costume: a short petticoat of scarlet, much embroidered, and over it a
blue skirt, rolled up in front and gathered in a sort of knot behind
the waist; a bodice adorned with needlework and metal; elaborate
glistening head-gear, and bare feet. The town-folk have no peculiarity
of dress. I observed among them a grave, intelligent type of
countenance, handsome and full of character, which may be that of their
brave ancestors the Bruttii. With pleasure I saw that they behaved
gently to their beasts, the mules being very sleek and
contented-looking. There is much difference between these people and
the Neapolitans; they seem to have no liking for noise, talk with a
certain repose, and allow the stranger to go about among them
unmolested, unimportuned. Women above the poorest class are not seen in
the streets; there prevails an Oriental system of seclusion.
I was glad to come upon the pot market; in the south of Italy it is
always a beautiful and interesting sight. Pottery for commonest use
among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far
beyond anything native to our most pretentious china-shops. Here still
lingers a trace of the old civilization. There must be a great good in
a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of
servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils—these oil-jugs
and water-jars—with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it
really so certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can
rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness?
The new age declares itself here and there at Cosenza. A squalid
railway station, a hideous railway bridge, have brought the town into
the European network; and the craze for building, which has disfigured
and half ruined Italy, shows itself in an immense new theatre—Teatro
Garibaldi—just being finished. The old one, which stands ruinous close
by, struck me as, if anything, too large for the town; possibly it had
been damaged by an earthquake, the commonest sort of disaster at
Cosenza. On the front of the new edifice I found two inscriptions, both
exulting over the fall of the papal power; one was interesting enough
to copy:—
“20
SEPT
., 1870.
QUESTA
DATA
POLITICA
DICE
FINITA
LA
TEOCRAZIA
NEGLI
ORDINAMENTI
CIVILI
. IL DI
CHE
LA
DIRA
FINITA
MORALMENTE
SARA
LA
DATA
UMANA
.”
which signifies: “This political date marks the end of theocracy in
civil life. The day which ends its moral rule will begin the epoch of
humanity.” A remarkable utterance anywhere; not least so within the
hearing of the stream which flows over the grave of Alaric.
One goes to bed early at Cosenza; the night air is dangerous,
and—Teatro Garibaldi still incomplete—darkness brings with it no sort
of pastime. I did manage to read a little in my miserable room by an
antique lamp, but the effort was dispiriting; better to lie in the dark
and think of Goth and Roman.
Do the rivers Busento and Crati still keep the secret of that “royal
sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils and trophies of Rome”? It
seems improbable that the grave was ever disturbed; to this day there
exists somewhere near Cosenza a treasure-house more alluring than any
pictured in Arabian tale. It is not easy to conjecture what “spoils and
trophies” the Goths buried with their king; if they sacrificed masses
of precious metal, then perchance there still lies in the river-bed
some portion of that golden statue of Virtus, which the Romans melted
down to eke out the ransom claimed by Alaric. The year 410 A.D. was no
unfitting moment to break into bullion the figure personifying Manly
Worth. “After that,” says an old historian, “all bravery and honour
perished out of Rome.”
CHAPTER IV
TARANTO
Cosenza is on a line of railway which runs northward up the Crati
valley, and joins the long seashore line from Taranto to Reggio. As it
was my wish to see the whole of that coast, I had the choice of
beginning my expedition either at the northern or the southern end; for
several reasons I decided to make straight for Taranto.
The train started about seven o’clock in the morning. I rose at six in
chill darkness, the discomfort of my room seeming worse than ever at
this featureless hour. The waiter—perhaps he was the landlord, I left
this doubt unsolved—brought me a cup of coffee; dirtier and more
shabbily apparelled man I have never looked upon; viler coffee I never
drank. Then I descended into the gloom of the street. The familiar
odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted hither and
thither on a mountain breeze. A glance upwards at the narrow strip of
sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared, of a dull day.
Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just
laden I saw somebody else’s luggage, and at the same moment there came
forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself, began to
look about for the porter. We exchanged greetings, and on our walk to
the station I learned that my companion, also bound for Taranto, had
been detained by illness for several days at the Lionetti, where, he
bitterly complained, the people showed him no sort of attention. He was
a commercial traveller, representing a firm of drug merchants in North
Italy, and for his sins (as he put it) had to make the southern journey
every year; he invariably suffered from fever, and at certain
places—of course, the least civilized—had attacks which delayed him
from three days to a week. He loathed the South, finding no
compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the
inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity. Interested by the
doleful predicament of this vendor of drugs (who dosed himself very
vigorously), I found him a pleasant companion during the day; after our
lunch he seemed to shake off the last shivers of his malady, and was as
sprightly an Italian as one could wish to meet—young, sharp-witted,
well-mannered, and with a pleasing softness of character.
We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so
called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria.
The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names,
where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is
much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains above ground; five hundred
years before Christ it was destroyed by the people of Croton, who
turned the course of the river Crathis so as to whelm the city’s ruins.
Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, La Grande Grece, was my
companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful
and important than that of Pompeii awaits the exc
avator on this site;
he held it certain that here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial
mud, lay the temples and the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when
Crathis first flowed over them. A little digging has recently been
done, and things of interest have been found; but discovery on a wide
scale is still to be attempted.
Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of “incomparable beauty”;
unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at unfavourable moments I
was strongly reminded of the Essex coast—grey, scrubby fiats, crossed
by small streams, spreading wearily seaward. One had only to turn
inland to correct this mood; the Calabrian mountains, even without
sunshine, had their wonted grace. Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent
in the foreground, preserved the southern character of the scene. The
great plain between the hills and the sea grows very impressive; so
silent it is, so mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of
vanished glory. I looked at the Crathis—the Crati of Cosenza—here
beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow
over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the
children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned
by their own vapours.
The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with
eucalyptus. Great bushes of flowering rosemary scented the air, and a
fine cassia tree, from which I plucked blossoms, yielded a subtler
perfume. Our lunch was not luxurious; I remember only, as at all worthy
of Sybaris, a palatable white wine called Muscato dei Saraceni.
Appropriate enough amid this vast silence to turn one’s thoughts to the
Saracens, who are so largely answerable for the ages of desolation that
have passed by the Ionian Sea.
Then on for Taranto, where we arrived in the afternoon. Meaning to stay
for a week or two I sought a pleasant room in a well-situated hotel,
and I found one with a good view of town and harbour. The Taranto of
old days, when it was called Taras, or later Tarentum, stood on a long
peninsula, which divides a little inland sea from the great sea
without. In the Middle Ages the town occupied only the point of this
neck of land, which, by the cutting of an artificial channel, had been
made into an island: now again it is spreading over the whole of the
ancient site; great buildings of yellowish-white stone, as ugly as
modern architect can make them, and plainly far in excess of the actual
demand for habitations, rise where Phoenicians and Greeks and Romans
built after the nobler fashion of their times. One of my windows looked
towards the old town, with its long sea-wall where fishermen’s nets
hung drying, the dome of its Cathedral, the high, squeezed houses,
often with gardens on the roofs, and the swing-bridge which links it to
the mainland; the other gave me a view across the Mare Piccolo, the
Little Sea (it is some twelve miles round about), dotted in many parts
with crossed stakes which mark the oyster-beds, and lined on this side
with a variety of shipping moored at quays. From some of these vessels,
early next morning, sounded suddenly a furious cannonade, which
threatened to shatter the windows of the hotel; I found it was in
honour of the Queen of Italy, whose festa fell on that day. This
barbarous uproar must have sounded even to the Calabrian heights; it
struck me as more meaningless in its deafening volley of noise than any
note of joy or triumph that could ever have been heard in old Tarentum.
I walked all round the island part of the town; lost myself amid its
maze of streets, or alleys rather, for in many places one could touch
both sides with outstretched arms, and rested in the Cathedral of S.
