Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
I got up, dressed, and as the sun began to stir behind Custonaci, came through the general room and the porch of the bungalow into the translucent freshness where the sceptical guard was already smoking an early cigarette.
The time will come when Cofano will see what influence this wooing of Fortune in a foreign land by the sons of Mount Eryx and Custonaci may have on the next incarnation of the goddess who reigns in this corner of the island. Calatafimi is a town of 10,000 inhabitants about twenty miles inland from Trapani.
The damp had patched the painting on the ceiling and disfigured the whitewashed walls, on which were hung a few pictures a lithograph of the Madonna di Custonaci, a cheap Crucifixion, a reproduction of the design for the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele in Rome, three shiny chromolithographs of English country scenes, representing the four seasons minus one, an absurd French engraving, Education Maternelle and S. Francesco da Paola, with a shell for holy water.
This being so, one would expect to find its home on the top of the very Mountain itself, in the chief place of the comune, and not down at an insignificant little village like Custonaci.
It was getting late; we had taken longer to come than I had anticipated, the horses were tired. There is no inn at Custonaci, but I knew that Mario could manage somehow; so I accepted, and we went through the village, down the cliff by a steep and difficult path, and across the plain.
Behind this room, with windows looking inland over the plain towards Custonaci, is the kitchen, and these two rooms make up the middle of the bungalow. The right wing consists of the brigadier's sitting-room, out of which a door leads to his bedroom, and the left wing is all one large room, occupied by the men as their bedroom. The brigadier took me into his sitting-room to rest.
The storm, the vow and the oxen are as much common form in legend as the ship; and the next thing that strikes one is the curious similarity between the alternate domiciles of the Madonna on the mountain and at Custonaci, and the flittings of Venus Erycina to and fro between the mountain and Carthage.
I said that possibly something of the kind had been attempted, and that there may have been insuperable obstacles of which we knew nothing; and in any case, whatever the desolation of Palestrina, Custonaci was not in a particularly thriving condition, while the prosperity of Monte San Giuliano is due more to the salt than to the Madonna.
We saw Marettimo hovering over Levanzo "on the horizon all highest up in the sea to the West," as Ithaca is described in the Odyssey. We saw Ustica floating over Cofano and Capo S. Vito. We looked down on Custonaci, the Sanctuary of the Madonna and the great curve of the bay from Cofano to the foot of the mountain.
If we look upon the arrival of the picture at Custonaci as involving the transplanting of a piece of Africa into Sicily, much as an ambassador's house is regarded as being part of his own country transplanted into a foreign land, we may then consider that the Madonna, to all intents and purposes, still travels between the Mountain and Africa, only she now has an easier journey and avoids actually dwelling among heretics.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking