The Project Gutenberg eBook of Old Calabria, by Norman Douglas

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Title: Old Calabria

Author: Norman Douglas

Release Date: April 23, 2003 [eBook #7385]
[Most recently updated: January 13, 2021]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Eric Eldred

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD CALABRIA ***




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

[Illustration: Tower at Manfredonia]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


TOWER AT MANFREDONIA
LION OF LUCERA
AT SIPONTUM
RUIN OF TRINITÀ: EAST FRONT
ROMAN ALTAR
NORMAN CAPITAL AT VENOSA
SOLE RELIC OF OLD TARAS
FISHING AT TARANTO
BY THE INLAND SEA
FOUNTAINS OF GALAESUS
TARANTO: THE LAST PALM
BUFFALO AT POLICORO
THE SINNO RIVER
CHAPEL OF SAINT MARK
SHOEING A COW
MORANO
AN OLD SHEPHERD
THE SARACENIC TYPE
PEAK OF POLLINO IN JUNE
CALABRIAN COWS
THE VALLEY OF GAUDOLINO
SAN DEMETRIO CORONE
THE TRIONTO VALLEY
LONGOBUCCO
GATEWAY AT CATANZARO
IN THE CEMETERY OF REGGIO
TIRIOLO
EFFECTS OF DEFORESTATION
OLD SOVERATO
THE MODERN AESARUS
CEMETERY OF COTRONE
ROMAN MASONRY AT CAPO COLONNA




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[1] 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 “Il
Saraceno“—a very innocuous pagan, to judge by a copy which I bought in
a reckless moment.

[1] These journals are now admitted to have been manufactured in the
sixteenth century by the historian Costanzo for certain genealogical
purposes of his own. Professor Bernhardi doubted their authenticity in
1869, and his doubts have been confirmed by Capasso.

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 Pietro 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.

[Illustration: Lion of Lucera]

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 modulos 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
Palæologus—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 mediævalism 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 came 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 pleasure 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.

Manfredonia lies on a plain sloping very gently
seawards—practically a dead level, and in one of the hottest districts
of Italy. Yet, for some obscure reason, there is no street along the
sea itself; the cross-roads end in abrupt squalor at the shore. One
wonders what considerations—political, aesthetic or hygienic—prevented
the designers of the town from carrying out its general principles of
construction and building a decent promenade by the waves, where the
ten thousand citizens could take the air in the breathless summer
evenings, instead of being cooped up, as they now are, within stifling
hot walls. The choice of Manfredonia as a port does not testify to any
great foresight on the part of its founder—peace to his shade! It will
for ever slumber in its bay, while commerce passes beyond its reach; it
will for ever be malarious with the marshes of Sipontum at its edges.
But this particular defect of the place is not Manfred’s fault, since
the city was razed to the ground by the Turks in 1620, and then built
up anew; built up, says Lenormant, according to the design of the old
city. Perhaps a fear of other Corsair raids induced the constructors to
adhere to the old plan, by which the place could be more easily
defended. Not much of Manfredonia seems to have been completed when
Pacicchelli’s view (1703) was engraved.

Speaking of the weather, the landlady further told me that the wind
blew so hard three months ago—“during that big storm in the winter,
don’t you remember?”—that it broke all the iron lamp-posts between the
town and the station. Now here was a statement sounding even more
improbable than her other one about Castel del Monte, but admitting of
verification. Wheezing and sneezing, I crawled forth, and found it
correct. It must have been a respectable gale, since the cast-iron
supports are snapped in half, every one of them.

Those Turks, by the way, burnt the town on that memorable occasion.
That was a common occurrence in those days. Read any account of their
incursions into Italy during this and the preceding centuries, and you
will find that the corsairs burnt the towns whenever they had time to
set them alight. They could not burn them nowadays, and this points to
a total change in economic conditions. Wood was cut down so heedlessly
that it became too scarce for building purposes, and stone took its
place. This has altered domestic architecture; it has changed the
landscape, denuding the hill-sides that were once covered with timber;
it has impoverished the country by converting fruitful plains into
marshes or arid tracts of stone swept by irregular and intermittent
floods; it has modified, if I mistake
not, the very character of the people. The desiccation of the climate
has entailed a desiccation of national humour.

Muratori has a passage somewhere in his “Antiquities” regarding the old
method of construction and the wooden shingles, _scandulae,_ in use for
roofing—I must look it up, if ever I reach civilized regions again.

