generation, outlasting dynasties and surviving revolutions; so that we find the actual banditti of Fondi and Itri represented in Tasso's time by Marco Sciarra, and nearer to our own by Fra Diavolo. The territory of these outlaws is as definite as that of more regularly constituted communities, and the laws of their organization far more unchanging. Who shall say that they have not subsisted for ten centuries as well as for three?
If moral evil could be compensated for by æsthetic good, the conquerors of southern Italy might put in a just plea for indulgence, and monuments of architectural beauty, wherever they have been established, oblige us to confess that Europe has not been altogether a loser by the inheritance of the Saracens. In Sicily, though we have no remains of their actual period of domination, their eastern fancy touched with its visionary grace the more ponderous and material taste of their conquerors, and the combination created a group of buildings unique in Europe. All know how the Arab genius, triumphing supreme in Spain, has bequeathed to us in the very names of the Alhambra and the Alcazar a spell by which to summon to our fancy vistas of shining courts and airy colonnades as our ideal of all that is most exquisite in stone or marble. And who, visiting the beautiful Moorish remains of Ravello, and gazing across the Bay of Salerno to the ruins of Pæstum, and down on the sapphire cove where Amalfi nestles a thousand feet below, does not feel in his heart half tempted to forgive the pirate crews whose galleys so often furrowed that blue expanse, and brought terror and desolation to those smiling shores?
The great subterranean reservoir on Cape Misenum, known as the Piscina Mirabilis, though generally attributed to the Romans, might, perhaps, with greater justice, be ascribed to the Saracens. There is at least the negative evidence that it is not mentioned by any Latin author, while the character of its architecture suggests, though it does not prove, Moorish origin. The safety of the Mussulman garrison, cut off from all communication with the land, must naturally have depended on an artificial supply of water, of which the Romans, masters of the country, were independent. Even the Roman fleet, for whose accommodation it is supposed to have been built, would hardly require so exceptional a contrivance on their own shores, while the Saracen galleys, whose crews could not scatter in safety on a hostile beach, may often have been obliged to resort to it before they could continue their voyages. A great underground tank was also built at Lucera for the use of the Mussulman garrison, and all eastern nations construct subterranean reservoirs like the vast artificial lake which underlies part of Constantinople, and whose extent has never even been explored.
To analyze the Sicilian and Calabrian dialects would require the science of a skilled philologist; but it is interesting to note in a more superficial way how many Arabic words have crept into modern Italian, and how some have made their way into our own language. To begin with, the name Saracens, by which, however, they never called themselves, but were known by other nations, is apparently derived from sarkin or sarrakin, strangers. The Italian darsena (dock yard), and our own arsenal come equally from dar-es-se-na'h; giarra and jar, from the Arabic verb giarr, to draw; applied in Sicily to large vessels for holding oil, or small ones for sweetmeats. Marg, in Arabic a meadow, in Sicilian means a marsh. Perhaps the flower African marigold has brought its English-sounding name from the land of its birth. Cake, which we trace to the German kuchen, has a striking similarity of sound to ke'k, a sweet dish eaten in Africa as far back as the tenth century. Rokûk, Arabic for paper or parchment, applied figuratively to scroll-shaped ornaments, became rococo. Camlet has nothing to do with camel, but comes direct from khamlah, a hairy cloth; as cotton does from kattân, a weaver. Augia, an arch, gives us ogive; while aztire, admiral, alembic, almanac, camphor, cipher, magazine, tariff, zero, and zenith, with many other scientific and commercial terms are as Arabic in form as they are in origin.
In Italian cuffia (cap) from kufia, a headdress; acciacchi, from as-shiakwa, ailments; bali and baliato, magistrate and magistracy, from wâli and waliato, an emir and his jurisdiction; cânova, (wine-cellar), from khânuwa, a vaulted shop on the ground-floor; catinella, from catù, basin; dogana, from diwân, a council or assembly, in low Latin transformed into dohana; tiratoio (cloth-mill), from tiraz, a silk-factory; with tarsia (inlaying), scialbo (pale whitish), camicia, giubba, gabella, and taccuino are among the more obvious and patent derivatives.
Itria, the Arabic name of vermicelli — as much manufactured in Sicily under the Saracens as it is at the present day — may have given its name to Itri, the notorious
