66 AUTUMN VISIT TO LIPARI ISLES 



Milan, with its cathedral wonderful example of the art 

 of carving in stone ; surely a woman had a hand in it ; 

 Florence, with its tall towers strong in their own strength, 

 rising straight and true, unbuttressed, city dear to the 

 heart of Englishmen ; and so on, and on, through Rome, 

 Naples, and at last Messina, queenly Messina, where, on 

 a brilliant September morning one such would be the 

 making of an English summer we joined a small but 

 scientific party of Englishmen and Italians, met to start 

 on a cruise among the ^Eolian or Lipari Islands, and thus 

 to celebrate the centenary of the famous visit made to 

 them in 1789 by the renowned naturalist Lazzaro 

 Spallanzani. 



We were soon aboard our boat, the Villa San Giovanni, 

 an excellent screw steamer, with first-class accommoda- 

 tion for sixteen passengers, just the number of our party. 

 She was all our own for a week, and eagerly we over- 

 hauled our prize, finally pronouncing all to be very good. 

 The beds we had ordered in were new and of luxurious 

 dimensions : of provisions there was a goodly store piles 

 of tinned meat, fancy biscuits, buckets full of lemons 

 with a view to lemon squash, and our bread, in the form 

 of hollow rings a foot or two in diameter, was a greedy 

 sight, as it hung threaded on cord festooned about the 

 pantry walls. Oh! goodly bread of Messina; too soon 

 you ran short, and we, murmuring at the dispensations of 

 our improvidence, vainly attacked the bread of Lipari. 

 This must be seen to be believed. It is baked in a 

 furnace till it is too hard to be cut with a knife, and then, 

 lest it should prove too appetising, is kept in the sun 

 till it can only be broken by geological hammers ; the 

 fragments soaked in wine refuse to swell up, but crumble 

 into a fine volcanic sand. Bread we could not call it, 

 except by euphemism, and " trachyte " was the name it 

 always went by with us. 



