A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  The sign on the door at the Catanzaro station said this funicular was closed. What a way to ease congestion. Commuters could park in the more open spaces below the town and ride the funicular up to work. Only in Italy, I thought, could something as helpful as this be shut down.

  Several months later, in correspondence with an Italian friend who was born in Catanzaro, I learned the story. The local government when I was there had just finished restoring the funicular—hence the fresh paint and modern fixtures. The line had been closed for many years, in fact, several decades, because there was no money to run it. After restoration, officials still had to look for money to operate it.

  I was told that nearly a year after my visit, the funicular is in full operation and doing much to ease the daily crush of traffic. The device is part of a grand tradition of mass transit in this town, my friend said, dating back to the early twentieth century. The older funicular took people up and down the hillside; at the top, a tram system on rails would take them from Piazza Roma to the very upper part of the city, an area known as Pontegrande. The tram tracks are long gone; the original tram station in Piazza Matteotti still stands, but it is now the site of a fast-food restaurant.

  Signor Paparazzo’s Hotel Centrale in Catanzaro once occupied the building on the right, across the street from Gissing’s “wonderful pharmacy,” a place that still sports “a sort of griffin in wrought iron.” The former Hotel Centrale is located at Corso Mazzini, n. 181. Filmmaker Federico Fellini used Paparazzo’s name for a celebrity photographer in the 1960s movie La dolce vita—and the English language gained the term “paparazzi.” In October 1999, Catanzaro officials installed a plaque commemorating Paparazzo, Gissing, Fellini and scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano. Photo by Wulfhard Stahl

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the day walking through the town, but could not find any hotel named Centrale where Gissing spent his days of recuperation visiting with the British vice-consul, who turned out to be Italian instead of British—Don Pasquale. The Scottish writer Douglas reports that a decade after Gissing was here, the vice-consul had died, and Douglas decided to skip going to this town since he could not visit with the man and talk about the Victorian writer, as Douglas had done with Dr. Sculco in Cotrone.

  More than a year after my visit, I discovered through my Catanzaro friend, Vittorio, that the Centrale did exist well into the 1970s. “My parents tell me that they would go there for drinks and to eat,” Vittorio told me. “I do not remember it as a hotel because I was a baby then.”

  He said the building, at Corso Mazzini, n. 181, is a beautiful structure, four floors above the ground and apparently built a short time before Gissing’s visit in late 1897.

  Meanwhile, Vittorio said that in the late 1990s, the building was vacant and for sale. For many years since the 1970s, it had housed the Medio Credito Centrale, an investment bank with, ironically, the word Centrale in its name.

  I learned long after I left Catanzaro that city officials want to immortalize the building that held the old hotel. In late October 1999, a plaque was placed on its front. It would honor Gissing, Paparazzo, Fellini, and Fellini’s Scripwriter Ennio Flaiano for their roles in plunging “paparazzi” into the modern lexicon, thereby bringing attention to the Calabrian capital.

  * * *

  But I knew none of this in early 1998. I returned to my squalid hotel and girded myself for spending a night in the tiny room, completely filled with a bed, a table, and a diminutive sink. The night clerk, a man in his early forties with one ear cocked toward the television room so he could overhear a soccer match, greeted me as I pushed my way inside through a narrow door, setting off a tinkling bell.

  On impulse, I asked him if he knew the name Paparazzo.

  “Yes, it is familiar,” he replied. “Perché?” (Why?)

  With my dictionary in hand and calling upon every ounce of my deficient knowledge of Italian, I told him about how the southern Italian name, written down in a famous travel narrative one hundred years earlier by a visitor to Catanzaro, came to symbolize the rise of celebrity during the last forty years of the twentieth century.

  Coriolano Paparazzo was the owner of Gissing’s hotel in Catanzaro, the Centrale. Signor Paparazzo was distressed that many of his guests ate in restaurants other than his own. He posted a note on the back of his guests’ doors urging them to “bestow their kind favors on the restaurant of the house.” By repeating this appeal, verbatim, in his book, Gissing granted Signor Paparazzo’s name eternal life.

