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Old Calabria

N >> Norman Douglas >> Old Calabria



Eric Eldred



OLD CALABRIA

BY NORMAN DOUGLAS







CONTENTS

I. SARACEN LUCERA
II. MANFRED'S TOWN
III. THE ANGEL OF MANFREDONIA
IV. CAVE-WORSHIP
V. LAND OF HORACE
VI. AT VENOSA
VII. THE BANDUSIAN FOUNT
VIII. TILLERS OF THE SOIL
IX. MOVING SOUTHWARDS
X. THE FLYING MONK
XI. BY THE INLAND SEA
XII. MOLLE TARENTUM
XIII. INTO THE JUNGLE
XIV. DRAGONS
XV. BYZANTINISM
XVI. REPOSING AT CASTROVILLARI
XVII. OLD MORANO
XVIII. AFRICAN INTRUDERS
XIX. UPLANDS OF POLLINO
XX. A MOUNTAIN FESTIVAL
XXI. MILTON IN CALABRIA
XXII. THE "GREEK" SILA
XXIII. ALBANIANS AND THEIR COLLEGE
XXIV. AN ALBANIAN SEER
XXV. SCRAMBLING TO LONGOBUCCO
XXVI. AMONG THE BRUTTIANS
XXVII. CALABRIAN BRIGANDAGE
XXVIII. THE GREATER SILA
XXIX. CHAOS
XXX. THE SKIRTS OF MONTALTO
XXXI. SOUTHERN SAINTLINESS
XXXII. ASPROMONTE, THE CLOUD-GATHERER
XXXIII. MUSOLINO AND THE LAW
XXXIV. MALARIA
XXXV. CAULONIA TO SERRA
XXXVI. MEMORIES OF GISSING
XXXVII. COTRONE
XXXVIII. THE SAGE OF CROTON
XXXIX. MIDDAY AT PETELIA
XL. THE COLUMN
INDEX.




OLD CALABRIA

I

SARACEN LUCERA


I find it hard to sum up in one word the character of Lucera--the effect
it produces on the mind; one sees so many towns that the freshness of
their images becomes blurred. The houses are low but not undignified;
the streets regular and clean; there is electric light and somewhat
indifferent accommodation for travellers; an infinity of barbers and
chemists. Nothing remarkable in all this. Yet the character is there, if
one could but seize upon it, since every place has its genius. Perhaps
it lies in a certain feeling of aloofness that never leaves one here. We
are on a hill--a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising up
from, the south--quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to
dominate the wide Apulian plain. And the nakedness of the land
stimulates this aerial sense. There are some trees in the "Belvedere" or
public garden that lies on the highest part of the spur and affords a
fine view north and eastwards. But the greater part were only planted a
few years ago, and those stretches of brown earth, those half-finished
walks and straggling pigmy shrubs, give the place a crude and embryonic
appearance. One thinks that the designers might have done more in the
way of variety; there are no conifers excepting a few cryptomerias and
yews which will all be dead in a couple of years, and as for those
yuccas, beloved of Italian municipalities, they will have grown more
dyspeptic-looking than ever. None the less, the garden will be a
pleasant spot when the ilex shall have grown higher; even now it is the
favourite evening walk of the citizens. Altogether, these public parks,
which are now being planted all over south Italy, testify to renascent
taste; they and the burial-places are often the only spots where the
deafened and light-bedazzled stranger may find a little green
content; the content, respectively, of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso._
So the cemetery of Lucera, with its ordered walks drowned in the shade
of cypress--roses and gleaming marble monuments in between--is a
charming retreat, not only for the dead.

The Belvedere, however, is not my promenade. My promenade lies yonder,
on the other side of the valley, where the grave old Suabian castle sits
on its emerald slope. It does not frown; it reposes firmly, with an air
of tranquil and assured domination; "it has found its place," as an
Italian observed to me. Long before Frederick Barbarossa made it the
centre of his southern dominions, long before the Romans had their
fortress on the site, this eminence must have been regarded as the key
of Apulia. All round the outside of those turreted walls (they are
nearly a mile in circumference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty
thousand people) there runs a level space. This is my promenade, at all
hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down
below, a long unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees
and sullen streamlets and white farmhouses--the whole vision framed in a
ring of distant Apennines. The volcanic cone of Mount Vulture, land of
Horace, can be detected on clear days; it tempts me to explore those
regions. But eastward rises up the promontory of Mount Gargano, and on
the summit of its nearest hill one perceives a cheerful building, some
village or convent, that beckons imperiously across the intervening
lowlands. Yonder lies the venerable shrine of the archangel Michael, and
Manfred's town. . . .

