I left Catania on the first of August. The views of Ætna suffer as much as the views from it, by its perfect unity. In ascending other mountains we maintain a sort of contest with the inferior hills, and are pleased to see them, one after the other, confess our superiority and lose their consequence. The same hills in looking at a mountain, form a sort of scale, which assists in our estimate of its magnitude. Some huge mass perhaps, at no great distance, impresses us with its magnitude, while yet the trees and buildings upon it enable us to measure its size. As we recede, other eminences bright with the hues of heaven, rise in rich succession, behind that which at first we had thought so immense; and beyond the rest the lofty summit, whose colour almost mixes with the sky, rises in supreme majesty. The mind measures the more distant by the nearer object, and the powers of the imagination are excited to the utmost. From the want of all these accessories, Ætna does not look so high as Parnassus, which yet I apprehend it considerably exceeds. The snow had diminished greatly since I first saw it on my way to Malta, yet the patches were considerable, even on its southern face, a circumstance the more remarkable in a mountain where there are few considerable hollows. Perhaps however, the cinders, in spite of their black colour, are very bad conductors of heat, for dry as was the absolute surface on Ætna, the mule in most parts, exposed a degree of moisture at every footstep; and this surprised me very much, when connected with the general nakedness and barrenness of the mountain.

Though the clouds hung low, and I was rather out of humour from being cheated at Catania, and from finding myself mounted on a bad horse, yet I found the scenery along the base of Ætna very delightful. The country is inhabited and cultivated, with abundance of olives and other trees, and beautiful little eminences rise gently between the road and the shore; and though this richness and fertility is occasionally interrupted by beds of lava, yet these are but slight blemishes, and perhaps contributed by contrast to enhance the pleasure. On approaching Taormina it became still finer. Some bold, advancing summits appeared dimly through the clouds, with deep, woody valleys between them, and farther off the rugged mountains of Taormina, ridgy and interrupted, and contrasting strongly in their broken, irregular forms, with Ætna and its dependent cones. The road is execrable. The waiter at Catania assured me that an excellent road had been made by the English all the way to Messina, but this was a lie invented to put me in a good humour, that I might bleed more freely. A tax indeed was laid on for the purpose of forming such a work, but the money has never reached its object. I procured some macaroni and love apples at a village called Le Giarre, and about an hour before sunset climbed the steep hill of Taormina, in company with the innkeeper, whom we found on the shore, and who conducted me to his house. I hastily walked to some of the principal objects. The town occupies a lofty situation, but on one side are two rocks, rising considerably higher; and the ancient theatre occupies the hollow between them. On the other side of the town there is a still loftier eminence, crowned with a castle; a second fortress, called Mola, is some hundred feet higher than the first, and beyond this the ground rises interruptedly to Monte Venere, which, if my landlord may be trusted, is nearly equal to Ætna, but whose elevation I should not estimate at much more than 3,000 feet; perhaps however, I did not see the loftiest summit. I returned to the theatre on the following morning. It is a fine, and very interesting relick, but my eye was diverted from nearer objects by the magnificent view spreading full in front of the koilon. It is here that Ætna appears in all his majesty. The long, descending line seems almost interminable, and hence too we distinguish the vast hollow which I had looked into from the summit, and which forms a grand feature in the scene; though I suspect that my knowledge of what they indicated, rendered its outlines much more impressive to me, than they would have been to a stranger.

The ruins of the Theatre are very considerable, and highly interesting from the preservation of the proscenium. It is of brick, but appears to have been adorned with marble columns and entablatures, and was perhaps cased with marble; circumstances which rather indicate a Roman than a Greek construction. A range of arches crowns the slope of the Sedili, running in part, along the very ridge of the hill.

On returning to dinner from the theatre, a guide came to offer me his services to point out the antiquities of the place. Two had applied the evening before. The first had attended kings and princes, and written sonnets in their praise, which he did me the honour to repeat to me. The other was a painter, an architect, and a poet, and had a son who was quite a prodigy; he also favoured me with some of his verses, but as I was neither king, prince, nor even a nobleman, I did not accept the services of either. These antiquities, besides the theatre, consist of part of the city walls, aqueducts, reservoirs, and tombs, and what is called a naumachia, which is a large, oblong court, sunk in the earth, and surrounded with niches. The wall, and these niches are built of brick, and there is a vault behind one part of them; but for the most part they seem to be against the earth.

