by Grant Allen
We have now tramped the entire length of the two chief longitudinal streets of Malta, and have seen most of the buildings of much general interest. But in the Strade Mezzodi and Britannica there are many private dwellings of the best description, and even some public ones, like the Auberge de France (devoted to the head of the Commissariat Department), warrant examination from a historical if not from an architectural, point of view. All of these knightly hotels are worthy of notice. Most of them are now appropriated to the needs of Government offices or, like the Auberge d’Arragon (an Episcopal residence), to the housing of local dignitaries. But where the Auberge d’Allemagne once stood the collegiate church of St. Paul has been built, and if there ever was an Auberge d’Angleterre (for the language of England was suppressed when Henry VIII. confiscated the English Commanderies and was early succeeded by that of Bavaria), the building which bore her name was leveled when the new theater was built. It is nevertheless certain that the Turcopolier or General of the Horse was, until the Reformation, selected from the Language of England, just as that of Provence always furnished the Grand Commander, France the Grand Hospitaller, Italy the Admiral, Arragon the Drapier, Auvergne the Commander, Germany the Grand Bailiff, and Castile the Grand Chancellor of the Sovereign Order, whose Grand Master held among other titles those of Prince of Malta and Gozo.
We are now at the Upper Barracca, one of those arcades erected as promenades by the knights, and still the favorite walk of the citizens in the cool of morning and evening. From this point also is obtained a good bird’s-eye view of Valletta and much of the neighboring country, and if the visitor continues his walk to St. Andrew’s Bastion he may witness a panorama of both harbors; one, which the Maltese affirm (and we are not called upon to contradict them), is surpassed by the Bosphorus alone. It is at all events the most picturesque of the island views. There at a glance may be seen the two chief harbors alive with boats, sailing vessels, and steamers, from the huge ironclad to the noisy little launch. We then see that beside the main peninsula upon which Valletta is built, and which divides the Quarantine from the Grand Harbor, there are several other headlands projecting into these ports in addition to the island occupied by Fort Manoel and the Lazaretto. These narrow peninsulas cut the havens into a host of subsidiary basins, bays, and creeks, while Valletta itself has overflowed into the suburbs of Floriana, Sliema, and St. Julian, and may by-and-by occupy Tasbiesch and Pieta; Bighi, where the Naval Hospital is situated, and Corradino, associated with gay memories of the racecourse, and the more sombre ones which pertain to the cemeteries and the prisons, all of which are centered in this quarter, where in former days the knights had their horse-breeding establishments and their game preserves.
But there are certain suburbs of Valletta which no good Maltese will describe by so humble a name. These are the “Three Cities” of Vittoriosa and Senglea, built on the two peninsulas projecting into the Grand Harbor, and separated by the Dockyard Creek, and Burmola or Cosspicua, stretching back from the shore. These three “cities” are protected by the huge Firenzuola and Cottonera lines of fortifications, and as Fort Angelo, the most ancient of the Maltese strongholds, and Fort Ricasoli, recalling the name of its builder, are among their castles, they hold their heads very high in Malta. Indeed, long before Valletta was thought of, and when Notabile was seen to be unfitted for their purpose, the knights took up their residence in Borgo or the Burgh, which, as the Statue of Victory still standing announces, was dignified by the name of Citta Vittoriosa after their victory over the Turks. Strada Antico Palazzo del Governatore recalls the old Palace which once stood in this street, and indeed until 1571 this now poor town was the seat of Government. Antique buildings, like the Nunnery of Santa Scolastica, once a hospital, and the Inquisitor’s Palace, now the quarters of the English garrison, are witnesses to its fatten dignity. Burmola is also a city of old churches, and Senglea named after the Grand Master De la Sengle, though at present a place of little consequence, contains plenty of architectural proofs that when its old name of “Chersoneso,” or the Peninsula, was changed to Isola, or “The Unconquered,” this “city,” with Fort Michael to do its fighting, played in Malta militant a part almost as important as it does nowadays when its dockyard and arsenal are its chief titles to fame.
