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The Toledo, or Via Cassaro, for it bears both these designations, runs from the sea to the Monreale gate, close to which is the Royal Palace, and the Cathedral square opens from this street. The Via Macqueda contains few buildings of interest except the University.
One structure of nave, and choir, and transept, is imposed upon another; and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured glass in the northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto.
But Giovanni neither required nor desired their ministrations; he would not eat nor drink, but contented himself with the patience of hatred to sit for two long hours awaiting the pleasure of his foolish victim. They left at last, a little before midnight the Duke, his brother Cesare, his cousin Monreale, and a numerous attendance, his own retinue and those of the two cardinals.
The valley, as it spread below our gaze, appeared one huge carpet of heavy-fruited orange-trees, save where at times a rent in the web left visible the bluish blades of wheat, or the intense green of a flax-plantation. Monreale is a mere country-town, containing no object of interest, save the Cathedral.
Josaphat and Buddha are one and the same person. Very suggestive to thought was a visit to the wonderful cathedral of Monreale, above Palermo; for here, at this southern extreme of Europe, I found a conception of the Almighty as an enlarged human being, subject to human weakness, identical with that shown in the sculptures upon the cathedral of Upsala, at the extreme north of Europe.
The cardinals, to whom Caradosso obtained introductions through Ascanio Sforza, were glad to ingratiate themselves with the powerful Duke of Milan at this critical moment, and the artist was able to inform his master that Cardinal di Monreale had given him a marble Leda a really good antique, though some limbs of it were missing and that other prelates had made him liberal offers.
These troops frequently came in contact with the Neapolitans in trifling skirmishes, and kept their attention so well occupied that General Colonna, in command of the force sent in search of the 'Filibuster, did not doubt that the whole Garibaldian army was concentrated over Monreale. Garibaldi rapidly moved his own column by night to its new base of operations.
Catarina seems to preserve an element of the poetic, almost magical; and as I drove with the Cavaliere Valguanera one evening in March out of Palermo, along the garden valley of the Oreto, then up the mountain side where the warm light of the spring sunset swept across from Monreale, lying golden and mellow on the luxuriant growth of figs, and olives, and orange-trees, and fantastic cacti, and so up to where the path of the convent swung off to the right round a dizzy point of cliff that reached out gaunt and gray from the olives below, as I drove thus in the balmy air, and saw of a sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roofs, draped in fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a summer dream.
Cardinal Monreale gave two rings, a sapphire and a diamond very beautiful and worth three thousand ducats; the prothonotary Cesarini gave a bowl and cup worth eight hundred ducats; the Duke of Gandia a vessel worth seventy ducats; the prothonotary Lunate a vase of a certain composition like jasper, ornamented with silver, gilded, which was worth seventy to eighty ducats.
On the road to Monreale there is an interesting botanical garden, where I saw some very fine specimens of plants entirely new to me camphor, coffee, castor oil, and others. There are many beautiful gardens in Palermo, besides the delightful public one known as the "Flora," which afforded such a charming and refreshing outlook from the Hotel de France, where I was staying.
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