At the municipality, which occupies the spacious apartments of a former
Dominican convent, they will show you the picture of a young girl, one
of the Beccarini family, who was carried off at a tender age in one of
these Turkish raids, and subsequently became “Sultana.” Such captive
girls generally married sultans—or ought to have married them; the wish
being father to the thought. But the story is disputed; rightly, I
think. For the portrait is painted in the French manner, and it is
hardly likely that a harem-lady would have been exhibited to a European
artist. The legend goes on to say that she was afterwards liberated by
the Knights of Malta, together with her Turkish son who, as was meet
and proper, became converted to Christianity and died a monk. The
Beccarini family (of Siena, I fancy) might find some traces of her in
their archives. _Ben trovato,_ at all events. When one looks at the
pretty portrait, one cannot blame any kind of “Sultan” for feeling
well-disposed towards the original.

The weather has shown some signs of improvement and tempted me, despite
the persistent “scirocco” mood, to a few excursions into the
neighbourhood. But there seem to be no walks hereabouts, and the hills,
three miles distant, are too remote for my reduced vitality. The
intervening region is a plain of rock carved so smoothly, in places, as
to appear artificially levelled with the chisel; large tracts of it are
covered with the Indian fig (cactus). In the shade of these grotesque
growths lives a dainty flora: trembling grasses of many kinds, rue,
asphodel, thyme, the wild asparagus, a diminutive blue iris, as well as
patches of saxifrage that deck the stone with a brilliant enamel of red
and yellow. This wild beauty makes one think how much better the
graceful wrought-iron balconies of the town would look if enlivened
with blossoms, with pendent carnations or pelargonium; but there is no
great display of these things; the deficiency of water is a
characteristic of the place; it is a flowerless and songless city. The
only good drinking-water is that which is bottled at the mineral
springs of Monte Vulture and sold cheaply enough all over the country.
And the mass of the country people have small charm of feature. Their
faces seem to have been chopped
with a hatchet into masks of sombre virility; a hard life amid burning
limestone deserts is reflected in their countenances.

None the less, they have a public garden; even more immature than that
of Lucera, but testifying to greater taste. Its situation, covering a
forlorn semicircular tract of ground about the old Anjou castle, is _a
priori_ a good one. But when the trees are fully grown, it will be
impossible to see this fine ruin save at quite close quarters—just
across the moat.

I lamented this fact to a solitary gentleman who was strolling about
here and who replied, upon due deliberation:

“One cannot have everything.”

Then he added, as a suggestive afterthought:

“Inasmuch as one thing sometimes excludes another.”

I pause, to observe parenthetically that this habit of uttering
platitudes in the grand manner as though disclosing an idea of vital
novelty (which Charles Lamb, poor fellow, thought peculiar to natives
of Scotland) is as common among Italians as among Englishmen. But
veiled in sonorous Latinisms, the staleness of such remarks assumes an
air of profundity.

“For my part,” he went on, warming to his theme, “I am thoroughly
satisfied. Who will complain of the trees? Only a few makers of bad
pictures. They can go elsewhere. Our country, dear sir, is _encrusted,_
with old castles and other feudal absurdities, and if I had the
management of things——”

The sentence was not concluded, for at that moment his hat was blown
off by a violent gust of wind, and flew merrily over beds of flowering
marguerites in the direction of the main street, while he raced after
it, vanishing in a cloud of dust. The chase must have been long and
arduous; he never returned.

Wandering about the upper regions of this fortress whose chambers are
now used as a factory of cement goods and a refuge for some poor
families, I espied a good pre-renaissance relief of Saint Michael and
the dragon immured in the masonry, and overhung by the green leaves of
an exuberant wild fig that has thrust its roots into the sturdy old
walls. Here, at Manfredonia, we are already under the shadow of the
holy mountain and the archangel’s wings, but the usual representations
of him are childishly emasculate—the negation of his divine and heroic
character. This one portrays a genuine warrior-angel of the old type:
grave and grim. Beyond this castle and the town-walls, which are best
preserved on the north side, nothing in Manfredonia is older than 1620.
There is a fine _campanile,_ but the cathedral looks like a shed for
disused omnibuses.