Turning our survey inland, we see from the Barracca a rolling country, whitish, dry, and uninviting, dotted with white rocks projecting above the surface; white little villages, each with its church and walled fields; and topping all, on the summit of a rising ground, a town over which rise the spires of a cathedral. This is Citta Vecchia, the “old city” as it was called when the capital was transferred to Valletta, though the people round about still call it by the Saracenic name of “Medina,” (the town), the more modern designation of “Notabile” being due to a complimentary remark of Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Castile. No town in Malta is more ancient. Here, we know from the famous oration of Cicero, that Verres, Prætor of Sicily, established some manufactories for cotton goods, out of which were made women’s dresses of extraordinary magnificence, and here also the same voluptuous ruler did a reprehensible amount of plundering from temples and the “abodes of wealthy and honorable citizens.” In their time-honored capital the Grand Masters had to be inaugurated, and in its cathedral every Bishop of Malta must still be consecrated. But the glory of Notabile is its memories, for in all Christendom there is no more silent city than the one towards which we creep by means of the island railway which has of late years shortened the eight miles between it and Valletta. Every rood, after leaving the cave-like station hollowed out of the soft solid rock, and the tunnels under the fortifications, seems sleepier and sleepier. Every few minutes we halt at a white-washed shed hard by a white-washed “casal.” And all the “casals” seem duplicates of each other. The white streets of these villages are narrow, and the people few. But the church is invariably disproportionately large, well built, and rich in decorations, while the shops in the little square are much poorer than people who support so fine a church ought to patronize. There is Hamrun, with its Apostolic Institute directed by Algerian missionaries, Misada in the valley, and Birchircara. Casal Curmi, where the cattle market is held, is seen in the distance, and at Lia and Balzan we are among the orange and lemon gardens for which these villages are famous. The San Antonio Palace, with its pleasant grounds, forms a relief to the eye. At Attard, “the village of roses,” the aqueduct which supplies Valletta with the water of Diar Handur comes in sight, and then, at San Salvador, the train begins the steep pull which ends at the base of the hill on which Notabile is built.
On this slope are little terraced fields and remains of what must at one time have been formidable fortifications. But all is crumbling now. A few of the Valletta merchants are taking advantage of the railway by building country houses, and some of the old Maltese nobility cling to the town associated with their quondam glory. But its decaying mansions with their mouldering coats of arms, palaces appropriated to prosaic purposes, ramparts from which for ages the clash of arms has departed, and streets silent except for the tread of the British soldiers stationed there or the mumble of the professional beggar, tell a tale of long-departed greatness. A statue of Juno is embedded in the gateway, and in the shed-like museum have been collected a host of Phœnician, Roman, and other remains dug out of the soil of the city. Maltese boys pester us to buy copper coins of the knights which are possibly honest, and their parents produce silver ones which are probably apocryphal.
In Notabile itself there is not, however, a great deal to look at, though from the summit of the Sanatorium, of old the Courts of Justice (and there are dreadful dungeons underneath it still), a glance may be obtained over the entire island. To the prosaic eye it looks rather dry to be the “Fior del Mondo,” the flower of the world, as the patriotic Maltese terms the land which he leaves with regret and returns to with joy. There to the south lies Verdala Palace, and the Boschetto, a grove in much request for picnic parties from Valletta, and beyond both,
the Inquisitor’s summer palace, close to where the sea spray is seen flying against the rugged cliffs. The Bingemma hills, thick with Phœnician tombs, are seen to the west, and if the pedestrian cares he may visit the old rock fortress of Kala ta Bahria, Imtarfa, where stood the temple of Proserpine, and Imtahleb near the seashore, where in the season wild strawberries abound. Musta, with its huge domed church, is prominent enough to the northeast, while with a glass it is not difficult to make out Zebbar and Zeitun, Zurrico, Paola, and other villages of the southeastern coast scattered through a region where remains of the past are very plentiful. For here are the ruins of the temples of Hagiar Khim and Mnaidra, rude prehistoric monuments, and on the shore of the Marsa Scirocco (a bay into which the hot wind of Africa blows direct), is a megalithic wall believed to be the last of the temple of Melkarte, the Tyrian Hercules.
But in Notabile, far before Apollo and Proserpine, whose marble temples stood here, before even the knights, whose three centuries of iron rule have a singular fascination for the Maltese, there is a name very often in many mouths. And that is “San Paolo.” Saint Paul is in truth the great man of Malta, and the people make very much of him. He is almost as popular a personage as Sir Thomas Maitland, the autocratic “King Tom,” of whose benevolent despotism and doughty deeds also one is apt in time to get a little tired. Churches and streets and cathedrals are dedicated to the Apostle of the Gentiles, and from the summit of the Sanatorium a barefooted Maltese points out “the certain creek with a shore” in which he was wrecked, the island of Salmun, on which there is a statue of him, and the church erected in his honor. It is idle to hint to this pious son of Citta Vecchia that it is doubtful whether Paul was ever wrecked in Malta at all, that not unlikely the scene of that notable event was Melita, in the Gulf of Ragusa. Are there not hard by serpents turned into stone, if no living serpents to bite anybody, and a miraculous fountain which bursts forth at the Apostle’s bidding? And is not “the tempestuous wind called Euroklydon” blowing at this very moment? And in the cathedral we learn for the first time that Publius, on the site of whose house it is built, became the first bishop of Malta. For is not his martyrdom sculptured in marble, and painted on canvas? And by-and-by we see the grotto in which St. Paul did three months’ penance, though the reason is not explained, and over it the chapel raised to the memory of the converted Roman Governor, and not far away the Catacombs in which the early Christians sheltered themselves, though whether there is an underground passage from there to Valletta, as historians affirm, is a point in which our barefooted commentator is not agreed.
