A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  I turned around and gazed back toward the cape. Two-story houses blocked my view of the column from the German bunker. Could one of those houses—empty in winter and surrounded by high walls that also enclose growling, barking guard dogs—be the one in which Gissing’s Dr. Sculco spent his youthful summers, memorizing lines from classical literature?

  To the north of these homes stood a small church. It did not appear old, but it had been well maintained, and its age was difficult to determine. The front doors stood wide open. A man pushing a wheelbarrow along a plank came out of the door. The wheelbarrow was loaded with rich, dark soil destined for a growing pile a few feet from the entrance.

  I looked inside. The once-tiled floor of the tiny chapel was gone. Pieces of tile poked out of the growing mound of dirt outside. People were midway into the open space where heavy sheets of plastic covered portions of the dirt floor not being worked on. Workers were on their knees, scraping soil with small trowels. Their presence there became obvious: It was not a renovation but an archaeological dig.

  I walked inside, using a long, sloping wooden ramp. Stop! a young man, obviously in charge, said in a loud voice. Everyone looked up, including the middle-aged priest who was wrapped in a black cloak and standing on a sheet of plastic, puffing on a cigarette. “Non è permesso!” the young man said. “Archeologia?” I asked. “Sì,” he responded abruptly, turning back to his work. I watched for a minute longer and walked back up the plank and out of the door just in time to see a passerby pull a piece of tile from the pile of dirt and tuck it into his coat pocket.

  * * *

  A short distance from the church, around the approaches to the two or three large stone summer homes, I found the fenced-in area surrounding Hera’s column, the single remaining surface remnant of a temple that originally contained forty-eight columns. This temple was originally established in the fifth century B.C.E. Not much has been excavated here in modern times. Now all that is protected is the single column itself, its base reinforced by modern brick footings.

  The grass-covered area where the once intact temple stood, once the most splendid Doric temple in southern Italy, is accessible, and though it is fenced in, there is nothing to see on the surface there except dirt paths crisscrossing through the grass.

  This lonely sentinel, with the Ionian Sea in the background, is all that remains of Hera’s temple at Capo Colonna, ten miles south of Crotone. Gissing longed to see this shattered Doric column, but never made it here. This is near the spot where Hannibal departed Italy to return to North Africa after failing to defeat the Romans. It is the site where his troops allegedly slaughtered four thousand native mercenaries who fought with Hannibal but who did not want to accompany him to Carthage. Photo by John Keahey

  The temple reportedly had a sculptured marble frieze, and its roof was layered in white marble, or so the ancient writers tell us. Supposedly, there was a gold column inside, along with a painting of Helen of Troy painted from a model chosen from among the fair female residents of Kroton.

  The single column is a lonely sight. It and its base must be nearly all that remains of the massive structure that, over the centuries, was torn apart, stone by stone, and used to build palazzi for the rich in old Cotrone and perhaps to reinforce Pietro of Toledo’s Renaissance castle. Gissing knew this, and he muttered in print about such folks who would despoil ancient sites for their own building blocks.

  I wondered how long the column would stand, without further intervention from humans. To see archaeological work at the church was heartening. All over the South there seems to be a resurgence in work of this sort at many ancient sites. But not much has been done in the area of Hera’s temple here. Except for a few modern buildings, the paved road, and the fence enclosing the site, the Capo Colonna must look about the same as it did one hundred, or even two hundred, years ago.

  And I wonder if the sea has been rising here over the centuries. At Sybaris, farther to the north, the shoreline, built up by alluvial deposits that filled in the ancient harbor, has moved away from the ancient city. Here at Capo Colonna, the Ionian is lapping to within ten or fifteen feet of the single column’s brick-reinforced base. Would the ancient Greeks have built such a temple so close to the water? A heavy storm from the southeast could dash against the column and undermine it.

  But the column has indeed stood for centuries, despite raging tempests and people’s best efforts at destruction. Its enemy has not been the sea, but the wealthy Cotronians who hauled away the temple’s massive stones in an orgy of barbaric recycling of ready-made, and free-for-the-taking, building stones.

