The spell of southern shores; or, From sea to sea in Italy - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ... Every grain of mentality we possess is challenged by the melancholy marvels of Syracuse. And the super-marvel of all, I believe, is within our own precincts, i. e. the Latomia de' Cappuccini. I have just emerged from the depths of those subterranean halls, and now I am resting in the garden bordering their brink. I have been seeking in the old poets, in the strange world about me, but seeking in vain, for the word which can make all things clear. For this place, to me, brims over with the mystery of human life on our planet. Syracuse, I am told, when it fell in 878 A. D., was left a labyrinth of ruins "without a living soul." Had it ever a soul, this Greek civilization whose beauty and glory and power were so far beyond our own, and which yet seems lacking in the finer and tenderer virtues? Here, above those incredible depths, all is steeped in tropical sunlight, all is passionately full of colour, of the radiance of life and beauty; below was once pitiless tragedy, and the tragic spirit haunts the place. Here, where I sit, the citizens of Syracuse, 413 B. c., with their wives and children, leaned to look down into those dizzying depths to laugh and gloat over the agonies of the Athenian prisoners of war, perishing before their eyes of starvation and fever.. "This garden," writes Symonds of the latomia, " was once the Gethsemane of a nation, where nine thousand free men of the proudest city of Greece were brought by an unexampled stroke of fortune to slavery, shame and a miserable end." One little touch reveals the intellectual susceptibility of the race, whatever their imperviousness to pity; in the end, those of the Athenian slaves who survived the horrors of the latomia were taken as slaves into Syracusan families, and many...