands break the horizon with clear-cut silhouettes — with an almost utter lack of verdure, save on the gentler slopes and in the rocky hollows, where pale olives and almond-trees shelter their frail branches. Local color is lacking. It is a simple drawing, delicately penciled as a Da Vinci back ground. But on this simple drawing Nature plays [68] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST her choicest color-scales. The whitish mountains and pale rock-surfaces catch every variation of the atmo sphere — every gradation of sun and shadow, of morning and evening, and sensitively pale into silvery opals, then flush with crimson and gold or threaten ingly lower under heavy thunder-clouds. Arbe — an Island Town Only occasionally man's presence is felt in a bit of ruined castle topping an island, or a chapel perched upon a ledge above the sea, and once in a while only, as a surprise, a town sheltered snug in the recess of a tiny harbor comes to greet the traveler. [69] BY ITALIAN SEAS ON BOARD THE PANNONIA A quiet day lolling in steamer-chairs with the pro peller's thud beneath us. The breath of the bora bears us along, the crested whitecaps chase us. To the east, the Velebit wraps its ashen summits in foggy sheets ; low-lying islands girt with shimmering sands float on an amethyst sea. The dreamy noonday hours wear on. And now up over the bow, rising out of the glittering sea, poising her square-cut mass be tween the mainland and Ugljan, rises Zara, the capital and first port of Dalmatia. Dalmatia of to-day comprises the greater part of the ancient province of Illyria. Among its archi pelagoes, Greeks, Phoenicians, and Syracusans founded numerous colonies. It became a Roman province in the second century before Christ, but remained refractory until the time of Augustus. On the fall of Rome it fell a prey to barbarians and was never free from war until the thirteenth century. Then Venice was beginning her glorious career, and her warlike Doge, Enrico Dandolo, destroying Zara, took possession of the coast. For almost three [70] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST centuries Dalmatia remained under Venetian dom ination and the great republic has left her impress everywhere upon the land— not only in numerous ef figies of her winged lion upon the walls and over the city gates, but in the characteristic architecture of the palaces and campanili, in the laws that govern the people, in their language, their arts and letters. In the sixteenth century the Sultan, profiting by the weakness of Venice's old age, pounced down upon this neighboring province and took it. Mosques were erected and a Turkish pasha installed in the castle of Clissa. But a hundred years later, Venice and the Austrian emperor combined broke the power of Islam, and Istria and Dalmatia were allotted to Aus tria and have remained under her dominion ever since, save for a few years of French occupation un der Napoleon. ZARA We are not novices in traveling, but never shall we forget the strange delight of the first few hours in Zara. Not that the city itself is so interesting, for, though it contains some noteworthy monuments, the general character is that of most Itahan towns ; nar- [71] BY ITALIAN SEAS row streets and tall, straight houses, churches more or less Lombard in character, pointed doorways sur mounted by crests as in Venice, courts with old walls shaded by a vine-pergola. But it is the life of the town that is so extraordinary, the wonderful wealth of costume and the variety of types to be seen in its winding streets — costumes the like of whose barbaric splendor is not to be found elsewhere in Europe to day. Take your place in the Via Tribunale in the morn ing hours when the peasants push their way to and from the market-place. Here two women from Benkovac stop and, looking into each other's eyes, carefully deposit their bundles on the ground, then kiss each other with resounding smacks upon each cheek. Their hair is plaited with red and green ribbon ; their caps, red as tomatoes and embroidered in silk, are half hidden under large ker chiefs. Over coarse linen shirts they wear dark-blue coats, long and shapeless and richly trimmed with beads and braid ; their woollen aprons and dangling fringes are of Oriental design, hke Kiskillam rugs; their short skirts show heavy leggings, woven like the aprons, and feet encased in moccasins. About their [72] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST necks hang numerous jewels and chains of roughly beaten metal, set with bits of colored glass, with car- nelians and turquoises. On their fingers gleam cum brous rings, and their waists are girdled with several lengths of leather-strap studded with metal nails, whence hang long, open-bladed knives. The whole costume, rude and barbaric in the extreme, still has had lavished upon it all the art of which the race is capable. Beside them three women entirely clothed in black, with sad, colorless faces such as Cottet paints, make a melancholy contrast to all their savage finery. Over there a group of five athletic men from Knin are discussing their affairs, and a brave bit of color they make. Their wide-sleeved shirts, fringed with tassels, gleam white under two double-breasted vests, one striped, the other richly wrought in silk and golden braid; thick scarfs bind in their waists and on some are replaced by huge leathern girdles from whose pockets peep knives, long pipes, combs, and towels. Their trousers, wide at the hips, taper in close at the ankles, where they meet the opance, a kind of slipper made of woven leather thongs. Each district varies the design of its costume, each [73] BY ITALIAN SEAS individual varies its details to suit his taste; every color is employed, by preference briUiant red. The road by the Porta Terra Firma is one of the busiest The Porta Terra Firma, Zara scenes. Here women from Obrovac spin from a distaff as they vend dry boughs in the wood-market; others trudge toward distant mountain homes, stag gering under piles of goat-skins or baskets of pro visions sufficient for the week to come; fishermen from Arbe and Pasman make ready their gayly painted boats for the homeward cruise; Slavs from [74] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST Zemonico, robust Bosnians from Bihac, Servians from Kistanje herd their flocks of turkeys, their goats and sheep and cattle; teamsters from Sinjurge along tough mountain ponies, hitched three abreast to rude wagons piled with sacks of grain, — a strange cosmopolitan whirl — half Occident, half Orient, where the blood of many races mingles ! sebenico No suspicion of a town has yet been revealed to the eye when the grim walls and ugly throats of the guns of Fort San Niccolo threaten to dispute the rocky defile into which our steamer enters — a passage so narrow that one can throw a stone across. When the big ship has carefully wriggled through, a broad har bor opens out with Sebenico piling in an amphi theatre at its far extremity. All the landscape is desolate, devoid of verdure, rocky, sun-baked, scourged by the fierce north wind, the bora, and the houses of the city and the great walls of the Spanish castles and the hill-sides and the stony valleys all are tinged with the same ashen hue. The city, rising from the water's edge like Genoa, [75] BY ITALIAN SEAS piles house on house high up the hill, punctuated here and there by a spire or a dome. But it proved more promising at a distance than on more intimate acquaintance. To be sure, the cathedral, with its fine north door, well repays a visit, and so, too, does the cemetery, commanding a noble survey seawards over the bay and the neighboring islands. The winding streets and high-staired alleys afford many a picturesque vista, but the town lacks distinctive features, and the hotel is far from good, as we can testify from painful experience. From Sebenico a little railroad, recently con structed, takes one on to Spalato. The distance is about forty miles, to which one gives five hours in the train! The track first winds through small inlaid valleys planted with vines, whose autumn russets con trast with the dull green of olives. Soon we mount into more arid regions. All is sad and bleak and barren — not a tree, not a shrub. Dry river-courses run down the gorges — raging torrents they are at times, after heavy rains. Now and then loose stones piled up frame a sheep-fold or form low walls to hedge in patches of earth. Higher and higher we climb, the tiny engine puff- [76] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST ing itself hoarse on the steep grade. The horizon grows wider and wider. Great fleecy clouds, like gulls, float across the azure sky, and over the sun- scorched hills sweep cool, purplish shadows, drifting in wandering undulations up and down the slopes. A few weak vineyards, built at the cost of how much toil, descend into the depths of marshy valleys — lakes in winter, stone-dry in summer. Not a house in sight; no sign of life but a shepherd wrapped in his mantle, still as bronze, and farther on a goose-girl down in a shaded hollow. Ever higher we go and higher, till suddenly the top of the pass is reached and a new world opens to our eager eyes. We are on the crest of the Mosor. From its dizzy height the eye drops unhindered down to where fold on fold of mountain sweeps to lower levels, luxuriant with vines and olives — the land of promise after the wilderness. Headlands like dark tongues shoot out to lick the shimmering sea, radiant in the silver light of noonday. Man has taken possession of this land of milk and honey, for down along the water's edge villages are seen and castles; houses dot the hill- slopes, and high upon a commanding peak a pilgrim church gives thanks unto the heavens. [77] BY ITALIAN SEAS This is the Riviera of the Seven Castles, and at its far end lies Spalato. SPALATO Almost half of Spalato's 20,000 souls five within the walls of Diocletian's palace. This latter is a rect angle, built upon the plan of the fortified Roman camp, enclosing within its Cyclopean walls, eighty feet in height, an entire quarter of the modern city. At each angle of the walls stands a massive tower. In the centre of each facade a gate opens, except in that turned toward the sea, where a narrow postern admitted the royal barge. One cross-street divides the enclosure into a northern and southern half, con necting the Silver Gate with the Iron Gate ; another leads from the northern or Golden Gate to the en trance of the Imperial apartments. It was through the Golden Gate — the Porta Au- rea, still in excellent preservation — that Diocletian entered his palace when coming from S alone. Under its soaring arches the cruel Emperor, once a simple soldier of the legion, now covered with the royal purple — a man of the people now appropriating to himself the name of Jovius, the equal of God— rumbled in bis gilded chariot and thundered down [ 78 ] Portico of Diocletian's Palace, Spalato DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST the passage-way between his slaves' quarters and those of his aged mother, until, racked with disease, a victim of all the luxury of later Roman times, he ^ A •^ S*jN*kc ¦y«>rA ,¦ ,s^HVAS?™*Sst.- ¦ SUM 5 The Old Quay and South Wall of Diocletian's Palace, Spalato painfully alighted before the noble portico, the en trance to his private apartments, where later he was to end his sufferings by his own hand. This portico is left to us to-day — a court a hun dred feet long and forty wide, enclosed on three sides by magnificent colonnades. A stately facade occupies the south end and gives access to a circular [79] BY ITALIAN SEAS structure whose lower travertine walls alone remain. The spaces between the western colonnade have been filled in with mediaeval houses, but on the east side the columns stand free. Two Sphinxes, mute and inscrutable, look down on the steps ascending to the so-called Mausoleum, a building vying in interest with the Pantheon of Rome. In form an octagon, it is surrounded by an ambulatory whose stone roof is held aloft by twenty- four Corinthian columns. Its interior is circular, but broken by eight niches — four square, four round. Eight huge monohthic pillars of Egyptian granite support a florid Corinthian cornice upon which rests a range of smaller columns of black porphyry, sup porting the dome. This latter is built of tiles of a fan-shaped construction found in no other existing Roman building. In fact, this dome and that of the Pantheon are the only two left to us from ancient times. In the Mausoleum, as in the other buildings of the group, a very hard stone, quarried near by at Trau, has been employed, and the veins of the acan thus leaves and the details of the cornices remain sharp as steel prints even after eighteen centuries of exposure and neglect. The Mausoleum, converted into a Christian [80] Entrance to the Mausoleum, Spalato DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST church in the fourteenth century, is now the Ca thedral of Spalato, and in a neighboring street another Roman temple is used as the Baptis tery. It is remarkable for its superb cassetted ceiling, in perfect pre servation, and for its font in the unwonted form of a Greek cross carved with most interesting By zantine ornament. When the neighboring Roman city of Salone was finally destroyed by the barbarians, its in habitants took refuge be hind the mighty walls of Diocletian's palace, where before the end of the seventh century a con siderable city had sprung up, and in it John of Ra- [81] The Ulica Zvonika, Spalato BY ITALIAN SEAS venna established himself as bishop. The old part of the city within the walls is now most densely packed. The few streets are dark and but five or six feet wide, the houses squeezed together and pushed up six or seven stories high. Yet here and there a fine old palace is encountered, rich with armorial bearings, carven doorways and traceried windows. The south wall of the palace, with a warm, sunny outlook over the sea, is now honeycombed with mod ern apartments, whose brightly colored window- shutters contrast vividly with the classic half -columns surrounding them. On the parapet three-story dwellings are perched, and along the quay that skirts the base, tobacconists and drinking-houses and little ship-chandlers' shops are barnacled to the huge Roman stones. Near the Porta Ferrea a church has been built high on top of the pagan walls, and its cracked bells peal for matins from a zvonik or bell- tower astride the gate itself. The east wall looks down upon the Pazar — a great open-air market — which on Monday gathers in a horde of peasants. The restless sea of humanity, the conglomeration [82] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST of color, is fascinating, but bewildering in the ex treme. Soon the eye learns to distinguish groups and individuals — here the venders of game and wild-fowl, there the sellers of turkeys and chickens, miserable- looking fowl lying with feet tied together and a dis consolate droop in the eye; along the road, pretty girls in red caps (the distinctive badge of unmarried women) , stand among mountains of corn-husks, sell ing them at a florin a load, said load to be delivered on their own fair shoulders. A mender of saddles plies a brisk trade, for pack-mules and ponies are legion; and so, too, does a fruit-peddler, selling de cayed pears to the Turks ; and beyond are the red tur bans of the Bosnians clustered over piles of meal- sacks, weighing out large wooden measures, the con tents of which are verified by men appointed for that purpose, whose business it is to pass a stick over the top of the measure, filling up any chink and scraping off any surplus. In Spalato we have two favorite walks. One out to the Campo Santo on a rocky ledge high over the sea — a cemetery peacefully quiet, whose white tombs gleam among tall cypresses. By the blue locust shadows that play upon its wall we like to [83] BY ITALIAN SEAS sit and watch the golden sun dip his face behind the distant sea. The other stroll leads up the Monte Mar j an, a rocky hill-side rich with southern growth. The city and its ample bay lie at our feet ; behind it green roll ing hill-sides, and beyond Clissa's fortress guards against the Turk, between the Golo and the Mosor, than whose sterile flanks the purple flush of orchids or the shadings of a sea-shell are not more tender or more splendid. DRIVE ALONG THE RIVIERA OF THE SEVEN CASTLES Our light open carriage, drawn by two fast horses, skims over a broad white road. The driver, a Dalma tian of the coast, speaks good Italian and cocks his red cap saucily, like Tommy Atkins, over his left ear. Peasants, bound for far-off fields, touch their hats as we pass and call out dobar dan! It is my birthday and we are out for a holiday. To the left, mirrored in still waters, sleeps "la Pic- cola Venezia," on an island just large enough to hold her. Her flat-stone roofs, painted dazzling white, [84] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST belie the genial warmth of the autumn sun and would make us believe that new snow had fallen. We bowl merrily along, till we come to a cross roads and notice a group of wrestlers, life-size — a bas-relief set in the wall of a peasant's house. And now every wayside cottage displays some antique stone built into its simple front— one a bit of mould ing, another a granite shaft, and another a little Venus crowded among rough stones. Stone tables rest on classic pillars and inverted Roman capitals take the place of benches. So we know that we are approaching ancient Salone — Rome's proudest city in Illyria. * Soon antique walls appear and the horses pull heavily over loose stones. A fragrant avenue of rosemary and now fantastic olive-trees, hung with small black fruit and festooned with vines and creep ers, frame in a landscape of surpassing loveliness; gently undulating slopes dropping to the peaceful sea on the one hand, climbing to majestic mountains on the other; purple ranges cutting their pure pro files against blue ranges, outlined against yet fainter forms and dying at last into the opalescence of the distant sky. [85] BY ITALIAN SEAS At our feet the dead fragments of the Roman city — few they are, but how they speak! The early Christian cemetery with its hundred and sixty sarco phagi, desecrated, lying in confusion, each broken open by a rude barbarian hand. One little tomb alone escaped the greed of the Hun, that of a girl of three, and in it have been found, together with her tiny bones, her baby jewels and rattle. Some of the stones are quite plain, others carved with Pax and with acanthus leaves, while on others, more preten tious, are figured scenes from mythology : the works of Hercules, Hippolytus and Phasdra, Meleager kill ing the Calydonian boar. Among the tombs lie ruins of the Great Basilica — - a fifth-century cathedral, many of whose shafts are still standing. As we approach the remains of the Baptistery near by, a group of ragged urchins, run ning ahead, throw themselves upon the ground and with grimy hands brush up the earth to show the squares and circles of a fine mosaic pavement. After seeing the extensive ruins of the city walls and gates, of the arena and theatre, we are off again along the coast. Soon Succurac comes into sight— the first of the [86] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST seven castles, linked hand in hand along the sea, each sheltering its vassal town, first from the barbarian, later from the rapacious Turk. Our road, bordered by luxuriant