by John Keahey
Near the tiny town’s main square, I said good-bye to Giuseppe and his three young friends. I asked him if I could reimburse him for his services. No, no, he said quickly. “It is my pleasure to show you my village.”
Such is the passion I find in Italy. Particularly, I find it in little towns far off the tourist track. Squillace is not a tourist town; Crotone seems to cater only to locals and some Italian tourists; Taranto is little known to the outside world except to German travelers, my cab-driver friend had told me days earlier.
In each city—even in clogged and smoky Catanzaro where a night clerk politely listened to my story about Signor Paparazzo and made me feel as though I had just enriched his life by telling the tale—I found unexpected adventure and people whose pride in their home cities flows through every pore. It is what keeps me coming back.
* * *
I still had one more stop to make before I reached Squillace’s train stazione miles away along the coast. Before I had left Giuseppe and his group of students, we had stood along the ramparts of the closed and austere Norman castle that dominated the town, looking across the small, narrow valley below. There, just off the road that would take me from the town, standing across a tiny stream and next to an olive grove filled with ancient trees, lay an arched bridge, with grass growing on the top.
There was no road going to either side of the bridge. Giuseppe had seen that I saw it. “It was built in the twelfth century,” he had said. That means it could have been a Norman bridge. An old road, now buried beneath a farmer’s fields, must have once gone over the top of it. “Interessante, eh?” Giuseppe said to me, with a wink.
This twelfth century C.E. bridge, likely built by the Normans, sits in a farmer’s field below the town of Squillace. High on the hill is a Norman castle. Much of the town’s architecture was influenced by the Normans and their predecessors, the Saracens. Gissing only spent a few unhappy hours in this small Calabrian village. He was drawn here because it was the home of his beloved Cassiodorus, the monk who served one of the last Roman Gothic kings during the fall of the western Empire, and who initiated the monastic tradition of copying ancient texts, thereby preserving them for later generations. Photo by John Keahey
Now I drove out of the town, rounding the first curve of the road that would take me toward the sea. Just above the olive grove, I parked the car and stood, looking down at the bridge. It definitely appeared to be on private property. I hesitated, but the urge was too great. I walked down, along the side of the grove, through a field that had lain fallow through the winter. I reached the stream, crossed the corner of the grove, and climbed on top of a low concrete wall that skirted the front of the arched, stone bridge.
I knelt down and looked at it closely. Knowing nothing about architecture, I could only surmise that the Normans, or perhaps Saracens who had earlier created much of Squillace, had built it. I knew from history books that the Normans had pushed westward from Italy’s heel and conquered much of Calabria by the eleventh century C.E. Here it was, on a farmer’s property. Untouched and intact after centuries. What a thing for a child to play on! I thought. Surely the owners knew what they had here.
After a few moments, I turned and began the quarter-mile trudge back up along the fallow field. Then I heard one low bark, looked up, and saw the farmer’s dog straining at a taut chain, trying to come toward me. There was no growling, no frenzied barking, just one low warning bark. This was not a dog to mess with. Carrying my innate fear up the hill with me, the same fear that earlier had visited me in Táranto, I made it back to the car in record time. I did not want to find out if that dog could break its sturdy chain.
With my pulse rate slowly returning to normal, I began to think about Reggio, for centuries an outpost on Italy’s bumpy toe. It was Gissing’s, and my, last stop before each of us, a century apart, would return to Rome.
Chapter 19
In the Lair of Cassiodorus
I reached Squillace stazione, along the coast and miles below the old town, and found it bathed in sunlight. The Ionian Sea beyond was placid, and turning before my eyes from gray to blue. A passing storm, which had scattered rain throughout the morning, had moved far out to sea. Far away, I could see dark gray clouds in the sky that touched the water. But here the sun was warm, and the train for Reggio di Calabria, mine and Gissing’s last stop in our Ionian odyssey, was waiting.
I have a regret here. I walked into the station and saw the southbound train sitting there. I had only a few minutes before it left and, too hurriedly, decided that rather than wait an hour or two for the next one as Gissing had done, I would climb on and settle in, expecting to arrive at Reggio in the late afternoon.
