A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  But this agency “is the daughter of the old Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, created in the nineteen fifties by the Social Democrats, and is the granddaughter of an earlier agency, which was created by the Fascists in the nineteen thirties.”

  The professor remains skeptical of the latest efforts; he has heard all this before. These organizations, with each reincarnation, “are only useful for personal, political, and bureaucratic dishonesty, and for the profusion of organized crime.”

  Generally, he says, few jobs are created, and despite the billions of lire that have been poured southward, nothing has happened to rectify the imbalance between the Italian North and South.

  Visitors to the South often see what I have seen: unfinished freeway ramps hanging out into space, or factories now standing unfinished and empty, that were built for industry—amid much pomp and celebration and fawning newspaper articles—that never came. Much of the money that went south over the last few decades, instead of enhancing the region and its people, ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, bureaucrats, and politicians.

  * * *

  The angry young man who had lashed out at me in frustration on the bus in coastal Calabria cannot be blamed. He was not angry at me personally, the traveler trespassing in his land; his anger was born out of generations of southern hopelessness.

  But everywhere in the South, gracious, enthusiastic individuals stand out in greater numbers than the one encounter with that young man. I often think of the cab driver in Táranto—“I am called Giuseppe,” he said proudly, as he wrote his name in my notebook—who called me back and pointed to a one-hundred-thousand-lira note (about fifty-seven dollars) I had unknowingly dropped after paying him. I also remember a bus driver at the beginning of my trip. Eager to practice his high-school English learned twenty years earlier, he allowed me to stand in his usually-off-limits-to-passengers driver’s area while we sped through the late evening streets that curve around the northern shore of Táranto’s Mare Piccolo or Little Sea.

  We talked of Greeks, of the wild dogs that, unimpeded by owners or collars, roam Italy’s heel and who are fed by locals from garbage pails (“Sono liberi,” They are free, he said of those dogs), and of life in America.

  “Ah, America,” I remember the bus driver saying. “I would like to go there and visit mio zio” (my uncle).

  “Will you go?” I asked. “Ci vogliono soldi!” (You need money!) he replied, rubbing his thumb against his first two fingers—a gesture that means “money” but often is also tinged with the frustration I saw many times as people I spoke with on trains, buses, and in hotel lobbies described life in the South. “Ah,” he said wistfully. “Magari!” If only!

  Southern Basilicata/southern Puglia

  Chapter 11

  Sunlight on Old Stones

  I arrived about midday. Taranto is a strange and wonderful city high on the inside of Italy’s heel. From the train station, I took a quick bus ride across a bridge to the island containing the old medieval city that was built on the ruins of Roman Tarentum and Greek Taras. The bus carried me farther east toward a hotel on a side street in the modern downtown, the Albergo Piasi. This new city, città nuova, developed across from the southeast end of the island, was connected by a drawbridge.

  The old city, the città vecchia, is made up of structures dating back to the medieval period. Very little exists from the Roman era, and, near the drawbridge, a single stone column juts into the sky—the only visible evidence that Greeks first settled this spot, and in the light of the setting sun, that column becomes a golden tribute to that era.

  In Greek times, the ancient city of Taras, founded in about 706 B.C.E. by colonists from the Greek city of Sparta, ended at a defensive wall near the neck of the peninsula with a ditch located near the point where the canal and drawbridge now sit. Later, after 275 B.C.E., the Romans took over the city, naming it Tarentum.

  Before the ditch was widened into a canal in the Middle Ages, making the city an island, the old city had once been part of the peninsula to the south, between the Mare Piccolo, (the Little Sea) and the Gulf of Taranto. It was across this peninsula that Hannibal’s soldiers, in 212 B.C.E., used mules to haul ships lashed to wagons from the Little Sea to the Gulf of Taranto and surprise the city’s Roman defenders. After Hannibal, the Romans once again re-established their control over the city.

  The writer Margaret Guido credits the ancient geographer Strabo with a fine description of the city around the time of the first millennium:

  “Evidently the town had a fine gymnasium and a spacious forum still dominated by the huge bronze figure of Zeus. But the acropolis (the upper fortified part of an ancient Greek city), between the forum and the harbor mouth, had already been shorn of most of its former glories. The via Appia approached the town by a bridge across the harbor mouth and, having crossed the present Città Vecchia and Città Nuova, left by a gateway through the walls on the east, just beyond the [cemetery].”

  Strabo, a Roman citizen who wrote in Greek and likely was Greek by birth, described the whole of the known world during the reigns of the first two Roman emperors, Augustus and Tiberius. He apparently saw Tarentum long after the Romans had despoiled much of the older Taras to rebuild their own city. Ever the dispassionate observer, I wonder how Strabo must have felt about his older Greek culture’s former glories being stripped away at Tarentum.

  Taranto became an island some fifteen hundred years later, in C.E. 480, under Aragonese rulers, far away from their native Spain. The peninsula was breached near the site of the old Greek and Roman defensive walls. It allows a second way into and out of the Little Sea, and it enhanced the city’s defenses.

  * * *

  It was precisely that kind of act—the breaching of the peninsula—that would have disturbed the ancient historian Herodotus. I am sure he would have commented on what he considered such an unnatural act had the breach taken place before his time, instead of centuries later, during the Middle Ages.

  Herodotus’s reaction to a similar act centuries earlier is detailed in his Histories and discussed at length in the book Herodotus written by James Romm. Herodotus would have considered creating an island from a peninsula to be an act contrary to the structure of the earth, Romm asserts.

  What had drawn Herodotus’s distaste was the decision by the Persian king Xerxes, who cut a canal across the isthmus of Athos, located in Macedonia, to the northwest of Greece. The king, according to Herodotus, “ordered it to be dug on account of his pridefulness, wishing to display his power and leave a memorial behind; for the Persians could have dragged their ships across the isthmus without taking any trouble at all”—much as Hannibal did at Tarentum. As Romm says, Herodotus “clearly registers disapproval of this alteration of the structure of the earth.”

  Interestingly, the ancient historian also opposed the structural inverse of such an act. Romm says: It is just as wrong to bridge a strait or a river, since water forms natural boundaries between peoples and territories, “so that to render crossable those that formerly could not be crossed seriously upsets the earth’s natural order.”

  For Herodotus, like many historians since, saw a great struggle over the ages between East and West. When people crossed boundaries between the two, they transgressed “a moral law embedded in the very structure of the earth.”

  Perhaps Herodotus, who thought nothing of crossing by ship many water boundaries during his travels, had the answer to the question: Why, over so many tens of centuries, has mankind struggled, and continues to struggle, over issues of territory? Perhaps this upsetting of natural balance is why Persia failed to cross from the East into the West effectively and be successful against the Romans. The Romans, dominant in the West, after a period of time also struggled in the East so far away—and across large bodies of water from Rome.

  Rome was doomed to fail in Asia. Asia never effectively conquered any significant portion of the West. This certainly remains true today. Herodotus would believe, Romm says, that attempts “to make
political geography supersede what is natural” would fail. The Persians perhaps should have stayed in the East, where Herodotus believed they had a more normal and natural place.

  “By contrast,” Romm says, “the yoking of continents is their [the Persians’] great sin and invites retribution from the gods.”

  * * *

  I do not know if the breaching of this peninsula doomed this city to the wrath of the gods, but the island makes Taranto truly unique. I certainly like its atmosphere. On the other side of Taranto’s drawbridge, across from the medieval citadel that had been built on top of the Roman citadel where legionnaires held off the invading Hannibal for two years, is the more modern portion of this city. In ancient times, the area contained a necropolis, or burial ground. It eventually became absorbed within the boundaries of the Greek, then Roman, town.

  Its tall buildings and wider-than-usual-for-Italy boulevards have developed on a grand scale over the last century since Gissing’s visit. In this area one hundred years ago was “a tract of olive orchards and of seedland.” This was the land that in ancient times contained Greek tombs.