  That happened because in 1958 the Italian film director Federico Fellini and his scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano were looking for a name to give their celebrity photographer in La dolce vita, the classic Italian film of Italy’s postwar generation. By naming this aggressive photographer Paparazzo, Fellini and Flaiano gave the world the term paparazzi, the bane of every person trying to flee the burdens of celebrity.

  I knew the sketchy details of the foundation of this word, and I knew that it had come from Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea, which Flaiano said in an interview he had opened “at random,” and the name caught his eye.

  An article about this etymology appeared in The Gissing Journal. In it, the authors duly recorded that in 1982 there were seventeen Paparazzos in the Catanzaro telephone directory. I got the 1997 directory from the obliging night clerk and counted forty entries. “It is Sicilian in origin, I think,” the desk clerk said.

  Then his phone rang. It appeared to be his wife, or a close friend, calling. As I stood there, he recounted the whole story I had just relayed about Paparazzo, the Centrale, and Catanzaro. He did not know this before, he said into the receiver. “Molto interessante.”

  I walked up the three flights to my tiny room feeling comfort that somehow, in my fledgling use of the language, I had communicated an entire story to a sleepy desk clerk who said he found it “very interesting.” He probably was just being kind, but I like to think he was just as fascinated by how that name from his small city became an icon for a generation.

  * * *

  The night was clear and, given the late hour, the traffic had disappeared. I knew it would begin again early in the morning and I was eager to head out of town. Gissing left, his health recovered, in a rented carriage. His destination was Squillace, the high mountain town farther to the south where a hero of Gissing’s, Cassiodorus, who served one of the last Roman barbarian kings, may have been born. It also was near where Cassiodorus created his monastery for the religious life he sought after the fall of the Western Empire.

  Gissing wanted to spend a night there. He arrived in a raging storm and had, within the space of a few hours, the worst experience of his trip, aside from his illness; and he fled Squillace in disgust.

  Chapter 18

  Bridge with No Road

  I awoke in my room high on the third floor of the little inn in Catanzaro wishing I had a Signor Paparazzo to talk with over breakfast. I could hear the traffic beginning, far below, even though the hour was early. Light, just breaking from the direction of the Ionian Sea miles away, was beginning to stroke the sides of the ravines that sweep past, far below, this fragile, earthquake-prone city. I would leave this morning, after my breakfast of cornetto con crema and double espresso.

  After all these years of visiting Italy and frequenting the growing number of places in my hometown that now sell espresso, I need more than the single shot in the morning. I need to sip something while I munch on my breakfast roll and read whatever English-language newspaper I can find. A double barely satisfies me. I could have what Italians call an Americano, which consists of the same amount of steam-driven coffee as a single shot of espresso, but heavily diluted with hot water so that it fills an American-size coffee cup. That, to me, is inadequate. Better to pay for a double, or even a triple, espresso, to start the day off properly!

  My bare-bones hotel did not offer such a prima colazione (breakfast), so I left my bag behind the desk and stepped out into the traffic for a dodge-and-weave across the street to
a coffee bar near the corner. While there, I purchased a bus ticket to get me down the hill to the train station below the town. From that point, I would head toward Squillace, which was Gissing’s goal once he left the hospitality of Signor Paparazzo and the British vice-consul, Don Pasquale.

  Gissing was reinvigorated from his few days in Catanzaro and finally well enough to resume his journey through the South. He was en route to the final city on his Magna Graecia itinerary, Reggio di Calabria. But he hoped to stop for the night at Squillace, known to the Greeks as Skylletion and to the Romans as Scylacium. Of greater interest to Gissing was that Scylacium was reputed to be the ancestral home of Cassiodorus, a descendant of Bruttian natives who were in this land long before the Greeks arrived more than one thousand years earlier.

  Cassiodorus, in the early to mid-sixth century C.E., served the barbarian Roman kings near the end of the once mighty Western Empire. He served as prefect of Italy and as a royal administrator and draftsman.