As the train moved slowly out of the station and south toward Reggio along the coastline, which makes up the front half of the bottom of Italy’s foot, I reread Gissing’s description of his two-hour layover at this very station. He had had an adventure here, one that I could try to re-create. Quickly, I thought about getting off at the next station, heading back to Squillace station, and taking the walk he did.
Alas, I succumbed to the rigors of being on the road and alone for three weeks, sat back in my comfortable seat, and watched the rain squall far out in the Ionian.
From the stazione, Gissing had filled his two hours by walking along the tracks “towards the black furrowed mountain side.” There is a tunnel here, now as then, that allows the train to shoot through the final ridge of the Apennine range—a point that Gissing called the promontory of the Mons Moscius. I never saw that name on any of my maps, but it is the spot, according to Gissing and my Italian Touring Club map, where the Apennines, which run nearly the length of Italy from high up in the boot, disappear into the sea. Both he and I had crisscrossed these mountains for weeks and, each in our own time, now were at the end of this historic mountain range and our respective journeys.
In these mountains, and in the hills beyond this ridge well into Italy’s toe where the high mass of the Aspromonte dominates, early Greeks pushed upward from the coast during the fifth century B.C.E. and onto high promontories and mountaintops all along this bottom of Italy. They were driven there by the fierce Italic tribes, and mosquitoes, and isolated for centuries. This isolation preserved their Greek language, and, I am told, an archaic form of Greek is still spoken in places here by the people known as Grecanici.
But like those remaining in the coastal cities, this barrier of language did not protect them from the successive sweeps of invaders. Despite these influences, these ancient Greeks continued to practice their Greek Orthodox faith, I have read, resisting Catholicism well into the fourteenth century C.E.
But Gissing’s thoughts during his two-hour layover did not turn to the Greeks. He was still thinking about the time of Cassiodorus and early Christianity’s ascendancy in the city of Rome, with popes replacing emperors and kings as the western Roman Empire crumbled. Near here, Gissing believed, was the monastery of Cassiodorus, where the monks piously copied their Latin manuscripts. The railroad tracks he walked along—the very path my train was taking—crossed the Fiume di Squillace, the river known in Cassiodorus’s time as the Pellena, which flowed, full of fish, along the monastery’s grounds.
In fact, his monastic compound has been called the Vivarium, a word that today refers to a container or place that contains small animals. In his day, it referred to the fish ponds he reputedly built along the river—a place where fish could be kept in a natural habitat.
“Here, then, I stood in full view of the spot which I had so often visioned in my mind’s eye. Much of the land hereabout—probably an immense tract of hill and valley—was the old monk’s patrimonial estate,” Gissing wrote. Because of my foolish, impulsive decision, I had to content myself with flashing by on the coastal train rather than ambling along the tracks toward the tunnel through the Mons Moscius as Gissing had done. I saw the tunnel coming up and quickly glanced through my compartment window down toward the water.
It was along the tracks, here
at this point, where Gissing met a group of railway workers who climbed with him down the rocky shoreline to the sea. These men, though illiterate, all knew of Cassiodorus and showed Gissing a small cave along the shore that Gissing speculated once must have connected with the Squillace, then Pellena, River. Over the centuries, he surmised, the river, like the Coscile and the Crati Rivers to the north at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia, had changed course, wandering away from the cave and far away from where it was nearly fifteen hundred years earlier along the ancestral lands of Cassiodorus.
Gissing tried to pay the men for their help and information. “They refused with entire dignity—grave, courteous, firm.… With handshaking, we took kindly leave of each other. Such self-respect is the rarest thing in Italy south of Rome, but in Calabria I found it more than once.”