foliage, now rises and falls on the slopes of hills. Wild rose-bushes and mulberries, hedges of myrtle and pomegranate laden with vermilion fruits, oleanders and clumps of dark cypresses, fields of feathery flax and smilax, of gor geous tomatoes and autumnal peas stretch out on either hand, and everywhere the vines catch with their slender tendrils the drooping olive branches, marry ing tree to tree. It is the time of the vintage. In every vineyard mountains of luscious grapes, purple as an emperor's coat, are piled around a wine press, where men bare-legged in the vats squeeze out rich juices. Groups of donkeys and long-haired ponies patiently await their loads of goat-skins, filled to bursting with new-made wine. On the roads carts stand waiting, each with its huge cask gaping to be filled. In them the skins are emptied, spilling their contents in breathy gasps, dying in spasms, till thrown to earth collapsed and dead. Under the hedge-rows peasants sleep, their heads pillowed on [87] BY ITALIAN SEAS wine-filled skins, their hands and bare feet puffed and crimson — a veritable orgy, a Bacchanalian rout, recalling the pagans and the Silenus of Pompeii. But here among tall shafts of aloes the spires and towers of Trau appear, and we leave our carriage at its gate. Trau is not clean ; in fact, it is the only dirty town we found in Dalmatia. The streets are dark and dismal and a ray of sunlight scarce ever touches their grimy pavement. One hesitates to enter the dingy lanes, where slatternly women perform their toilet by the open door or wash their dirty linen in vats of suds: where coopers thump resounding bar rels and donkeys bear their evil-smelling loads. Bac chus has been here, too. The purplish pavements reek with drippings — from every house exhales the odor of fermenting wine. But the Piazza is well kept, and on the west front of the Cathedral we are repaid by seeing the finest portal in Dalmatia — and fine enough it is for any place. To the right of the door a primitive Adam, to the left an equally primitive Eve, stand upon snarling lions, crushing evil monsters. Myriad fig ures people the arches, and on the friezes and pilas ters peacocks strut and strange beasts disport them selves and children play with birds of paradise. [88] Cathedral Portal, Trau BY ITALIAN SEAS As we journey homeward in the twilight hours the morning's panorama rolls back again, but soft ened and chastened by the evening light. Asses almost hidden under loads of grass, tired children sleeping in the plodding carts, misty tree- forms, cavalcades of Slavs, huge men with turbaned heads astride of fleet-foot ponies, file in procession across the sapphire sky — a strange kaleidoscope of misty forms, half real, hke phantoms not living, yet not dead. A break in the gathering clouds and a last pink ray of daylight flushes with coral the towering moun tain-tops — then darkness and the twinkling stars. ON BOARD THE ALMISSA On leaving Spalato in the morning hours we watch the hills glide by. We wonder at the captain's skill as he lands our steamer in limited wind-swept coves where the jagged teeth of rocky ledges lurk ready to rend the bottom. There is barely room for the ship to turn even with the aid of cable and windlass, for her bow is but four feet off the rocks when her propeller stirs up mud astern. [ 90 ] i\-'¥;.v- : ^'T, Peasants at Makarska BY ITALIAN SEAS These cliffs of Biokovo were long dreaded by hon est mariners, for all through the middle ages they were a favorite haunt of pirates. But what a superb front they turn to the sea! Ashen mountains tower to the very heavens. On their summits, as on Jove's brow, thunder-clouds threaten and fleck the cliffs with mottled shadows. Half-way up the stem flanks olive-trees cling; little villages with whitewashed roofs sleep in the midst of russet vineyards. Bright green files of poplars and groups of young pines shine fresh among their grayer neighbors. We can trace a road no wider than a pin-scratch chmbing in sharp zig-zags up and up the jagged mountain-side — up to its very summit, and can see the peasants toiling high among goat-pastures. In the calm quiet of noonday the bark of a dog comes clear across the water. As I lean over the rail, the blue, 'transparent sea suddenly turns yellowish and turbid. Looking up, I see that we have changed our course and are heading landwards, and in a moment we enter the mouth of a river, the Narenta. Its murky waters are confined by dikes, below which, as in the Low Countries, marshy fields appear, [92] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST with here and there a pool reflecting, mirror-like, the trees and mountains. Miserable huts like those of Indians, built of cane, hug the dike-sides as though a bit of solid earth were needful to keep them from floating away. Dingy, wilted hay-stacks surround them, and one wonders when the harvest was grown. Yet these fields, now partly inundated, yield fine crops in the summer. Vines flourish, even with their gnarled roots in the water, and fig and peach and cherry trees spread their branches among clumps of bamboo. Cattle graze on the grassy embankments, and a shepherdess, twisting flax from her distaff, drones a minor melody. Close by the river bank natives paddle along in zoppoli — fragile boats made of very thin planks, placed at a wide angle, like the leaves of a half -open book; others skim by in trupini — skiffs so light that they can be carried on the shoulders from place to place, yet are able to hold heavy loads of hay, grain, and reeds. The river swarms with salmon-trout, and in the neighboring lakes famed eels and shrimp abound. Ducks and snipe breed in plenty, and the captain [93] BY ITALIAN SEAS tells us that pelicans, herons, wild swans, and even vultures and eagles are still to be found. Farther on the course of the Narenta follows the base of steep mountains fringed by whole villages of cane-huts clinging among the rocks. Cattle are imprisoned in stone enclosures, half cave, half barn yard, and miserable tailless chickens forage in the rock crevices. Groups of peasants huddle about the hut-doors or toss the chaff in dusty clouds from wheat and rye. For two hours the steamer ascends this narrow waterway — the channel never more than a ship's length wide and just deep enough to clear the keel. The deck is like a moving platform high above the fields, where half -submerged grape-vines still strug gle to keep their rotting branches above the water. After we pass Fort Opus the country becomes more commonplace, and at sundown we reach Met- kovich. [94] II MOSTAR A HORDE of Turks rushed aboard, for what turned out to be very little luggage. A *• young turbaned giant carried off our bags, and we hastened toward a waiting train, which was to take us into the interior of Herzegovina. Darkness fell about, and rain flecked the window- panes. The blackness of a starless night enveloped us, except when long waits at stations revealed, in the flash of a lantern, a red fez or a white caftan. But finally dancing lights appeared, reflected in a river, and we had reached Mostar. From a rattling carriage nothing could be seen but low houses, with an occasional gleam from a tiny latticed window. Flickering oil-lamps swung above shop-doors, or over chestnut-stands; figures glided by in white drapery, in fez, and ample trousers. At day-break next morning, we throw open our shutters. High mountains tower all about us, girt to their middles with vine-terraces, russet and golden; olive-trees sweep up the slopes to meet the [ 95 ] BY ITALIAN SEAS vineyards, and from their gray foliage a dozen slender minarets, arrow-like, shoot up from where nestle low stone-roofed houses. Far below roar the churning waters of the Narenta. Near us the noisy river is spanned by a bridge, swaying under the feet of a bustling Oriental throng, making its way to the market-street; Bosnians bestriding the shoulders of mules and ponies like Arabs or Andalusians; Ser vian mountaineers in white shaggy -skirted coats and leggings; young girls from Ljubuski in coquettish jackets and red fez and full trousers of cherry and mauve silk; trains and trains of horses, burdened with saddle-bags and well-filled baskets — cavalcades re sembling desert-caravans of swaying camels; Greek priests, black-bearded and black-gowned, contrasting curiously with Servian women all in white, whose outer garments, tucked up, reveal short pantaloons. We sip our coffee overlooking a shady garden where a Turk is raking up the autumn-leaves. Troops of little turbaned boys chatter in soft voices as they take their way to school. Low houses border the road to the market, and be tween them, here and there, diminutive latticed win dows squint over forbidden walls. As I wonder [96] A Corner of the Market BY ITALIAN SEAS whether the women of a harem really live behind those well-barred panes, looking up I see a face in stantly withdrawn. But near by a court-gate swings temptingly open, and I step within; a long blue house, whose overhanging upper-story is adorned with richly framed Moorish windows, shuts in a stone-paved court. Under the stairs ascending to the Odalik — the women's apartments — and along the walls, gayly covered divans, with a luxury of Ori ental cushions, invite to repose. A coffee-tray, with half -emptied cups, rests on a low tabouret, from un der which peeps a pair of gold-wrought slippers, dainty enough to cause Cinderella's despair. A young woman is coming down the steps, her slender fingers trailing the balustrade, her face turned away, but I mark the grace of her figure, the amber tones of her full neck, the glint of gold upon her gorgeous henna-dyed hair. How I should have loved to brave the glance of those dark eyes ! . . . The life and death of Mostar centres round its mosques, beside whose snowy minarets cypress-trees, like sombre twins, stretch up their sable forms: Noirs soupirs de feuillage elances Vers les cieux. [98] f DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST In their shadows cemeteries, not re mote like ours, nor saddened by uncer tain thoughts, lift their turbaned grave- posts — vague shadows of the buried, rising from dank, tangled grasses and creeping vines. N o peal of church- bell summons the "Faithful" to prayer, but at day break, at noonday, at nightfall, the muezzin, an elder with long, white beard, climbs high on every minaret, The Saric Mosque, Mostar an(J from its airy platform sends forth his plaintive call, echoed back and [99] BY ITALIAN SEAS forth, until the very air vibrates with the trembling notes. Just as the last echoes are lulling, at the mosque entrance, richly painted with arabesques, you will see rows and rows of shoes — for who would carry the dust of the streets upon the rugs that face toward Mecca! And I think of Ba- yazid, far off in Constantinople, in the shadow of the mosque that bears his name, reposing in his tomb, covered with a carpet of gold and silver, with, under his head, a brick kneaded from the dust brushed from his shoes and garments. For there is in the Koran a verse to this purport: He who is dust- soiled walking in the paths of Allah, need not fear the fires of Hades. The narrow ways of Mostar are a perfect "Mid way." Every turn is a picture, with color enough to make an impressionist go mad with joy. In the shaded angles venders of roasted chestnuts sit under tattered awnings, and extol in strident voices the hot quality of their bursting nuts. Playing about the door-ways are beautiful little children, wearing pan taloons a la Mameluke, colored like flowers, jonquil, cherry-red, and chrysanthemum tones. Slender youths, with tiny pots of coffee, run about, to supply [100] «: 'War, X Each shop contains a squatting Turk or two BY ITALIAN SEAS the constant demand for this favorite beverage. Turkish women, with faces veiled in opaque muslin, drag their yellow shoes in waddling steps — unshapely figures these, muffled in the ferajehs, a long mantle, whose scoop-shaped hood shadows the hidden face, and whose sleeves hang empty, thrown back over the shoulders. Tall, bearded merchants, in wadded gowns and fresh white turbans, take their stately way leisurely through the crowd. Little kiosques, on either hand, unfold their doors at day-break. Each shop, like a menagerie-cage, contains a squatting Turk or two, plying a special trade : sandal-makers, in the midst of glue and color- pots, and rows and rows of wooden lasts; a dozen little tailor-dens, the neatest these, hung with em broidered vests, their occupants, sitting cross-legged, sewing the golden braids ; workers in repousse silver, moulding their wad of clay for a cushion, on which they lay a sheet of silver, then hammer it into a shapely buckle. And one shop, more spacious than the others especially attracts me. In it, carefully folded on shelves, lie gorgeous woollen and cotton stuffs ; in cases upon its walls, gleam silks of Broussa that shine like moonlight with threads of silver, gold- [102] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST embroidered caftans fit for the shoulders of an oda lisque, gauzes shot with lustrous silks, slippers all wrought with threads of gold. Long-fringed rugs pile high in corners ; and suspended from the ceiling, brasses, coppers, coffee-pots, and water-vases, sparkle and shine as reflected lights play upon their under surfaces. About the door hang strings of fez, red as ripe tomatoes, big, clumsy clasp-knives, with bone handles, children's sandals, painted, and hung by dangling tassels, shaggy sheep-skin blankets, leather pouches, appliqueed with birds in red and black or leaf -forms in brass, scarfs of purple, blue, and green, whose screeching colors, you may be sure, are not of Turkish origin. And back of all this confusion, in a filtered half-light, sits a patriarch, white-turbaned, with a face of passive fatality, his eyes fixed, his eagle nose hooked over a long, white beard, his lean cheek bronzed and withered, and his transparent fingers, hke a bird's claw, clutched over a never-neglected pipe. And now we cross the great stone bridge — a bridge so famous that from it Mostar took its name. With a single span it leaps from rock to rock over the deep- sunk Narenta, even as the heavenly bow throws wide [103] BY ITALIAN SEAS over the earth its radiant half circle. Two massive watch-towers threateningly guard its narrow way upon whose steep incline the ponies stumble, and the women bend double under their heavy loads. As we reach the centre of the arch, leaning over the parapet, the head grows giddy as our glance falls far below to where the circling waters of the river foam in never-ceasing eddies. At the far end of the bridge, passing beneath a high arched gate, where a bronzed beggar in filthy rags stretches out a mummied hand, we enter the poorer quarters. The kiosques, less at tractive perhaps, are more crowded with busy throngs. Vegetable-venders and fruit-merchants occupy the stalls, beside butcher shops where ox tongues, fatted pork legs, and bloody sheep's heads hang in abhorrent array. Here the pleasance ends. An isolated booth or two straggle on, but the impression quickly changes, and we find ourselves in the open country on the left bank of the Narenta. Shadows of feathery willows play upon her swirling waters; the great bridge swings high its slender limbs out of the depths and sweeps its graceful curve in air; gray stone roofs lean one upon the other, and minarets, white and [104] Mostar from the Narenta DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST needle-like, punctuate the life-centres; high on the hill-side scintillate the gilded domes and spires of the Greek Church, and back of all these varied forms the mountains tower, preserving, untouched by modem hfe, this picturesque bit of the Orient. [105] Ill RAGUSA AND CATTARO A FTER leaving the Trebisnjica with the moon /-m shining on its waters or hiding behind the rac- ¦^ "^ ing clouds, our train crossed the mountains, then corkscrewed in wide loops down the peaks. Far below in fathomless hollows lay villages, slumbering on hill-tops, with here and there a light gleaming from a tardy window. Villas along the Ombla filed by in ghostly procession and we stopped at Gravosa. It is almost midnight. It has rained, but the night air is soft and fresh. Other carriages starting with ours run a mad race along the road. The horses, their heads toward home, take the hills at a trot and descend at a gallop. Vague forms, half seen in the misty moonlight, speed by : pointed cypress tops and many-fingered pines; the tall shafts of aloes; over hanging fig boughs ; a belfry framing in a big, black bell, narrow stairs climbing into the night; on the one hand conscious of the mountains, on the other, of precipices and the sea, the sound of whose tossing surf comes faintly to our ears. Suddenly, a dark [106] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST passage under over-arching boughs and the horses' hoofs strike hollow on a bridge. Above us a mitred saint, white and ghostlike, nods from a niche on mighty city -walls. A black-mouthed outer gate gulps us in and we descend a steep incline, turn a sharp angle and descend again; another angle and another gate, again through frowning walls and we have passed the impregnable defences of Ragusa and rattle over her paving-stones. The moonlight floods the long Stradone, flanked by rows of palaces, shutters drawn, asleep ; no living being stirs in all the silent street. Even the morning sunlight fails to dispel the strange impression of our midnight arrival, for the morrow reveals Ragusa of to-day, still a perfect vision of the Middle Ages. Its stone-paved streets, narrow as hallways, squeeze between high houses with heavily grated windows. Not a stone has budged in centuries — nothing new has been erected and no where is a sign of decay. Its walls and towers girdle it intact. It is the only city that I know where sol dier-life still peoples the mediaeval walls ; where sen tries pace the crenelated towers and sentinels stand guard at every gate. Its massive bastions house [ 107 ] BY ITALIAN SEAS whole regiments; its moat, converted to a military road, resounds with the tramp of marching feet, and ffiR,: In the Val d'Ombla the drum's beat and bugle's call echo back and forth between reverberating walls. But in spite of her martial appearance Ragusa has always been a peace-loving town. Her citi zens were a wily race and built her giant walls and towers not so much from warlike motives as to [108] Mincetta Tower, Ragusa The Market-place, Ragusa BY ITALIAN SEAS protect their purses. When Venice was strong they courted her favor ; when the Sultan waxed powerful and knocked at her gates, her envoys knew how to curry favor with him by paying heavy tributes. In peace her commerce flourished and her people be came rich and powerful, so that, despite the deviation of maritime trade from the Adriatic to other chan nels, she outlived her more powerful sister republics of Genoa and Venice. She borrowed her arts, her institutions, and her government from the latter city. Her "Rector" corresponded to the Doge, her Small Council duplicated the Council of Ten, the architec ture of her palaces is Venetian Gothic, Titian's Ma donnas decorate her churches, bronze giants strike the hours in the Campanile, and even flocks of fat pi geons, as in San Marco, feed by public charity in the piazza. The worst blow to her independence was not struck by the hand of man. In 1667 a terrific earth quake destroyed half her houses and killed 4,000 of her people, and soon