  The day I chose for my journey was bright and crisp. In reality, the journey by train to Squillace’s coastal station is less than an hour from Catanzaro. Gissing had opted for a carriage because he thought it would be quicker, since he would need a carriage anyway to get from the station up to the town in the hills beyond. He ran into a tempest that filled the steep gorges on the approach to Squillace with roaring water, the waters’ roar competing with the wind to drown all civilized sound from the Englishman’s ears. From the station during my journey, I, too, would need a carriage, in the form of an automobile, to go up into the town.

  The ride down from the upper Catanzaro station to Catanzaro Lido, the small tourist area along the Ionian Sea where I would change for Squillace, follows the same route as the train Gissing rode up to the lofty city. He described being surrounded by fields and orange groves. “All around lay orchards of orange trees, the finest I had ever seen, and over their solid masses of dark foliage, thick-hung with ripening fruit, poured the splendour of the western sky. Beyond, the magic sea, purple and crimson as the sun descended upon the vanishing horizon. Eastward, above the slopes of Sila, stood a moon almost at its full, the yellow of an autumn leaf, on a sky soft-flushed with rose.”

  My description is not as enchanting. When I rolled down from the upper station to the Lido station, I, too, passed through orange groves and fields, but I am sure they are not as expansive today as they were ten decades ago. Along the short twenty-minute route are homes and businesses, and around the station a large, plain commercial area has filled in Gissing’s wondrous spaces.

  Still, the morning was a delight, and I headed toward Squillace with as much enthusiasm as did Gissing. But I knew how his story turned out. I had no idea what my story would be.

  * * *

  Until I read Gissing’s narrative, I had never heard of Cassiodorus. This historic figure charmed the British writer for reasons I can only guess at. Perhaps it was because Cassiodorus continued to live a full and productive life when he left the employ of the fading barbarian rulers in Rome, serving as scribe and writing diplomatic letters for the most famous of them, Theodoric.

  A Christian, Cassiodorus made a failed attempt with Pope Agapetus to create a school of Christian higher education in Rome. He retired in C.E. 538 during the Gothic wars, went to Constantinople and served in the Eastern Empire for a few years, eventually making it back to his home in the area around Roman Scylacium, now known as Squillace.

  There he created a monastery somewhere near the town alongside his family estate and made perhaps his greatest contribution to the Western world. The historian J. B. Bury, in his History of the Later Roman Empire, called what Cassiodorus did in ancient times “a novelty.” The old monk created a scriptorium, or writing room, in the monastery and had his monks copy “both pagan and Christian books, working at night by the light of self-filling ‘mechanical lamps.’ It is well known that the preservation of our heritage of Latin literature is mainly due to monastic copyists. The originator of the idea was Cassiodorus.”

  Perhaps Gissing’s attraction to this prolific old man was his full life and singular accomplishments. Cassiodorus wrote histories of the Goths, and of Rome and the Roman world. He preserved Western literature. Such a life would impress Gissing, as it should all of us. His death is believed to be in 585 C.E. If that date is correct, Cassiodorus would have been ninety-five years old.

  * * *

  I left the main north–south highway near the Squillace station and followed a narrow, two-lane blacktop that, given its placement along the fields and hills leading to the tiny white town perched on the high ridge ahead, had to follow Gissing’s path to the town through the storm. The road pitched and rolled over the fields, gradually gaining height, and then swept up a mountainside in steep curves. I exulted that the road ahead appeared to move around to the town’s backside rather than go straight up the steep side facing the sea. This was precisely as Gissing had described it. And here I began to contemplate what I would find.

  Gissing had a horrible time in what he described as a tumble-down village—an experience I suspect would be similar to a traveler from a cosmopolitan United States city, say New York, going into a primitive-looking, newly formed, wild West town, during a massive thunderstorm, in the mid 1800s. Gissing found mud and water flowing down steep streets and, faint with hunger, he stepped out of his carriage, ankle deep in water and in front of what appeared to be the town’s Osteria Centrale and Albergo Nazionale.

