A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  This kind of conquering and the repeated subjugation of these southerners happened century after century, as foreign invaders and Rome itself swept over the land. The southern Italians from earliest, almost mythological, times have been leery of the State, viewing it always as something imposed on them rather than something they were part of. Instead, they prefer loyalty to family, village, and province above all else.

  In the mountains just inland from Italy’s west coast between Sapri and Paola, two Calabrians meet along a narrow, two-lane roadway in the midst of an olive orchard. The man on the left is carrying a piece of olive wood he just cut from one of his decades-, if not centuries-, old trees that dot this southern Mediterranean land. Photo by John Keahey

  For example, more than two thousand years ago, many of these peoples rebelled against the yoke of Rome, even going so far as to ally themselves with Carthage in North Africa—from whom they had as much to fear as from the Romans—to help them toss off Roman control.

  Levi tells us that the period of the Italic wars between native tribes and the expanding Romans gave Rome much difficulty. In the end, the southerners failed to evade the more powerful and unified Roman State. Levi says, “But they kept their individuality and did not mingle [as did other conquered peoples all over the Mediterranean world eager for coveted Roman citizenship] with their conquerors.”

  No one, in the South’s long history, ever tried to make the people independent. The Normans ruled here between C.E. 1130 and 1198, and were succeeded by the Germans. Then came the French in 1266, who greatly expanded the power of feudal nobility. The peasants were then taken over and taxed heavily by the Aragonese, an independent kingdom in what is now northeast Spain, bordering on France. These late-Middle-Ages rulers required payments on sheep and other livestock. It obviously was in their best interests that livestock herds be expanded, so the rulers worked to reduce the number of small farmers and agricultural laborers, and converted cropland to pasture.

  Eventually, in 1734, southern Italy and Sicily became an independent Kingdom of Naples under the Spanish Bourbons, but the Mezzogiorno continued to be dominated by feudal landowners well beyond Italy’s unification in 1861, when the Bourbons were driven out by Italians from the North led by Garibaldi.

  It took World War II and subsequent land reform to eliminate the peasant class that Levi found in the Fascist 1930s. But in many updated encyclopedias, the Mezzogiorno still is defined as the “economically underdeveloped region” of southern Italy. Such baggage!

  * * *

  Even in modern times, the South’s poor chafe against Rome. The government, with its ability to tax and conscript, simply is not trusted. As late as the 1930s, the southerners had a different concept of what was and was not lawful, compared to the Fascist State’s view. The laws decreed from Rome can well be ignored, southerners believed; the laws of reason and good sense, Levi tells us, were followed instead. “A man is ‘lawful’ if he behaves as he should; a wine is ‘lawful’ if it is not watered.” A petition signed by members of the pre–World War II peasant class was viewed by them as “lawful,” but not by the Fascist State, which would toss the signers into jail. The laws of the State made no sense to the southerners’ sense of reasoning, which was honed during centuries of subjugation.

  “Just as long as Rome controls our local affairs and wields the power of life and death over us we shall go on like dumb animals,” Levi quotes one frustrated southerner objecting to a Fascist demand.

  Levi, a physician by training, recounts how the pre–World War II Fascist government did not want him treating patients during his year-long exile to the South, even when the sick peasants in their remote villages had nowhere else to turn for medical help. One man died because Fascist bureaucrats would not allow Levi to see him, and villagers grumbled that Rome poured millions into its war to conquer Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) but refused to send money to control the malaria that had for centuries ravaged the southern Italian peasants.

  Italian friends have explained to me their distrust of the Italian State, even in today’s more sociable, humanistic times.

  “When we pay money to the State, we know it is wasted on giant projects that never get finished,” says one who defends why Italians are famous for dodging income-tax obligations. “At best, our money is lost; at worst stolen. Why should we?”