Along the streets, little red flags are hanging out of the houses, at
frequent intervals: signals of harbourage for the parched wayfarer.
Within, you behold a picturesque confusion of rude chairs set among
barrels and vats full of dark red wine where, amid Rembrandtesque
surroundings, you can get as drunk as a lord for sixpence. Blithe
oases! It must be delightful, in summer, to while away the sultry hours
in their hospitable twilight; even at this season they seem to be
extremely popular resorts, throwing a new light on those allusions by
classical authors to “thirsty Apulia.”

But on many of the dwellings I noticed another symbol: an ominous blue
metal tablet with a red cross, bearing the white-lettered words
“VIGILANZA NOTTURNA.”

Was it some anti-burglary association? I enquired of a serious-looking
individual who happened to be passing.

His answer did not help to clear up matters.

“A pure job, _signore mio_, a pure job! There is a society in Cerignola
or somewhere, a society which persuades the various town
councils—_persuades_ them, you understand——”

He ended abruptly, with the gesture of paying out money between his
finger and thumb. Then he sadly shook his head.

I sought for more light on this cryptic utterance; in vain. What were
the facts, I persisted? Did certain householders subscribe to keep a
guardian on their premises at night—what had the municipalities to do
with it—was there much house-breaking in Manfredonia, and, if so, had
this association done anything to check it? And for how long had the
institution been established?

But the mystery grew ever darker. After heaving a deep sigh, he
condescended to remark:

“The usual camorra! Eat—eat; from father to son. Eat—eat! That’s all
they think about, the brood of assassins. . . . Just look at them!”

I glanced down the street and beheld a venerable gentleman of kindly
aspect who approached slowly, leaning on the arm of a fair-haired
youth—his grandson, I supposed. He wore a long white beard, and an air
of apostolic detachment from the affairs of this world. They came
nearer. The boy was listening, deferentially, to some remark of the
elder; his lips were parted in attention and his candid, sunny face
would have rejoiced the heart of della Robbia. They passed within a few
feet of me, lovingly engrossed in one another.

“Well?” I queried, turning to my informant and anxious to learn what
misdeeds could be laid to the charge of such godlike types of humanity.

But that person was no longer at my side. He had quietly withdrawn
himself, in the interval; he had evanesced, “moved on.”

An oracular and elusive citizen. ...




III
THE ANGEL OF MANFREDONIA


Whoever looks at a map of the Gargano promontory will see that it is
besprinkled with Greek names of persons and places—Matthew, Mark,
Nikander, Onofrius, Pirgiano (Pyrgos) and so forth. Small wonder, for
these eastern regions were in touch with Constantinople from early
days, and the spirit of Byzance still hovers over them. It was on this
mountain that the archangel Michael, during his first flight to Western
Europe, deigned to appear to a Greek bishop of Sipontum, Laurentius by
name; and ever since that time a certain cavern, sanctified by the
presence of this winged messenger of God, has been the goal of millions
of pilgrims.

The fastness of Sant’ Angelo, metropolis of European angel-worship, has
grown up around this “devout and honourable cave”; on sunny days its
houses are clearly visible from Manfredonia. They who wish to pay their
devotions at the shrine cannot do better than take with them
Gregorovius, as cicerone and mystagogue.

Vainly I waited for a fine day to ascend the heights. At last I
determined to have done with the trip, be the weather what it might. A
coachman was summoned and negotiations entered upon for starting next
morning.

Sixty-five francs, he began by telling me, was the price paid by an
Englishman last year for a day’s visit to the sacred mountain. It may
well be true—foreigners will do anything, in Italy. Or perhaps it was
only said to “encourage” me. But I am rather hard to encourage,
nowadays. I reminded the man that there was a diligence service there
and back for a franc and a half, and even that price seemed rather
extortionate. I had seen so many holy grottos in my life! And who,
after all, was this Saint Michael? The Eternal Father, perchance?
Nothing of the kind: just an ordinary angel! We had dozens of them, in
England. Fortunately, I added, I had already received an offer to join
one of the private parties who drive up, fourteen or fifteen persons
behind
one diminutive pony—and that, as he well knew, would be a matter of
only a few pence. And even then, the threatening sky . . . Yes, on
second thoughts, it was perhaps wisest to postpone the excursion
altogether. Another day, if God wills! Would he accept this cigar as a
recompense for his trouble in coming?

In dizzy leaps and bounds his claims fell to eight francs. It was the
tobacco that worked the wonder; a gentleman who will give _something
for nothing_ (such was his logic)—well, you never know what you may not
get out of him. Agree to his price, and chance it!