The tombs are successions of vaulted chambers, partly built of brick, partly cut in the rock, and frequently placed over one another, in two, three, or even four stories. A wall seems to have been uniformly erected in front, in which a small square opening was left to each vault. There is a fragment of Greek building in the church of San Pancrazio, but the lower part has suffered, because the stone is reputed a remedy for fevers: we may observe some other remains of little consequence, but probably Roman, in the same neighbourhood. There are also some specimens of early Gothic in Taormina, in which the doorways are of a singular, but by no means unpleasing style. The opening is square, with a small console within each upper angle; and round it is a wide face, perfectly plain; beyond this are clustered shafts, and the abacus of the capital is continued over the doorway; over this is a pointed arch, with the same peculiarity of a broad flat member between the opening and the mouldings.

The rocks about the theatre, and I believe in general, those on which Taormina is placed, are calcareous. It seems, by what I could distinguish of it, to be a gray, hard limestone, not at all crystalline, with white veins, but in the hills behind, and in a ravine which I passed after leaving the place, I observed also an argillaceous rock with a shining surface, somewhat unctuous to the touch. The inhabitants say that there are mines of copper and lead in the neighbourhood, but not now worked.

I had bargained for two dollars per horse from Catania to Taormina, and there I agreed with the vetturino, that if he would stay one day at his own expense, I would give him two dollars per horse more to Messina. This you see is four dollars per horse for three days, or one and one-third dollar per day, which I apprehend is about the fair value of the service; but of course a long journey for a single day deserves higher pay.

On the 3rd of August we left Taormina. After descending the hill, the road lies principally along the shore; except that at Alessio we have to climb over a rocky point of red and gray limestone with white veins; and towards Messina, a plain of some extent intervenes between us and the sea. The beach is composed of sand and small stones, except at the openings of the ravines, where the torrents have brought down large, rounded fragments, among which the horses pick their way as well as they can; the magnificent royal road not being discernible. These blocks consist of masses of a grit stone, passing into breccia; of clay-slate, of mica-slate, and of granitic stones, the latter frequently in great quantity, but I saw neither this, nor mica-slate, in sitû. There are also blocks of decomposing granite, lying on the limestone, on the north side of the promontory at Alessio. The hills to the left are frequently broken into pyramidal buttresses.

Messina, like Catania, bears traces of the earthquakes from which it has suffered, but a longer interval has elapsed, and there are no houses propt up, though there are many half ruined. The cathedral is a large building of Norman times. The front displays a sort of Italian Gothic, with a little modernization, the whole forming a very poor composition. In the flank is the ornamented window, published from Mr. Smirke’s drawings, in the Archæologia, which has excited so much controversy; but it is evidently an addition, and probably of the fifteenth century. The inside is divided into three naves by two ranges, each of twelve antique columns. They are not all of a size, but on an average may be considered as about five diameters apart. These are the spoils of more ancient structures, but the capitals are of the date of the church. The bases are all Attic, badly shaped, but without any indications of the Gothic taste. Two are new, and one of these is decidedly the worst in the church. In the choir, the half dome is covered with an early mosaic. The effect of this arrangement, i. e. of a double colonnade leading to an enriched recess, is as usual, very fine, though many of the details are bad. A well proportioned range of pilasters and arches of the cinque cento occupies part of the side-aisles, and there is a good tomb of the same date, and also some altars. Two of these are alike, each of two columns, whose distance apart is about two fifths of their height; behind each column is a pilaster, and both columns and pilasters are covered with carving, and the niche between them is surrounded by two bands of ornaments, but these are for the most part lightly marked, and the whole forms an elegant composition. Another altar of the same period, and similarly enriched, would perhaps not be inferior, if some panelling in the back wall were not objectionable. Yet here the columns are their full height apart. Proportion is no doubt of great importance in architecture, but it is not only one proportion which will please. When I first entered the church, it was the evening of a festa. The end altar of each nave was splendidly illuminated, and the long, half-obscure avenues, each leading to a blaze of light, produced a sublime effect. Yet the columns had begun to receive some tapestry of spiral stripes, and the capitals were shrouded with canopies of crimson damask fringed with gold, preparatory to the fuller decorations of the following day; and these in some degree disturbed the harmony of the scene. Of these capitals, one or two are ancient Corinthian, of good style, but damaged; the others are Gothic imitations of an early date, that is, with distinct leaves and no running foliage. The guide books in Sicily do not condescend to notice Gothic antiquities, and we do not readily find the histories of these buildings. Some of the churches present a great deal of inlaid work of marble and hard stones, and we may sometimes see one part of a building thus highly finished, while the rest is merely whitewashed. The pictures in general seem to be very bad.