This castle being a _national monument,_ they have appointed a custodian
to take charge of it; a worthless old fellow, full of untruthful
information which he imparts with the hushed and conscience-stricken air
of a man who is selling State secrets.

"That corner tower, sir, is the King's tower. It was built by the King."

"But you said just now that it was the Queen's tower."

"So it is. The Queen--she built it."

"What Queen?"

"What Queen? Why, the Queen--the Queen the German professor was talking
about three years ago. But I must show you some skulls which we found
_(sotto voce)_ in a subterranean crypt. They used to throw the poor dead
folk in here by hundreds; and under the Bourbons the criminals were
hanged here, thousands of them. The blessed times! And this tower is the
Queen's tower."

"But you called it the King's tower just now."

"Just so. That is because the King built it."

"What King?"

"Ah, sir, how can I remember the names of all those gentlemen? I haven't
so much as set eyes on them! But I must now show you some round
sling-stones which we excavated _(sotto voce)_ in a subterranean crypt----"

One or two relics from this castle are preserved in the small municipal
museum, founded about five years ago. Here are also a respectable
collection of coins, a few prehistoric flints from Gargano, some quaint
early bronze figurines and mutilated busts of Roman celebrities carved
in marble or the recalcitrant local limestone. A dignified old lion--one
of a pair (the other was stolen) that adorned the tomb of Aurelius,
prastor of the Roman Colony of Luceria--has sought a refuge here, as
well as many inscriptions, lamps, vases, and a miscellaneous collection
of modern rubbish. A plaster cast of a Mussulman funereal stone, found
near Foggia, will attract your eye; contrasted with the fulsome epitaphs
of contemporary Christianity, it breathes a spirit of noble resignation:--

"In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. May God show
kindness to Mahomet and his kinsfolk, fostering them by his favours!
This is the tomb of the captain Jacchia Albosasso. God be merciful to
him. He passed away towards noon on Saturday in the five days of the
month Moharram of the year 745 (5th April, 1348). May Allah likewise
show mercy to him who reads."

One cannot be at Lucera without thinking of that colony of twenty
thousand Saracens, the escort of Frederick and his son, who lived here
for nearly eighty years, and sheltered Manfred in his hour of danger.
The chronicler Spinelli [Footnote: These journals are now admitted to
have been manufactured in the sixteenth century by the historian
Costanze for certain genealogical purposes of his own. Professor
Bernhard! doubted their authenticity in 1869, and his doubts have been
confirmed by Capasse.] has preserved an anecdote which shows Manfred's
infatuation for these loyal aliens. In the year 1252 and in the
sovereign's presence, a Saracen official gave a blow to a Neapolitan
knight--a blow which was immediately returned; there was a tumult, and
the upshot of it was that the Italian was condemned to lose his hand;
all that the Neapolitan nobles could obtain from Manfred was that his
left hand should be amputated instead of his right; the Arab, the cause
of all, was merely relieved of his office. Nowadays, all memory of
Saracens has been swept out of the land. In default of anything better,
they are printing a local halfpenny paper called "II Saraceno"--a very
innocuous pagan, to judge by a copy which I bought in a reckless moment.

This museum also contains a buxom angel of stucco known as the "Genius
of Bourbonism." In the good old days it used to ornament the town hall,
fronting the entrance; but now, degraded to a museum curiosity, it
presents to the public its back of ample proportions, and the curator
intimated that he considered this attitude quite appropriate--
historically speaking, of course. Furthermore, they have carted
hither, from the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, the chair once
occupied by Ruggiero Bonghi. Dear Bonghi! From a sense of duty he used
to visit a certain dull and pompous house in the capital and forthwith
fall asleep on the nearest sofa; he slept sometimes for two hours at a
stretch, while all the other visitors were solemnly marched to the spot
to observe him--behold the great Bonghi: he slumbers! There is a statue
erected to him here, and a street has likewise been named after another
celebrity, Giovanni Bovio. If I informed the townsmen of my former
acquaintance with these two heroes, they would perhaps put up a marble
tablet commemorating the fact. For the place is infected with the
patriotic disease of monumentomania. The drawback is that with every
change of administration the streets are re-baptized and the statues
shifted to make room for new favourites; so the civic landmarks come and
go, with the swiftness of a cinematograph.

Frederick II also has his street, and so has Pietjo Giannone. This
smacks of anti-clericalism. But to judge by the number of priests and
the daily hordes of devout and dirty pilgrims that pour into the town
from the fanatical fastnesses of the Abruzzi--picturesque, I suppose we
should call them--the country is sufficiently orthodox. Every
self-respecting family, they tell me, has its pet priest, who lives on
them in return for spiritual consolations.

