dominant feature of the
landscape--[Greek: Aitna mater ema--polydendreos Aitna]--than which
no other mountain is more sublimely solitary, more worthy of
Pindar's praise, 'The pillar of heaven, the nurse of sharp eternal
snow.' It is Etna that gives its unique character of elevated beauty
to this coast scenery, raising it to a grander and more tragic level
than the landscape of the Cornice and the Bay of Naples.

_PALERMO_

THE NORMANS IN SICILY

Sicily, in the centre of the Mediterranean, has been throughout all
history the meeting-place and battle-ground of the races that
contributed to civilise the West. It was here that the Greeks
measured their strength against Phoenicia, and that Carthage
fought her first duel with Rome. Here the bravery of Hellenes
triumphed over barbarian force in the victories of Gelon and
Timoleon. Here, in the harbour of Syracuse, the Athenian Empire
succumbed to its own intemperate ambition. Here, in the end, Rome
laid her mortmain upon Greek, Phoenician, and Sikeliot alike,
turning the island into a granary and reducing its inhabitants to
serfdom. When the classic age had closed, when Belisarius had vainly
reconquered from the Goths for the empire of the East the fair
island of Persephone and Zeus Olympius, then came the Mussulman,
filling up with an interval of Oriental luxury and Arabian culture
the period of utter deadness between the ancient and the modern
world. To Islam succeeded the conquerors of the house of Hauteville,
Norman knights who had but lately left their Scandinavian shores,
and settled in the northern provinces of France. The Normans
flourished for a season, and were merged in a line of Suabian
princes, old Barbarossa's progeny. German rulers thus came to sway
the corn-lands of Trinacria, until the bitter hatred of the Popes
extinguished the house of Hohenstauffen upon the battlefield of
Grandella and the scaffold of Naples. Frenchmen had the next
turn--for a brief space only; since Palermo cried to the sound of
her tocsins, 'Mora, Mora,' and the tyranny of Anjou was expunged
with blood. Spain, the tardy and patient power, which inherited so
much from the failure of more brilliant races, came at last, and
tightened so firm a hold upon the island, that from the end of the
thirteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, with one
brief exception, Sicily belonged to the princes of Aragon, Castile,
and Bourbon. These vicissitudes have left their traces every