Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet.  Off the island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little picaroon, with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos and pistols stuck in their waistbands.  The pirates thoroughly ransacked the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little that they wanted except brandy and provisions.  In releasing the vessel, the ragamuffins seem to have had a touch of humor, for they gave the captain a “receipt” for what they had taken, and an order on the British consul at Messina to pay for the same.  This old-time courtesy was hardly appreciated at the moment.

Irving passed a couple of months in Sicily, exploring with some thoroughness the ruins, and making several perilous inland trips, for the country was infested by banditti.  One journey from Syracuse through the center of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed existed in the world.  The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin.  “God knows my mind never suffered so much as on this journey,” he writes, “when I saw such scenes of want and misery continually before me, without the power of effectually relieving them.”  His stay in the ports was made agreeable by the officers of American ships cruising in those waters.  Every ship was a home, and every officer a friend.  He had a boundless capacity for good-fellowship.  At Messina he chronicles the brilliant spectacle of Lord Nelson’s fleet passing through the straits in search of the French fleet that had lately got out of Toulon.  In less than a year Nelson’s young admirer was one of the thousands that pressed to see the remains of the great admiral as they lay in state at Greenwich, wrapped in the flag that had floated at the masthead of the Victory.

From Sicily he passed over to Naples in a fruit boat which dodged the cruisers, and reached Rome the last of March.  Here he remained several weeks, absorbed by the multitudinous attractions.  In Italy the worlds of music and painting were for the first time opened to him.  Here he made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and the influence of this friendship came near changing the whole course of his life.  To return home to the dry study of the law was not a pleasing prospect; the masterpieces of art, the serenity of the sky, the nameless charm which hangs about an Italian landscape, and Allston’s enthusiasm as an artist, nearly decided him to remain in Rome and adopt the profession of a painter.  But after indulging in this dream, it occurred to him that it was not so much a natural aptitude for the art as the lovely scenery and Allston’s companionship that had attracted him to it.  He saw something of Roman society; Torlonia the banker was especially assiduous in his attentions.  It turned out when Irving came to make his adieus that Torlonia had all along