  Here the Englishman had one of his more lyrical encounters: “[T]here, alone amid great bare fields, a countryman was ploughing. The wooden plough, as regards its form, might have been thousands of years old; it was drawn by a little donkey.… Never have I seen a man so utterly patient, so primevally deliberate. The donkey’s method of ploughing was to pull for one minute, and then rest for two; it excited in the ploughman not the least surprise or resentment. Though he held a long stick in his hand, he never made use of it; at each stoppage, he contemplated the ass, and then gave utterance to a long ‘Ah-h-h!’ in a note of the most affectionate remonstrance. They were not driver and beast, but comrades in labour. It reposed the mind to look upon them.”

  The first few streets southeast of the drawbridge look as though they were built in the 1800s. The farther to the southeast I went, across the “olive orchards and seedland” of Gissing’s time, the more modern—and more cluttered—the city became.

  Somewhere to the north from this spot, along the far shore of the Little Sea—beyond the glistening black sticks that, poking out of the calm water, mark the locations of fishermen’s crab pots—was the mouth of the Galeso, a river famous in antiquity and a magnet for Gissing.

  He walked to it, carrying visions of its serenity that he had imagined while reading the classical writers. These thoughts must have fed his depression as he yearned to escape into what he perceived to be a simpler, idealized past. I would find that river the next day.

  * * *

  The Galeso was on the tourist map I picked up the next morning. It was right where Gissing, in his chapter “Dulce Galaesi Flumen” (Sweet River Galeso), said it was. He had walked to the site, but I recruited a cab driver who professed knowledge of the area. The driver—the proud and honest southerner who later pointed to my dropped money—followed the road and rail line that pointed east toward the Adriatic coast. After a few short miles, he stopped on a bridge, raised a finger in the direction of the Little Sea, and said, “Ecco, il Galeso.”

  From this point, the little cattail-choked river lined by giant trees ran perhaps only a short distance to the inner sea. I looked in the opposite direction and saw where the river seemed to come out of nowhere, just a few hundred yards away. Smokestacks of some petroleum center poked up from behind the low hills beyond.

  “It rises just over there, from the ground. No other source,” Giuseppe said, bending over and moving his open, flat hand up and down a few inches above the pavement.

  The river is less than a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) long, from beginning to end, the cab driver pointed out, seemingly awestruck that such a short body of water could be so famous as to draw an American tourist to its banks.

  Except for the giant trees along its length and the sound of humming automobiles from the nearby highway, it was the same river Gissing discovered.

  The Englishman wrote that in late 1897, the Galeso flowed through “bare, dusty fields and a few hoary olives.” But what I was seeing, one hundred years later, with the trees added and a neatly cultivated farm on one side, was beautiful—more like what the Roman poet Horace might have seen when, in his second book of odes, he described the banks of the river Galaesus as a perfect place to retire, a place where sheep with fleece so fine browsed along its banks, their valuable coats protected by leather garments.

  The Galeso River, looking north, springs out of a marsh shown by the reeds just beyond the concrete wall. A petroleum refinery, on the outskirts of nearby Taranto, is in the distance. Gissing marveled that this then-desolate spot and the short, narrow river were so famous in classical Greek times. Photo by Paul Paolicelli

  Giuseppe motioned me back into his cab, breaking my daydream. “We go closer,” he said. Within a few moments we were bumping through deserted fields on a weathered dirt road. With a sudden jerk, he stopped the car. We crawled out of his tiny cab and stepped onto a concrete bank of the river, directly below a bridge holding Taranto’s main rail line to the Adriatic. Looking southeast, we saw the river was beautiful, even with the highway bridge in the distance and the sound of humming cars floating down to us.

