A MACARONI FACTORY 



Italy without macaroni would be Hamlet without the ghost. Macaroni is made of a 

 special variety of hard wheat. The paste is forced through a press full of holes, which 

 brings it out in long strings. These are cut into about six-foot lengths and hung on poles 

 in the open air to dry, with a nonchalant disregard for germs and dust. By the time it has 

 collected sufficient of both to make it nicely stiff it is cut into commercial lengths, boxed, 

 and sold. 



SICILY, THF GARDEN OF FDF,N 



Geographical location was the deciding 

 factor of the life of this loveliest of all 

 Mediterranean islands. Here we have 

 neither time nor place for Sicily beyond 

 the merest hint of a long series of vivid 

 pictures, which begin with the misty tra- 

 ditions of the Garden of Eden and carry 

 us through the evolution of civilization 

 right to the present. Every State of an- 

 cient Europe falls into a place in the en- 

 during pageant. Greek and Roman, Car- 

 thaginian and swart Moor, Spaniard and 

 French and Italian fight and retreat, build 

 and demolish, create and undermine. 



Nature itself, now in the guise of the 

 misunderstood gods of old, now in con- 

 vulsions or in quiet fertility that science 

 has made plain to us, weaves its mysteri- 

 ous shuttle through and through the 



highly colored fabric. And men — such 

 men ! — tower above their fellows in the 

 story like Titans : Pindar, iEschylus, 

 Theocritus, Thucydides, Archimedes, the 

 two great Hierons, Cicero, Verres, Dio- 

 dorus, Hamilcar and Hannibal, Roger the 

 Count and Roger the King, Belisarius, 

 the great Crusaders — Richard of the Lion 

 Heart and Louis the Saint of France — 

 Charles of Anjou, Frederick II, the 

 "Wonder of the World," and Garibaldi. 

 Even this partial list reads like a com- 

 pendium of ancient and medieval romance 

 and chivalry. 



Sicily's history is as vivid and picture 

 esque, as ferocious and creative and de- 

 structive, as mythical and intensely prac- 

 tical, as the stories of all the rest of the 

 world put together. And in beauty of 

 nature, of climate, of man, and of beast, 

 the island is a paradise today, whether or 



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