after another calamity overtook her, the burning of the church of her patron saint, St. Biagio, whose silver statue was spared, as by a miracle, by the flames. In Ragusa we always felt we were assisting at a [ no ] .tu The Stradone and Guard-house, Ragusa BY ITALIAN SEAS play. In the Plaza there was the scene by the foun tain, bright with masks and dolphins, with cupids and jets of sparkling water, where the pigeons love to bathe; where the girls come trooping in their rib boned shoes and snowy stockings and, as they laugh ingly gossip and draw their pails of water, a little knot of soldiers at the guard-house near by sum up their charms and pick the prettiest. There was the scene at dusk, among the defences of the Porta Ploce, where giant walls and battle- mented towers frown down on moated gates and bar bicans, where villanous-looking Turks skulk in the shadows driving shaggy cattle and flocks of cluck ing turkeys. And on the Stradone, Ragusa's principal street, there was the scene in Michele Kiri's shop, a cave like place whose ogive door does triple duty — en trance, window and show-case. As we poke our heads into its dark recess our eyes grow wide with wonder like Aladdin's as he rubbed his lamp. A group of Albanians sit cross-legged on low benches stitching gold and silver braids on clothes of green and blue. Around the walls hang rows and rows of caps and coats and vests thick with silk embroideries,. [112] Vestibule of the Rector's Palace, Ragusa DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST surtouts of scarlet, stiff with golden arabesques and cordings,the fleecy marriage robes of Montenegrines, of softest camel's hair and set with gems, long, wadded crimson gowns, such as mountain princes wear on state occasions. In cases, jeweled flint-lock pistols gleam and swords and daggers with Toledo blades and hilts of beaten silver. Long-barreled guns inlaid with mother-of-pearl lie by great leathern belts, studded with carnelians encircled by filigree, the wealth of a mountain borderland, where on fete days each man wears his fortune on his back; riches upon riches like a dream of the Arabian Nights, till one thinks to wake and find it vanished. And at night there were the scenes of humbler hfe in dingy wine-shops, where smoky oil-lamps cast un certain lights among the purple wine-kegs and lit up rows and rows of odd-shaped bottles. Amid the flick ering shadows, a group of contadini gather around a comrade and his gusla — a primitive guitar — and, grinning, listen as he chants the wondrous deeds of Marko Kraljevic, varying the warhke tale with many a joke and note of merriment. But, best of all, there was a quiet afternoon spent in an old Franciscan convent, when the Superior, a [113] BY ITALIAN SEAS charming man of middle age, took me through cor ridor and cell, through the library stocked with rare manuscripts and parchments; through the brothers' court, shaded by palms, vine-grown and redolent of orange-blossoms; and to the refectory, where with his own hand he brewed me a cup of Turkish coffee — "as a souvenir," he said. And he showed me with pride, in the old church, an organ, on which he played most beautifully, and he told me that the instrument — pipes and stops, key -board and bellows — had just been made in his own convent by one of the cunning brothers! What charming days we spent in quiet old Ragusa, in the genial warmth of her southern sun shining hot on the amethyst sea! What joy to sit upon our porch and over the pine-tops see the green walls frowning and the great mass of San Lorenzo, pi geons wheeling round its casements, brood over the open sea, stretching blue and tender away and away to where it marries the sky ! THE BOCCHE DI CATTARO A narrow passage between two formidable forts and the heavy waters of the open sea, dashing in [114] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST foam on rocky crags, are still as if by magic, and we glide into a land-locked bay. Ahead of us moun tains tower. A wondrous pearly light flitting through overhanging clouds faintly tinges their high est crags with silver. Down by the water, Castel- nuovo's pink roofs nestle snug among fields and or chards, and above forests of oak and pine darken the slopes. To the right a narrow strait leads to a second bay. But just at the entrance our steamer stops, and a flat barge swings alongside to take off an officer and his horse. As we wait, twilight quickly creeps upon us, and in a few moments the mountains are but huge silhouettes dimly outlined against the darken ing sky. I know of nothing more provoking than to pass at night a place that one desires to see ; but now adays, when the traveler is subservient to the means of transport, and, like a lifeless object, is but an ac cessory to the voyage, these mishaps are not of rare occurrence. The sound of music suddenly surprises us, and, on turning a bend, we see a blaze of myriad lights — an Austrian squadron anchored in Teodo Bay, the band playing for dinner on the flag-ship. And now all is dark again — the mountains so close about us that stars only twinkle straight above our [115] BY ITALIAN SEAS heads. At ten o'clock the engines stop, and the rattle of chains and windlasses tells us we are docking for the night. Next morning, as we go on deck, we are lying at Cattaro. On every hand great mountains, bare and precipitous, hedge us in. Were it not for the thou sand-ton steamer on which we stand, we should fancy ourselves in a mountain lake — a lake as grand as Como, yet sterner, more like Lugano perhaps, and quite as majestic as a Norwegian fjord. The butting cliffs of the Pestingrad rise 4,000 feet above our heads. On one of its great buttresses, scarred by walls and bastions, perches a mediaeval fortress, an impregnable castle protecting the little town nestling closely under it. Cattaro, intrenched behind grim walls, hums with early morning hfe, and the markets and bazaars swarm with Montenegrins and Albanians driving bargains with Herzegovinians and swarthy Turks, for Cattaro is a focal point in West Balkan hfe. After we had "done" the town, the Leda's captain greets us and proposes a morning drive. A coach man is easily found, a bargain struck, and soon we are rolhng along toward the Catene. On the sheltered riviera the vegetation is most luxuriant. Even in [116] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST these early days of November, heliotrope and tube roses mingle their heavy perfume with the scent of mignonette and wild jasmine. Orange and lemon trees thrust their ripening fruit over the garden walls of old Venetian palazzi on whose wide balconies oleanders bloom. Pepper-trees and acacias throw feathery shadows on tiny rock-bound ports where fishermen are mending their nets. All along the way we breathe the balm of the rich southern air, the sweet fragrance of the flowers, the stern grandeur of the ever-present mountains whose pearly summits all but lose themselves in the opalescence of the sky. The Catene is a narrow strait, so called because it could be closed by means of chains in time of need. It connects the three main waterways of the Bocche and affords a comprehensive view of all three: the Bay of Teodo, ample and enclosed by rolling hills; the Bay of Risano, a limited cove shut in by moun tains almost 5,000 feet in height, and lastly, the Bay of Cattaro, largest and grandest of all. In front of Perasto, lying among orange-groves at the foot of Monte Cassone, two tiny islets, poised hke caravels upon the water, bear the island churches of San Gior gio and the Madonna dello Scapello. On a moody afternoon — sunshine alternating with [117] BY ITALIAN SEAS deep shadows and flecks of rain — we drove up the Cettinje road. Until this century the only road con necting the Montenegrin capital with the coast wound in sharp zigzags down the flanks of the Pes- tingrad and ended in the ravine behind the castle of Cattaro. Sixteen years ago the Austrian govern ment, recognizing the impracticability of this old road, constructed a new one, a triumph of road- building, so wonderfully engineered that, though it mounts to an altitude of 4,000 feet in a distance of twenty miles, horses can trot up nearly all its grade, and Cettinje, thirty miles away, can be reached in five or six hours. We first ascend between the walls of vineyards, but soon gain more open vistas. Oaks and dark- green laurels and feathery olive-trees grow among the granite rocks. Pomegranates on golden trees burst their thick peels and spill their crimson fruit, spoiling to be plucked. But soon the trees are left behind and only dry moss clings to the bare cliffs. The diligence from Budua comes rumbling down the road, drawn by well-groomed horses, a trim vehicle in a fresh coat of yellow paint, with a smart coach man on the box. Girls pass by astride of little moun- [118] DOWN THE DALMATIAN COAST tain ponies; women troop townwards, bearing great bundles of fagots on their heads; and now another caravan comes into view, this time the Montenegrin coach from Cettinje, a dingy, rattle-trap affair full of people and followed by a mail-wagon and an extra horse, a deplorable contrast to the bright Austrian stage we had just passed. A court personage in an antiquated landau follows close behind. Up, up we climb, always over the same smooth, broad road, doubling in zigzags back and forth up the mountain's flanks. At each turn the Bay of Cattaro drops deeper and deeper into the hollow, the town becoming a mere plain spread out beneath us. A longer stretch of straight road and we reach a frontier fortress. Here five ways divide, but still we take the upper one. Presently from the top of a rise we see over the Vrmac and a glorious panorama unfolds itself. Far below the marshy grain-fields of the Zupa shelve to the glimmering waters of Teodo Bay, where floats the Austrian squadron, a battle ship, three cruisers, and an ugly fleet of torpedo- boats. Around us on commanding bluffs earthworks and masked batteries tell us we are on the Austrian frontier. And now another turn and another view, [119] BY ITALIAN SEAS this time toward Budua and the sea, whose calm horizon shows level above jagged hill-tops. Always the same up-grade, always the same zig zags cut in the mountain's flanks, always the same broad road, and now everything drops below the eye — the great sweeping clouds are free above our heads, the mountain-tops on a level with the horizon, the valleys lie like topographical charts beneath our feet and the three great bays of the Bocche — calm and glittering — sleep peaceful in the mountain-hollows. Evening mists thicken far below, long shadows creep up the mountain-sides, the clouds gather close about our heads, and suddenly a burst of glory, a ray of the dying day, flashes through a cloudy rent, flush ing the glaring flanks of the Pestingrad deeper and deeper, till they glow like burnished copper against an inky cloud — a fitting finale to this incomparable drive ! [120] CATTARO TO NAPLES A TRANSITION CATTARO TO NAPLES A TRANSITION WE had lingered in Cattaro three days while the Leda changed her cargo. On the afternoon of the third day, long files of horses from the Montenegrin pastures came down the mountain side — dwarfish, long-haired beasts with sullen tempers and ugly eyes. File by file, with many a tug and push, they were urged up the gang plank, several hundreds stowed away between decks and as many more tied to ropes along the bulwarks. Before dinner we pulled out from the dock and soon were steaming down the Bocche, passing in re view their varied beauties, this time by the waning light of day. Again we passed San Giorgio and its island churches, again sighted the Austrian ships in Teodo Bay and Castelnuovo at the foot of its lofty mountains, then carefully threaded the narrow strait and plunged into the open sea. A stiff breeze and the scurrying clouds high over head had long warned us that all would not be as calm outside the straits as within them. [123] BY ITALIAN SEAS At the first big wave, the horses up on deck began to tumble to and fro, and snort and kick, until their keepers whipped them to obedience. The breeze kept freshening as night drew on and those who are fa mihar with the Adriatic know how the wind can blow. How we rolled and pitched in those cross seas ! How pitiful in the fitful gleams of light to see the beasts, so closely packed that they could not fall down forced by every effort to keep upon their feet and face the waves that every now and then broke over the bow! How they neighed and snorted and how their hoofs resounded on the hollow decks! We pitched and rolled till sleep closed our eyes. Next morning at six we entered the Porto Nuovo at Bari. After a hasty breakfast on deck— the ship smelt abominably with its freight of battered horses —we put off for shore in a small boat. There were several hours to pass before train-time, so we took an early morning drive about the town. What could be more exhilarating than this air after the all-night blow? — exhilarating until we reached the narrow lanes clustered thick, haphazard, round the Cathedral. Already they reeked with humanity, with venders, with swarms of half -naked children, with mongrel [124] CATTARO TO NAPLES curs and dirty cats, and we were glad indeed to emerge once more into the newer Borgo whose broad, straight streets lead to the railway-station. .--- f^'Z'&sgS-z^iets*. ¦fjf Piazza Massari, Bari Soon our slow-going train was skirting the Apulian coast. How quickly the sea had calmed! What a moody creature the Adriatic is, frowns and smiles succeeding each other upon her face as frequently as upon the features of the hot-tempered beings who people her shores! Now she lay smiling, soft and tranquil in the morning light, forgetful of her anger of the night before. Already the white-sailed fishing- boats were out for their morning catch. Turning our eyes landward, we noted the richness [125] BY ITALIAN SEAS of the country : the fine olive plantations, famous for centuries for their yield of olive-oil; the peach and cherry orchards now stripped of their fruit; the figs with shining waxen leaves and the hedges of prickly- pear (the fichidindia) in the full bearing of its strange red bloom. Molfetta, Bisceglie, Trani with its lofty cathedral, succeeded each other, their houses low, flat, painted in delicious pastel tones of shell-pink or pale ochre, and so oriental in appearance, with their blank sides pierced only with the tiniest of windows, that one was not at all surprised to see the population living on the roof-tops. In the streets, at the stations or along the field paths, we caught glimpses of funny two-wheeled sciarraba — strange etymological corruption of "char- a-bancs" — the universal cart of the country. What romantic associations attach to this province of Apulia! But a few miles hence, near Barletta, Hannibal gained his signal victory at Cannae, slaying seventy thousand Roman soldiers and taking one of the Consuls prisoner. All through the Middle Ages the fields were a continual battleground twixt Nor man and Savoyard, Angevin and Spaniard. Robert [126] CATTARO TO NAPLES Guiscard lies buried in Canosa ; near Andria, Colonna and Bayard "sans peur et sans reproche," each with his thirteen knights, the flower of chivalry, fought for the possession of Barletta; Manfred left his name to Manfredonia. And as we cross the great, treeless expanse of the Tavoliere di Puglia, where at this season hundreds of thousands of sheep are turned out to graze, as they were in the days of Rome, we recall the great Hohenstaufen, Frederick II. as we approach Foggia, his residence. Here at Foggia our train is remade and we start across the Italian Peninsula, leaving the Adriatic be hind us, turning our faces toward the mountains up the valley of the Cervaro. We regretted that we could not stay at Benevento, so rich in classic souvenirs. Instead we interested our selves, while at the station, in the modernity of a young naval officer who entered our compartment and his friends wishing him god-speed from the plat form and sending "their greetings to the marquis." As we left we caught a glimpse of the city, crested on its hill-top and dominated by imposing churches. Then we entered a veritable vale of loveliness. In the midst of upland fields stood rows of stately [127] BY ITALIAN SEAS plane-trees chained together by grape-vines, golden in the warm autumnal sunshine, lacing themselves, across, backward and forward, one above another, until they formed, as it were, glowing screens of flut tering leaves and tendrils, giving unimaginable elegance to the landscape and at once recalling Gau- tier's charming description wherein he likens them to a bacchante-choir, who, in mute transport, celeb rating the ancient Lycaea, joined hands to scamper over the fields in an immense farandole. In the fields under them, great oxen, slow and de liberate, plowed up the black, rich soil — true oxen of the sun, tawny and robust, with broad foreheads and long curving horns, such as Homer depicts in the Odyssey. And now we descend the valley of the Calore. Tall stone-pines begin to appear among the poplars, — trees shorn of all their lower limbs, but branching out to great breadth at the top, hanging suspended, as it were, like green islands in the sky. They pace the fields in lordly avenues. No vine dares cling to the proud trunks that bear their loads alone. The afternoon wears on; the shadows lengthen. Down, down we fly now, in one tunnel and out of an- [128] •*"ct«- ^'¦¦/%'X. ' '""''"'¦ Pace the fields in lordly avenues BY ITALIAN SEAS other. On a height below a church-spire gleams and houses stepping down a steep hill-slope. Below them an endless plain — all limits lost in a silvery haze — a light of silver with only the stone-pines distinguish able by their dark spots of color. Ah, for another glimpse of that fairyland, that mystic land of charm! But no; down, down we go, unrelentingly, our whistle blowing a continuous warning note until we reach the level of the plain, there to enjoy a similar peaceful pastoral scene of new-turned earth and fields of softest green, of vines festooned from tree to tree, of stone-pines standing sentinel. How rich and lush it all is ! And the color of it all— the tawny browns, the russets and ochres, the scarlets and golden yellows ! The evening mists begin to thicken. A filmy mountain shape appears, but faint and evanescent as a dream. Is it, or is it not? Yes, at least it is Vesuvius, volumes of smoke pour ing down its eastern slope — no scirocco — the good weather sign! [130] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS A NEAPOLITAN STORY IF you should ask Giuseppe whether he had ever seen a Christmas-tree, he would shake his head and answer, "No." Though he knew all the saints in the Itahan calendar, if you should ask him who Santa Claus was, he would look perplexed, and vow he had never heard of him. And if, continuing your queries, you should ask what he liked best for Christmas dinner, he would snap his black eyes, and quickly answer, "Eels!" For little Neapolitan boys have never seen a Christmas-tree nor even so much as heard of plum- pudding and turkey with cranberry sauce. And dear old Santa Claus never ventures as far south as Naples for fear the icicles would melt off his long white beard, and his fleet reindeer would suffocate in the unwonted heat! But Giuseppe could tell you all about the banca- relle in the Toledo, and about bombs they set off at midnight on Christmas-eve, and about the wonders [133] BY ITALIAN SEAS of the presepi