Six columns on the inside of the Church of the Vergine Annunziata della nazione Catalana, and a few fragments on the out, are said to have been taken from a temple of Neptune. At San Giovanni Battista della nazione Florentina there are six columns, which are supposed to have once belonged to a temple of Hercules; but they are probably from different buildings, since three are of granite, two of cipollino, and one is of marmo Greco; the bases are Attic, but with rather deep hollows, and were probably made for the church. The side doorways have an ornament seemingly made for them, which is completely Roman, and not ill executed, while it is applied to a disposition of the parts which we should call Norman.

The mountain behind Messina is said to be 3,500 feet in height. It is the usual storehouse of snow; but this failed last winter, and they were obliged to import it from Calabria. The mountains there form a more solid and continued mass, but they break down in pyramidal buttresses like those of Sicily, and the nearer ones have the appearance of a similar, sandy, or gravelly composition. The principal range retains the snow till the beginning of June, and may therefore be about 6,000 feet in height. The harbour of Messina is said to be too deep, part of it being as much as forty fathoms.

I engaged a place in a speronara to Palermo for eight dollars; it was called L’Addolorata, which appeared rather ominous. An awning at one end would protect a few passengers from the sun, and I was to share this part with only one companion; but the master, whose name was Santo la Camera, cheated me in that, and in everything else that he could. To endeavour to elude his share of the bargain, and yet claim the full execution of mine, seemed not to be against his moral code. The distance is one hundred and ninety miles, and it is usually performed in two days, or at most three, always coasting along the shore. The speronara is an open boat, above 40 feet long, and I suppose 10 wide in the broadest part; the first 4½ feet from the stern is a space allotted to the steersman; the awning extends for about as much more; next are benches for eight rowers, and towards the prow a single mast, to which they contrive to fix four sails when the wind is gentle and favourable. In the covered part I found two companions. The first a cavaliere, who was always called eccellenza, and treated with great respect by the rest of the party; the other a priest, whom the captain of the vessel assured me had previously paid for his journey from Palermo to Messina, but now on his return gave nothing for his passage; but he himself informed me at first, that he paid four dollars, afterwards he said six. I believe they were both lies to serve a countryman, as my inquiries were evidently directed to ascertain the justice of what I paid myself; and afterwards, when I reproached the captain with being paid twice over for the use of the cabin, the truth made its appearance. The space immediately before the awning, and between the benches, was filled up, and mattrasses and rags were spread for four women, two men, and three children, all of whom the captain had taken out of charity, i. e. on their paying for the passage; the crew consisted of seven men and three boys, and one other passenger was stationed in the prow.

We left Messina on the 9th and rowed all night against the wind: of course I saw nothing of these celebrated straits beyond what I had enjoyed from the neighbourhood of Messina. The northern coast of Sicily is very mountainous, higher ones rising inland beyond those which skirt the shore. The latter expose a mixture of wood and cultivation, and there are frequently small cultivated plains at their feet, forming altogether a delightful appearance. Ætna I did not see, I believe because hid in the clouds, but the nearer hills present such a continued barrier that it could only have been visible from a few points. About twenty-five miles from Palermo is the wide open valley of Termini, the ancient Himera, and this was the only considerable opening I observed, but we might have passed others in the dark; for partly rowing, and partly sailing, we continued our course without intermission. On the right were the Lipari Islands, all mountainous, and almost all inclining in form to a single truncated cone, or to a combination of cones; nevertheless there are some which, from their shapes, I should suspect not to be entirely volcanic. We reached Palermo on the evening of the 11th.

Palermo is situated on a beautiful bay, which bears a competition with that of Naples, but the situation of the city is nearly on a flat, and the mountains which encircle its noble plain, have throughout a similarity of character; both which circumstances limit, not the beauty of any particular scene, but the variety of the whole. These surrounding mountains are nevertheless finely broken and varied in their details. The highest summits may perhaps rise between three and four thousand feet, but in the back ground we distinguish, in clear weather, the vast mass of the Nebrodes, now called mountains of the Madonnia. I was led to expect, before I reached Sicily, that they always had a snowy cap, but this is not the case, though they may perhaps always preserve snow in their hollows. You enjoy this scene to great advantage from the Marina, a public promenade extending along the shore, bordered by good houses, which however, are irregularly disposed, rising mostly upon a continued terrace. At the extremity of this place the view is embellished by the fine groves of the botanic garden; beyond this we see the spacious and well cultivated plain rising gently towards the abrupt mountains I have already mentioned, which recede in successive distances, till the series is lost in the Nebrodes. In the opposite direction is Monte Pellegrino, a fine detached hill, but deficient in wood.