He consigned the cigar to his waistcoat pocket to smoke after dinner,
and departed—vanquished, but inwardly beaming with bright anticipation.

A wretched morning was disclosed as I drew open the shutters—gusts of
rain and sleet beating against the window-panes. No matter: the
carriage stood below, and after that customary and hateful apology for
breakfast which suffices to turn the thoughts of the sanest man towards
themes of suicide and murder—when will southerners learn to eat a
proper breakfast at proper hours?—we started on our journey. The sun
came out in visions of tantalizing briefness, only to be swallowed up
again in driving murk, and of the route we traversed I noticed only the
old stony track that cuts across the twenty-one windings of the new
carriage-road here and there. I tried to picture to myself the Norman
princes, the emperors, popes, and other ten thousand pilgrims of
celebrity crawling up these rocky slopes—barefoot—on such a day as
this. It must have tried the patience even of Saint Francis of Assisi,
who pilgrimaged with the rest of them and, according to Pontanus,
performed a little miracle here _en passant,_ as was his wont.

After about three hours’ driving we reached the town of Sant’ Angelo.
It was bitterly cold at this elevation of 800 metres. Acting on the
advice of the coachman, I at once descended into the sanctuary; it
would be warm down there, he thought. The great festival of 8 May was
over, but flocks of worshippers were still arriving, and picturesquely
pagan they looked in grimy, tattered garments—their staves tipped with
pine-branches and a scrip.

In the massive bronze doors of the chapel, that were made at
Constantinople in 1076 for a rich citizen of Amalfi, metal rings are
inserted; these, like a true pilgrim, you must clash furiously, to call
the attention of the Powers within to your visit; and on issuing, you
must once more knock as hard as you can, in order
that the consummation of your act of worship may be duly reported:
judging by the noise made, the deity must be very hard of hearing.
Strangely deaf they are, sometimes.

The twenty-four panels of these doors are naively encrusted with
representations, in enamel, of angel-apparitions of many kinds; some of
them are inscribed, and the following is worthy of note:

“I beg and implore the priests of Saint Michael to cleanse these gates
once a year as I have now shown them, in order that they may be always
bright and shining.” The recommendation has plainly not been carried
out for a good many years past.

Having entered the portal, you climb down a long stairway amid swarms
of pious, foul clustering beggars to a vast cavern, the archangel’s
abode. It is a natural recess in the rock, illuminated by candles. Here
divine service is proceeding to the accompaniment of cheerful operatic
airs from an asthmatic organ; the water drops ceaselessly from the
rocky vault on to the devout heads of kneeling worshippers that cover
the floor, lighted candle in hand, rocking themselves ecstatically and
droning and chanting. A weird scene, in truth. And the coachman was
quite right in his surmise as to the difference in temperature. It is
hot down here, damply hot, as in an orchid-house. But the aroma cannot
be described as a floral emanation: it is the _bouquet,_ rather, of
thirteen centuries of unwashed and perspiring pilgrims. “TERRIBILIS EST
LOCUS ISTE,” says an inscription over the entrance of the shrine. Very
true. In places like this one understands the uses, and possibly the
origin, of incense.

I lingered none the less, and my thoughts went back to the East, whence
these mysterious practices are derived. But an Oriental crowd of
worshippers does not move me like these European masses of fanaticism;
I can never bring myself to regard without a certain amount of
disquietude such passionate pilgrims. Give them their new Messiah, and
all our painfully accumulated art and knowledge, all that reconciles
civilized man to earthly existence, is blown to the winds. Society can
deal with its criminals. Not they, but fond enthusiasts such as these,
are the menace to its stability. Bitter reflections; but then—the drive
upward had chilled my human sympathies, and besides—that so-called
breakfast. . . .

The grovelling herd was left behind. I ascended the stairs and,
profiting by a gleam of sunshine, climbed up to where, above the town,
there stands a proud aerial ruin known as the “Castle of
the Giant.” On one of its stones is inscribed the date 1491—a certain
Queen of Naples, they say, was murdered within those now crumbling
walls. These sovereigns were murdered in so many castles that one
wonders how they ever found time to be alive at all. The structure is a
wreck and its gateway closed up; nor did I feel any great inclination,
in that icy blast of wind, to investigate the roofless interior.

I was able to observe, however, that this “feudal absurdity” bears a
number like any inhabited house of Sant’ Angelo—it is No. 3.

