Twenty miles farther southwards along the coast lie the town and baths of Aci Reale, a pleasant resort in the "cure" season, but to others than invalids more interesting in its associations with Theocritus and Ovid, with "Homer the Handel of Epos, and Handel the Homer of song;" in a word, with Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, and the much-enduring Ulysses. Aci Castello, a couple of miles or so down the coast, is, to be precise, the exact spot which is associated with these very old-world histories, though Polyphemus's sheep-run probably extended far along the coast in both directions, and the legend of the giant's defeat and discomfiture by the hero of the Odyssey is preserved in the nomenclature of the rocky chain which juts out at this point from the Sicilian shore. The Scogli dei Ciclopi are a fine group of basaltic rocks, the biggest of them some two hundred feet in height and two thousand feet in circumference, no doubt "the stone far greater than the first" with which Polyphemus took his shot at the retreating Wanderer, and which "all but struck the end of the rudder." It is a capital "half-brick" for a giant to "heave" at a stranger, whether the Cyclops did, in fact, heave it or not; and, together with its six companions, it stands out bravely and with fine sculpturesque effect against the horizon. A few miles farther on is Catania, the second city in population and importance of Sicily, but, except for one advantage which would give distinction to the least interesting of places, by no means the second in respect of beauty. As a town, indeed, it is commonplace. Its bay, though of ample proportions, has no particular grace of contour; and even the clustering masts in its busy harbor scarcely avail to break the monotony of that strip of houses on the flat seaboard, which, apart from its surroundings, is all that constitutes Catania. But with Etna brooding over it day and night, and the town lying outstretched and nestling between the two vast arms which the giant thrusts out towards the sea on each side, Catania could not look wholly prosaic and uninteresting even if she tried.