  I have often wondered whether there was ever a peaceful period in the Mezzogiorno. Did one or two consecutive generations ever live out placid lives between periods of conquest and subjugation, decade after decade, century after century? There must have been such periods, but historians tend to focus more on radical changes that involve hardship, mass death, and destruction, than on periods of blissful calm, if any ever existed here.

  Chapter 5

  No Boats Stop at Paola

  Paola stazione came into view. The train stopped briefly. I said good-bye to the elderly Sicilian; he smiled warmly and nodded, and I jumped out, bag in hand, at the bottom of a hill that one hundred years ago likely was barren of buildings, including this train station, which must have been built after Gissing’s visit; hence his reliance on the coastal steamer. It was mid-morning—a bit later in the day than when Gissing climbed off the small ship from Naples. I asked a train worker if any boats called here now. “Never,” he said. “This is not a port.” He looked slightly amused at my question.

  I had covered the distance from Naples in a few hours; it took Gissing a night of steaming. I would have preferred his way, but then I would not have met the signore going to Sicily to visit his mother.

  Gissing saw a tiny, “yellowish little town” set high against the coastal mountains that shield inland Calabria from the outside world. There is less yellow among the buildings today. Perhaps there is just a hint of that fine intensity that matches the color of lemons found on the trees around the train station. But the modern town now spills down the mountainside to the sea.

  Northern Calabria

  Post–World War II buildings are everywhere, bracketing the old city center on three sides; only the steepness of the ever-climbing mountain above protects the top of the old town. I knew I would leave for Cosenza within a few hours, so I checked my luggage at the station and walked a few hundred feet to the beach where the English writer must have disembarked one hundred years earlier.

  The beach is stony, but here and there are some patches of sand. There still is no harbor, no dock, no boats tied up. The trainman must have thought my question was indeed odd. A few feet offshore, rusting away in the choppy blue Tyrrhenian, stand round metal casings that must have supported a pier at one time. The beach that Gissing walked up, as the locals, eager for the foreigner’s coins, fought over the right to carry his luggage, is now a parking lot.

  It was in high surf, just a few yards away from where I stood, that Gissing was lowered from the steamer down to a boat that would carry him to dry land.

  “The surf was high; it cost much yelling, leaping, and splashing to gain the dry beach,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, not without apprehension, I had eyed the group awaiting our arrival; that they had their eyes on me was obvious, and I knew enough of southern Italians to foresee my reception. I sprang into the midst of a clamorous conflict; half a dozen men were quarrelling over possession of me. No sooner was my luggage on shore than they flung themselves upon it. By what force or authority I know not, one of the fellows triumphed; he turned to me with a satisfied smile, and—presented his wife. ‘Mia sposa, signore!’” Then, Gissing reports, he watched, incredulously, the wife, not the man, grab his steamer trunk, “(a frightful weight), fling it on to her head, and march away at a good speed.”

  On the day of my visit, this beach was nearly empty except for a few cars with lone occupants sitting and looking seaward, and three bright blue buses used for travel between towns within the region, each waiting to start its schedule. It was a sunny day. The bus drivers stood by their carriage doors, smoking and gazing out to sea.

  One hundred years earl
ier, Gissing marched up this beach at Paola surrounded by townspeople fighting for the privilege of carrying his large steamer trunk. Winning the struggle to carry his possessions was a stout peasant woman, who carried it on the top of her head into the yellow-tinged town high above. Photo by Paul Paolicelli

  I was pleased to note that one thing had not changed since Gissing’s time: A squat, yellowish, square building, its sign saying DOGANA, or customs house, stood where a predecessor shack might have stood well into the last century when Gissing climbed off the ship and had to have his belongings searched. No such search is required today. It appears the office now is for the Polizia di finanza, the fiscal police who ensure that shopkeepers give cash-register receipts to customers, thereby guaranteeing that the transaction is recorded and the State gets its share.

