Vistas in Sicily by Arthur Stanley Riggs

Author:Arthur Stanley Riggs [Riggs, Arthur Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781363878086
Google: KrlgvgAACAAJ
Publisher: Wentworth Press
Published: 2016-08-27T16:02:48+00:00

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SYRACUSE, THE PENTAPOLIS

NEVER make the blunder of trying to study the Greater City when any of the big “tourist yachts” are in port. You will know soon enough when they are—cloop! cloop! cloop! go the hoofs under your windows long before you have thought of breakfast. An endless string of carriages plods out of the island full of gesticulating, noisy, Baedekering enthusiasts who make up in cheery adjectives what they lack in knowledge. When they are back at evening, white with dust and happily weary, and the launches have taken them all on board the white floating palaces, Syracuse sighs and sleeps again. Once more it is safe to venture out. Once more cabs can be had at decent rates. And once more the timid ghosts of Greek and Roman days come to the gentle call.

Ortygia, the island, was once connected with the mainland by a mole of cut stone, and afterward separated and attached and separated again as the whims and dangers of the different periods dictated. Now it is both connected and detached. Between island and shore is the citadel, separated from both by little canals crossed by stout bridges, and capable of defense in time of necessity. All the dust of a whole rainless season seems to concentrate upon the dusty road leading from the island across the bridges, by the citadel, past the rows of shipping that fill the docks on either side of the mole, and so on through the deserted square which was once the Agora of Syracuse.

Every Greek city had its agora, or marketplace, as every Roman city had its forum. Besides being the market, where food and commodities of every other sort were sold the agora was the assembling place of the city, the central exchange for news and views. You must use your imagination to-day to reconstruct the agora, to people it again with the dark faces and flowing robes of the Greeks of old, to hear the clank of weapons and armor as a Tyrant’s bodyguard passes through the unsmiling crowd: for the agora, now, is only a bare, open square, through the middle of which a naked red column thrusts upward. A kindlier fate has overtaken the Roman Palæstra near by—a gymnasium and auditorium where the youth of Latinized Syracuse used to polish their muscles and wits alike. One exquisite bit of it remains—the little semi-circular lecture hall, in which clear water covers the pit, and mirrors back the delicate maidenhair peeping from the cracks and joints between the marble seats in its gleaming horseshoe. What schoolboy debating societies met here, and who were the “exchange professors” who held forth in this choice hall where now waterbugs and tiny lizards alone give sign of life?

Not far from town the road runs into pleasant farming country, followed by orchards of almonds, lemons, and citrons. Farther up the slopes of Neapolis and Epipolai straggle great rocky groves of uncanny, fantastically shaped old olives, the most disreputable-looking tenants of the soil imaginable.

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