in the churches — for he had his way of celebrating Christmas just as we have ours. And now for several weeks as he plodded through the narrow lanes of Naples, selling his onions, he had been watching sure signs of the approaching holi days. Had he not seen the zampognari come in from their mountain homes — shepherds dressed in sheep-skins with their legs tied up in thongs of hide, playing bagpipes in the streets, while little boys clapped their hands and danced before them, first on one foot, then on the other? And were not the shops putting forth their most attractive wares, and were not the pastry-cooks making little boys' mouths water with displays of most amazing cakes and tarts, dressed mountains high with candied fruits and icing? And now httle booths were being put up along the Toledo. Even at home Aunt Carmela was rigging up an extra awning and dressing her vege table shop with green boughs, and making it attrac tive by hanging about the door bunches of small red tomatoes, and yellow grapes and poppone — green Sicilian melons tasseled with colored tissue paper. Giuseppe was a little onion-seller. Having no mother, he lived with his Aunt Carmela, and was one [134] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS of that large class of Neapolitan boys who go about the streets bare-footed in tattered rags, sing ing at the top of their lusty voices when not calling out their wares, and seemingly as happy as the sons of any prince. And now the day before Christ mas had come, and he prepared to set off even earlier than usual, and with a longer string of onions. But just as he was leaving the shop, Aunt Carmela called him back and said: "Here, take this paper and these seven soldi, and before you come home to-night go to the monks of San Gregorio and they will give you a torta for me." As he started out, the tardy winter sunshine was just squeezing into the narrow streets, and Christmas was in the very air. Every cart flaunted flags and colored papers, and all the donkeys and shaggy horses wore sprigs of green in their harness. The air was ahve with venders' cries, and Giuseppe had [135] A Peddler BY ITALIAN SEAS to scream his "cippole, cippole," else he could not even hear the sound of his own voice. But the onions sell well this morning. In the Via Conte di Mola the people are all his friends. It must be confessed that he stops often to chat with his comrades who sell garlic and brooms and goat's cheese. At a corner sits Zia Amelia shak ing her big copper tub of boiling chestnuts. She hails Giuseppe with a friendly "giorno" and takes three of his biggest onions. A little farther on, on a high table outside a shop-door — holding court as it were — sits Benedetto's white poodle, surrounded as he always is by a crowd of boys and girls marveling at his curly white coat. And to-day an organ-grinder is playing gay tunes, and all the children are dancing, and the half -shaved poodle looks majestically down as proud as a king. How happy Naples is! It is hard for little boys to sell onions on such a day, but Giuseppe braces himself up, remembering that he must make a few extra coppers, for was n't he seven and almost a man, and were not some of these very same coppers to help buy the eels for dinner to-night? There, near the corner, Donna Gracia is filling the lamps in front [136] Donna Gracia Filling the Lamps GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS of the Madonna — three lamps there are to-day, and beautiful new paper-flowers. And oh, good for tune! for Donna Gracia buys the remainder of his onions, and he jingles ten big soldi in his pocket. And he thanks the Madonna, looking smilingly down at him, as he counts his wealth and then hastens into the Toledo — the main street of Naples. What a bustle in the great thoroughfare ! As far as you can see along both sidewalks, range banca- relle — gay httle booths covered with rickety awn ings, where boys and girls and grown-up people, too, for that matter can buy anything in the world for a cent. There are tin bugs that fly and green balloons that squeak and knives and tiny bersaglieri with feathers jn their caps and little wax Gesu Bimbi, lying in cradles shaded by parasols of pink paper- flowers. And there are side-combs for little girls' hair and brooches and crooked horns of coral to keep away the evil eye, and beautiful pink shells, in which, when he puts them to his ear, Giuseppe can hear the roaring of the sea just as you can down on the Mer- gellina. He idles along fascinated, as who would n't be, from one gay booth to another, until suddenly he finds himself in the sunshine of the Piazza Dante. [137] BY ITALIAN SEAS But he hardly knows it to-day, for instead of the broad open space, bare and desolate, he sees a weav ing multitude of venders and purchasers — a topsy turvy of crockery, of tinsmith's wares, of blue-glass jugs and thick tumblers. Alighieri", high on his pedestal, his chin upon his fingers, looks solemnly down on the restless throng in the same austere man ner as when he walked among them centuries ago. But Giuseppe is not thinking of the great poet. His little mind is intent on that torta for Aunt Car mela. From the crowded Via Tribunali he turns into the street of St. Gregory the Armenian, and there stands wide-mouthed with wonder. Here is a Christmas street indeed! All along its narrow way, shops put out upon the paving stones richly robed Madonnas in glass cases, and such lovely Gesu Bimbi with real curled hair and golden crowns upon their heads. On shelves around the doorways are ranged boxes of strange Eastern Kings, of black servitors in gor geous attire, of shepherds and saints and peasants, and camels and elephants. Cows and donkeys lie waiting to be placed in the manger. Angels fly about the ceilings among bunches of gayly painted flowers. [138] What a bustle in the great thoroughfare ! GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS In each doorway sits a young girl. Near her a glue-pot steams over a charcoal brazier, and all about lie baskets of moss and bits of cork, and armies of little chalk figures ready to be stuck upon the rough grotto standing on a chair before her. And Giu seppe's eyes grow wide as under her deft touch the rude paste-board grotto with its triple cave is trans formed into a veritable work of art. Trees grow upon its painted mountain-tops. Pink castles and shepherds' huts are built upon its shelving roads. Moss falls in soft masses to break the harsher hnes. Iri the centre grotto the Child is placed, with Mary and Joseph watching over it; the shepherds, the Magi gather about. In a side cave peasants make merry at a Christmas feast. And now the nimble fingers plant gay flowers round the sleeping Child and the presepe is finished. As Giuseppe wanders down the street — so slowly — he sees fond mothers buying these pretty toys, and he thinks of the happy children who will have a presepe all their own that Christmas-eve, and of the tiny toddlers, the youngest of the family, who will light the Christmas candles. In one shop larger than the others, where in a case upon the street such wonderful wooden zampognari, [ 139 ] BY ITALIAN SEAS dressed in real clothes, play their pipes, he sees a priest buying a presepe for a church — each of its little figures made with love and care, the Eastern kings in velvets and satins, the peasants in old-fash ioned knee-breeches and kerchiefs. Lovely lambs lie upon the hillsides, and angels hover in the air. It is a wonderland, this street, but once again Aunt Carmela's errand spurs him on, and with a sigh he hurries along to the Gregorian convent. Its big street-door gapes wide open, and he climbs a long broad flight of steps on whose soaring vaults angels on clouds and bearded prophets are painted. The green double doors of the convent are closed, but in each is a httle barred wicket through which the monks can see without being seen— for these good brothers, who spend their hves in cooking for the poor, never show themselves to the world. At either side of the door, in niches, revolve beautiful tables covered with domes of burnished brass. Giuseppe gave Aunt Carmela's paper and the seven soldi to an old woman standing by the wicket, and she told him to go and sit down among the men and women waiting on the long stone bench at the head of the stairs. 1 140 ] Here is a Christmas street indeed! GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS As he sat, he watched with wonderment those shin ing brass rotoli revolve by invisible means, each revo lution bringing round a mysterious package. As their names were called, old men and young girls, poor women and little boys, would receive these pack ages — one a basket, another a dish, covered with a A Donkey Cart white cloth, others loaves of well-baked bread, and others platters. And he wondered what that mira culous table would bring around for him. When the old donna called Aunt Carmela's name he stepped up and she handed him a low basket wrapped in a clean white cloth. He deftly placed the basket on his head and trotted down the long broad steps, then [141] BY ITALIAN SEAS took a short cut home, for he wished to be in time to help in buying the Christmas dinner. When he reached his aunt's shop she greeted him quite affectionately, having had a prosperous day. Then she uncovered the basket' he had brought, and he saw that it contained a beautiful susamiella — a tart covered all over with chocolate and sugar — a dish that little Neapolitan boys are very fond of in deed. When she asked him where his onions were, he proudly produced his ten soldi and handing them to her, said : "Here, these will help buy the eels for dinner." Aunt Carmela actually patted him on the head, a very great condescension on her part, and Giuseppe was very proud, I can tell you. The bottega was left in charge of a cousin, and Giuseppe and his aunt started off to buy the Christ mas dinner. Day was closing and the narrow streets were teem ing with a busy crowd making their last purchases. The shop-windows reeked with good things to eat. The butchers' shops displayed rows of whole lamb skinned to the middles, and kids, heads down, spitted on sticks of wood. In one store-window Giuseppe was fascinated at the sight of a little sucking-pig, [142] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS roasted whole, of a crackly brown color, lying on its stomach with a golden orange in its mouth. But he knew it was no use wishing for that delicacy— that was only for rich boys. In the wider streets and at every street-corner market-stalls had been erected. Vegetables and fruit littered the sidewalks. Women with baskets were haggling and bargaining over tubs of oysters and clams and sea-urchins (which an American boy would n't look at, but which Giuseppe smacked his lips over) . And there were such quan tities of fish with their tails tied to their heads so that their bodies were on a curve and their great red gills stood wide open to show that they were fresh. But the things that interested him most were the endless baskets of eels — squirming, wriggling eels, the chief delicacy of the Neapolitan Christmas. How slippery they looked in their low flat baskets, and how they wriggled when the man tried to catch them! Finally, Aunt Carmela, after much bargaining, de cided upon some that were not so lively, Giuseppe thought, but they were a little cheaper than the others. The vender dexterously threaded them one after another on a twisted straw and Giuseppe car ried them in triumph wriggling home. [143] BY ITALIAN SEAS By the time they reached the shop it was night. The busy day was over, so the vegetables were brought in from the street and stowed away in cor ners between the furniture and under the beds. For you must know that bed-room and fruit-store and living-room and dining-room and kitchen are all one in Aunt Carmela's house, as they are in the home of nearly every small dealer in Naples. The vege tables are usually arranged about the door-way on shelves and rickety tables. The room, having no win dow, receives its only light and ventilation from the glass door, shaded by muslin curtains. In the centre of one wall an open fireplace is hung with sooty pots and pans and a copper vessel or two. A cupboard for dishes and two wardrobes stand in corners. The remaining available space is occupied by two iron beds, a half-dozen lame chairs, a deal table, and a tub half -full of soapy water. At the foot of the beds a bureau bears upon its marble top all the finery of the poor household. Blue glass vases and a cup or two — too fine to be put in the cupboard — stand be tween five-pronged gilt candelabra. Against the wall range three glass cases, two containing artificial flowers, the third a figure of the Virgin and Child, [144] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS before which an oil-wick is always burning, for though often there may not be bread in the house, there is always oil for the Virgin's taper. To-night the dark room is the scene of much activ ity. The fire is poked up in the chimney-piece. The greasy table is moved near the door, and around it are ranged the rickety chairs and several fruit-boxes. For Aunt Carmela, better off than most of her poor relatives, has invited them to share her nine o'clock Christmas dinner — a dinner, you must understand, where no meat is permitted, but which is a veritable orgy of fish and vegetables. While Aunt Carmela is busy cooking, Giuseppe spreads a fresh cloth on the table and puts a cracked oil-lamp in the centre. And then he arranges ten thick plates along the sides, each with a chunk of bread beside it. Knives and forks are few, but to make up for them there are many bottles of dark-red wine. And now the guests begin to arrive and soon are seated around a great steaming dish of maccaroni al pomidoro— the children propped up in high-chairs, the men in shirt-sleeves with their caps on their heads. After the pasta, fish is brought on — baccala fried [145] BY ITALIAN SEAS and baccala boiled — and quantities of vegetables, all stewed together. There is much talking and much drinking of the dark-red wine. Then come the eels, fried and cut in pieces, saluted with "ahs" and "ohs" and rattling of plates, and everybody begins to feel gay and drinks more wine. Giuseppe, who had been given no knife, uses his pocket clasp-knife, as do Uncle Beppo and the other men, and he feels very warm and happy. Then Aunt Carmela brings in the oranges and nuts and figs and the susamiella from the Gregorian convent ; and as Giuseppe gulps down his great big slice he thinks there never was or has been such a feast as this ! But the warmth of the room and the weight of this unaccustomed evening meal, combined with his long walks that day, were too much for the little fel low. Even Uncle Beppo's loud voice and the clink ing of the wine-glasses and the scraping of the chairs could not keep his eyes open. So he threw himself, dressed as he was, on one of the beds and soon was sound asleep. Not even the loud laughter nor the rattle of the lotto numbers as they fell from the bag, nor the clink of the coppers, nor the scraping of the chairs and benches as the diners pushed back from [146] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS the table and crowded out to go to the Midnight Mass, locking the door behind them — none of these sounds disturbed his weary sleep. Two zampognari played their pipes But in his dreams he heard the exploding bombs and fireworks in the crowded streets — the pande monium of the Naples night — and he saw such won derful visions! There, by bis bedside, two zampo gnari played their pipes, and he watched the bags fill up and the old fingers wander over the worm- eaten keys, and he dreamt he was their httle boy, [147] BY ITALIAN SEAS dancing before them and clapping his hands — danc ing first on one foot and then on the other. And then around their heads there grew a wondrous hght, and in the light he saw the Madonna smiling so gently at him and the Child, while angels with golden halos flew about and cherubim and Magi came with precious caskets! . . . Giuseppe slept very late on Christmas-morning, but even when he awoke, everyone in the shop was still asleep. For all Naples is tired out from the festivities of Christmas-eve, and Christmas-day is very quiet. Giuseppe, from force of habit, hunted out a string of onions and set off on his daily rounds. But to-day he lagged about the churches. He knew that within their portals the presepi had been uncovered. In his babyhood his dear mother had always taken him in her arms to see these wonderlands, and when he was older had led him by the hand and pointed out their beauties. But now he had no dear mother, and he was a man and must look out for himself. So when he came to Santa Maria in Portico, he resolutely ascended the stone steps to the open door. But there sat three old beggars, and one, pushing [148] There he saw a wondrous scene GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS him back, said: "Here, piccolo, out with your onions," and he timidly went back a step or two. How he longed to behold what everyone else was going in to see! Just then some women, with their heads tied up in colored kerchiefs, came clacking up the steps in their wooden pattens, and Giuseppe squeezed in after them unnoticed, for the old beggars were too busy asking for coppers. And then he found himself before a wondrous scene: mountains so high, as high as Saint Elmo, he thought — covered with castles and strange trees and figures as big as hfe. He felt quite at home in the great church, and soon was standing by the candles in front of the manger, saying an Ave Maria. There was the Madonna in a great cave, and back of her a donkey, and a cow as big as Uncle Beppo's that he takes night and morn ing through the streets to sell the milk. The Ma donna is dressed in a long pink satin gown with a blue scarf about her shoulders — blue as Giuseppe's own blue skies. On her head rests a golden crown, and at her feet, on a big wisp of real straw, lies a lovely Child in a dress of white and gold— what a pink little Bimbo he is ! Watching over him stands [149] BY ITALIAN SEAS Saint Joseph— Giuseppe's own patron saint.in a gor geous purple robe — he had never seen so elegant a San Giuseppe before. Above the entrance to the cave flutters a half circle of pink little cherubs, and so happy they look! Above them larger angels fly out to proclaim the gladsome tidings. And what a black man is kneeling before the Infant and offering the Virgin a basket of chestnuts ! Behind him comes a contadina in a lovely dress of red silk brocade, such as the fathers hang upon the church pillars. She is bringing a basket of eggs, and has upon her head a white kerchief such as grandma used to wear when she came in from Castellamare. What a funny httle dog follows that old man carrying the oranges ! Descending from the mountains come the black Kings in coats of gold, with great turbans on their heads, and their slaves behind them are laden with golden boxes — what can be in them? And there are the shepherds who saw the Star and more people traveling on camels from far-off countries, and there are castles and palm-trees and fairy roads — all so wonderful that Giuseppe's little neck grows tired looking up so high. And there, in another grotto, he spies an old blind beggar, near a wine-shop, where [150] GIUSEPPE'S CHRISTMAS a lovely donna in purple satin is selhng sausages and long loaves of bread, and a man is vending cheese of goat's milk— oh, how Giuseppe loves that cheese and bread! Suddenly he sees that it is real goat's cheese spread on real cabbage-leaves, and remembers that he has n't A Goatherd .