  Since reading Gissing’s work, I had always been bothered by his obsessive melancholy, expressed both in his By the Ionian Sea and in most of his fiction. For the first time, here at Capo Colonna with the cold wind blowing across the fluted column, I could feel some sympathy for his despair over how the modern world has turned its back on the ancient.

  Sitting at its base, my back to the sea, I looked once more around the temple enclosure. It could have been on this very spot that Hannibal sat, agonizing in his disappointment and humiliation at being forced to retreat to Carthage after nearly two decades of wreaking death and destruction on the Romans and on his own men. I wondered how many of those who started with him on that long winter journey across the Alps sixteen years earlier were still with him at the end. Damn few, probably.

  * * *

  Hannibal’s rage against the Romans dipped back into his childhood as he watched his father, Hamilcar Barca, devastated by Roman demands to abandon Sicily at the end of the First Punic War. Carthage and Rome, once allies, were struggling to fill the vacuum of power throughout the Mediterranean created by the death of Alexander the Great, a century earlier.

  Hamilcar took his son to Spain to rebuild Carthage’s empire. Hannibal took over the army at his father’s untimely death, fought for a few years against native Spanish tribes, and then besieged Roman ally Saguntum (now Sagunto, sixteen miles north of Valencia in Spain). Hannibal knew that act would provoke war with his father’s longtime enemy.

  So, in 218 B.C.E., Hannibal assembled ninety thousand men, twelve thousand horses, and thirty-seven elephants, moved west-to-east through southern France, and eventually crossed the Alps, invading Italy and catching the Romans by surprise. It was at a heavy cost. He crossed the Alps, in winter, in fifteen days, and at a considerable loss of life.

  After a handful of victories and an especially decisive battle at Cannae, in southeast Italy about five and a half miles southwest of modern Barletta on the Adriatic coast, he won the military support of many cities in the South for his cause against the Romans.

  But the Roman army played a waiting game, and the years passed. Hannibal once got to the gates of Rome, but unlike Alaric six centuries later, mysteriously retreated back to the South. The ancient writers tell us that one of Hannibal’s generals bitterly remarked during that retreat that the Carthaginian knew how to win a battle but did not know how to win a war.

  The North African general was pressed farther and farther south. On the deaths of key officers, and without hope of reinforcements from North Africa, Hannibal left the peninsula. He had spent sixteen years in Italy, living off the land, trying to break the will of Rome’s allies, and terrifying Roman citizens in the Eternal City, who many times believed all was lost.

  His goal was to weaken Rome to the point where Carthage would be given Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. But despite being recognized as one of the greatest military leaders in history, he was too far away from home fighting a war unpopular among his countrymen, and he did not sustain the support of possible European allies, including the Gauls.

  Livy, the Roman historian who lived two centuries after Rome’s war with Hannibal, wrote in his ten-book history of the Second Punic War that “Hannibal has been conquered not by the Roman people whom he defeated so many times in battle and put to flight, but by the envy and continual disparagement of the Carthaginian senate.”

  Roman
propagandists painted Hannibal as bloodthirsty and cruel. Stories of his brutality against soldiers and prisoners abound. Many of the reports likely are true, since these were indeed cruel and savage times. But, as The Oxford Classical Dictionary puts it, “The record of Rome’s treatment of defectors [the peoples and the cities that allied with Hannibal] makes for grimmer reading.”

  Hannibal died, in 182 B.C.E., drinking poison as enemy soldiers closed in around him. He had spent the last years of his life seeking refuge in various countries, but was always forced out as Rome advanced. He was sixty-two and, at his painless death, had lived much longer than the tens of thousands of men—Romans, Carthaginians, and mercenaries—whose lives he was responsible for ending.