There was a religious festival some nights ago in honour of Saint
Espedito. No one could tell me more about this holy man than that he was
a kind of pilgrim-warrior, and that his cult here is of recent date; it
was imported or manufactured some four years ago by a rich merchant who,
tired of the old local saints, built a church in honour of this new one,
and thereby enrolled him among the city gods.

On this occasion the square was seething with people: few
women, and the men mostly in dark clothes; we are already under Moorish
and Spanish influences. A young boy addressed me with the polite
question whether I could tell him the precise number of the population
of London.

That depended, I said, on what one described as London. There was what
they called greater London--

It depended! That was what he had always been given to understand. . . .
And how did I like Lucera? Rather a dull little place, was it not?
Nothing like Paris, of course. Still, if I could delay my departure for
some days longer, they would have the trial of a man who had murdered
three people: it might be quite good fun. He was informed that they
hanged such persons in England, as they used to do hereabouts; it seemed
rather barbaric, because, naturally, nobody is ever responsible for his
actions; but in England, no doubt--

That is the normal attitude of these folks towards us and our
institutions. We are savages, hopeless savages; but a little savagery,
after all, is quite endurable. Everything is endurable if you have lots
of money, like these English.

As for myself, wandering among that crowd of unshaven creatures, that
rustic population, fiercely gesticulating and dressed in slovenly hats
and garments, I realized once again what the average Anglo-Saxon would
ask himself: Are they _all_ brigands, or only some of them? That music,
too--what is it that makes this stuff so utterly unpalatable to a
civilized northerner? A soulless cult of rhythm, and then, when the
simplest of melodies emerges, they cling to it with the passionate
delight of a child who has discovered the moon. These men are still in
the age of platitudes, so far as music is concerned; an infantile aria
is to them what some foolish rhymed proverb is to the Arabs: a thing of
God, a portent, a joy for ever.

You may visit the cathedral; there is a fine _verde antico_ column on
either side of the sumptuous main portal. I am weary, just now, of these
structures; the spirit of pagan Lucera--"Lucera dei Pagani" it used to
be called--has descended upon me; I feel inclined to echo Carducci's
"_Addio, nume semitico!_" One sees so many of these sombre churches,
and they are all alike in their stony elaboration of mysticism and
wrong-headedness; besides, they have been described, over and over
again, by enthusiastic connaisseurs who dwell lovingly upon their
artistic quaintnesses but forget the grovelling herd that reared them,
with the lash at their backs, or the odd type of humanity--the gargoyle
type--that has since grown up under their shadow and influence.
I prefer to return to the sun and stars, to my promenade beside
the castle walls.

But for the absence of trees and hedges, one might take this to be some
English prospect of the drowsy Midland counties--so green it is, so
golden-grey the sky. The sunlight peers down dispersedly through windows
in this firmament of clouded amber, alighting on some mouldering tower,
some patch of ripening corn or distant city--Troia, lapped in Byzantine
slumber, or San Severo famed in war. This in spring. But what days of
glistering summer heat, when the earth is burnt to cinders under a
heavenly dome that glows like a brazier of molten copper! For this
country is the Sahara of Italy.

One is glad, meanwhile, that the castle does not lie in the natal land
of the Hohenstaufen. The interior is quite deserted, to be sure; they
have built half the town of Lucera with its stones, even as Frederick
quarried them out of the early Roman citadel beneath; but it is at least
a harmonious desolation. There are no wire-fenced walks among the ruins,
no feeding-booths and cheap reconstructions of draw-bridges and
police-notices at every corner; no gaudy women scribbling to their
friends in the "Residenzstadt" post cards illustrative of the
"Burgruine," while their husbands perspire over mastodontic beer-jugs.
There is only peace.

These are the delights of Lucera: to sit under those old walls and watch
the gracious cloud-shadows dappling the plain, oblivious of yonder
assemblage of barbers and politicians. As for those who can reconstruct
the vanished glories of such a place--happy they! I find the task
increasingly difficult. One outgrows the youthful age of hero-worship;
next, our really keen edges are so soon worn off by mundane trivialities
and vexations that one is glad to take refuge in simpler pleasures once
more--to return to primitive emotionalism. There are so many Emperors of
past days! And like the old custodian, I have not so much as set eyes on
them.

