Henry William Harper

“ It is only here and there that our people care to come to a service if there is no sermon. They come, no doubt, to pray, but their first motive is to listen. With all their faults, the Italians put worship first.
Coming out of the cathedral, we met a Sicilian country cart, drawn by one powerful mule, and carrying at least eight persons, for Sicilians are certainly not "merciful to their beasts." ”

“ Sicilians differ from Italians. You notice distinct types, Greek, African, Roman, and Norman. They are graver people, and I am told their songs show this. In their churches their reverence is noticeable, but they are intensely superstitious. Fortune-tellers abound, and are taken seriously. One Sunday morning, after Mass, in an open space in front of the Cathedral at Palermo, a large crowd gathered round a well-dressed woman, blindfolded, sitting in a chair. ”

“ At the Hotel Trinacria. A place of great antiquity; Greeks, Romans, Saracens, French, and Italians have successively held it. It has one of the finest harbours in the world, and does a large export trade of lemons, oranges, almonds, and fruit. Thence to Taormina, which has quite as old an history,—one of the most picturesque situations. A mass of broken, rolling hills rising sheer out of the sea, on the top of which is perched the town, approached by a zig-zag road absolutely impossible for cycles. Such a wealth of wild flowers ”

“ The presents are not supposed to be brought by a Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, or a Christ-child, but by a stern, terrible woman, who comes with gifts for good children, but bags of ashes for the bad ones. ”

“ Another, a parish priest, a man of culture and education, finding that I was well up in the story of the Roman Pro-consul Verres, who made himself famous by plundering Termini of many of its works of art, brought a copy of the Verrine Orations in which Cicero denounced Verres so successfully before the Roman Senate, and secured the restitution of the spoils. He was quite astonished when I told him that at school and at Oxford these Orations were text books which we all studied. As a rule priests in Italy and Sicily know little Latin beyond their breviary. ”

“ Bargaining with the owner of a stall of country produce, as one must always do, since fixed prices are unknown, I succeeded in reducing the price from threepence to a penny. Everyone buys the day's food in this way, and an elderly well-dressed man watched with great interset the foreigner's business ”

“ Termini. Another characteristic town, twenty miles from Palermo; the "Thermæ Imerense" of old Greek days; a naval base where, in 480 B.C., they defeated the Carthagenian fleet that was raiding Sicily on the very day that at Marathon the Greeks defeated the Persian host,—two decisive battles which saved Europe from African and Oriental domination.
Our party of three were the only English folk in the town. Most tourists pass the place by. Our hotel was a spacious building, frequented by Sicilians chiefly in summer for bathing and the hot springs, which are included in the hotel precincts. ”

“ Your only course is to buy something of the kind and join in the fun, doing as others do. The Italian can let himself go in a fashion that we Northerners can hardly imitate.
Among the churches in Rome there are many specially interesting from their association with the earliest Apostolical times. "Salute Prisca and Aquila; ... Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens," writes St. Paul to Timothy (II Tim. iv, 19, 21) . Again, "Aquila and Priscilla salute thee, with the church that is in their house (I Cor. xvi, 19) . ”