This is the latest pastime of the Italian Government: to re-number
dwellings throughout the kingdom; and not only human habitations, but
walls, old ruins, stables, churches, as well as an occasional door-post
and window. They are having no end of fun over the game, which promises
to keep them amused for any length of time—in fact, until the next
craze is invented. Meanwhile, so long as the fit lasts, half a million
bright-eyed officials, burning with youthful ardour, are employed in
affixing these numerals, briskly entering them into ten times as many
note-books and registering them into thousands of municipal archives,
all over the country, for some inscrutable but hugely important
administrative purposes. “We have the employes,” as a Roman deputy once
told me, “and therefore: they must find some occupation.”

Altogether, the weather this day sadly impaired my appetite for
research and exploration. On the way to the castle I had occasion to
admire the fine tower and to regret that there seemed to exist no coign
of vantage from which it could fairly be viewed; I was struck, also, by
the number of small figures of Saint Michael of an ultra-youthful,
almost infantile, type; and lastly, by certain clean-shaven old men of
the place. These venerable and decorative brigands—for such they would
have been, a few years ago—now stood peacefully at their thresholds,
wearing a most becoming cloak of thick brown wool, shaped like a
burnous. The garment interested me; it may be a legacy from the Arabs
who dominated this region for some little time, despoiling the holy
sanctuary and leaving their memory to be perpetuated by the
neighbouring “Monte Saraceno.” The costume, on the other hand, may have
come over from Greece; it is figured on Tanagra statuettes and worn by
modern Greek shepherds. By Sardinians, too. ... It may well be a
primordial form of clothing with mankind.

The view from this castle must be superb on clear days. Standing there,
I looked inland and remembered all the places I had
intended to see—Vieste, and Lesina with its lakes, and Selva Umbra,
whose very name is suggestive of dewy glades; how remote they were,
under such dispiriting clouds! I shall never see them. Spring hesitates
to smile upon these chill uplands; we are still in the grip of winter—

Aut aquilonibus
Querceti Gargani laborent
Et foliis viduantur orni—

so sang old Horace, of Garganian winds. I scanned the horizon, seeking
for his Mount Vulture, but all that region was enshrouded in a grey
curtain of vapour; only the Stagno Salso—a salt mere wherein Candelaro
forgets his mephitic waters—shone with a steady glow, like a sheet of
polished lead.

Soon the rain fell once more and drove me to seek refuge among the
houses, where I glimpsed the familiar figure of my coachman, sitting
disconsolately under a porch. He looked up and remarked (for want of
something better to say) that he had been searching for me all over the
town, fearing that some mischief might have happened to me. I was
touched by these words; touched, that is, by his child-like simplicity
in imagining that he could bring me to believe a statement of such
radiant improbability; so touched, that I pressed a franc into his
reluctant palm and bade him buy with it something to eat. A whole
franc. . . . _Aha!_ he doubtless thought, _my theory of the gentleman:
it begins to work._

It was barely midday. Yet I was already surfeited with the angelic
metropolis, and my thoughts began to turn in the direction of
Manfredonia once more. At a corner of the street, however, certain
fluent vociferations in English and Italian, which nothing would induce
me to set down here, assailed my ears, coming up—apparently—out of the
bowels of the earth. I stopped to listen, shocked to hear ribald
language in a holy town like this; then, impelled by curiosity,
descended a long flight of steps and found myself in a subterranean
wine-cellar. There was drinking and card-playing going on here among a
party of emigrants—merry souls; a good half of them spoke English and,
despite certain irreverent phrases, they quickly won my heart with a
“Here! You drink _this,_ mister.”

This dim recess was an instructive pendant to the archangel’s cavern. A
new type of pilgrim has been evolved; pilgrims who think no more of
crossing to Pittsburg than of a drive to Manfredonia. But their cave
was permeated with an odour of spilt wine and tobacco-smoke instead of
the subtle _Essence des pèlerins_
_des Abruzzes fleuris,_ and alas, the object of their worship was not
the Chaldean angel, but another and equally ancient eastern shape:
Mammon. They talked much of dollars; and I also heard several
unorthodox allusions to the “angel-business,” which was described as
“played out,” as well as a remark to the effect that “only damn-fools
stay in this country.” In short, these men were at the other end of the
human scale; they were the strong, the energetic; the ruthless,
perhaps; but certainly—the intelligent.