Yet this Frederick is no dim figure; he looms grandly through the
intervening haze. How well one understands that craving for the East,
nowadays; how modern they were, he and his son the "Sultan of Lucera,"
and their friends and counsellors, who planted this garden of exotic
culture! Was it some afterglow of the luminous world that had sunk below
the horizon, or a pale streak of the coming dawn? And if you now glance
down into this enclosure that once echoed with the song of minstrels
and the soft laughter of women, with the discourse of wits, artists and
philosophers, and the clang of arms--if you look, you will behold
nothing but a green lake, a waving field of grass. No matter. The
ambitions of these men are fairly realized, and every one of us may keep
a body-guard of pagans, an't please him; and a harem likewise--to judge
by the newspapers.

For he took his Orientalism seriously; he had a harem, with eunuchs,
etc., all proper, and was pleased to give an Eastern colour to his
entertainments. Matthew Paris relates how Frederick's brother-in-law,
returning from the Holy Land, rested awhile at his Italian court, and
saw, among other diversions, "duas puellas Saracenicas formosas, quae in
pavimenti planitie binis globis insisterent, volutisque globis huo
illucque ferrentur canentes, cymbala manibus collidentes, corporaque
secundum modules motantes atque flectentes." I wish I had been there. . . .

I walked to the castle yesterday evening on the chance of seeing an
eclipse of the moon which never came, having taken place at quite
another hour. A cloudless night, dripping with moisture, the electric
lights of distant Foggia gleaming in the plain. There are brick-kilns at
the foot of the incline, and from some pools in the neighbourhood issued
a loud croaking of frogs, while the pallid smoke of the furnaces,
pressed down by the evening dew, trailed earthward in a long twisted
wreath, like a dragon crawling sulkily to his den. But on the north side
one could hear the nightingales singing in the gardens below. The dark
mass of Mount Gargano rose up clearly in the moonlight, and I began to
sketch out some itinerary of my wanderings on that soil. There was Sant'
Angelo, the archangel's abode; and the forest region; and Lesina with
its lake; and Vieste the remote, the end of all things. . . .

Then my thoughts wandered to the Hohenstaufen and the conspiracy whereby
their fate was avenged. The romantic figures of Manfred and Conradin;
their relentless enemy Charles; Costanza, her brow crowned with a poetic
nimbus (that melted, towards the end, into an aureole of bigotry);
Frangipani, huge in villainy; the princess Beatrix, tottering from the
dungeon where she had been confined for nearly twenty years; her
deliverer Roger de Lauria, without whose resourcefulness and audacity it
might have gone ill with Aragon; Popes and Palaso-logus--brilliant
colour effects; the king of England and Saint Louis of France; in the
background, dimly discernible, the colossal shades of Frederick and
Innocent, looked in deadly embrace; and the whole congress of figures
enlivened and interpenetrated as by some electric fluid--the personality
of John of Procida. That the element of farce might not be lacking, Fate
contrived that exquisite royal duel at Bordeaux where the two mighty
potentates, calling each other by a variety of unkingly epithets,
enacted a prodigiously fine piece of foolery for the delectation of
Europe.

From this terrace one can overlook both Foggia and Castel
Fiorentino--the beginning and end of the drama; and one follows the
march of this magnificent retribution without a shred of compassion for
the gloomy papal hireling. Disaster follows disaster with mathematical
precision, till at last he perishes miserably, consumed by rage and
despair. Then our satisfaction is complete.

No; not quite complete. For in one point the stupendous plot seems to
have been imperfectly achieved. Why did Roger de Lauria not profit by
his victory to insist upon the restitution of the young brothers of
Beatrix, of those unhappy princes who had been confined as infants in
1266, and whose very existence seems to have faded from the memory of
historians? Or why did Costanza, who might have dealt with her enemy's
son even as Conradin had been dealt with, not round her magnanimity by
claiming her own flesh and blood, the last scions of a great house? Why
were they not released during the subsequent peace, or at least in 1302?
The reason is as plain as it is unlovely; nobody knew what to do with
them. Political reasons counselled their effacement, their
non-existence. Horrible thought, that the sunny world should be too
small for three orphan children! In their Apulian fastness they
remained--in chains. A royal rescript of 1295 orders that they be freed
from their fetters. Thirty years in fetters! Their fate is unknown; the
night of medievalism closes in upon them once more. . . .

Further musings were interrupted by the appearance of a shape which
approached from round the corner of one of the towers. It cams nearer
stealthily, pausing every now and then. Had I evoked, willy-nilly, some
phantom of the buried past?