If an Englishman were transported in rapid succession to the bay of Naples, to Corfu, to the citadel of Athens, to Messina, and to Palermo, which would he prefer? or if he contemplated the morning sun gradually lighting up Ætna from the theatre of Taormina, would he not pronounce it finer than any of them? I have seen each at no very long interval, but I cannot decide; that which is present always seems the most beautiful, and if I give to Athens the preference, it is, perhaps, that a thrilling sensation of its past glory mingles with the emotion produced by the scenery; and certainly it is that in which the circumstances of beauty to which we are habituated in England are most deficient. There are no villages, no gentlemen’s seats; no trees near enough to be distinctly seen, except in the gray stripe of the olive-grove. No mixture of shade and cultivation; no farm-houses; no ivy-covered ruins; no running stream; no bold cliffs; and if there are high mountains, they are at such a distance, that all their asperities are softened down into an even tint. What then is there at Athens? There are the brilliant aerial tints shed over sea and land; a succession of hills of finely varied forms, with the waters of the Saronic gulf glittering among them at different distances; the mountains of the Peloponnesus; the Acropolis of Corinth; the isles of Egina and Salamis; the Piræus; the plain of Athens; and the gray olive-grove finely contrasting with the yellow hue of the plain. Nearer are the Pnyx, the Areopagus, and the remains of the Propylæa: and the white marble columns of the Parthenon, against one of which the spectator is leaning, though they hardly make part of the view, yet certainly contribute to its effect.

Palermo has two good, straight streets, crossing each other at right angles; two squares, one of which is in front of the royal palace; and the Marino, which bounds the city on the east. The rest of the town is composed of narrow, crooked and dirty streets. Indeed this was the state of the whole city till 1564, when the viceroy, Don Pedro di Toledo, began to form the two principal avenues. These are of good width; and the palaces which border them, though not of correct, are by no means of contemptible architecture. The antiquities are principally of Norman times, with one or two edifices which claim, and probably with justice, a Saracenic origin, without being of a much earlier date. To me, who have been so long examining the remains of Grecian liberty, these seem quite modern; however, some of them are of great historical value, and I shall proceed to give you a little account of them, observing by the way, that the common people of Sicily have lost all pride of their Greek ancestry, and confound in their accounts all who were not Christians, or rather Roman Catholics, under the name of Saracens; or if they acknowledge some difference of nation, they do not at all doubt that they lived about the same period, and one very wise cicerone assured me on his honour, that some of the city walls built by the said Greeks or Saracens, had been injured by the universal deluge. A priest in one of the churches maintained that one part of the building had been erected by the French; I asked at what time? At the time the Romans governed the island.

There is a Saracenic castle called Zisa, just out of Palermo; its origin indeed has been disputed, but there is a peculiarity of style in its architecture, and a correspondence with some of the buildings existing in Turkey, which leaves no doubt of the fact. The windows have been altered, except a few small, square ones in the lower part, but the wall is ornamented with obtusely pointed arches, very slightly recessed, and without ornament. The principal entrance is under a scheme arch within a very highly pointed one, which is probably an alteration. This and two others open into a corridor which has been modernized, and opposite to the middle arch of the corridor, there is a large archway opening into an ancient hall. Three sides of this hall retain their original disposition, and it is altogether the most curious part of the building. It is a square room with four recesses, one of which communicates with the corridor, as above mentioned, and gives air and light to the room. The roof is a groined and obtusely pointed vault, but without ornament; a very small shaft stands at each salient angle of each of the three recesses. There are some ornaments in mosaic in the upper part of the walls, and above these an arch, which is neither groin, vault, nor dome, but a combination of little arches, and bits of arches, so intricately disposed, that after spending three or four hours in the endeavour to express it on paper, I have been at last obliged to give it up. There is a fountain in the middle, and did the corridor open on a lawn, or into a garden, you could hardly imagine a more delightful retreat on a hot day.

