Every hour of the day the Street is a variety show with the mixed life passing through it, and acting its dramas there. Flocks of goats squeezing through on their way to pasture; donkeys carrying distorted wine skins or gay glazed pottery protruding from their panniers; women going to the fountain, balancing slender Greekish water jars on their heads; the painted carts carrying up the tourists’ luggage; the tourists themselves in veils and goggles bargaining at enticing shop doorways, or peering into the windowless room of Taormina’s kindergarten, where a dozen or more infants are primly ranged, every mother’s daughter with knitting pins in hand and silky brown curls knotted on top of head like little old women, sitting solemnly in the scant light of the open door, acquiring from a gentle old crone the art of creating their own stockings. There the barber strums his guitar on a stool outside the “Salone” door while he waits for custom; the Polichinello man obstructs traffic with the delighted crowds of boys collected by Punch’s nasal chantings and the shrill squeaks of “Il Diavolo.” There come the golden loads of oranges and lemons; green glistening lettuces and feathery finochi; bread hot from the bakers in queer twists and rings; live chickens borne squawking from market, and poor little kids going to the butchers. The busy tide of every-day life never ebbed 74its colourful flow from the beginning of the street at the arch of one old gateway until its end at the arch of the other. Buying and selling, learning, working, and idling, the Present surged there, but a step aside into any of the backways, and one was instantly in the Past. Old women spinning in doorways with the very same twirling spindles as those of two thousand years ago. The very same old women, one had almost said, their hawk-like dried faces were so unimaginably far removed from youth, from all modernness. The very names of the streets spell history and drama. History rises up and becomes alive.