-- V - had a thing to eat that morning and feels very hun gry. But he has n't sold an onion yet, and there 's not a centesimo in his pocket. In a chapel he kneels before San Giuseppe's altar and repeats his prayer, and adds: "And oh, San Giuseppe, if you could, I 'd so like some goat's cheese, for I 'm very hungry." A side door swings open and Giuseppe sees a ray [151] BY ITALIAN SEAS of sunshine, and out he goes into the daylight and raises his shrill httle cry, "cippole, cippole." The same cry answers him from a balcony and a basket is lowered. And there in the basket lies a soldo, which he exchanges for three of his onions and off he goes. And then would you believe it, from around the corner comes a man with a flat basket on his head calling fresh goat's cheese, and Giuseppe changes two of his centesimi for a pat on a cabbage- leaf. "Oh, San Giuseppe 's always so good to me," says he, as he puts his string of onions down on the sidewalk. Then kneeling beside them, he pulls out of his ragged pocket a chunk of coarse bread upon which, with his clasp-knife, he spreads the lump of cheese — and there, in the sunhght, he eats his meagre little Christmas dinner. [152] SICILY SICILY EASTER TIDE IT was a good two months since the Cristoforo Colombo had brought us over from Naples, since we had awakened that first morning to find our selves in Palermo's beautiful bay. All about purple mountains encompassed the fertile Conca d'Oro, rounded like a vase to receive the sea from Monte Pellegrino, Saint Rosaly's shrine, on the one hand, to the Catalfano, bearded with giuncara, the Kvirei- pos of Theocritus, on the other. These two months had been given in the usual way to a study of Monreale and the Capella Palatina; to a trip to Segesta; to Girgenti, "most beautiful of the cities of mortals"; to Castrogiovanni, the Enna of the ancients, home of Ceres and Proserpine ; and now we found ourselves comfortably settled in Taormina, with an apartment of our own standing on the very wall of the old Naumachia. Venere ministered to all [155] BY ITALIAN SEAS our wants — Venus in name, though not in looks, being a Sicihan of the Norman cast, with grey eyes V, The Cloisters at Monreale and high cheek-bones; nor did she in character re semble the fickle Grecian goddess, being but a good and faithful soul, steadfast and worthy and devotion itself. [156] SICILY Our living-room opened upon a terrace, old rose in color, with a marble seat at either end and potted aloes at the corners. Immediately below this terrace lay the depths of the Naumachia, shored up on its walls of Roman masonry, but now devoid of even a vestige of water. Instead of its once glassy surface, darkened by reflections of surrounding heights, it now showed green and grassy and fragrant with the odor of lemon-trees in bloom, whose sweetness on those still evenings of early spring arose so strongly to our windows as to be at times intolerable. In the afternoons and at dusk, a shepherd there would play his pipes as he watched his sheep nibbling in cool shadows — notes so sweet and bird-like, music naive and primitive, such as Acis learned from Pan to play to his Galatea. Beyond this lemon-grove the cliff dropped sheer two hundred yards to the level of the glittering Ionian Sea. Southward, where glistening lines of sand curved sharp against the purple waves, the ancient plains of Naxos lay, and Acireale by the lava islands that the bhnded Polyphemus, roaring in his rage, hurled at crafty Ulysses. Beyond them Etna reared its lofty [157] BY ITALIAN SEAS head, ten thousand feet above the sea, stretching its rich dark lava fields below, its craters, bald and bleak, above, and covered with a cloak of snow, whence jagged rocks protruded, like tippets on an ermine mantle, while about the summit hung its filmy crown of smoke, the breath of Enceladus imprisoned in its bosom. Northward the Greek Theatre settled in a saddle of the hills, and beyond it loomed the mountains of Taranto's gulf and the pale Apennine chain dying in the point of Calabria. What sunsets we enjoyed over this glittering Ionian Sea! At times its wide expanse lay green as a pale emerald and again lit up with reflections of turquoise and amethyst or grew gray and misty un der the humid breath of the scirocco, changing its color like a chameleon with every accident of atmo sphere and every mood of wind and weather. And now the early Spring began to manifest it self. Along the hedges the euphraise displayed its humble corolla and in the grass the first violets peeped forth, "pale as a pair of unhappy lovers." Then we found the aster with its golden disk, the centaury and cyclamen and the asphodel, Bacchus's [158] SICILY favorite flower. The bougainviUea clothed the villas in its royal purple bloom. ^*J&.. Pulpit, Capella Palatina, Palermo Before we knew it Holy Week was upon us. In turn we visited the different churches to see in each a crucifix laid upon the pavement embowered in [159] BY ITALIAN SEAS lilies that were to flower mid grains of wheat ready to sprout on Easter-day. The peasants, especially children, came in humbly in great numbers and, dropping upon their knees, kissed the rude figures of ivory or wood and drew down their tiny brothers and sisters to do likewise. The past few days I had been reading Renan's "Life of Christ" and was finishing it on Holy Thurs day. The town was strangely silent. No venders hawked their donkey-loads of oranges and vege tables; no carts rattled over the lava paving-stones; not even a footstep echoed between the high stone walls. Suddenly the silence was broken, for at the far end of the village a bell began to toll, slowly and solemnly — deep, long-spaced notes at equal intervals: a fu neral knell. Then came the tap of a muffled drum followed by distant notes of a dirge. I stepped out upon our other terrace, commanding a view of Taor- mina's single, twisting street. Others, like myself, were out upon their balconies or at their windows and, hushed, all eyes were turned toward the end of the street that leads to the Messina gate. There at its farthermost extremity a slow-moving procession [160] ¦ Taormina SICILY came into view, preceded by a group of eager, won der-stricken children. Choir-boys with lighted can- Fountain of the Minotaur, Taormina dies led the way, followed by a gray -beard, aged and wrinkled, clad in a long white gown, his head en circled with a crown of thorns, and staggering under the weight of a great black cross inscribed with the [161] BY ITALIAN SEAS four mystic letters. Behind him his brotherhood, also in white, followed two and two. Many who did not wish their identity known in the charitable work of the fraternity had drawn their pointed hoods down over their faces, only the eyes being visible through two round apertures; others had their caps thrown back, exposing their rough, weather-beaten faces that Phoebus had scorched to parchment with his fierce rays. All wore capes of faded crimson, crowns of thorns and halters knotted round their necks. Six of the stoutest carried a pitiful Pieta, — a statute of the Virgin, of colored wood, life-size, life-like in her misery, her hands raised in agony, a sword plunged in her heart and upon her knees a figure of the cruci fied Christ. Around this litter clustered groups of peasants, men and women, who from time to time cast furtive glances at the mournful figure and reached out their hands to touch the wounds, then kissed the tips of their fingers. Following the Pieta thus carried like a bier, walked the village priest, chief mourner, muffled in a great black cassock which he drew up to his very eyes that gleamed piercingly from under the broad brim of his shovel-hat. After him trooped more peasants in festival attire, but so mute, so [162] Procession on Holy Thursday SICILY down-hearted in their sorrow that surely no one with a heart, no matter what his religious con victions, could fail to have been impressed by their simple, heart-felt demonstration of faith. What the humble Galileans felt that day so long ago, they felt to-day, not needing the pomp of gorgeous churches nor the spell of incense-laden air to waken their hearts, but feeling their sorrow in spite of the open heaven and the breath of the fields in their nostrils. We followed the little concourse from church to church and at each the crowd grew denser, collecting as it passed tlirough the village. Finally at San Domenico the procession made its way with such great difficulty that in the bustling I noticed the poor old man who carried the cross, vainly striving to make his way to the church door. In his efforts his crown of thorns had been pressed upon his forehead and drops of blood ran down his face and through his snowy beard on to his crumpled gown. But he, ob livious of self, pushed on, intent only on the mission he was accomplishing. That night, so they told us, he slept upon the cold stone floor and, when asked why he did not occupy his bed, rebuked them with the answer: "Should I lie higher than my Master?" [163] BY ITALIAN SEAS Early Friday morning we were awakened by the sound of muffled drums and saw a similar procession, only this time, instead of the Virgin wounded in the heart, a figure of the fe. dead Christ was car ried in a glass coffin from church to church. But it was at five of that same afternoon that the great pro cession was formed. Every member of the brotherhoods and every nun and every peasant, man or wo man, carried a hghted candle, as they do at high-class funerals. The cortege formed quite as on the day before, with the addition of several schools of boys and girls carrying their silken banners. From these schools of little girls in white a dozen had been chosen to carry the twelve symbols of the Cruci- [164] The Badia Vecchia SICILY fixion: — the whipping-post, the whip, the hammer and the pincers, the sponge, the lance, the seamless garment, the napkin of Saint Veronica, the ladder, the nails, and lastly the cross. Saturday morning a carriage drew up at our door to take us up the Alcantara valley, for we wanted to see as much as possible of the people's life that day. It was a dubious morning, but we hoped that the sun would peep forth later, and that Mercury, guardian of roads and journeys, would be kind to us. We were soon winding down the looped road that descends from Taormina to Giardini, where we found the httle street-altars decked for Holy Week with sprouting grain, to symbolize the Resurrection, and draped with snow-white sheets. Then we crossed the turbid Alcantara, swollen and yellow, rushing down to Naxos from the upper mountain valleys, and followed up along its bank through a rich coun try, planted thick with vines and lemon-trees, whose fruit now in full harvest, lay in golden pyramids upon the ground. What mountains of it there were, and how little store the peasants set by it! Sicily [165] BY ITALIAN SEAS has lost the market for its lemon crop. California has supplanted it. Lemons that used to bring four times as much, now sell for two or three francs a thousand. It is the same old story, repeated ad infinitum. Sicily, a terrestrial paradise to the ancients, the home of Ceres, goddess of plenty, the granary of Europe, is to-day but a poor land where the peasant barely ekes out his subsistence. Misrule, abuse of taxation, lack of progress and lack of education have been its persistent enemies. Until this generation, so an engineer of the Gir- genti sulphur-mines told me, only eight per cent, of the population could read or write, and even now, with compulsory education in force, only twenty- five per cent, are educated. The law is a dead letter. It cannot be enforced, for it does no good to put the parents in prison, and no fines can be collected from the penniless peasants, who would rather turn their boys out to guard the goats at ten cents a day than send them to school. They work the fields as in the time of Adam, plowing with rude wooden plows that merely scratch the surface of the earth, where a good steel imple- [166] SICILY ment would easily reach virgin soil. The result is evident. The Sicilian for years has been quitting his fields, to direct his energies elsewhere. This question of emigration is recognized as a vital one in Italy, not as a simple matter of jurisdiction over emigrants or pre ventive measures against their departure, but re solving itself into this question: how to keep the im mense capital of human energy which every year is taken from the mother-country from expending itself for the benefit of others. In this age, when the races are fighting not with the sword, but with the pick and shovel, each realizes that everything that goes to the increment of the neighbor is per nicious to itself. The three million Italians who in less than thirty years have left their native fields, made sterile by the assessor's tax, to substitute agriculture for cattle- raising in the Argentine pampas, to plant coffee in the depths of the Brazilian forests, to grow the vine and orange and lemon in California and, even in the basin of the Mediterranean to sow grain and plant olives in Tunis under the French flag and construct the dikes of the Nile for the Enghsh, thus to redeem [167] BY ITALIAN SEAS ten thousand square miles of arable land, have created competition to their own home industries, and in many cases, as in this very lemon-crop, have completely killed their country's export trade. As an intelligent Italian once said to me : "In the conquest of the earth, the great feat of our time, Italy is the arm. Others think, she works; others direct, she obeys; others become rich, she remains poor." The little towns along our route showed only too plainly the pernicious results of misrule: half -aban doned, poor and dismal villages, especially so that day under a lowering sky that threatened rain at any moment. At Kaggi the church-door stood open and music floated forth to the peasants picturesquely grouped under the porch. We looked in a moment to watch the sea of heads in yellow and cadmium kerchiefs that extended from the door to the altar, where the priests were chanting in a cloud of incense. Then on the road again we admired the striking silhouette of Motta Camastra, perched like an eagle's nest high among the cliffs. And now the first big drops of rain began to fall and we put up the carriage [168] — -^ A *fi\ &^*~'; ¦_., •••••m ^>t 'tv-. I® f>) J- ^ma^ Perched on the steep hill-sides BY ITALIAN SEAS top. An avenue of cupa led past a quiet campo santo, shadowed by cypresses, to Francavilla, whose ruined castle had long been in sight, with behind it the strange outline of Castiglione that we were to see from so many points of view. Even here, far from Etna, whose towering bulk had for some time shad owed our path from the left, streams of lava had penetrated. We clattered over Francavilla's stony streets, where again in the mud and rain we were impressed with the squalor and poverty of the town, lean pigs, chickens, children, cats and peasants living pell-mell, promiscuously in dire confusion. How they stared at us — rare forestieri — and how the pigs squealed at the horses ! As we wound up the loops under the hazel-nut trees that lead to Castiglione, the rain began to fall in torrents — a downpour such as one only encounters in southern climes. We drove into a stable where we alighted and were piloted by a slattern to rest and wait awhile in a room upstairs. Luckily we had lunched from a well-stocked basket by the roadside. We were actually afraid to sit in the upholstered chairs. We did sample the hazel-nuts for which the town is famed all over Sicily, and then were shown [170] SICILY the baby of the house, the only cherished possession. Around its neck hung the inevitable bit of red coral to ward off the evil eye. These old-time superstitions still are universal among the peasantry. Their constant dread is the jettatura, and all wear luck-charms to ward it off. When a child is born four amulets are hung about its neck: a httle horn of coral, a cockle shell, a key and a tiny sack of salt — the horn to keep away the jettatura, the shell for safe-keeping, the key to enter paradise and the salt for wisdom. A Sicihan friend told us of a child whose lovely blonde curls were the envy of every mother in the neighborhood. Often the house-porter, when he saw little Jeannette, so pretty with her dimpled arms and ribbons at her shoulders, used to say to her mother: "Ah, signora, I so fear the evil eye for the little signorina." But the mother held firm. One day, however, both curls and ribbons were gone and signora, when questioned, merely answered, "Oh, the jettatura!" It is the prayer of every Sicihan mother not to have a child born in March, their month of evil omen — the month of the Passion. We were back in the carriage at three again and [ 171 ] BY ITALIAN SEAS once more began to climb. The clouds swept very low. As we looked back on Castiglione the mists hung all about it, disclosing first one silhouette, then another, veiling and unveiling a church, a cross or a castellated rock. Far below, down at the bottom of the hazel-clad hillsides, lay valleys, fields and vine yards and the Alcantara winding ribbon-like through it all. On the other hand, the flanks of Etna mounted into the clouds, patches of snow appearing under the pine forests on the lower slopes. We took a last look down the road we had ascended, for we were now at the top of the pass on the Monte Rizzo, then started downward into the valley of the Minissale. Even as we did so the sky began to lighten and the clouds to rush from the black wastes of the Mon- gibello, towering ever higher and higher until at last its summit was disclosed in a rift of scudding clouds, The awful peak, Etna's great mouth Round which the sullen vapor rolls. Linguaglossa, whence Crispi's daughter drew her title, proved cleaner than its neighbors and possessed shops of some importance. After we had rattled [172] SICILY over its rough paving-stones we found ourselves on the very slopes of Etna. How can one describe the strangeness of the Etnean landscape, where the earth lies deep buried under a covering of inky substance? The diligent work of patient generations of humanity has ter raced these lava streams all up the hillsides and grown them rich with vineyards. Villas and well-kept. houses testify to the fruitfulness of the soil. Yet every now and then the landscape takes on a hateful mood. Around Piedimonte, entirely built of lava and, after the heavy rainfall of a moment since, shin ing like a negro's face in summer, nature had piled up mountains of fantastic form and gouged out chasms of horrid shape, black, barred and desolate as the surface of the moon, hateful as the pits in Dante's Hell. Down, down we went, steeper and steeper, passing vineyards and orchards and villages whose gardens are adorned with evergreens cut to represent women or beasts of strange design. The clouds had lifted. The sun burst forth and danced upon the distant silent sea. We forgot the horrid blackness of the past in the [173] BY ITALIAN SEAS joy of the glorious chestnut woods where Dionysius cut the timber for his fleet. In doorways we spied women spinning with the distaff as of old — a fashion immemorially antique. Thus spun the daughters of the Kings of Greece ; thus spun the Fates. Here by the sea all the air seemed fragrant with mythology. Involuntarily one recalls Taine's picture of Ulysses and his comrades in their two-sailed boat, anchoring in the mouth of some small creek, there to refresh themselves and sleep half naked upon a rock. How simple was that fine old life! How simple Homer's picture of luxury: a goddess in a cavern with birds about, and a great fire, and running water, and near by a grape-vine heavy with luscious fruit! How simple, too, his natural man who fears and says so and who weeps! As we skirt the shore a famihar background comes into view and we find ourselves looking up again at Taormina, hung high above us, with Mola peeping over its shoulder. Easter morning dawned brightly. Of course there were the usual elaborate services in all the churches and after these were over the people trooped back to their homes, there to wait ex- [174] " ^°m?'