Sketches and studies in Southern Europe Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The eruptions of Etna have blaekened the whole land for miles in every direetion. That is the first observation foreed upon one in the neighborhood of Catania or... more » Giarre or Bronte. From whatever point of view you look at -Etna, it is always a regular pyramid, with long and gradually sloping sides, broken here and there by the exereseenee of minor eraters and dotted over with villages; the summit erowned with snow, divided into peak and eone, girdled with elouds, and eapped with smoke, that shifts shape as the wind veers, dominates a blue-blaek monstrous mass of outpoured lava. From the top of Monte Rosso, a subordinate voleano whieh broke into eruption in 1669, you ean traee the fountain from whieh " the unapproaehable river of purest fire" that nearly destroyed Catania issued. You see it still bubbling up like a frozen geyser from the flank of the mountain, whenee the sooty torrent spreads, or rather sprawls, with jagged edges to the sea. The plain of Catania lies at your feet, threaded by the Simeto, bounded by the promontory of Syraeuse and the mountains of Castro Giovanni. This huge amorphous blot upon the landseape may be eompared to an ink-stain on a variegated tableeloth, or to the eoal-distriets marked upon a geologieal atlas, or to the heathen in a missionary map—the green and red and gray eolors standing for Christians and Mohammedans and Jews of different shades and qualities. The lava, where it has been eultivated, is redueed to fertile sand, in whieh vines and fig-trees are planted—their tender green foliage eontrasting strangely with the sinister soil that makes them flourish. All the roads are blaek asjet, like paths leading to eoal-pits, and the eountry-folk on mule- baek plodding along them look like Arabs on an infernal Sahara. The very lizards whieh haunt the roe...« less