  * * *

  Around Hera’s column at Capo Colonna burned the campfires of Hannibal’s Carthaginian army and, if ancient accounts are true, of the mercenaries whose bodies would be left to rot along Kroton’s beaches as the general sailed southwest to North Africa. Livy—was he a Roman propagandist?—tells us that the mercenaries tried to take refuge in the “hitherto inviolate shrine” of Hera’s temple, but were “brutally butchered in [its] very precincts.” Some modern historians believe Hannibal slaughtered his army’s horses—because there was no room for the animals in the boats that carried his troops to Carthage—not men.

  Before he fled to North Africa, Hannibal reportedly set up a large bronze plaque within the temple grounds, which Livy said was “inscribed in Greek and Carthaginian to commemorate his many military exploits.” No one I talked to seems to know where that bronze plaque rests today, if it ever existed at all.

  I sit in the midst of the temple that now, except for the single column at my back, is stoneless, at least on the grass-covered surface, trying to visualize what it must have been like. All I can conjure up is how Gissing, locked deep into delirium and fever in his room at the Concordia, saw it in his imagination. He wrote of these dreams:

  “I saw the strand by [Kroton]; the promontory with its temple; not as I know the scene to-day, but as it must have looked to those eyes more than two thousand years ago. The soldiers of Hannibal doing massacre, the perishing mercenaries, supported my closest gaze, and left no curiosity unsatisfied.… When I spoke of the experience to Dr. Sculco, he was much amused, and afterwards he often asked me whether I had had any more visioni. That gate of dreams was closed, but I shall always feel that, for an hour, it was granted me to see the vanished life … a world known to me only in ruined fragments.”

  I walked back to my car, drove past the German bunker and decided it was time to move on to lofty heights inland from the Ionian Sea. I would next go to Calabria’s capital, Catanzaro, forty miles to Crotone’s southwest, where the still feverish Gissing went, against his doctor’s orders, to get out of the malarial and stagnant lower elevation, and to recover his health in fresh mountain air. Catanzaro was not a place for reflection about the Greeks; few, if any, likely stood on its high promontory. It was a place for recuperation.

  Gissing certainly did not know then that the story of his visit to the mountaintop would give the world a southern Italian name that would live on: the last name of the proud owner of Hotel Centrale, Coriolano Paparazzo.

  Chapter 17

  Paparazzo’s Kitchen

  Catanzaro was Gissing’s city of refuge and recuperation. Here he was bathed by the gentle breezes that swept away the cobwebs of illness he carried from the malarial plain of what was then called Cotrone. How things change in one hundred years!

  Modern Crotone is now a healthy destination point. Its swamps were drained long ago and its water supply improved. Today, its beaches are regularly raked for the few tourists who venture this far south.

  Catanzaro, meanwhile, still “the breezy height” Gissing described, is a much-changed, modern hilltop city with all the problems that designation implies. One of its great benefits is that it is the gateway to delightful villages higher up in the Calabrian Mountains.

  I arrived, early afternoon, at Catanzaro Lido, the station that Gissing called the “marina,” located along the Ionian Sea and several miles below the upper town. I did not know there was another train station, still higher up at the base of the promontory that holds this capital of Calabria, so I took a taxi and relied upon the driver for a hotel recommendation. It did not appear that Gissing’s hotel, at least in its 1890s incarnation, still existed.

  We wove our way up the serpentine road into Catanzaro and, once we reached the summit, a jammed, noisy, urban maze lay before us. It was mid-morning. Traffic was packed onto the narrow streets; the cab’s meter ticked as we barely moved. It seemed that as many city buses as cars were stretched along the main roadway through the town, at least here defeating the theory that mass transit alone solves congestion. It still takes people to leave their cars at home!

  Schoolchildren and pedestrians streamed at will through the traffic, moving from one side of the street to the other. It was gridlock, and the cab driver told me it was common. “Most of the day it is like this,” he said.

  Eventually, we made our way to a side street that swung around the brow of the hill. In between tall buildings that looked like they were built a century ago, I could look out and see where the Ionian Sea was supposed to be, my view stunned into submission by the coastal haze. We stopped at a small inn. I paid the driver and got a room for the night—a small, pathetic accommodation. I did not fight it since I figured I would be here only one night. I was in the third week of my journey and getting weary. Despite the poor quarters, the bed appeared comfortable and the room was warm.