  Turn south, and the mouth of the Galeso, about one-half mile from the river’s origin in reeds, empties into Taranto’s Little Sea, or Mare Piccolo, east of the town. These trees were not here in Gissing’s time. He reported seeing only dry dusty fields and a few hoary olives. Along these banks, according to the classical poet Horace, the Greeks grazed their sheep with fleece so fine their coats had to be protected by leather garments. Photo by Paul Paolicelli

  We stood silent for several moments. Then Giuseppe started talking softly, so softly that I had to ask him to repeat himself. He told me that in 1943, when he was six years old, a British bomb destroyed this rail bridge—at the spot where we were standing—to break this vital supply line to those key Adriatic ports.

  “I remember it,” he said. “It was a time most unpleasant, but we were glad the British came and the Germans left.” After a quiet moment, he chuckled. “Now I drive more German tourists than British, or Americans like you. Only Germans seem to come here now.”

  His meter was ticking. We left, and I felt the visit to this river had not been long enough. I wanted to walk its short length to where it flowed into the Little Sea.

  * * *

  For now, I wandered through the medieval city on Taranto’s island, making my way back to the hotel across the island’s drawbridge. I saw dogs, i cani liberi, sniffing through garbage being tossed to them by a man rummaging through a Dumpster. I thought of a line from the classic Sicilian novel The Leopard, written in the 1950s by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “In front of every habitation the rubbish from wretched tables piled up along the leprous walls. Shivering dogs rifled through it, their eagerness always disappointed.”

  And, as the sky darkened, turning the deep, narrow streets into tunnels lined with faint window-lights, I passed small children shrieking in their games, bouncing balls off the medieval stones on the narrow, dark, and twisting streets. I got lost several times, backtracking repeatedly to regain my bearings.

  Only once did I see a dog on a leash. It was a giant German shepherd, pulling its slight owner this way and that. The man was being led by the dog, the animal obviously in charge, despite his tether. He was the only dog I saw over a three-week period that appeared to be tended by any human.

  I passed the Greek column, its color now like burnished gold in the glow of a sun just beginning to disappear beyond the sweep of the gulf, and passed the once Roman, now medieval, fort before crossing the drawbridge over the canal. As I walked the block or so into the crest of the newer city, I skirted the perimeter of a park—Piazza Garibaldi—full of murmuring groups of teenagers. Just before I reached the side street by my hotel, I looked ahead and down Via T. D’Aquino, a wide boulevard barricaded against motor traffic by giant flower planters. Instead of the usual polluting cars th
at clog Italian city streets, people were everywhere. It was passeggiata, that time in the early evening when all over Italy people wander out into the public squares of their towns and villages to see and to be seen, and to catch up on the day’s gossip with their neighbors.

  * * *

  I remembered my first passeggiata—or at least the first one I recall with any kind of awareness. I was in Città di Castello, a small Umbrian hill town, with my new wife and her two teenage children. We had agreed to meet in the town square at six o’clock. I was an hour early and sat on the stoop of the post office in the late afternoon sun. I must have dozed against that stone pillar because I only gradually became aware of a low murmuring, getting louder and louder. I had closed my eyes to a near-empty square. I opened them to a square filled with people, standing in small groups, talking, gesturing, patting and poking babies, laughing and linking arms with their companions.

  Through this hubbub of sound, I noticed my wife walking through the square between her son and daughter, their arms linked, laughing and all speaking at once. In the midst of a cluster of Italians following a time-honored tradition—a passeggiata, or walkabout—of keeping solid their connections to one another, I realized I was beginning to firm up my new connections.

  Another trip and several passeggiate later, some friends and I drove into Pistoia between the Tuscan towns of Lucca and Florence. We had been traveling all day, sight-seeing and visiting hill town after hill town. I was tired and wanted to head back to my pensione, but they insisted on one more stop. Amidst my grumbling, we parked in Pistoia’s modern outskirts and walked a few blocks into the old town center. We rounded a corner and I heard that familiar rumble of voices and saw the streets alive with people, young and old, standing and talking. The evening was cold and threatening rain. It didn’t matter. It was passeggiata. With friends, I forgot my fatigue and joined the masses, soaking in Italy once again.