  These gray-uniformed officials, though, while they do not go through a traveler’s luggage anymore at every stop, have another role: They seem to prey more on the customers than on the shopkeepers. I had heard for years that I should keep a receipt for even the smallest purchase in Italy until I was several hundred feet beyond the store. These special police are known for stopping purchasers, asking to see the receipt for goods that obviously were just bought, and, if one is not produced, issuing a citation on the spot.

  Sometimes shop owners insist on providing the receipt; other times they take the cash, make change without using the cash register, and offer no receipt. After all, if it is rung up on the machine, a record for the tax collector is created. Only once—in a rest-stop coffee bar outside of Naples—have I seen an officer of the polizia di finanza watching transactions to ensure they were rung up and receipts dispensed.

  * * *

  The walk up the hill toward the rampart that likely was Gissing’s pathway follows modern streets lined with the usual collection of small shops found near the train stations of most Italian cities: a bar serving coffee, a tiny space jammed with hardware, a barbiere (barber), a souvenir shop. Pedestrians still use the rampart; cars follow a narrow road that heads straight up along the town’s south side.

  A pleasing park, with a gratifying view of the Tyrrhenian coast north and south of Paola, sits at the top, and a narrow cobblestone street leads a few hundred feet up to the weathered-stone gate at the entrance to the old town. My predecessor must have walked through this gate. I doubt if any part of the newer town that now lies before it existed one hundred years ago. The gate leads into the old main piazza, Piazza del Popolo, with a grand old fountain at a point where two streets, from the south and north, enter the square. Gissing was deposited at an inn called the Leone, the Lion.

  He writes: “The room into which they showed me had a delightful prospect. Deep beneath the window lay a wild, leafy garden, and lower on the hillside a lemon orchard shining with yellow fruit.… The beauty of this view, and the calm splendor of the early morning, put me into happiest mood.… I ate and drank by the window, exulting in what I saw and what I hoped to see.”

  In an hour’s worth of walking around the square, I saw no building identified as the Leone nor did I expect to. There was no evidence that an old inn existed in the old town, but I did see gardens where lemon and orange trees flourished in front of buildings facing the sea. This small, old center, with another fountain a few hundred feet down Corso Garibaldi to the north, was charming. The second fountain covered a larger space than the one at Piazza del Popolo. It had several spigots pouring steady streams into the trough-like basin. I could visualize the women Gissing saw drawing “fair water in jugs and jars of antique beauty.”

  The square was silent. The day was comfortably warm. Birds were in the trees in tiny gardens everywhere. The shocking blue sky had only a few wisps of clouds. The sound of cars—the plague of modern Italy—was distant and easily put out of mind. I could live here, I thought, glancing up at a two-story medieval stone house opposite the tiny square, its back opening from the second level onto a small garden with two orange trees, a lemon tree, and a variety of colorful bushes.

  I walked into a small alimentari, or grocery store, located just a few feet from this murmuring old fountain and picked out meats and cheeses for a picnic lunch. The two women there smiled at my attempts to identify the kinds of food I wanted. What do you call “picnic” in Italian? I asked. “Picnic,” the woman behind the meat counter said, a broad, warm smile crossing her smooth, unlined face. Months later, I discovered a more appropriate, traditional phrase would have been una merenda, an afternoon snack.

  The fountain in Páola’s Piazza del Popolo sits in the middle of the old town’s one street. This view looks to the south, down via Giuseppe Valitutti. Turn north toward a second, larger fountain with several individual spigots and the street becomes the Corso Garibaldi. The inn Gissing knew as the Leone was near this spot. Photo by John Keahey

  I returned to the second fountain—my favorite—and devoured la mia merenda: crisp bread holding salami and cheese, a bottle of sparkling water, con gas (with bubbles), an orange with its peel streaked dark red—a “blood” orange from the far South, perhaps Sicily. I, like Gissing sitting at his window, was in heaven.

  Too soon, I was back at the train station, gathering my luggage and getting ready to board the locale for Cosenza. On this trip, the train entered the mountain immediately south of the town, bore through a black tunnel for twenty minutes, and erupted on the east side of the Apennines just north of Cosenza. Disappointing and certainly not a picturesque trip.