I thought, once again, about the many times I, too, had found such graciousness and self-respect. I remember the guide in Squillace just a few miles away from this spot. He, like the railroad workers one hundred years earlier, had smilingly and kindly rebuffed my offer of grateful remuneration. He had shaken my hand warmly, telling me how it pleased him that someone cared about this town. I remember the man who came out of his house with the huge iron key to let us into the abandoned church, happy to divert his attention, for no monetary reward, for a group of strangers. I remember my guide at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia who spent a morning trudging with me through the water-soaked ruins, explaining with enthusiasm how the ancient cities were unfolding before her and her colleagues’ eyes. I remember the fisherman along Taranto’s Little Sea who calmed his pack of guard dogs and talked to me for half an hour about catching crabs and shrimp, the cab driver who pointed out my dropped one-hundred-thousand-lira note, the young Pugliese bus driver telling me about wild dogs and life in the South.
I reflected on all this, alone again in my train compartment, as I zipped through the tunnel that took me out of the Apennines and along the coast of the Aspromonte, the last great spur of mountain massif that rises, in a series of terraces, above the Ionian Sea. For someone who spoke little Italian and had spent three weeks talking with people who spoke little English, I had learned a great deal about graciousness and pride.
What I did not notice—and apparently Gissing did not notice it either—was that just on the other side of that tunnel, at the end of a short road that drops off to the left, is the purported tomb of Cassiodorus. At least that is what the inscription says, a friend told me long after I returned home.
Knowing how myth often becomes “reality,” I do not know if the bones of Cassiodorus truly are there. It does make for an appealing tourist attraction.
I recall visiting the spot in Idaho where a marker designates the final resting place of my mother’s ashes, and discovering—after dozens of visits, complete with flowers and tearful remembrances—that her ashes had never actually been placed there. They were several hundred feet away, in a tiny storage room, locked behind the cemetery offices.
I wasn’t present when, much later, the cemetery custodian over the telephone promised me that he placed them beneath the marker. Short of reopening the small box beneath the plaque, I have to take his word for it, just like modern visitors to European shrines have to take it on faith that Napoleon’s bones, say, really are in that tomb in Paris, or that Cassiodorus’s remains really are under that stone slab near the train tunnel in Calabria.
Chapter 20
The End of the Toe
It was late in the day when the train pulled into Reggio. I walked outside of the station and into the warm, tree-lined square full of city buses waiting to begin their routes. I had a map, and it appeared that I wanted to move north several blocks toward the city center, about a mile away. The first bus driver I talked to told me where to catch a bus for the center, and said I could find a hotel there. Within minutes, I was lodged in a moderately priced room, complete with television and all the amenities. By this time, I was desperate for an English-speaking news station. But only Italian-language stations were represented. I went out and wandered the streets, joining the crowds of pedestrians along the traffic-free Corso Garibaldi.
What a delight Reggio is, with its orderly streets and strict limitations on automobiles. The Corso, except for certain times of day, is off limits to cars. Only buses and people can use the wide boulevard during the afternoon and evening hours.
I did see one horrifying scene here: A young miniskirted mother, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, sitting on a tiny scooter, her tiny daughter standing between the knees of the mother, who was weaving in and out among the pedestrians and buses.
The cathedral in Reggio di Calabria, Gissing’s last stop on his tour of Magna Graecia, is newly restored. The city was heavily damaged by a major earthquake a few years after his visit and was bombed during World War II. Little of what Gissing saw here remains. Photo by John Keahey
Ah, Italy. The land where seat belts are sat on and a toddler stands on a scooter’s floorboard, holding on for dear life and shrieking with joy at the wind in her hair!
* * *
Not much of the city Gissing saw remains. He was there during December 1897. It was razed by an earthquake in 1908, and rebuilt with wider streets and low, reinforced-concrete buildings. Centuries earlier, unlike most conquerors, the Romans treated the city well; after all, Rhegion, so named by the Greeks and later named Rhegium by the Romans, had remained loyal to Rome during the Punic Wars, including Hannibal’s invasion.
Along the Lungomare Matteotti, the street along the harbor just down from the Corso Garibaldi, are only a dribbling of Greek ruins—a short wall. Just a few hundred feet away are the remains of a Roman bath. Not much else of the ancient city exists. But standing here with my back to the city, after dropping down from the traffic-free Corso during my early evening walk, I could gaze across, as Gissing did, to the east coast of Sicily, just a few miles away.