Another Saracenic ruin, but at some distance from the city, is called Casteddu, i. e. Castello; the Sicilians uniformly changing double l into double d, and the terminal o into u. It is of considerable extent, and ornamented with obtusely pointed arches, and very slightly retreating faces. It also exhibits some arches nearly flat, which are probably modern; and there are small square-headed windows which belong apparently to the ancient work; and long loop-holes, which are likewise terminated by a lintel. Among the arches, some have key-stones, and others have not. Close by this building there is a smaller edifice of the same sort, and there are other remains of walls and mounds, on one of which is an old olive-tree, 12 feet in diameter at the base. These are all seated on a pool called Mare d’aquadolce, which is supplied by copious springs of fine water, rising at the foot of the mountains; and close by these springs there is another fragment, consisting of a mixture of squared stones and brickwork, and having pointed arches, which may perhaps be Saracenic.

These are the principal objects referred to Saracenic times, and though the arches are pointed, yet they can hardly be said to be edifices belonging to the pointed style of architecture. They have a character peculiarly their own, and are readily distinguished from the Norman edifices of this country. To these I now turn; and first, as is reasonable, I must say something about the Cathedral. This was founded I believe, by William the Second, called the good, in 1187. It contains the sepulchre of his grandfather Roger, first Norman king of Sicily, and of his father, William the bad. These were at first deposited in a small chapel built by Roger, which was pulled down to make way for the church. The tomb of Roger is a plain sarcophagus, composed of slabs of porphyry, under a canopy, having the form of a little temple, with four columns, and an architrave enriched with mosaics. Those of some other Sicilian princes are disposed in the same manner, but with more ornament. Considerable alterations and additions have been made at different periods to the church, and lately the artists have proceeded with a view of imitating the old style, which renders the analysis more difficult, but if there are parts certainly of more recent dates, and others very doubtful, there still remains externally a large portion undoubtedly of the original work. In the succession of slightly retreating faces, and the obtusely pointed arches, the Norman architects appear to have followed their Saracenic predecessors; they introduced a greater quantity of moulding, but still there is less of this than we should find in Norman buildings of as high a finish in France or England. They brought with them also their zigzag, of which no traces occur in the Saracenic remains; but instead of forming it by carved mouldings, it generally consists of black marble inlaid on a white, or light-coloured ground. Other Norman ornaments also occur, partly in relief, but more often in inlaid work. The western extremity has a square termination, instead of a gable; and it is flanked with a little tower at each angle, of a very whimsical taste. In the centre is a large and lofty arch, but interrupted, as in the annexed sketch.

The upper part contains a comparatively small window. The doorway below preserves its arch entire, but the external moulding is broken and recomposed in a zigzag manner. The composition has no beauty, and is certainly not coeval with the building. I cannot pretend to assign it a date, but there are in it no traces of the restoration of Roman architecture. The principal entrance is on the south side, by an open porch of three arches, and this is also an adjunct, perhaps of the fourteenth century.

There are several buildings of the middle ages in Palermo, which enable one to trace the progress of the art. The most interesting is perhaps the Church of San Niccolò della Kalsa, the tower of which abounds in inlaid work, and we may trace in it imitations, both of the Norman ornaments, and of those of Roman architecture; but the combinations of the former are more complicated than those of the cathedral. This was probably erected in the twelfth century. In the Saracenic architecture we find no carved mouldings, the artist depending entirely for their enrichments on inlaid work and mosaics. The Normans adopted this style, but applied it to their own favourite ornaments, and mixed with it carved mouldings; the carving came gradually more into use, and inlaying and mosaics diminished, and the latest example pointed out to me of the latter, is in the Palazzo de’ tribunali, erected in 1307. Even the zigzag ornament was in use till 1302, as it is exhibited in the church of St. Francis, which is of that date. The front of the church of San Niccolò della Kalsa, was probably erected after the tower, and indeed after 1306, which is the date of the earliest tomb in the church; the ornaments are less Norman, and the effect is made to depend on mouldings, and not on inlaid work. Yet the distribution is simple, and it is very far from the richness or intricacy of the portals of the French or English ecclesiastical edifices of that period.

There is a good botanic garden at Palermo, and the warmth of the climate gives us an opportunity of seeing many of our green-house plants growing freely and in great perfection in the open air. Among them we may observe the sugar-cane, the papyrus, and the banana; and the botanist will also be gratified by meeting with many Sicilian plants, which are hardly to be seen elsewhere. The casino was designed by M. du Fourny, whom I have already mentioned to you at Paris: the general form is good, but the details do not please me. The metopes (for the order is Doric) are ornamented with different fruits. The idea is ingenious, but it ought to have exhibited the various modes of fructification, especially such as tend to elucidate the different families of plants. In the present instance, they have neither been well chosen nor well executed.