Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Honey Of Hybla

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An important preservative as well as sweetener, honey was an indispensable ingredient in the Classical kitchen. Along with the bees of Mount Hymettus and Mount Ida in Greece, the wild bees of Mount Hybla in the province of Ragusa, Sicily, were the most celebrated source of honey in Antiquity. They and their produce became a literary byword for all things exceptionally sweet and good, eventually coming to represent poetry itself. Citing Theocritus (c. 300 bc), the founding father of the pastoral idyll, the American 19th-century nature writer John Burroughs expanded on the subject in his Locusts and Wild Honey: ‘Sicily has always been rich in bees.

The idylls of Theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees, ‘flat-nosed bees’ as he calls them in the Seventh Idyll, and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world’s goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes Adonis are ‘honey-cakes’, and other tidbits made of ‘sweet honey’. In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.’ In his first Eclogue, Virgil described the ideal lullaby for old age to be the murmuring of Hybla bees. Ovid compared women’s hairstyles to their numberlessness. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with some sarcasm Cassius remarks that Mark Antony’s fine words ‘rob the Hybla bees and leave them honeyless’.

In one sonnet John Keats longs to sweeten his song by sipping the dew on ‘Hybla’s honied roses’ in the moonlight. Fanny Trollope, disappointed in business in the US, made euphemistic use of the honey’s proverbial qualities in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832): ‘During nearly two years that I resided in Cincinnati, or its neighbourhood, I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his efforts to increase it; thus every bee in the hive is actively employed in search of that honey of Hybla, vulgarly called money; neither art, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit.’ That pursuit was possibly not far from the mind of James Leigh Hunt when he published a popular volume of Sicilian divertimenti simply entitled A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla in 1848. The actual thing can in fact still be purchased, in different varieties according to the flora of the season: the satra honey is derived from wild thyme; zagara honey from citrus flowers.

Extract from Blue Guide Sicily © Blue Guides, All Rights Reserved. For more Sicily posts, see here.

A Grumpy Visit to Westminster Abbey

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One of the things about London that always delights and impresses visitors from overseas is the fact that the great national museums are free. It delights and impresses me, too. Just think of the British Museum. Think of all that responsibility. The duty of the curators to all those works of art is immense. The cost of conserving them, keeping them proof from theft, must be prodigious. Not to mention the salaries for all the other staff, the cleaning, the heating. Yet as visitors, we are not burdened with any of that. It’s free. And they maintain an impeccable website too. How do they manage it?

Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, the great Collegiate Church of St Peter, costs £18 per adult per visit. Of course, it is a similarly rich repository of history and heritage. And it faces similarly enormous costs of upkeep. The fabric of the building, its delicate monuments, ancient woodwork, paintwork, stonework, stained glass. Heating bills, cleaning bills, feather dusters. It is also a place of worship. Lest anyone forget this, every hour, on the hour, a disembodied recorded voice rings out across the fan vaulting enjoining us to bow our heads and pray. And it has cost us all £18 to get in.

Perhaps I wouldn’t mention this twice in a single paragraph, though, if I felt amply compensated by the experience of having been there. But I don’t. Despite the steep ticket price, large sections of the Abbey are roped off and you soon find yourself herded along a demarcated one-way route a bit like shuffling up a RyanAir check-in line. And the vergers are intransigent. ‘I’m sorry!’ A uniformed arm is politely but firmly held out across my scurrying person, ‘That part of the Abbey is closed!’ I had wanted to see one thing in particular. I knew it was somewhere in the south aisle. Access was barred. But I had paid £18! That is an expensive way to be told to shove off.

Of course, I am not in charge of maintaining the Abbey and I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I know the vergers are only doing their job. One of them, in the Lady Chapel, was charming and helpful. The others, even as they said ‘No’, mostly said it with a smile. But still, I was a visitor and I had a sub-par ‘visitor experience’. Wouldn’t it be more logical to do one of the following: Either let the Abbey be free, but because it is a functioning church, reserve the right to close parts of it off and boot sightseers out when services begin. This is what they do in St Peter’s in Rome, and if you haven’t paid you can’t with all conscience object if sections are out of bounds. Or, charge a hefty admission fee, but then admit that it’s a museum, as they do in the major churches of Venice and Florence. And for goodness sake allow visitors to see what they’ve paid for. Where exactly in the south aisle IS the monument to Sir Godfrey Kneller? I’m not going to pay another £18 on the off chance that it might not be roped off next time. But unlike the British Museum, Westminster Abbey does not maintain an impeccable website. It lacks a properly marked-up floorplan showing who is buried and commemorated where. Is this because it is assumed that no one really wants to know? Or is it because the chances, for a visitor, of being able to see the monuments of his or her choice are so slim that it honestly isn’t worth it?

The Abbey also operates a no-photo policy, which is galling. I would have loved to take a few pictures. I’m not talking about setting up a tripod or blinding other visitors with my flash. I’m talking about snapping epitaphs with my telephone. In St Peter’s (Rome), photography is allowed and it gives visitors enormous pleasure. In Westminster Abbey it is rigorously prohibited, and instead, visitors are informed glibly that there is a wide selection of postcards in the Abbey shop. Postcards?! I didn’t want a postcard. I had hoped to be able to take a close-up shot of the extraordinary Nightingale memorial, by Roubiliac (1761), so I could study it at home. Or perhaps illustrate a short comparison in this blog with Bernini’s Alexander VII monument (1678) in St Peter’s (Rome). In both monuments, the draped skeleton of Death emerges from below to threaten the commemorated mortal with an intimation of their end (in the Bernini monument, Death’s instrument is an hour glass; in the Roubiliac, it is a spear). But while Pope Alexander sits tight, unmoved by the premonition, Mrs Nightingale faints into the arms of her appalled husband. These descriptions all a bit meaningless without a picture, aren’t they? But in Westminster Abbey there is strictly no photography; and the ruling is stubbornly policed. Oh well, there is a wonderful archive image of the Nightingale tomb here, on this excellent Spitalfields blog. And here (below) is the Bernini (photo © Jean-Pol Grandmont). Roubiliac had certainly seen the Bernini work. Nine years before he designed the Nightingale, in 1752, he had achieved a long-cherished ambition to visit Rome. By all accounts he didn’t stay very long, but it was enough. Presumably the authorities at St Peter’s permitted him to use a sketch book.