  Then, as is usual during undisciplined travel in Italy, when the traveler is willing to let things happen and not try to control events, I had a marvelous experience in an unexpected trip into the mountains.

  It started after I left my squalid room, found an osteria, and ate a delicious meal. I climbed onto a city bus, just to let it carry me around Catanzaro so I could take in the sights. We wove through the outer perimeter, taking forever in the congestion. I could see that this mountaintop city had a more modern tinge to it than Gissing must have found.

  There are certainly old buildings here, many containing upscale shops and what appeared to be much nicer hotels than the one my cab driver, in his hurry to get out of this city and back down to the coast, had deposited me in. But this town, I have read somewhere, has, over the centuries, been wracked by earthquakes and rebuilt several times. Gissing talked about one that hit the century before his visit—two centuries before mine—where not a house was left standing and people perished by the thousands.

  So the buildings today bear scant resemblance to the town’s medieval past. It was settled, probably during the ninth or tenth century C.E., long after the Greeks and the Romans, and during a time when the coastal inhabitants were driven inland to escape malaria and a constant stream of invaders from the sea. You see these towns everywhere on high promontories, established centuries ago for protection from both humans and microbes.

  As the bus went around the outer curves, I could look down into the gorge below and the road that winds its way up the side. Even there, automobiles and trucks were packed end to end on both sides of the narrow roadway. People were walking up the hill to conduct their business in the town above. Once again I thought of the phrase “tyranny of traffic.” Catanzaro, which started as a quiet mountain town, was, during this visit, a modern disaster of congestion and haze.

  Eventually, the traffic thinned and the bus began following a ridge line that was turning from buildings into trees. The bus went up, up into the Calabrian mountains, and eventually I realized that it was not going to return to the city anytime soon. It had to at some point, I figured, so I merely sat back, enjoyed the view unfolding before me, and began to unwind from the traffic nightmare below. It was only the bus driver and me.

  Ahead, a small church appeared at the bend in the road. The driver slowed and made a quick sign of the cross as he cranked the wheel to the left to make the turn. We pass
ed along long ridges looking down into steep gorges with streams full of melted snow pouring off the high mountains above. It was paradise compared to where I had just come from. It was almost warm enough to open a window and enjoy the breeze.

  About forty-five minutes into the trip, the bus pulled into a little village built up on the slopes. The driver told me he had a twenty-minute layover before resuming the journey back to Catanzaro. I got out and went into a small bar for a coffee. Its owner, a small, elderly Italian man, struck up a conversation as soon as he realized I was American. He spoke perfect English.

  “I was in the U.S. Army,” he told me. He had lived in Brooklyn, Texas, and Germany for many years, he said, but came back here, to his family’s home province, to retire. “This is home,” he said, waving his hand toward the still higher mountains that glistened through the windows of his bar.

  I walked outside and sat on a bench overlooking a deep gorge, joining the bus driver, his gaze fixed in the distance as he smoked a cigarette. My Italian was not good enough to engage him in deep conversation, but I got the impression he cherished this part of his daily bus route: sitting in this little village with the name of Pentone, high on the Calabrian slopes and far, far away from the chaos of Catanzaro.

  We returned, this time with one other passenger, a studious-looking young man who, along with the driver, made the sign of the cross as we passed the tiny church on the road below. I stepped off the bus in Catanzaro’s main street, in the midst of hundreds of schoolchildren making their way home through bumper-to-bumper traffic, the cars honking and the children squealing with delight as they chased one another, dodging cars and giant orange buses.

  Near one end of the town, I saw a small, freshly painted structure containing a new “car” for a funicular, one of those traction-driven contraptions one sees in some of the larger Italian cities, built along steep mountainsides. They hook onto steel rails and are propelled up and down the hills like the cable cars in San Francisco. Naples has at least three similar funicular systems plying the hills of that city’s northwest crescent.