And all the while the cup circled round with genial iteration, and it
was universally agreed that, whatever the other drawbacks of Sant’
Angelo might be, there was nothing to be said against its native
liquor.

It was, indeed, a divine product; a _vino di montagna_ of noble
pedigree. So I thought, as I laboriously scrambled up the stairs once
more, solaced by this incident of the competition-grotto and slightly
giddy, from the tobacco-smoke. And here, leaning against the door-post,
stood the coachman who had divined my whereabouts by some dark masonic
intuition of sympathy. His face expanded into an inept smile, and I
quickly saw that instead of fortifying his constitution with sound
food, he had tried alcoholic methods of defence against the inclement
weather. Just a glass of wine, he explained. “But,” he added, “the
horse is perfectly sober.”

That quadruped was equal to the emergency. Gloriously indifferent to
our fates, we glided down, in a vertiginous but masterly vol-plane,
from the somewhat objectionable mountain-town.

An approving burst of sunshine greeted our arrival on the plain.




IV
CAVE-WORSHIP

Why has the exalted archangel chosen for an abode this reeking cell,
rather than some well-built temple in the sunshine? “As symbolizing a
ray of light that penetrates into the gloom,” so they will tell you. It
is more likely that he entered it as an extirpating warrior, to oust
that heathen shape which Strabo describes as dwelling in its dank
recesses, and to take possession of the cleft in the name of
Christianity. Sant’ Angelo is one of many places where Michael has
performed the duty of Christian Hercules, cleanser of Augean stables.

For the rest, this cave-worship is older than any god or devil. It is
the cult of the feminine principle—a relic of that aboriginal obsession
of mankind to shelter in some Cloven Rock of Ages, in the sacred womb
of Mother Earth who gives us food and receives us after death.
Grotto-apparitions, old and new, are but the popular explanations of
this dim primordial craving, and hierophants of all ages have
understood the commercial value of the holy shudder which penetrates in
these caverns to the heart of worshippers, attuning them to godly
deeds. So here, close beside the altar, the priests are selling
fragments of the so-called “Stone of Saint Michael.” The trade is
brisk.

The statuette of the archangel preserved in this subterranean chapel is
a work of the late Renaissance. Though savouring of that mawkish
elaboration which then began to taint local art and literature and is
bound up with the name of the poet Marino, it is still a passably
virile figure. But those countless others, in churches or over
house-doors—do they indeed portray the dragon-killer, the martial
prince of angels? This amiable child with girlish features—can this be
the Lucifer of Christianity, the Sword of the Almighty? _Quis ut Déus!_
He could hardly hurt a fly.

The hoary winged genius of Chaldea who has absorbed the essence of so
many solemn deities has now, in extreme old age, entered upon a second
childhood and grown altogether too
youthful for his _role,_ undergoing a metamorphosis beyond the
boundaries of legendary probability or common sense; every trace of
divinity and manly strength has been boiled out of him. So young and
earthly fair, he looks, rather, like some pretty boy dressed up for a
game with toy sword and helmet—one wants to have a romp with him. No
warrior this! _C’est beau, mais ce n’est pas la guerre._

The gods, they say, are ever young, and a certain sensuous and fleshly
note is essential to those of Italy if they are to retain the love of
their worshippers. Granted. We do not need a scarred and hirsute
veteran; but we need, at least, a personage capable of wielding the
sword, a figure something like this:—

His starry helm unbuckled show’d his prime
In manhood where youth ended; by his side
As in a glist’ring zodiac hung the sword,
Satan’s dire dread, and in his hand the spear. . . .

There! That is an archangel of the right kind.

And the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,
has suffered a similar transformation. He is shrunk into a poor little
reptile, the merest worm, hardly worth crushing.

But how should a sublime conception like the apocalyptic hero appeal to
the common herd? These formidable shapes emerge from the dusk,
offspring of momentous epochs; they stand aloof at first, but presently
their luminous grandeur is dulled, their haughty contour sullied and
obliterated by attrition. They are dragged down to the level of their
lowest adorers, for the whole flock adapts its pace to that of the
weakest lamb. No self-respecting deity will endure this treatment—to be
popularized and made intelligible to a crowd. Divinity comprehended of
the masses ceases to be efficacious; the Egyptians and Brahmans
understood that. It is not giving gods a chance to interpret them in an
incongruous and unsportsmanlike fashion. But the vulgar have no idea of
propriety or fair play; they cannot keep at the proper distance; they
are for ever taking liberties. And, in the end, the proudest god is
forced to yield.

