A letter by Oscar Wilde from Sicily ( April 16th, 1900)
My dear Robbie,
Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world, it dreams away its life in the Conca D’Oro, the exquisite valley that lies between two seas.The lemon-groves and the orange-gardens were so entirely perfect that I became again a Pre Raphaelite and loathed the ordinary Impressionists whose muddy souls and blurred intelligencies would have rendered but by mud and blur those “golden lamps hung in a green night” that filled me up with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite detail of the true Pre-Raphaelits is the compensation they offer us for the absence of motion; Literature and Music being the only arts that are not immobile.
Then nowhere, not even in Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics. In the Cappella Palatina, which from pavement to domed ceilings is all gold, one really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honeycomb looking at angels singing; and looking at angels, or indeed at people singing, is much nicer than listening to them. For this reason the great artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make whistlings.
Monreale you have heard of, with its cloisters and cathedral. We often drove there, the “cocchieri” most dainty finely-curved boys. In them, not in the Sicilian horses, is race seen. The most favoured were Manuele, Francesco and Salvatore. I loved them all, but only remember Manuele.
I also made great friends with a young Seminarist who lived in the Cathedral of Palermo, he and eleven others in little rooms beneath the roof, like birds.
Every day he showed me all over the Cathedral, and I really knelt before the huge porphyry sarcophagus in which Frederick II lies. It is a sublime bare monstrous thing, blood-coloured, and held up by lions, who have caught some of the rage of the great Emperor’s restless soul. At first, my young friend, Giuseppe Loverde by name, gave me information but on the third day I gave information to him, and rewrote History as usual, and told him all about the >Supreme King and his Court of Poets, and the terrible book tthat he never wrote. Giuseppe was fifteen, and most sweet. His reason for entering the Church was singularly medieval. I asked him why he thought of becoming a clerico and how.
He answered ” my father is a cook, and most poor, and we are many at home, so it seemed to me a good thing that there should be in so small a house as ours one mouth less to feed, for, though I am slim, I eat much: too much alas! I fear”.
I told him to be comforted, because God used poverty often as a means of bringing people to Him. and used riches never, or but rarely. So Giuseppe was comforted ì, and I gave him a little book of devotion, very pretty and with far more pictures than prayers in it; so of great service to Giuseppe, whose eyes are beautiful. I also gave him many lire,and prophesied for him a Cardinal’s hat, if he remain very good, and never forgot me.
He said he never would: and indeed I don’t think he will, for every day I kissed him behind the high altar.