- The Easter Dance SICILY pectantly for the noon-hour to sound. As the first stroke of twelve pealed from the town-clocks, pan demonium was let loose. Every bell in every church- tower broke forth in deafening peals; guns were fired and pistols ; bombs exploded everywhere ; even a cannon or two added their deepest bass notes to the turmoil and in every house an old chair or some other old piece of furniture was broken — for good luck! Then all the population trooped forth again, this time to a big open space down by the Castellamare, where the pipers and zampognari had assembled and the drone of their wheezy pipes was already to be heard. At first the peasants stood sheepishly about, then, caught by the music, couple after couple began to dance, not the sophisticated dances of the day, but the old-time country jigs and fancy steps of a by-gone day. The unmarried women and even the young matrons never dance ! So the men joggled along together in couples or with the older women, and a queer picture they made with their sandals of rawhide, their thong-bound legs, their stocking-caps and blue jackets and breeches. The women stood by in chattering groups and watched them. As the hours wore on, the excitement grew; the [175] BY ITALIAN SEAS dancers warming up with the exhilaration of move ment and the stirring of their blood. The steps be came more daring, their heels flew higher and higher, applause and the pipers' quickened measure ever stimulating them to fresh endeavor, and when at last we left at eventide, the merry sounds of laughter and quickly shuffling feet were always in our ears. [176] II CARETTI AND MARIONETTI WHO that has visited Sicily has failed to notice the peasants' carts? One meets them at every turn: on week-days loaded with barrels of wine, sacks of flour, cord- wood or any other commodity; on Sundays transporting entire families to town to join the weekly festivals. Humble as are their uses, simple as one would expect to find them in so poor a land, they are nevertheless full of expression, — precious indications of the people's art and thought. They are travel ing books, moving poems, as it were, carrying along the dusty roads of Sicily all that is romantic in its history, tradition, customs and literature. They have kept alive among the lower classes, illiterate and uneducated, the romance and poetry of the Age of Chivalry, and its quick, angry passions as well. Over the entire island they present the same gen eral type:— a box swung high upon a single axle — an axle no longer of plain iron uniting the two wheels, but wrought into a delicate fret-work of [177] BY ITALIAN SEAS carvings, with, in the center, the figure of a patron saint or a Madonna. The wheels themselves and all the upper body are also carved, then painted a pale canary-yellow, mottled with red and green in stripes and dots. Hubs, spokes, tires, shafts and axle, all are enriched with conventional patterns, with angels, heads of cherubs, half -moons or any other fantasy that pleases the artisan's fancy. But this decoration serves only as a background or frame, as it were, for the main body of the cart, which is closed in after the fashion of our dump- carts, by wooden panels. The front and back panels, narrower than the sides, are usually only decorated with single figures of a religious character. The painter's imagination has full rein, however, upon the sides, which are each divided like a diptych, and here one finds the pictures that make the study of these carts so full of interest. The subjects? All the traditions of Sicily and its mixed races ; all the events of classic history, of the Age of Chivalry, of the great epopees of more modern times. Here we find the "Queen of Sheba," "The "Death of Virginia." There and in greater numbers Burning of Troy," the "Rape of the Sabines," the [178] SICILY "Orlando at Roncevaux," "The Treason of Gane- lon," "Charlemagne and his Paladins," with quan tities of King Rogers: "Coronation of Roger," "Roger Entering Palermo," and so forth; for this monarch seems to be especially dear to the Sicilian A Sicilian Cart heart. Then from later history come "Columbus before Ferdinand and Isabella," "Charles V and Francis I," Napoleon leading his army at Areola, or bidding adieu to the Old Guard. It is history that trots behind the horses of Sicily! The pictures are painted in oil and signed like any other oil painting, and the painter's address is care- [179] BY ITALIAN SEAS fully appended. So one Sunday morning I started out with the determination to find for myself one of these cart-painters, whose handiwork I had often noted, and who seemed a master of his calling. He lived in the Corso dei Mille, and his name was Dome nico Monteleone. After some trouble I found his shop, at the rear of an enormous court. At one side, before a smithy, a number of donkeys and horses were being shod, and I took time to admire in detail the trappings and harness adorned with cock-feathers, bits of mirrors and gayly painted leathers. At the back of the court stood a big shed, whose door was bedaubed with palette-scrapings — canary- yellow, red and green, the universal color scheme of the Sicilian cart. Inside the shed, half a dozen work men were busily painting as many carts : one scraping the soft wood and removing bits of old paint from the ballerini's eyes or mouths and the interstices in general; a second putting on an undercoat of drab; another painting a second coat of yellow, and still an other mottling this with daubs of red and green. Over in a corner another- — a veritable artist, he — palette in hand, was painting little heads with fine camel's hair brushes ! [180] SICILY *i. The proprietor, a burly, rubicund individual with a big black mustache, proved talkative, even garru lous at the mention of a glass of wine. He quoted prices that as tounded me : two hun dred lire for an entire cart; fifty more for painting it, and thirty extra for the side panels ! ^ Looking about at p X, the blank walls of the .._;..:: fished, I asked: '&&¦? "And from what do the pic- % A you copy *:., tures?" V. He looked surprised '- a moment; then, tap ping his forehead with Here are the designs!" "And the people leave you the choice of subject?" "Niente! My clients always choose themselves!" Then there was no doubt of it. My surmises were correct. Peasants, workmen, petty artisans and shopkeepers ordered these heroic pictures, com- [ 181 ] ':'!4teS3 / : ri^m & Water-carrier gravity, he answered BY ITALIAN SEAS manded a "Downfall of Carthage," a "Ruggiero and Angelica," a "William TeU." But where did these illiterate people, only a tenth of whom can read or write, ever hear of these quasi- mythical personages whose story has faded from the minds of many educated people of to-day? What traditions have kept alive these histories of the past? It was not until somewhat later, when talking one day to the custodian of the Martorana, that I dis covered the key to the mystery. By chance, in his verbose wanderings, he began to tell of the con- tastori and the marionetti. Now, the Italian marionetti I knew well, but not the Sicilian; and as for the contastori, I had never heard of them. Following his directions, it was not long before I found one in a market-place close by. As soon as the first hint of spring-warmth per vades the air, the contastore blossoms forth, like the early crocus. In the shade of a tree or under the lee-side of some building, he sets out his straggling row or two of benches and his wooden table. Then, like a spider who has spun his web, he awaits his victims, each of whom he taxes two-fifths of a cent for his seat! [182] SICILY When the benches are more or less filled and his audience are slowly and beatifically sucking sticks of candy into needle-like points, he mounts upon his table. With wooden sword in hand with which to punctuate his grandiloquent phrases and give strength and gesture to his tales of love and war and fearful slaughter, he recounts to his spell-bound listeners stories of chivalry and tales of daring, em broidered, enlarged and enriched to suit his temper ament and that of his audience as well — last descend ant in this prosaic age of the strolling bard and minnesinger. The contastore reaches only the small audience and is the lesser factor; but the puppet-show, the people's theatre, leavens the whole lump and touches the heart-strings of the populace. It must not be thought that puppet-shows are an institution due to our grandfathers. They are as old as remotest antiquity. We know that the Romans had a Punch called Maccus, for a very creditable representation of him has lately been un earthed near Naples — a bronze, humped before and behind and graced with the classic hooked nose and nut-cracker chin. [183] BY ITALIAN SEAS Even the word "marionette" dates back six hun dred years to the time when the Venetians, sub stituting wooden dolls for girls in their religious processions, called them "mariettes" or little Marias. All through the Middle Ages puppets played an important part in the amusement and education of the masses, for they were not always relegated to the realms of comedy. In the hands of famous directors, they invaded the whole range of dramatic art, and fantoccini even sang grand opera, and, if we may believe reports, sang it creditably, too. Wonderful enough in France, where they were much in favor with the grand monde ; where digni fied members of the Academie Francaise like Male zieu did not disdain to write plays for them; where thinkers like Voltaire fell victims to their wiles, in Italy the marionetti reached even a higher state of development. Here they were used for political ends! Some years ago, for now the vogue has died away, Italian nobles gave fantoccini shows in their private palaces — plays reeking with escapades of Roman mon- signori and political satire that dared not show its face on public boards. I think it is Stendhal who [184] SICILY tells of one he witnessed in Florence on a little stage but five feet high, though perfect in every detail, where diminutive marionettes gave a comedy adapted from Macchiavelli's "Mondragore." The method of manipulating the figures has re mained quite the same through all ages. The ope rator still pulls the wires as of old from his castello — a loft supported on a four-sided scaffolding — the ancient Greek Trrjyfia Terpdycovov- On carefully examining the dolls owned by a com plaisant impresario under the colonnades of the Mu- nicipio of Orta, I found them not entirely made of wood. The head was of papier-mache — light and capable of feeling the slightest impulsion, and pro vided with a hinged lower jaw arranged to imitate the movements of talking. The body and thighs were wooden; the arms, legs and neck of lead or leaded so as to readily obey the laws of gravity. All the strings destined to move the arms and legs united inside the body and issued together from the head. A metal rod connected this latter with the operator in his castello, and by it the manikin could be moved about the stage. The play dealt with peasant life, relating the trite [185] BY ITALIAN SEAS story of a country lass who, despite the allurements of the city and the attentions of a great gentleman, remains true to her rustic swain; of Rosalia, her mother, and Pietro, her father — a cobbler with but just enough work to keephis family from starvation, and the voices of their hungry children calling from behind the scenes for "polenta, polenta!" At an other show I saw a shepherd in his goat-skins do a drunken scene upon his stilts that 'for low comedy was absolutely inimitable, and well do I remember a dancing giant who dropped first his arms, then his legs, and finally his head, each of which, with the body, became a separate waltzing figure. I had assisted, a delighted spectator, at many a puppet-show, consoling myself for my frivolity with the thought that many a better man had done the same, remembering Gautier's love for them, and Stevenson's, and I began to think I knew their tricks and all their salient features. Each district of Italy has its favorite puppet- hero: Naples, Scaramuccia and Pulchinella; Venice, Messer Pantaleone; Turin, Girolamo; Bologna, Dottore Bellandrone; Bergamo, Arlequino. Each character has a distinct individuality. [186] Pulchinella SICILY The Neapolitan hero, Scaramuccia, is a sort of false bravo, quarrelsome but cowardly, and always clothed in black, which, Riccoboni says, shows him to be of Spanish origin. He declares himself a prince of some exotic country, but is usually supposed to have been raised in prison, at the King's expense, and to have spent his youth on the galleys. He is always valet to some gran signore, and an execrable valet, too, robbing his master and his master's friends. He shares his ill-gotten gains with Pul chinella, and, as they warm up over their gluttonous feasts, he dilates upon his courage and his impossible loves, till Punch, wearied, lays about him with his stick. Then Scaramuccia drops under the table! When the fit of anger is past, up he pops again with "Afraid! Me! I afraid! I 'm brave — not sheep- brave, but wolf -brave!" A very different character is Harlequin, Berga mo's hero, and a very charming story is told of his origin. It seems that in that pretty city of the Lower Alps, there once dwelt a httle boy — lovable and full of wit — by name Arlequino. So modest was he that, despite his many accomplishments, his school-friends [187] BY ITALIAN SEAS never were jealous of him, but loved him as did his parents. At carnival-time all the children, as usual, were to have fancy costumes and they eagerly asked Arlequino what he was to wear. "Ah," said he, "my parents are too poor this year to give me a travesty." At this his companions were greatly grieved, for they had especially counted upon romping with him. So they arranged that each should contribute a piece of stuff, and that from these pieces they would make a suit for Arlequino. On the appointed day each brought his bit of cloth, but what was their dismay to find that each scrap was of a different color! In their naivete they had never thought of that. But Arlequino did not mind. He took the bits, patched them together and on Mardi Gras appeared in the strange motley coat he always wears, his wooden sword in hand, his face covered with a black half- mask, jumping, dancing, singing at the head of his comrades — the life of the festa. Arlequino is always endowed with tbe traits of the little Bergamasque boy: kindness, agility, credulity, and the French have added his discreet gourmandise. So, as I said before, each part of Italy has its hero, [188] SICILY but the Sicilian marionetti reserve a distinct surprise for him who sees them for the first time. Their plays differ essentially from their continental prototypes both in plot and character. In mise-en-scene and cleverness of action they compare with any that I have heard or read of. Almost invariably they are founded upon the same theme — Ariosto's ' ' Or lando Furioso." The theatre is usually installed in a vacant shop and has a temporary air, for as soon as the shop is rented the showman moves on. Outside hangs a gaudy poster depicting the thrilling scenes to be enacted within — pictures of battle and tourney, — far better suited to the illiterate public than a lettered announcement. An admission fee of two soldi is charged. On enter ing, a strong odor of garhc offends the nose, there being no other ventilation than the closed street-door. The audience, for the most part masculine, sits in serried ranks on ordinary rush-bottomed chairs. A little gallery on either side of the shop shows above [189] A Marionette Knight BY ITALIAN SEAS its rail an expectant row of faces, lit by the fitful glow of coal-oil lanterns. The stage, surprisingly large, is framed in red pasteboard draperies. Six small lamps do duty as foot-lights. The curtain rises and displays a Council of the Paladins. The background and wings figure a mas sive Gothic hall. The puppets, each nearly five feet tall, stand sheathed cap-a-pie in shimmering armor — armet and pauldron, plastron and tasseled skirt imitated to the life by a local tinsmith. In bombastic phrases the discussion begins. The audience recognizes each character as an old familiar friend — Orlando by his commanding figure, his deep bass voice and his helmet — Topt high with plumes like Mars his burgonet; Rinaldo by his flaming panache; Marfisa by her shrill falsetto. Carlo Magno sits upon his throne, wrapped in robes of state, nodding approval or ex pressing discontent. Occasionally an operator's arm or leg, Brobding- nagian, distorted to unnatural size, appears from flies or wings as he moves a figure. [190] A Sicilian Marionette-show SICILY The faces on the rush-covered chairs glow with excitement as they follow the multitudinous inci dents: Orlando's quest for his long-lost Angelica, Ruggiero's flights upon the Hippogriff to his well- beloved Bradamante; but above all, reveling in the terrific onslaught 'twixt Pagan and Paladin, Oli- viero pitted against the King of Africa, Gradasso daring to face II Furioso, and Brandimarte slaying King Agramante. The clash of tin resounds on tin ; turbaned Turks pile high upon the stage ; the shock of battle is terrific, heightened by the operator's feet thumping upon the hollow stage, and their voices in unison shouting the battle-cries. Del gran romor fu visto il mar gonfarsi, Del gran romor, che s'udi sino in Francia. Who, after witnessing these shows, with all their wealth of detail and incident, could longer question where the Sicilian populace gains its love for the Age of Chivalry? [191] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA THE MEDITERRANEAN lies flat to the horizon. Swirling cirrus-clouds, catching the first flush of early morning, cast a rosy tint upon the water. A richer flush in the sky — then a golden glow, and the sun shows an edge above the sea. Slowly it unfolds its fiery rim, until, increasing in intensity, it leaves the water's edge. Glints of golden hght dance down the waves — down to the Asia's side — and warm sunbeams temper the keen ness of the frosty wind. Morning mists gather round a long, low, gleam ing streak on the far horizon, the only object to catch the eye in all this waste of waters : the chalky cliffs of Malta — one of the bulwarks of England's strength; with Gibraltar and Port Said, the key to the Mediterranean. As we approach the shore, Valetta's mass detaches from surrounding promontories. Vapory clouds, chased by the moist scirocco, float vague shadows over its dazzling houses, emphasizing first one sil houette, then another. Six British soldiers, in khaki, [195] BY ITALIAN SEAS on the forward deck, watch their future home with interest. Two openings in the