Cataldo, who, by the bye, was an Irishman. All is strange, but too
close-packed to be very striking or beautiful; I found it best to
linger on the sea-wall, looking at the two islands in the offing, and
over the great gulf with its mountain shore stretching beyond sight. On
the rocks below stood fishermen hauling in a great net, whilst a boy
splashed the water to drive the fish back until they were safely
enveloped in the last meshes; admirable figures, consummate in graceful
strength, their bare legs and arms the tone of terra cotta. What slight
clothing they wore became them perfectly, as is always the case with a
costume well adapted to the natural life of its wearers. Their slow,
patient effort speaks of immemorial usage, and it is in harmony with
time itself. These fishermen are the primitives of Taranto; who shall
say for how many centuries they have hauled their nets upon the rock?
When Plato visited the Schools of Taras, he saw the same brown-legged
figures, in much the same garb, gathering their sea-harvest. When
Hannibal, beset by the Romans, drew his ships across the peninsula and
so escaped from the inner sea, fishermen of Tarentum went forth as
ever, seeking their daily food. A thousand years passed, and the fury
of the Saracens, when it had laid the city low, spared some humble
Tarentine and the net by which he lived. To-day the fisher-folk form a
colony apart; they speak a dialect which retains many Greek words
unknown to the rest of the population. I could not gaze at them long
enough; their lithe limbs, their attitudes at work or in repose, their
wild, black hair, perpetually reminded me of shapes pictured on a
classic vase.
Later in the day I came upon a figure scarcely less impressive. Beyond
the new quarter of the town, on the ragged edge of its wide,
half-peopled streets, lies a tract of olive orchards and of seed-land;
there, 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, and traced in the soil—the
generous southern soil—the merest scratch of a furrow. I could not but
approach the man and exchange words with him; his rude but gentle face,
his gnarled hands, his rough and scanty vesture, moved me to a deep
respect, and when his speech fell upon my ear, it was as though I
listened to one of the ancestors of our kind. Stopping in his work, he
answered my inquiries with careful civility; certain phrases escaped
me, but on the whole he made himself quite intelligible, and was glad,
I could see, when my words proved that I understood him. I drew apart,
and watched him again. Never have I seen man so utterly patient, so
primaevally 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.
Walking onward in the same direction, one approaches a great wall, with
gateway sentry-guarded; it is the new Arsenal, the pride of
Taranto,
and the source of its prosperity. On special as well as on general
grounds, I have a grudge against this mass of ugly masonry. I had
learnt from Lenormant that at a certain spot, Fontanella, by the shore
of the Little Sea, were observable great ancient heaps of murex
shells—the murex precious for its purple, that of Tarentum yielding in
glory only to the purple of Tyre. I hoped to see these shells, perhaps
to carry one away. But Fontanella had vanished, swallowed up, with all
remnants of antiquity, by the graceless Arsenal. It matters to no one
save the few fantastics who hold a memory of the ancient world dearer
than any mechanic triumph of to-day. If only one could believe that the
Arsenal signified substantial good to Italy! Too plainly it means
nothing but the exhaustion of her people in the service of a base ideal.
The confines of this new town being so vague, much trouble is given to
that noble institution, the dazio. Scattered far and wide in a dusty
wilderness, stand the little huts of the officers, vigilant on every
road or by-way to wring the wretched soldi from toilsome hands. As
became their service, I found these gentry anything but amiable; they
had commonly an air of ennui, and regarded a stranger with surly
suspicion.
When I was back again among the high new houses, my eye, wandering in
search of any smallest point of interest, fell on a fresh-painted
inscription:—
“
ALLA
MAGNA
GRAECIA
.
STABILIMENTO
IDROELETTROPATICO
.”
was well meant. At the sign of “Magna Graecia” one is willing to accept
“hydroelectropathic” as a late echo of Hellenic speech.
CHAPTER V
DULCE GALAESI FLUMEN
Taranto has a very interesting Museum. I went there with an
introduction to the curator, who spared no trouble in pointing out to
me all that was best worth seeing. He and I were alone in the little
galleries; at a second or third visit I had the Museum to myself, save
for an attendant who seemed to regard a visitor as a pleasant novelty,
and bestirred himself for my comfort when I wanted to make sketches.
Nothing is charged for admission, yet no one enters. Presumably, all
the Tarentines who care for archaeology have already been here, and
strangers are few.
Upon the shelves are seen innumerable miniature busts, carved in some
By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy Page 3
