All this of course he described to me on the morrow over a late breakfast, and I envied him the experience. They had walked half the night, in fact, and in fairyland. The sea front was more or less folded up and deserted but as they advanced upon the interior of the town they came to the margins of the darkness, and saw everywhere lights budding and springing up. It was an inferno of activity, and they realized that they were intruding upon the preparations for a great fête — in fact the name day of Palermo’s patron saint, Saint Rosalie. Half the great city was still alive and awake, for apart from the numerous artisans who were busy arranging the decorations the streets were full of wide-eyed onlookers and curious children. The crowds walked up and down in this atmosphere of impromptu kermess, watching the colored awnings going up, the electric light fixtures being set and tried out, watching the Catherine wheels and other fireworks being settled on their pinions. And tall as giraffes, moved the three-storey trolleys normally used to change the municipal electric light bulbs but now pressed into service to string out rolls and rolls of colored bunting across the streets. Children were bathing in the fountains, infected by all this blazing light and excitement. A whole market garden of flowers had sprung up in one quarter which they doused down with water every few minutes. It gave off a smell of wet earth like paradise. No wonder the hotels were short of bathwater! Livestock too was coming into town in lorries and being planked down beneath the booths and stalls; pigeons, ducks, quail and chickens, and morbidly sensitive rabbits! Miss Lobb thought herself in Paradise, and she was sad to think that she could not at that late hour buy a rabbit or a pot of basil. But the stress of the alcohol was diminishing now, and it was clear that by the time they regained the hotel she would be all right again. Deeds, combining therapy with culture, told her the story of Saint Rosalie.
Walking lightly thus, arm in friendly arm, they joined themselves to the dense groups of curious promenaders, who had turned the principal streets into an impromptu midnight Corso. The crowd swayed and swelled, ebbed this way and that, just like batches of seaweed in a sea grotto. It was quite simply bliss, and the history of Rosalie gave a kind of folklorique color to all that was going on round them. Deeds, who had had a lot of practice telling stories to his own children, found no difficulty in enlisting Miss Lobb’s tenderest feelings on behalf of this little fifteen-year-old niece of William the Good who was so overcome by feelings of sanctity that she disappeared from the face of the earth — translated, some say, by angels direct to heaven. In fact, she had retired to a hermit’s cave on Monte Pellegrino, there to pass a long life of anonymity, and finally there to die without letting anybody know what she had done. This was in 1159. The long silence fell and she was forgotten, all trace of her was lost. Then in 1624 while the town was in the dread grip of the plague, a holy man was troubled by a dream of her. He dreamed her history, and quite clearly saw in a vision that her remains lay buried in a mountain cave — he could indicate the exact spot. He suggested to the proper authorities that if these relics, which had in the interval acquired great magical powers of healing, were reverently gathered and carried in triumphal procession round the walls of the city, there was a sporting chance that the plague would abate.
This was duly done and Saint Rosalie saved the city and became its patron. The relics of the little saint were placed in a silver coffer and duly housed in the main cathedral of Palermo while her festival (July 15) leads off several days of rejoicing and present giving, with brilliant and extravagant firework displays and religious services. It was the dress rehearsal to this event that Deeds had so luckily attended with Miss Lobb. They were so thrilled with all there was to see that they did not get back to the hotel for several hours. By then Miss Lobb was completely sobered and went to bed with expressions of rapturous gratitude. Deeds felt ennobled, if a bit exhausted, or at any rate so he admitted. But it was while he was embarking on an account of his wild night out with Miss Lobb that Saint Rosalie intruded on our sunlit breakfast in person, so to speak. Maroons started going off all over the town and for those not in the know there was a moment of pardonable anxiety. I thought the strikers had blown up the hotel. The Bishop, who was in the pool, almost gave signs of cardiac failure — he thought for a moment that the Catholics had struck home. But after the first smoke had cleared a smiling Roberto came to explain the noise, and suddenly we all noticed that everything was all right again, the stress and fatigue. We were all friends again and full of joy abundant — a new mood had set in, though there was no real reason for it unless it be a change of wind in the night. Or the soothing effect of little Rosalie’s sanctity.
Good humor, like the bath water, had all of a sudden returned to the company and breakfast in the bright sunlight of a Palerman summer morning was almost a convivial affair. After the onslaught of the maroons had been explained away, that is. But this morning we were to bend our mind to sterner cultural things than the processions which had already started forming in the streets of the capital. We were going to visit the Archaeological Museum in order to see the sculptural treasures which the wretched archaeologists had carefully removed from Selinunte. It was distasteful to be forced to replace them mentally in order to admire them — I was reminded of my youth when I used to traipse round the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, trying in a dispirited fashion to replace them upon the Acropolis which I had not as yet seen, with the help of photographs. It did not work, context is everything; besides, these were decorative additions to structure not independent art works.
PALERMO, THE CATHEDRAL
Nevertheless the Sala de Selinunte contains real treasures like the famous Zeus and Hera on their wedding day, Heracles strangling an Amazon; they brought back memories of the deserted dunes, melting away in the sunlight above the lonely blue sea. There were other fine things too, from Himera and from Agrigento — indeed the museum is apparently the largest Greek Classical Museum outside metropolitan Greece itself. But something stuck, some subtle change of key, of rhythm; it was like a grain of sand in a Thermos flask. One somehow couldn’t receive the full impact of these disembodied objects, however beautiful they were. Something that Deeds said made me realize that the reason was, of course, Saint Rosalie. What had happened was that we had stepped out of the Greek and Roman world, the historical Sicily of ancient times; and we had entered a new Sicily, the Arab, Norman, Spanish Sicily with its own notions of temporal beauty. The arrival of Saint Rosalie had been timely — together with her uncle William the Good — she symbolized this sudden change of axis and emphasis which was the message that Palermo held for us. We were now in modern times, and the effect of the Greek spirit had become distant, diluted, all but lost under the waves of cultures more recent if just as agitated. That was why these precious Greek relics seemed to lose their density and weight. Yes, objectively one realized that they must be seen, for even as fragments many of them were superb. Nor do I really know if the other members of the party shared this queer feeling that they were somehow dispossessed of their birthright in being put on view in this spacious and beautifully lit museum. But altogether it was an hour agreeably spent in a cool cavern of sculpture and nobody could pretend to be the worse for the experience.