It was only the custodian, leading his dog Musolino. After a shower of
compliments and apologies, he gave me to understand that it was his
duty, among other things, to see that no one should endeavour to raise
the treasure which was hidden under these ruins; several people, he
explained, had already made the attempt by night. For the rest, I was
quite at liberty to take my pleisure about the castle at all hours. But
as to touching the buried hoard, it was _proibito_--forbidden!

I was glad of the incident, which conjured up for me the Oriental mood
with its genii and subterranean wealth. Straightway this incongruous and
irresponsible old buffoon was invested with a new dignity; transformed
into a threatening Ifrit, the guardian of the gold, or--who
knows?--Iblis incarnate. The gods take wondrous shapes, sometimes.




II

MANFRED'S TOWN


As the train moved from Lucera to Foggia and thence onwards, I had
enjoyed myself rationally, gazing at the emerald plain of Apulia, soon
to be scorched to ashes, but now richly dight with the yellow flowers of
the giant fennel, with patches of ruby-red poppy and asphodels pale and
shadowy, past their prime. I had thought upon the history of this
immense tract of country--upon all the floods of legislation and
theorizings to which its immemorial customs of pasturage have given
birth. . . .

Then, suddenly, the aspect of life seemed to change. I felt unwell, and
so swift was the transition from health that I had wantonly thrown out
of the window, beyond recall, a burning cigar ere realizing that it was
only a little more than half smoked. We were crossing the Calendaro, a
sluggish stream which carefully collects all the waters of this region
only to lose them again in a swamp not far distant; and it was
positively as if some impish sprite had leapt out of those noisome
waves, boarded the train, and flung himself into me, after the fashion
of the "Horla" in the immortal tale.

Doses of quinine such as would make an English doctor raise his eyebrows
have hitherto only succeeded in provoking the Calendaro microbe to more
virulent activity. Nevertheless, _on s'y fait._ I am studying him and,
despite his protean manifestations, have discovered three principal
ingredients: malaria, bronchitis and hay-fever--not your ordinary
hay-fever, oh, no! but such as a mammoth might conceivably catch, if
thrust back from his germless, frozen tundras into the damply blossoming
Miocene.

The landlady of this establishment has a more commonplace name for the
distemper. She calls it "scirocco." And certainly this pest of the south
blows incessantly; the mountain-line of Gargano is veiled, the sea's
horizon veiled, the coast-lands of Apulia veiled by its tepid and
unwholesome breath. To cheer me up, she says that on clear days one can
see Castel del Monte, the Hohenstaufen eyrie, shining yonder above
Barletta, forty miles distant. It sounds rather improbable; still,
yesterday evening there arose a sudden vision of a white town in that
direction, remote and dream-like, far across the water. Was it Barletta?
Or Margherita? It lingered awhile, poised on an errant sunbeam; then
sank into the deep.

From this window I look into the little harbour whose beach is dotted
with fishing-boats. Some twenty or thirty sailing-vessels are riding at
anchor; in the early morning they unfurl their canvas and sally forth,
in amicable couples, to scour the azure deep--it is greenish-yellow at
this moment--returning at nightfall with the spoils of ocean, mostly
young sharks, to judge by the display in the market. Their white sails
bear fabulous devices in golden colour of moons and crescents and
dolphins; some are marked like the "orange-tip" butterfly. A gunboat is
now stationed here on a mysterious errand connected with the Albanian
rising on the other side of the Adriatic. There has been whispered talk
of illicit volunteering among the youth on this side, which the
government is anxious to prevent. And to enliven the scene, a steamer
calls every now and then to take passengers to the Tremiti islands. One
would like to visit them, if only in memory of those martyrs of
Bourbonism, who were sent in hundreds to these rocks and cast into
dungeons to perish. I have seen such places; they are vast caverns
artificially excavated below the surface of the earth; into these the
unfortunates were lowered and left to crawl about and rot, the living
mingled with the dead. To this day they find mouldering skeletons,
loaded with heavy iron chains and ball-weights.

A copious spring gushes up on this beach and flows into the sea. It is
sadly neglected. Were I tyrant of Manfredonia, I would build me a fair
marble fountain here, with a carven assemblage of nymphs and
sea-monsters spouting water from their lusty throats, and plashing in
its rivulets. It may well be that the existence of this fount helped to
decide Manfred in his choice of a site for his city; such springs are
rare in this waterless land. And from this same source, very likely, is
derived the local legend of Saint Lorenzo and the Dragon, which is quite
independent of that of Saint Michael the dragon-killer on the heights
above us. These venerable water-spirits, these _dracs,_ are interesting
beasts who went through many metamorphoses ere attaining their present
shape.

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