To the northwest blinked the lights of Messina; to the southwest, shrouded in haze and out of sight, would be the slopes of Etna, a volcano, like Vesuvius, that still threatens all life on its fertile Sicilian slopes.
Reggio has a poor harbor, but it must have been chosen by the ancients for its commanding position along the Strait of Messina. It was an ideal trading spot, bringing together ships from the Greek world south of Italy, the colonists in Sicily just a few hundred yards across the strait, and those plying the waters along Italy’s west coast. The original Greek settlers here were always under threat of invasion, first by fellow Greek colonists from other cities, later by the other nationalities that foraged along this impressive coastline.
Eventually, the Siracusans from the southeast coast of Sicily needed Rhegion as a bridgehead for the defense of their island. After a long siege that ended in 386 B.C.E., the Greeks from Syrakusai, modern Siracusa, dismantled the wall I saw the remains of, and built a palace along the waterfront. Eventually, after the Romans took over following Hannibal’s departure from Kroton farther north, new colonists were sent by the Roman emperor Augustus just before the birth of Christ to newly renamed Rhegium, which flourished throughout the imperial Roman period.
* * *
My first morning here was spent in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Graecia. Gissing toured these displays. He had flipped back through the pages of the museum’s guest book and discovered the name, on its first page, of “François Lenormant, Membre de l’Institut de France,” the date 1882. There was no such book for me to flip back through, to see if I could discover Gissing’s name, or to record my own. I later found out that the old one is filed away. But it was hard to determine whether the building he visited was the same one I saw. So much has changed here in the last one hundred years, particularly after the giant earthquake eleven years following his visit.
Gissing talked about seeing a plaque on a sidewalk honoring a war hero, a common soldier. It would be impossible to find it, even if it still existed. Gissing scholars, who delve into such minutiae, have found a street in Reggio named for the s
oldier—perhaps they got the name “Emilio Cuzzocrea” from Gissing’s diary—although it would appear that the plaque Gissing saw no longer exists.
But the museum I visited is one of the best in Italy. It, joined with the new ones at Sibari and Metaponto, and the venerable one in Taranto, provides a great repository for the wonders of Magna Graecia. In linear fashion, the Reggio museum covers Bronze Age and Iron Age Calabria, the archaic and Hellenic Greek civilizations, and the Roman period. I had seen a great deal of these types of antiquities elsewhere and moved quickly through the displays.
One of two Riace Bronzes, pulled out of the sea in the 1970s from the shallow harbor of Calabria’s Riace Marina on the underside of Italy’s toe, is housed in Reggio’s archaeological museum. The two bronzes were restored here and have their own earthquake-proof display area in the vast museum. Photo by John Keahey
Here, I was more eager to see the Riace Bronzes, those incredible life-size statues pulled out of twenty-five feet of seawater nearly one thousand yards off the coast at nearby Riace Harbor in 1972. Riace is where modern-day immigrants, Kurds and North Africans, poured into Italy every year during the late 1990s, but it also is where a Greek ship, carrying goods to and from Greece, must have wrecked thousands of years ago.
These bronzes were painstakingly restored over a five-year period in this museum, and toured the world before being lodged permanently in the amphitheater where the restoration took place. Now they stand, in their own large, bright, humidity-controlled room, with their own guard, who obligingly let me take photographs, as long as I did not use my flash. “Senza flash!” he told me politely, wagging his index finger.
The statues are not behind protective glass but out in the open, positioned on a special platform-fixture system designed to keep them upright during an earthquake—a frequent event in this southern Calabrian city. Once again, as in Táranto and Síbari, I had the museum, and this room, to myself. Just me, the guard, and the bronze representation of two fierce, golden Greek warriors or athletes. They have similar outlines and their measurements are nearly the same, but each stance is different, and the heads are held at different angles. Scientists speculate they may have been part of a cluster of heroic statues; they may have been done by different artists and at different dates.
