sunshine, two well-dressed men approached me, and with somewhat
excessive courtesy began conversation. They understood that I was about
to drive to Cosenza. A delightful day, and a magnificent country! They
too thought of journeying to Cosenza, and, in short, would I allow them
to share my carriage? Now this was annoying; I much preferred to be
alone with my thoughts; but it seemed ungracious to refuse. After a
glance at their smiling faces, I answered that whatever room remained
in the vehicle was at their service—on the natural understanding that
they shared the expense; and to this, with the best grace in the world,
they at once agreed. We took momentary leave of each other, with much
bowing and flourishing of hats, and the amusing thing was that I never
beheld those gentlemen again.
Fortunately—as the carriage proved to be a very small one, and the sun
was getting very hot; with two companions I should have had an
uncomfortable day. In front of the Leone a considerable number of
loafers had assembled to see me off, and of these some half-dozen were
persevering mendicants. It disappointed me that I saw no interesting
costume; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying age.
The only vivid memory of these people which remains with me is the
cadence of their speech. Whilst I was breakfasting, two women stood at
gossip on a near balcony, and their utterance was a curious
exaggeration of the Neapolitan accent; every sentence rose to a high
note, and fell away in a long curve of sound, sometimes a musical wail,
more often a mere whining. The protraction of the last word or two was
really astonishing; again and again I fancied that the speaker had
broken into song. I cannot say that the effect was altogether pleasant;
in the end such talk would tell severely on civilized nerves, but it
harmonized with the coloured houses, the luxuriant vegetation, the
strange odours, the romantic landscape.
In front of the vehicle were three little horses; behind it was hitched
an old shabby two-wheeled thing, which we were to leave somewhere for
repairs. With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured
farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just ten o’clock.
At once the road began to climb, and nearly three hours were spent in
reaching the highest point of the mountain barrier. Incessantly
winding, often doubling upon itself, the road crept up the sides of
profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable
spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with furious
torrents. From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we passed that
of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their rich-hued foliage on
bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the feathery bowers of wild
clematis (“old man’s beard”), and many a spike of the great mullein,
strange to me because so familiar in English lanes. Through mists that
floated far below I looked over miles of shore, and outward to the
ever-rising limit of sea and sky. Very lovely were the effects of
light, the gradations of colour; from the blue-black abysses, where no
shape could be distinguished, to those violet hues upon the furrowed
heights which had a transparency, a softness, an indefiniteness, unlike
anything to be seen in northern landscape.
The driver was accompanied by a half-naked lad, who, at certain points,
suddenly disappeared, and came into view again after a few minutes,
having made a short cut up some rugged footway between the loops of the
road. Perspiring, even as I sat, in the blaze of the sun, I envied the
boy his breath and muscle. Now and then he slaked his thirst at a stone
fountain by the wayside, not without reverencing the blue-hooded
Madonna painted over it. A few lean, brown peasants, bending under
faggots, and one or two carts, passed us before we gained the top, and
half-way up there was a hovel where drink could be bought; but with
these exceptions nothing broke the loneliness of the long, wild ascent.
My man was not talkative, but answered inquiries civilly; only on one
subject was he very curt—that of the two wooden crosses which we
passed just before arriving at the summit; they meant murders. At the
moment when I spoke of them I was stretching my legs in a walk beside
the carriage, the driver walking just in front of me; and something
then happened which is still a puzzle when I recall it. Whether the
thought of crimes had made the man nervous, or whether just then I wore
a peculiarly truculent face, or had made some alarming gesture, all of
a sudden he turned upon me, grasped my arm and asked sharply: “What
have you got in your hand?” I had a bit of fern, plucked a few minutes
before, and with surprise I showed it; whereupon he murmured an
apology, said something about making haste, and jumped to his seat. An
odd little incident.
At an unexpected turn of the road there spread before me a vast
prospect; I looked down upon inland Calabria. It was a valley broad
enough to be called a plain, dotted with white villages, and backed by
the mass of mountains which now, as in old time, bear the name of Great
Sila. Through this landscape flowed the river Crati—the ancient
Crathis; northward it curved, and eastward, to fall at length into the
Ionian Sea, far beyond my vision. The river Crathis, which flowed by
the walls of Sybaris. I stopped the horses to gaze and wonder; gladly I
would have stood there for hours. Less interested, and impatient to get
on, the driver pointed out to me the direction of Cosenza, still at a
great distance. He added the information that, in summer, the
well-to-do folk of Cosenza go to Paola for sea-bathing, and that they
always perform the journey by night. I, listening carelessly amid my
dream, tried to imagine the crossing of those Calabrian hills under a
summer sun! By summer moonlight it must be wonderful.