  Months later, in another journey to this village, I had a car. It made all the difference in following Gissing’s trail. The car would keep me out of that dark, uninviting train tunnel. It would allow me to find the old road Gissing followed in his rented carriage. That road, in good repair and still used by locals, appears on some of the more detailed road maps.

  Chapter 6

  The Missing Madonna, and Concrete Bunkers with a View

  The day promised rain. I was looking for the old highway to Cosenza, and the weather was cold. The air had that chilly, wet bite to it that could mean rain might turn to snow. Rain would be no problem, but snow over the tops of the coastal mountains could make the old highway treacherous. With some searching, helpful directions from obliging residents, and a lot of backtracking, I found the road Gissing used, his small carriage drawn by “three little horses” and his driver accompanied by a “half-naked lad” who, apparently for the fun of it, would leap off the carriage, take “a short-cut up some rugged footway between the loops of the road,” and reappear a few minutes later.

  Gissing set off from in front of the Leone, where “a considerable number of loafers had assembled to see me off, and of these some half dozen were persevering mendicants [beggars.] It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume; all wore the common, colorless garb of our destroying age.… With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just ten o’clock.”

  The road his carriage driver followed up and over the mountains is the old S107, probably created by the Romans more than one thousand years ago. In recent years, it has been replaced by a new four-lane, freeway-style highway that quickly cuts through the mountains nineteen miles inland to Cosenza, like the train, through its own series of tunnels.

  The old road turns sharply off the new highway just a mile or so to the south of Paola. It heads immediately back north and leads a traveler up the incredibly steep mountain, the Catena Costiera, in a series of hairpin curves, climbing higher and higher until I felt almost like I was hanging over the Tyrrhenian coast. The road is paved but extremely narrow, barely wide enough for two cars passing in opposite directions. Some of the hairpin curves are even narrower, so that if two vehicles meet, one would have to stop and wait for the other to pass. And many of the curves are blind where they move around the nose of a promontory.

  On this trip over the mountain, I met perhaps four other vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Often, when I stopped to survey the view, I could hear car af
ter car humming along the new highway farther south, their engine noise filtering through the oak, chestnut, beech, and pine trees that, thankfully, shielded them from my view. Except for that distant humming, once over the initial crest of the tall coastal range, I was lost in a deep, silent forest that fascinated me as much as it had the Englishman.

  On the steep mountainside, well before I got to the trees, cattle grazed, their bells clanking like deep, hollow-toned wind chimes as they moved through the short grass. The slope was so steep that I imagined those cows must have longer legs on their downhill side.

  The new S107 can be seen from the old S107 that carried Gissing in a small three-horse carriage across the coastal mountains from Paola to Cosenza. The lichen-covered dome of a German bunker is in the foreground. Photo by Paul Paolicelli

  Midway up, just before the mountain reached a plateau near where the trees began—Gissing writes that it took three hours to reach this point; I made it in about twenty minutes—I stopped at one of the infrequent wide spots along the twisting, narrow roadway. I beheld the Tyrrhenian Sea. The little town of Paola, far below and to the north, was shimmering in that light in such a way that I couldn’t separate the modern buildings from the aging, yellow-tinged, centuries-old ones. Gissing saw such a view, but he did not see in November 1897 what lay at my feet, just over the edge: a moss-covered, speckled-gray, cement World War II German machine-gun bunker.

  I looked down on the lichen-mottled chamber’s rounded dome just a few feet below me. Then I heard voices behind me. A group of Italian men, in what appeared to be hunting clothes, stood on top of a much larger German bunker on the road’s opposite side. They were scanning the mountainside with field glasses, as the Germans must have done fifty-five years earlier. In a few minutes, they climbed into a handful of trucks and cars and sped away down the hill, seemingly oblivious to the blind curves.