coast present them selves, one on each side of Valetta, and our steamer, heading between the casemates of St. Elmo and Fort Ricasoli, enters the Great Harbor. The spacious bay seems narrow, so towering are the masses of construction that surround it. Nature is buried under mountains of masonry. On all sides ramparts and bastions, houses and arcades, and yet more houses, press one upon another's shoulders up to the very heavens. The mind is appalled at this colossal work of man, at these piles of buildings whose powdery whiteness dazzles the eye. Behind each crenelated headland. lurks a man-of-war. In the smaller bays around the Borgo, troop-ships and training-ships, cruisers and gunboats, transports and colliers, crowd round naval arsenals and dockyards. Down the center of the bay line England's biggest battle-ships — a dozen of them — their bands playing for morning parade, their decks swarming with "Jackies." We steam slowly past the Renown, the flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron, proudly floating at her masthead Admiral Sir John Fisher's flag, the red cross of St. George. Farther down the harbor, Floriana's mass looms [196] Valetta, Malta IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA up behind the immense bastions of Fort Lascaris. Everywhere is the same impression of indomitable strength — of a city built for resistance — of a fortress rendered impregnable by every art of war, by cen turies of labor. And the animation upon the water ! How can one depict it? The dghaisas give the dominant note — native boats like gondolas, not black, however, and slender like their Venetian sisters, but stocky, and striped and painted in many colors. Their rowers stand facing the prow, and propel their heavy craft with surprising rapidity. These boats, everywhere, dart in and out among puffing launches from the war-ships and gigs, manned by trim blue-jackets; among fishing-smacks with lateen sails, and tugs towing long lines of coal-barges. Under the pro tecting guns of the Upper Barracca lie the merchant craft, moored calm and quiet, as befits such vessels, their cranes swinging to and fro. The Asia has now slowed down; the quarantine officer has come over the side, and, in the smoking- room, has made each passenger take oath that he has not been in Egypt within ten days — for cholera is signaled there. After an hour's delay our luggage is lowered over [197] BY ITALIAN SEAS the side into a stout dghaisa. Two sun-baked sons of Malta speed us over the ruffled water. The sun A Maltese Fishing-smack peeps in and out behind the scurrying clouds. We dodge around the larger craft, and in a few moments are at the landing-steps, where the bustle is in describable. Crowds are clamoring to be ferried [198] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA over to the Borgo and the navy arsenal; other crowds, equally impatient, await their turn to land. The boatmen yell and gesticulate, while trying to keep their craft from scraping on the big stone steps. After the usual formalities at the custom-house, we are given over to the mercy of a horde of squab bling cabmen. In a daze we rattle past the fish- market, with its motley crowd of every nationality, then rumble over a drawbridge and through the Vic toria Gate. Valetta's streets are busy — almost as busy as the waters of the bay. The main thoroughfares are nearly level, running straight along the crest of the hill, but the cross-streets pitch steep down to the har bors on each side, and are often disposed in steps, their incline is so rapid. The houses are high, flat- roofed, and provided with the balconies that form the leading characteristic of Maltese architecture — balconies roofed over and inclosed by windows and shutters, so arranged as to control the currents of air let in to refresh the inner apartments — a sort of Moorish moncharbis, behind whose blinds the quick glance of a pair of black eyes is often caught. At street corners statues of saints of heroic size, [199] BY ITALIAN SEAS with lighted lamps before them, recall the narrow streets of Naples. Now and then we pass a big palace — quite sure to be an Auberge of the Knights of one of the seven langues — building in no way reminiscent of a way side tavern, as their name would imply, but huge palazzi in a pompous Italian style, with great tro phies and escutcheons over the doorways. Now, in stead of housing haughty members of the Order — the proud Castilian, the fiery Provencal, the dark Itahan, or the blond-bearded German — one Au berge is used by the artillery mess, another by the engineer corps, a third by the Admiralty, while the Auberge de Provence, with its magnificent hall, is the home of the Malta Union Club. The Maltese women still wear the f aldetta, a gar ment whose somber shadow imparts to them a certain demureness and sobriety. Imagine a great hood of black silk falling to the knee, gathered fanwise on one side of the head and whaleboned out on the other into a full sweeping curve. In this mantle the women drape themselves — gather it round them in the wind, tilt it to ward off the sun's hot rays, or to screen their dark glances; in its ample folds they [200] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA carry the market-basket or a child whose face peeps out from its black depths. No Maltese woman ever is seen without it. Several came over on our steamer from Sicily, and donned their faldetta as soon as we entered port. It seems that more than a cen tury ago Malta was visited by the plague and the entire popu lation of the island seemed doomed. At last the women, desperate at seeing so many of their dear ones carried off, made a vow to the Virgin that, if she would abate the pestilence, they would renounce all color and wear black for a hundred years. And behold, the pestilence ceased ! So the women donned mourning for a century, and when that period of time was up, some twenty years ago, they began to use color, but only in sub dued tones, dull blue and carmelite brown remain ing favorites to-day, giving them a quaint, Quaker- [201] Lady Wearing the Faldetta BY ITALIAN SEAS ish air. Then, too, they had become so accustomed to the great faldetta that its use was never discon tinued, but is as universal to-day as it was in their period of deepest mourning. The Maltese men wear no distinctive costume, and the streets present the usual mixed population of Mediterranean ports; Sicilians in yellow kerchiefs and embroidered belts ; Arabs and Bedouins in bour- nous and gandurah; Greeks and Turks and Neapol itans. Our carriage swings round a corner and enters St. George's Square, with the Governor's palace on one side and the guardhouse on the other. Before the sentry-box, in the blazing sun, stiff as though made of wood, but neat and smart, a red-coat sentinel stands guard for the King. Under the portico on a stone seat lounge a half-dozen of his comrades. The Strada Reale, broad and straight, leads hence to the Porta Reale, Valetta's main gate, and its only exit to the country. The Strada Reale is a busy street, and in its attractive shops we admire exquisite Mal tese laces, renowned for centuries and now coming much into vogue. Our hotel windows looked out over a world of [202] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA roof-tops, the strangest that I have seen. Not a spot of green nor a spear of grass broke their bleak expanse. Walls and roofs, all of them flat, are made of the same buff stone, powdery and gilded by the sunlight to a brilliant yellow, most trying to the eyes. Imagine this mass of quivering light cut against a sea of intensest blue, with a brilliant cloud less sky overhead, and you have an idea of why the island has jocularly been likened to a fried flounder! At the end of the Strada Reale lies a garden called the Upper Barracca, where nursery-maids and soldiers congregate under the shady loggia. This is the spot from which to view the harbors. The five bays open their narrow arms at your feet, each hemmed in with giant forts and studded with battle ships. As we looked down into the fathomless moat, hewn in the solid rock from harbor to harbor by the labor of thousands of Turkish slaves; and as, turn ing in the other direction, we looked toward the mouth of the harbor, and the deep blue sea, I was tempted to sketch.' I had been at work but five minutes when I caught the eye of a sentry a hun dred feet below, on top of Fort Lascaris. Just three [203] BY ITALIAN SEAS minutes later, looking round, I saw two big troopers of the Royal Malta Artillery, who, saluting, politely requested to see my permit! I had not thought of that. As I afterwards found out again and again, every inch of Valetta is under strict military super vision, and sketching is allowed only by special per mission of the Governor. My name and address were duly taken, and politely, but firmly, I was told it must not occur again until a permit was issued. After luncheon we drove out to see our friends, the C s, who have a beautiful villa in the country. On leaving the city gate we remarked the gigantic defenses on the land side of Valetta — moat and aba cus and glacis and scarps and counterscarps hun dreds of feet in length. Passing through the outer gate, we entered the country — if country it can be called — where even in May only an occasional patch of green rejoices the eye, where whitish trees line roads deep-powdered with a creamy dust. Even here on the glacis the tents of British soldiers are pitched. Mr. C is, I believe, the only American resident of Malta. His villa is one of the most beautiful homes on the island. Seven broad terraces of olive, orange, and lemon trees ascend from the water's [204] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA edge to a spacious pergola, several hundred feet in length, overgrown with roses and trumpet-vine, and masses of gorgeous purple bougainviUea. The house itself savors of the Spanish — low and rambling — with salon after salon filled with souvenirs of the days of the Knights, with silver of rare workman ship, with portraits of Grand Masters in flowing robes with crosses of St. John upon their breasts. Among pictures by Francia and Robusti, by Cara- vaggio and Preti, examples of Cropsey, Van Elten, and Bierstadt strike a strange note. In the well-chosen library I refreshed my memory on the history of Malta, and as I looked from the window could read with new understanding of the heart-sinkings of l'lsle Adam and his brother knights on coming from the gardens of Rhodes to this desert island spot. Prescott's wonderful ac count of the great Siege took on a fresh interest when I could place St. Elmo, the old city, and the harbors where the swimmers fought in the water with their knives between their teeth. Even in so sober a historian the story reads like a recital of the Knights of the Round Table or the Paladins of Charlemagne. The courage of Jean de la Valette, his [205] BY ITALIAN SEAS determination in the face of all obstacles, his diplo macy and wisdom, fill the mind with admiration. And as the Valetta bells clang out in the distance in dire confusion, I imagine they are calling the people together on the 8th of September, the end of the great Siege, when the Turk took to his ships and never again dared face the Knights of Christendom. I could see the cortege as Prescott describes it — the whole body of the Knights and the people of the capital, walking in solemn procession, with the Grand Master at their head, to the Church of St. John. A knight in full armor bore on high the vic torious Standard of the Order. By his side a page walked, carrying the gold-hilted sword, set with dia monds, presented by Philip II. of Spain to Jean de la Valette. As the procession entered the church the Standard was laid at the altar's foot, with a flourish of trumpets and the boom of cannon from the ramparts. The Knights filled the nave of the church, the chaplains and people stood within the chapels. At the reading of the Gospel, the Grand Master, taking the naked sword from the page, held it aloft as a sign that the Knights would ever battle for the Church. [206] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA And the same martial tone pervades St. John's Church to-day. Its exterior, plain and sober as a fortress, in no way prepares one for the blaze of glory within. But once the portal crossed, arches and pillars gleam with the arms of Knights and Grand Masters, with the "pomp of heraldry," with trumpets and drums and cannon and floating banners. II Calabrese's superb ceiling unrolls its glorious length of armored heroes, strangely mixed with figures of saints and angels. The chapel walls, incrusted with martial tombs, bear records of warlike deeds. The pave ment, probably the most sumptuous in Europe, is formed by tombstones of Princes of the Order, slab touching slab the length and breadth of the church — one vast mosaic of emblazonment, of colored mar bles and precious stones. The furnishings of the church are of the richest. Its crowning glory, how ever, is seldom seen by the traveler; it was, notwith standing, our good fortune to behold it. During our stay the Archbishop celebrated his jubilee — the fiftieth anniversary of the celebration of his first mass. For this event a magnificent series of fetes was organized, and for them the church was [207] BY ITALIAN SEAS hung with tapestries woven for it in Flanders by the brothers De Vos — a series of pictures each more than twenty feet square, hanging the entire length of the nave and made to tone in perfect harmony with their surroundings. On the day of the jubilee a special invitation ad mitted us to the nave. Imagine that nave in all its glory of color, filled with the representatives of Mal ta's social, political, and ecclesiastical life — officers of the army and navy in full dress, their scarlet coats rich with gold-lace; magistrates in flowing black gowns and white neckcloths; groups of Franciscan and Benedictine friars and Dominican brothers in black and white. Imagine the chapels packed to over flowing with a sea of Maltese faces. Imagine be tween the double file of Maltese police a grand pro cession entering the church, amid a burst of music from the organ-loft and a chorus of many voices: fines of choir-boys, of clergy in rich robes edged with precious antique Malta laces; of mace-bearers in full-bottomed wigs and robes of purple and scar let carrying huge maces of silver and gold ; then the Chapter of St. John — abbots in white miters and robes of cloth of silver, followed by bishops in golden [208] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA miters and robes of cloth of gold. Lastly, the Arch bishop, alert and erect in spite of his age and his burden of embroidered vestments studded with pre cious' stones, his sharp gray eyes turning right and left as he blesses the kneeling multitude. During the singing of the Te Deum a flutter runs over the con gregation, and the Governor of Malta, Major-Gen eral Sir Francis Grenfell, walks up the aisle to his raised dais opposite the Archbishop's throne. A fine type of British officer he is — straight in his tight- buttoned coat, simply trimmed with gold — a fine head, set bull-dog fashion well down into his shoul ders, clean-featured and clear-eyed, with a nervous habit of biting at his mustache. 'Mid clouds of incense, the chorus of many voices, the organ's pealing notes, the display of richest vestments, the solemn Te Deum is rendered, and at its close Governor and Archbishop walk from the church together. In spite of these occasional official rapproche ments, the Enghsh have not succeeded in making themselves any too popular with their Maltese sub jects. Few Maltese have taken the trouble to learn the Enghsh language. Even the policemen can [209] BY ITALIAN SEAS scarcely answer an English question. Much feeling has been caused by a decision to substitute officially English for the Italian language, to which the Mal tese have been accustomed for centuries. Feehng has run so high that the natives refuse to commemo rate the coronation of King Edward, their Council professing that they have more cause for tears than for rejoicing. English and Maltese mingle little socially, and there are but few mixed marriages. Valetta is not the only considerable town in Malta. The original capital, Citta Vecchia, still crowns its hill-top some eight miles away. It can be reached by the carriage road or by a little railway running across the island. Citta Vecchia still justifies its second appellation, La Notabile, for even to-day it presents an imposing appearance, girdled with ramparts and crowned with the spires and domes of the Church of St. Paul. It is entered by crossing a deep moat now cultivated as a vegetable garden. The streets are wide for a mediaeval city, and its houses, of a warm, golden hue, retain a certain air of grandeur, with their rows of spacious windows, their coroneted portals, and great doors ornamented with finely chiseled bronze knockers. [210] IMPRESSIONS OF MALTA Modern life has never touched this proud old city with its handsome monuments, its deserted streets of palaces and stately open squares, and it sits haughtily upon its hill-top like a fine old conservative gentleman, to look across the flat-lands at its modern and happy rival. Inside the Church of St. Paul we found a pave ment similar to that of St. John's over in Valetta, but of course less rich and less noteworthy. Here, too, two thrones, one for the Bishop and one for the King, who sits far off in Buckingham, face each other at opposite sides of the high altar. One day we drove to Hagiar-Kim— a temple, or rather two temples, built by the Phoenicians nearly four thousand years ago. Happily we had with us a friend, a man well able to describe these interesting remains — Monsignor D . By his aid we were enabled to comprehend the strange arrangements of egg-shaped chambers, joining one upon the other, and the uses of holes to admit the oracle's voice— with a little closet behind where the "oracle" hid. He also pointed out to us mushroom-shaped altars for human sacrifices. The ruins are extensive, and are, I believe, the best preserved of their kind in exist ence. Their situation is desolate in the extreme ; on [211] BY ITALIAN SEAS the slopes of a stony waste of coast overlooking the African Sea, whose wild expanse is broken by but a single object— the rocky islet of Filfla— washed like some storm-tossed galley by the angry waters. In the temple seven little sandstone figures have been found — the Kabiri, now preserved in the mu seum of Valetta— idols probably connected with the worship of abundance or fertility, devoid of heads, but with holes in the neck where a nodding head was inserted. Malta boasts of other remarkable attractions for the archaeologist. Its southern and western shores are riddled with Phoenician tombs and dwellings. Some notable Roman remains — villas and early Christian catacombs — have recently been unearthed near La Notabile. There is St. Paul's Bay to be visited — where the Apostle landed after his ship wreck — and the cave in which he preached while the guest of Publius at Citta Vecchia. [212] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL A FRICA was stamped upon the faces of our l\ Arab crew. A score of them had just closed ¦*" -^ down the hatches— a strange-looking gang, these loosely-clad men of the sun, now bent over taking their "wash-up" before a trickling faucet. True disciples of Allah, they followed his bidding, and would have washed in sand, had water been lacking. The