We descended at a sharp pace, all the way through a forest of
chestnuts, the fruit already gathered, the golden leaves rustling in
their fall. At the foot lies the village of San Fili, and here we left
the crazy old cart which we had dragged so far. A little further, and
before us lay a long, level road, a true Roman highway, straight for
mile after mile. By this road the Visigoths must have marched after the
sack of Rome. In approaching Cosenza I was drawing near to the grave of
Alaric. Along this road the barbarian bore in triumph those spoils of
the Eternal City which were to enrich his tomb.
By this road, six hundred years before the Goth, marched Hannibal on
his sullen retreat from Italy, passing through Cosentia to embark at
Croton.
CHAPTER III
THE GRAVE OF ALARIC
It would have been prudent to consult with my driver as to the inns of
Cosenza. But, with a pardonable desire not to seem helpless in his
hands, I had from the first directed him to the Due Lionetti, relying
upon my guide-book. Even at Cosenza there is progress, and guide-books
to little-known parts of Europe are easily allowed to fall out of date.
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On my arrival----
But, first of all, the dazio. This time it was a serious business;
impossible to convince the rather surly officer that certain of the
contents of my portmanteau were not for sale. What in the world was I
doing with tanti libri? Of course I was a commercial traveller;
ridiculous to pretend anything else. After much strain of courtesy, I
clapped to my luggage, locked it up, and with a resolute face cried
“Avanti!” And there was an end of it. In this case, as so often, I have
no doubt that simple curiosity went for much in the man’s pertinacious
questioning. Of course the whole dazio business is ludicrous and
contemptible; I scarce know a baser spectacle than that of uniformed
officials groping in the poor little bundles of starved peasant women,
mauling a handful of onions, or prodding with long irons a cartload of
straw. Did any one ever compare the expenses with the results?
A glance shows the situation of Cosenza. The town is built on a steep
hillside, above the point where two rivers, flowing from the valleys on
either side, mingle their waters under one name, that of the Crati. We
drove over a bridge which spans the united current, and entered a
narrow street, climbing abruptly between houses so high and so close
together as to make a gloom amid sunshine. It was four o’clock; I felt
tired and half choked with dust; the thought of rest and a meal was
very pleasant. As I searched for the sign of my inn, we suddenly drew
up, midway in the dark street, before a darker portal, which seemed the
entrance to some dirty warehouse. The driver jumped down—”Ecco
l’albergo!”
I had seen a good many Italian hostelries, and nourished no
unreasonable expectations. The Lion at Paola would have seemed to any
untravelled Englishman a squalid and comfortless hole, incredible as a
place of public entertainment; the Two Little Lions of Cosenza made a
decidedly worse impression. Over sloppy stones, in an atmosphere heavy
with indescribable stenches, I felt rather than saw my way to the foot
of a stone staircase; this I ascended, and on the floor above found a
dusky room, where tablecloths and an odour of frying oil afforded some
suggestion of refreshment. My arrival interested nobody; with a good
deal of trouble I persuaded an untidy fellow, who seemed to be a
waiter, to come down with me and secure my luggage. More trouble before
I could find a bedroom; hunting for keys, wandering up and down stone
stairs and along pitch-black corridors, sounds of voices in quarrel.
The room itself was utterly depressing—so bare, so grimy, so dark.
Quickly I examined the bed, and was rewarded. It is the good point of
Italian inns; be the house and the room howsoever sordid, the bed is
almost invariably clean and dry and comfortable.
I ate, not amiss; I drank copiously to the memory of Alaric, and felt
equal to any fortune. When night had fallen I walked a little about the
scarce-lighted streets and came to an open place, dark and solitary and
silent, where I could hear the voices of the two streams as they
mingled below the hill. Presently I passed an open office of some kind,
where a pleasant-looking man sat at a table writing; on an impulse I
entered, and made bold to ask whether Cosenza had no better inn than
the Due Lionetti. Great was this gentleman’s courtesy; he laid down
his pen, as if for ever, and gave himself wholly to my concerns. His
discourse delighted me, so flowing were the phrases, so rounded the
periods. Yes, there were other inns; one at the top of the town—the
Vetere—in a very good position; and they doubtless excelled my own
in modern comfort. As a matter of fact, it might be avowed that the
Lionetti, from the point of view of the great centres of
civilization, left something to be desired—something to be desired;
but it was a good old inn, a reputable old inn, and probably on further
acquaintance----
Further acquaintance did not increase my respect for the Lionetti; it
would not be easy to describe those features in which, most notably, it
fell short of all that might be desired. But I proposed no long stay at
Cosenza, where malarial fever is endemic, and it did not seem worth
while to change my quarters. I slept very well.