All these are to him irreverent doubts. Notabile, with its cathedral, and convents, and monasteries, its church of St. Publius, the “stone of which never grows less,” the seminary for priests, the Bishop’s Palace and the Bishop’s Hospital, is no place for scepticism touching Saint Paul and his voyages. Any such unbeliefs we had better carry elsewhere. The day is hot and the old city is somnolent, and the talk is of the past. At the wicket gate of the little station at the hill foot the engine is, at least, of the present. And as we slowly steam into Valletta, and emerge into the busy street, we seem to have leapt in an hour from the Middle Ages into the Twentieth Century. The band is playing in the Palace Square, and the politicians are in procession over some event with which we as seekers after the picturesque are not concerned. But in Valletta we are in the land of living men. Behind us is a city of the dead, and around it lie villages which seem never to have been alive.
XIII. SICILY
Scylla and Charybdis — Messina, the chief commercial center of Sicily — The magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater at Taormina — Omnipresence of Mt. Etna — Approach to Syracuse — The famous Latomia del Paradiso — Girgenti, the City of Temples — Railway route to Palermo — Mosaics — Cathedral and Abbey of Monreale — Monte Pellegrino at the hour of sunset.
To the traveller who proposes to enter Sicily by the favorite sea-route from Naples to Messina the approach to the island presents a scene of singular interest and beauty. A night’s voyage from the sunny bay which sleeps at the foot of Vesuvius suffices to bring him almost within the shadow of Etna. By daybreak he has just passed the Punta del Faro, the lighthoused promontory at the extreme northeastern angle of this three-cornered isle, the Trinacria of the ancients, and is steaming into the Straits. Far to his left he can see, with the eye of faith at any rate, the rock of Scylla jutting out from the Calabrian coast, while the whirlpool of Charybdis, he will do well to believe, is eddying and foaming at the foot of the Pharos a few hundred yards to his right. Here let him resolutely locate the fabled monster of the gaping jaws into which were swept those luckless mariners of old whose dread of Scylla drove them too near to the Sicilian shore. Modern geographers may maintain (as what will they not maintain?) that Charybdis should be identified with the Garofalo, the current which sweeps round the breakwater of Messina seven miles to the south; but Circe distinctly told Ulysses that the two monsters were not a “bowshot apart”; and the perfectly clear and straightforward account given of the matter by Æneas to Dido renders it impossible to doubt that Scylla and Charybdis faced each other at the mouth of the Straits. The traveller will be amply justified in believing that he has successfully negotiated the passage between these two terrors as soon as he has left the Pharos behind him and is speeding along the eastern coast of the island towards the city of Messina.
Very bold and impressive grows the island scenery under the gradually broadening daylight. Tier on tier above him rise the bare, brown hill-slopes, spurs of the great mountain pyramid which he is approaching. These tumbled masses of the mountains, deepening here where the night shadow still lingers into downright black, and reddening there where they “take the morning” to the color of rusty iron, proclaim their volcanic character, to all who are familiar with the signs thereof, unmistakably enough. Just such a ferruginous face does Nature turn towards you as you drop down at twilight past the Isleta of Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria, or work your way from the eastern to the western coast of Teneriffe, round the spreading skirts of the Peak. Rock scenery of another character is visible on the left, among the Calabrian mountains, dwarfed somewhat by the nearer as well as loftier heights of the island opposite, but bearing no mean part in the composition of the land- and sea-scape, nevertheless. Mile after mile the view maintains its rugged beauty, and when at last the town and harbor of Messina rise in sight, and the fort of Castellaccio begins to fill the eye, to the exclusion of the natural ramparts of the hills, the traveller will be fain to admit that few islands in the world are approached through scenery so romantic and so well attuned to its historic associations.
There are those who find Messina disappointing, and there is no doubt that to quit the waters of a rock-embosomed strait for the harbor of a large commercial seaport possessing no special claim to beauty of situation, is to experience a certain effect of disenchantment. It would not be fair, however, to hold the town, as a town, responsible for this. It is only some such jewel as Naples or as Algiers that could vie with such a setting. Messina is not an Algiers or a Naples; it is only an honest, ancient, prosperous, active, fairly clean, and architecturally unimpressive town. The chief commercial center of Sicily, with upwards of eighty thousand inhabitants, a Cathedral, an Archbishop, and a University, it can afford, its inhabitants perhaps believe, to dispense with æsthetic attractions. But its spacious quays, its fine and curiously shaped port, the Harbor of the Sickle as it was called by the ancients when after it they named the city “Zancle,” have an interest of their own if they are without much claim to the picturesque; and the view from the Faro Grande on the curve of the Sickle, with the Sicilian mountains behind, the Calabrian rocks in front, and the Straits to the right and left of the spectator, is not to be despised.