peaceful sea was heaving in a lazy swell, the soothing sleep following a storm. A few French men, their hands behind their backs, nervously paced the deck; some Italian women in their best black Sunday silks, lolled in steamer-chairs; a group of Enghshmen stood discussing the probabilities of sea-sickness. The early southern night closed down quickly like the hd of a box. In the darkness, the officer on the bridge seemed a Titan against the sky ; myriad stars set the sable night a-twinkle. . . . Next morning when I appeared, the motley crew was swabbing down the deck. A fat Maltese boat- [215] BY ITALIAN SEAS swain stood watching them, dipping a ration of bread, piece by piece, into a tin cup. On seeing me he touched his cap and pointing a coffee-stained morsel over the bow, exclaimed: "Africa — that." I noted on the horizon, not the bare low line I had expected, but high, jagged mountain peaks, faint, pale and opalescent in the morning air. Soon the cliffs of Cape Bon cut clearly against the dim tints of Kairouan and Zaghouan, and over the starboard bow appeared the ruddy crags of Cape Carthage, with a village, Sidi-ben-Said, hung hke a fleck of snow upon their summits. What a thrill that very name awakes — Carthage, Queen of the Seas! Carthago delenda est. The words have been ful filled. To-day not a stone remains upon another; the plow turns up its streets. Here we are at La Goulette. A pilot-boat manned by a fez-capped crew comes out to meet us. Slowly we steam down the canal recently cut through the shallow Lake of Tunis and connecting the city with the sea. On either hand green dikes line up, leading like carpets to a royal gate. I search for a flight of flamingoes sweeping across the sky, but search in vain, so content myself watching a camp of [216] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL Bedouins, huddled together in the shadow of half a dozen camels. We pass the citadel built by Charles of Spain. All the landscape is green with vegeta tion ; olive orchards, orange and lemon trees, groves Bedouins of pines and caroub trees cover the hill slopes. To the left, on a height, the tomb of a sainted marabout dominates the snowy domes and minarets of Tunis. At the end of the canal the steamer swings into a square basin and with the aid of winches is slowly hauled alongside the dock. [217] BY ITALIAN SEAS A dozen French policemen and douaniers, wide- trousered and important, are the only familiar beings among a mob of Arabs awaiting our arrival. A noisy wrangle is going on as to the first right of boarding, and suddenly a strapping negro settles the question by leaping like a tiger from the dock and swings himself upon the deck, before the gendarme with a "Veut-tu descendre" has time to lay hands upon him. Another tries to follow and another ; up the gangplank they swarm, like rats, and it was not until the captain had thrown one persistent Touareg over the side, that we could go in peace to the custom house. After the simple formahties there — the mere chalking of a circle upon each article of luggage — we jumped into a neat victoria. Leaving the dock yards, we soon reach the outskirts of the French quarter, where miserable wooden shanties increase in number until their roof -lines touch — a mushroom growth like the main street of a western town, flaunt ing numerous drink-shop signs and the inevitable evidences of washerwomen. But coming in to the Avenue de la Marine the character changes. The houses grow higher, more [218] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL solid and more pretentious, until the street is strongly reminiscent of an outer Paris boulevard. Its broad expanse, shaded by a quadruple row of stately palm trees, is the playground of scores of youthful col onists romping with hoop and top or at hide-and- seek with their nurse maids. Midway up the avenue opens an imposing square, where a fountain sprays clusters of frail papyrus and blooming water-lilies. One side of this place is occupied by the Residence, the palace of the French Governor-General. Op posite it, the Cathedral of St. Mary raises its gray facade. Even as we pass the chimes are ringing and a crowd of gay-gowned women and an endless file of black-coat boys are entering the triple portal. Our rooms give on a balcony, facing the military club, which proved to be the focal point for the for eign hfe of Tunis. Under the striped awning a score of officers are taking their apertifs. The ave nue, stretching on, is bordered by cafes where the "high-life" of Tunis is spending a leisurely half- hour before luncheon, and suggests, if not a Capu- cines at least a Poissoniere. The shop windows are carpeted with novelties; the crowd under the lofty arcades looks fresh and summery. Smart traps dart [219] BY ITALIAN SEAS by, with footmen in native dress; an electric car scrapes round the corner and suddenly, to complete this picture of modernity, an automobile comes crash ing down the street bellowing its warning "toot- toot." In its wake — strange mixture of the Orient — a troop of camels, coal-laden, slowly lumbers along, their drivers whacking and shouting "Dja! Dja! Barra!" After luncheon we stroll out. The air is balmy and perfumed with the breath of early spring. Arab flower-venders, making the tour of the cafes — lithe, bare-legged and clad in a single garment, the haik — balance upon their heads flat baskets filled with jasmine, carnations, roses and hehotrope. As the Frenchman says, we smell our coffee in front of a cafe by the gate of Bab-el-Bahr — the Water Gate. Pouring out from the Arab city come the crowds of Islam, streaming in through the same old gate goes the civilization of the Occident. Here is the fusion-point of East and West — the mingling of many races: French, Maltese, Italian and Greek on the one hand; Arab, Turk, Touareg, Bedouin on the other. A dapper commis voyageur goes in through the [220] Mosque of Sidi-ben-Ziad, Tunis IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL gate, carrying in either hand a black box bound in brass whose very shape tells the errand he is bent upon. Coming out of the gate, a Mohammedan is weighted with all the cunning devices of Arab craft: embroidered slippers, gaudy silks, pipettes, plaited fans, luck charms, hands of Fatma and tinsel jew elry. Sturdy little African donkeys go by burdened with baskets of yellow loquats, their drivers beating them and yelling, " Arri! Arri!" A team empties out its load of wealthy Arabs and beggarly Be douins, each — venerated Hadj or dirty street sweeper — with a bunch of jasmine tucked in his tur ban, for who in Tunis is not a lover of the perfume of fresh flowers? We pass under the Bab-el-Bahr into the Arab city. Signs in Arabic and Hebrew join the more famihar Latin characters of French and Italian words. Under the arcade of the civil prison, the Bey's soldiers stand guard in semi-darkness. By them a group of Kybal women whine and cry as they watch one of their number dragged into the grue some passage, heavy chains clanking about her feet. In the light again we pause before the Great Mosque. Figures motionless as statues wrapped in [221] BY ITALIAN SEAS white bournous lean lazily over its balustrade ; on its steps the proud patrician elbows the ragged pauper. As the Cathedral is the heart of the French town, so this Great Mosque is the nerve-center of the Arab quarter and from it radiate the souks — the main thoroughfares of the Moslems. Instead of broad and airy streets, these souks are narrow, congested alleys, vaulted with stone or covered in with roughly jointed planks, but cool and restful. The sun's rays filter here and there through chinks and air-holes overhead, and play in powdery streaks upon a daz zling array of many colored fabrics. On either hand stand little shops but six feet square, wherein squat one, two, or even six merchants, surrounded by their wares : herbists 'mid piles of henna and sweet smell ing myrrh ; saddle-makers in shops hung with leopard skins; tailors surrounded by a brave array of em broidered cloths and velvets. Each souk has its own special trade. There is a shoemaker's souk, the silk weaver's souk, the souk where the far-famed Chechia or red fez is made. Despite the bustle of moving throngs a most un natural quiet prevails. No noise accompanies the slippered feet; the voices are hushed and quiet, al- [222] Before the Great Mosque, Tunis IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL most whispers ; no sounds of altercation or of voices raised in bartering. But on turning a corner at the end of the souks a very different scene confronts us. Twenty or more dellalin (auctioneers), are all selling goods at once, pushing about as is their custom from bidder to bidder. The things to be sold are waved on high: bournous or haik, gandurah or embroidered caftan. Here the noise is deafening. Then suddenly, in the midst of this commotion, a silence falls upon the crowd and a passage opens for an old man, appar ently demented, to stumble along carrying on high the Bey's red flag — a white crescent on a field of crimson. They tell me he is a marabout — a poor religious fanatic, but a worker of miracles, and held in great veneration among the Arabs. After he has passed the crowd closes in like the angry waters of the Red Sea. . . . Here we are in the Jewel Market. Surely that was Fatma, reincarnated, come back to earth in flesh and blood, but this time appearing without her veil! There she sat under a snowy dome, flooded in iridescent sunbeams — more gorgeous than the mis- [223] BY ITALIAN SEAS tresses of Haroun-al-Raschid. A lustrous, golden mesh caught up her dusky hair and framed the pale oval of her face ; dark-stained lids shaded her almond r a (\pmi > No noise accompanies the slippered feet eyes and her full lips parted as she watched the crowd about her. Rough pearls, threaded on hoops of gold, hung from her ears ; golden chains, set with rose-cut [224] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL diamonds, encircled her slender neck; pearls hung about her shoulders and her waist was girt by a belt of gold. On her satin pantaloons embroidered birds thrust up their heads in song. Her hands, dyed deep with henna and painted, like mits, with little spots of brown, peeped out, claw-like, from rows of bracelets; each finger sparkled with gems. She had come from Algeria to attend the daily sale of jewels — had come with a stout middle-aged Algerian in European dress. The dellalin always paused before the two and thrust out their bony fin gers gleaming with precious rings. Then the Al gerian would test each stone, sometimes giving a bid but more often dropping his glass to turn away with out so much as a shrug. So the sale went on until the muezzins' plaintive cry rang out at midday from the minarets calling the faithful to prayer and bring ing each auctioneer before his highest bidder. I watched Fatma — vision of the Arabian Nights — mingle with the out-going tide. The golden mesh that bound her hair glowed like a nimbus as a streak of light fell full upon it and then was swallowed in dusky recesses of the souks. I, too, was swept along by hurrying throngs out into the scorching beams [225] BY ITALIAN SEAS of a midday sun, crude, pitiless and unpoetic, and my gorgeous Fatma seemed but the vision of a heated brain. Hadj Mahomet T sits in his dainty shop, a living Buddha, seated before his gilded fan. Hun dreds of fasceted golden vials, catching and reflect ing a thousand lights, shimmering like sparks of fire, frame the niche wherein he sits. Before him a low taper flickers and his pointed fingers, busily engaged in sealing a bottle of precious extract, glow vermilion in the candle's flame. What a young god he looks in his snowy bournous, his white turban wrapped tight about his head. Hadj Mahomet T is perfumer to the Bey, an aristocrat, but a radical, departing from the tradi tions of his forefathers. His wife and we sit sipping coffee on two little benches, one on either side of the shop. But why does his wife sit unashamed, laugh ing and chatting, unveiled before him? Because she is a French woman, young and pretty, one of the four Europeans who have intermarried with the natives. Gracefully he anoints each of our fingers with an essence of exquisite perfume : white rose, violet, lilac [226] Little shops but six feet square IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL and heliotrope, and then we start out to visit his cousin. We leave the souks by the Kasbah Gate in whose shadow wretched bundles of humanity — mere piles of rags — lay huddled mid half -naked creatures pos sessed by the demon, convulsively thrusting out their hands and imploring water to quench their thirst. Across the way, by low cafes, Arabs lounge on mats, playing childish games with dice and cards. Under the leafless branches of a caroub-tree squat bread- sellers with their coarse brown loaves. We enter a street bordered by high white-washed walls, pierced here and there by Moorish doors studded with huge nails and painted pale rose or faded green. On the keystone of each arch, a luck charm, the hand of Fatma, wards off the evil eye, or a black stone, misshapen and out of line, serves the same strange purpose. We pause before a door such as I have described, though one of noticeable height and elaborate work manship. Before it squats a man-servant, brown and wrinkled as a withered autumn leaf. He bids us follow through a vestibule and tiled corridor, then leaves us at the open door of the patio. As we stop a moment on the threshold, my eye [227] BY ITALIAN SEAS quickly runs from the court, with its colonnade of twelve slender columns and its walls tiled in ara besque of blue and yellow, to the intense blue sky over head. Under a Moorish arch a fountain coolly drips. In a corner of the court three graceful young negresses are playing in a low swing, chirping and singing like a cage of song-birds, their bronzed skins shining with bluish lights, their slender necks and arms encircled with chains and bracelets, their loins girt with brightly colored cloths. Discovering our companion, they swoop down upon her, like a flight of swallows, with screams of dehght, and, surround ing her, they twine their arms about her and kiss her hands and dress, while their eyes flash a thousand signs of welcome. Several elderly servants clack over on their pattens to meet us, and the young wife herself, her head high, comes gracefully across the court to greet us. She leads us into a long, high-ceilinged room, whose upper walls, elaborately stuccoed, suggest the magnificence of the Alhambra. Low couches sur round a niche decorated with gilded open-work, screens and gaudy mirrors. A magnificent wedding chest in repousse silver stands in a corner. On high [228] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL shelves rare pieces of faience elbow the commonest modern vases painted with poppies and impossible birds. Superb fruits and flowers in bowls decorate an ordinary walnut table. /V...F-.. £ A Woman of Quality "Ah, 'civilization,' what incongruities you bring into Oriental life," I thought as my eye fell on the plaid stockings of my hostess peeping from under her richly embroidered Turkish trousers — stockings such as Parisians used to wear two years ago. The [229] BY ITALIAN SEAS day when an Arab could detect a youthful female by the smooth skin of a shapely ankle is gone forever; fashion in the form of checked stockings has killed that coquetry! We were seated, as guests of distinction, on cane- bottomed chairs, though I should much have pre ferred the divan where our fair hostess sat cross- legged, holding one foot in her hand. The old ser vants brought in pipettes of coffee. "And have you brought me your photographs?" was the first unexpected query. All I could do was to promise to send one. My engraved card meant nothing, since she could neither read nor write. But she was happy, she said, in her married life. Four years ago she had been brought to this very room by a fat Jewess — always the go-between in betrothals — brought from her father's house completely veiled and dressed in her beautiful wedding clothes. At the entrance door her feet were washed, so that she might enter her husband's house free from the dust of the outside world. Here her husband met her and led her in and seated her upon a raised chair in a niche. "Yes," said she, "just so. My husband trembled greatly, for he had never seen my face though we had [230] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL been betrothed for a year. He hesitated to lift the heavy silver veil that hung about me, for he feared a disappointment; but suddenly with much emotion he threw it back — and he did not seem disappointed! He looked long into my eyes, then picked up a glass of sweetened water that stood prepared on a table be fore me, and he drank deeply of it and passed it to me to drink. And that was a token that he loved me and took me for his wife. And he covered my hands and face with kisses and I was happy, too. Then he left the house not to return that night. When our friends, waiting in the patio, heard the good news, they burst open the doors and, surrounding me, shouted for joy. And then the women undressed me and carried me to the great carved bed and fas tened close the silken curtains, and all night long they feasted and danced and made merry, as they al ways do at marriages and circumcisions, while I lay alone in my dark curtained bed and hstened to their merriment. But I was content, for I knew my hus band would break bread with me on the morrow." "And," added Madame T , "he gave the fat Jewess a thousand francs for finding him so beauti ful a wife." "And your children, where are they?" [231] BY ITALIAN SEAS "Ah, that is the sorrow, for I have none; but I al ways hope." Then Madame T whispered, "She still goes to the miraculous slide, Sida Fethalla — a slide that gives the joys of motherhood to whomsoever slips down its steep incline prone upon the stomach; but as yet the miracle has not worked." Our pretty hostess sighed and shook her head and said, "But at least I am not jealous of my husband; that would be the worst misery. I know some women who became so jealous of their husbands that they gave them potions that robbed them of their man hood." She took from her bosom a tiny silver box, inhaled a pinch of snuff and passed it on to us. "And I am lucky; no one has ever cast on me the evil eye. My poor cousin was not so fortunate; ill luck and misfortune fell upon her, one thing after another, until they knew their house must shelter some evil omen. So every thing was moved into the court — mirrors and rugs, tables and beds, every stick of furniture and every ornament, and at last back of a mirror high up on a wall they found a box of por cupine quills ! Was n't that enough to bring ill luck [232] IN THE BEY'S CAPITAL on any house? After they had burned the quills, all went well." Poor little ignorant creature, I thought — bird in your gilded cage — adorning yourself in silks and jewels, with never a thought in your empty brain, while your husband, courtly, well-educated, hand some, speaking French fluently, enjoys the outside world. But he scowled ugly yesterday when I ex tolled your beauty before one of his friends, as ten years hence he will be scowling at mention of his second choice. Then later you will come to look like those ugly women, old and pasty, that I saw, painted and rouged and blackened, but still in silks, squat ting on mats in your bare upper rooms — old, de serted Josses! THE END [233]