I had come here to think about Alaric, and with my own eyes to behold
the place of his burial. Ever since the first boyish reading of Gibbon,
my imagination has loved to play upon that scene of Alaric’s death.
Thinking to conquer Sicily, the Visigoth marched as far as to the
capital of the Bruttii, those mountain tribes which Rome herself never
really subdued; at Consentia he fell sick and died. How often had I
longed to see this river Busento, which the “labour of a captive
multitude” turned aside, that its flood might cover and conceal for all
time the tomb of the Conqueror! I saw it in the light of sunrise,
flowing amid low, brown, olive-planted hills; at this time of the year
it is a narrow, but rapid stream, running through a wide, waste bed of
yellow sand and stones. The Crati, which here has only just started
upon its long seaward way from some glen of Sila, presents much the
same appearance, the track which it has worn in flood being many times
as broad as the actual current. They flow, these historic waters, with
a pleasant sound, overborne at moments by the clapping noise of
Cosenza’s washerwomen, who cleanse their linen by beating it, then
leave it to dry on the river-bed. Along the banks stood tall poplars,
each a spire of burnished gold, blazing against the dark olive foliage
on the slopes behind them; plane trees, also, very rich of colour, and
fig trees shedding their latest leaves. Now, tradition has it that
Alaric was buried close to the confluence of the Busento and the Crati.
If so, he lay in full view of the town. But the Goths are said to have
slain all their prisoners who took part in the work, to ensure secrecy.
Are we to suppose that Consentia was depopulated? On any other
supposition the story must be incorrect, and Alaric’s tomb would have
to be sought at least half a mile away, where the Busento is hidden in
its deep valley.
Gibbon, by the way, calls it Busentinus; the true Latin was Buxentius.
To make sure of the present name, I questioned some half a dozen
peasants, who all named the river Basenzio or Basenz’; a countryman of
more intelligent appearance assured me that this was only a dialectical
form, the true one being Busento. At a bookseller’s shop (Cosenza had
one, a very little one) I found the same opinion to prevail.
It is difficult to walk much in this climate; lassitude and feverish
symptoms follow on the slightest exertion; but—if one can disregard
the evil smells which everywhere catch one’s breath—Cosenza has
wonders and delights which tempt to day-long rambling. To call the town
picturesque is to use an inadequate word; at every step, from the
opening of the main street at the hill-foot up to the stern mediaeval
castle crowning its height, one marvels and admires.
So narrow are the
ways that a cart drives the pedestrian into shop or alley; two vehicles
(but perhaps the thing never happened) would with difficulty pass each
other. As in all towns of Southern Italy, the number of hair-dressers
is astonishing, and they hang out the barber’s basin—the very basin
(of shining brass and with a semicircle cut out of the rim) which the
Knight of La Mancha took as substitute for his damaged helmet. Through
the gloom of high balconied houses, one climbs to a sunny piazza, where
there are several fine buildings; beyond it lies the public garden, a
lovely spot, set with alleys of acacia and groups of palm and
flower-beds and fountains; marble busts of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and
Cavour gleam among the trees. Here one looks down upon the yellow gorge
of the Crati, and sees it widen northward into a vast green plain, in
which the track of the river is soon lost. On the other side of the
Crati valley, in full view of this garden, begins the mountain region
of many-folded Sila—a noble sight at any time of the day, but most of
all when the mists of morning cling about its summits, or when the
sunset clothes its broad flanks with purple. Turn westward, and you
behold the long range which hides the Mediterranean so high and wild
from this distance, that I could scarce believe I had driven over it.
Sila—locally the Black Mountain, because dark with climbing
forests—held my gaze through a long afternoon. From the grassy
table-land of its heights, pasturage for numberless flocks and herds
when the long snows have melted, one might look over the shore of the
Ionian Sea where Greek craftsmen built ships of timber cut upon the
mountain’s side. Not so long ago it was a haunt of brigands; now there
is no risk for the rare traveller who penetrates that wilderness; but
he must needs depend upon the hospitality of labourers and shepherds. I
dream of sunny glades, never touched, perhaps, by the foot of man since
the Greek herdsman wandered there with his sheep or goats. Somewhere on
Sila rises the Neaithos (now Neto) mentioned by Theocritus; one would
like to sit by its source in the woodland solitude, and let fancy have
her way.
In these garden walks I met a group of peasants, evidently strange to
Cosenza, and wondering at all they saw. The women wore a very striking
By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy Page 2