  The structures and surrounding buildings, to Gissing’s eye, personified squalor of the worst kind. They made his room at the Concordia—and my room at the inn in Catanzaro—look like palaces.

  As he wandered the streets that “in the ordinary sense of the word, do not exist,” following his absolutely unsatisfactory meal laced with what he was sure was poisonous wine, he looked into the houses of the people and saw unparalleled squalor. Gissing thought of the phrase he had once heard spoken in a small town between Rome and Naples: C’è miseria (There is nothing but poverty).

  Squillace has changed. I drove up the mountain’s backside and into a tan and light yellow paradise. Streets, albeit as steep as a century earlier, do exist. It was about noon, and people stood outside their doors talking to one another.

  An elderly woman, in a bright coat of many colors—an unusual sight in the South, where elderly women, usually all widows, wear black—was trudging up one of the narrow streets, paved and with steps cut into the middle. She leaned forward with every step, solidly planting her walking stick as far uphill as she could reach. Then she would walk two or three small steps up to it, holding on as if she were moving headlong into a ferocious gale.

  White, gentle clouds were moving over the summit and the morning’s promise of sun was fading; there was no wind, just the steepness of grade that I assumed she had been trudging most of her long life.

  I parked and started to walk up into the town, looking to see if I could find any evidence of Osteria Centrale or Albergo Nazionale. Of course I could not. Those businesses were long gone, as were their “ill-looking” proprietors. Again, as I did everywhere but Crotone, I could only look and wonder where the buildings were that Gissing described so vividly. In Squillace, the buildings easily dated back to a time much earlier than his visit. The buildings had to be here, and possibly the owners’ descendants.

  I moved higher up into the town, toward the Norman castle that Gissing saw on its perch at the town’s highest point. It was fenced off and its gate locked. I had wanted to climb its rampart and view the valley below. I turned and walked toward a small group of people. The oldest of the group, a middle-aged man, was pointing out the homes and sights. “Did you see the castle?” he asked me in Italian. “Sì,” I said. “Ma è chiuso” (But it is closed).

  I turned to make my way back down to my car. The man, Giuseppe Cerullo, grabbed my arm and asked me to stay. “Go with us,” he said, explaining that the three young people with him were students and he was giving them a tour of his historic vi
llage. My Italian was not up to full comprehension, but I gleaned enough to make the unexpected diversion worthwhile.

  We passed a nondescript house, and Giuseppe pointed to its Arabic-style window. This was a house built by Saracens in the Middle Ages, he said. The house had been stuccoed and painted dozens of times in the centuries since, but the distinctive window and its North African design endured. He pointed to a giant boulder under the corner of another house. The Saracens built their homes on such rocks, he said, that are embedded deep into the earth, on “natural” foundations.

  We walked past another home, with a round circle of earth in the midst of the pavement in front, about four or five feet in diameter. Here, Giuseppe said, stood a giant palm tree, “for many, many, many decades, perhaps a century.”

  Finally, he took us to a tiny abandoned structure jammed between restored Saracen-era homes. This, he said, was a Christian church, dating back to the Middle Ages. “It has been deconsecrated,” he said, meaning it is no longer an active church. The building was locked, but Giuseppe knocked on the door of a nearby house. A man, who had seen us out the window, opened his door and walked out, holding a large, rusty key. The man unlocked the empty church’s door, using both hands to turn the key, then swinging the door open as wide as his proud smile. “Molto vecchio” (Very old), he said to us as we walked into the dim interior lit only by sunlight edging its way in through narrow, vertical windows.

  All ornamentation, of course, had been removed, including the tiles from the floor. In one spot, just in front of where the tiny altar would have sat, was a disturbed area that looked like the rectangular shape of a grave. “Forse una tomba” (Perhaps a tomb), Giuseppe said. I did not have the language ability to ask if the excavation was being done by archaeologists or by the owners. Perhaps I did not want to know.