We see this same fatality in the very word Cherub. How different an
image does this plump and futile infant evoke to the stately Minister
of the Lord, girt with a sword of flame! We see it in the Italian
Madonna of whom, whatever her mental acquirements may have been, a
certain gravity of demeanour is to be presupposed, and who, none the
less, grows more childishly
smirking every day; in her Son who—hereabouts at least—has doffed all
the serious attributes of manhood and dwindled into something not much
better than a doll. It was the same in days of old. Apollo (whom Saint
Michael has supplanted), and Eros, and Aphrodite—they all go through a
process of saccharine deterioration. Our fairest creatures, once they
have passed their meridian vigour, are liable to be assailed and
undermined by an insidious diabetic tendency.

It is this coddling instinct of mankind which has reduced Saint Michael
to his present state. And an extraneous influence has worked in the
same direction—the gradual softening of manners within historical
times, that demasculinization which is an inevitable concomitant of
increasing social security. Divinity reflects its human creators and
their environment; grandiose or warlike gods become superfluous, and
finally incomprehensible, in humdrum days of peace. In order to
survive, our deities (like the rest of us) must have a certain
plasticity. If recalcitrant, they are quietly relieved of their
functions, and forgotten. This is what has happened in Italy to God the
Father and the Holy Ghost, who have vanished from the vulgar Olympus;
whereas the devil, thanks to that unprincipled versatility for which he
is famous, remains ever young and popular.

The art-notions of the Cinque-Cento are also to blame; indeed, so far
as the angelic shapes of south Italy are concerned, the influence of
the Renaissance has been wholly malefic. Aliens to the soil, they were
at first quite unknown—not one is pictured in the Neapolitan catacombs.
Next came the brief period of their artistic glory; then the syncretism
of the Renaissance, when these winged messengers were amalgamated with
pagan _amoretti_ and began to flutter in foolish baroque fashion about
the Queen of Heaven, after the pattern of the disreputable little genii
attendant upon a Venus of a bad school. That same instinct which
degraded a youthful Eros into the childish Cupid was the death-stroke
to the pristine dignity and holiness of angels. Nowadays, we see the
perversity of it all; we have come to our senses and can appraise the
much-belauded revival at its true worth; and our modern sculptors will
rear you a respectable angel, a grave adolescent, according to the best
canons of taste—should you still possess the faith that once
requisitioned such works of art.

We travellers acquaint ourselves with the lineage of this celestial
Messenger, but it can hardly be supposed that the worshippers now
swarming at his shrine know much of these things. How
shall one discover their real feelings in regard to this great
cave-saint and his life and deeds?

Well, some idea of this may be gathered from the literature sold on the
spot. I purchased three of these modern tracts printed respectively at
Bitonto, Molfetta and Naples. The “Popular Song in honour of St.
Michael” contains this verse:

Nell’ ora della morte
Ci salvi dall’ inferno
E a Regno Sempiterno
Ci guidi per pietà.

_Ci guidi per pietà. . . ._ This is the Mercury-heritage. Next, the
“History and Miracles of St. Michael” opens with a rollicking dialogue
in verse between the archangel and the devil concerning a soul; it ends
with a goodly list, in twenty-five verses, of the miracles performed by
the angel, such as helping women in childbirth, curing the blind, and
other wonders that differ nothing from those wrought by humbler earthly
saints. Lastly, the “Novena in Onore di S. Michele Arcangelo,” printed
in 1910 (third edition) with ecclesiastical approval, has the following
noteworthy paragraph on the

“DEVOTION FOR THE SACRED STONES OF THE GROTTO OF ST. MICHAEL.

“It is very salutary to hold in esteem the STONES which are taken from
the sacred cavern, partly because from immemorial times they have
always been held in veneration by the faithful and also because they
have been placed as relics of sepulchres and altars. Furthermore, it is
known that during the plague which afflicted the kingdom of Naples in
the year 1656, Monsignor G. A. Puccini, archbishop of Manfredonia,
recommended every one to carry devoutly on his person a fragment of the
sacred STONE, whereby the majority were saved from the pestilence, and
this augmented the devotion bestowed on them.”

The cholera is on the increase, and this may account for the rapid sale
of the STONES at this moment.

This pamphlet also contains a litany in which the titles of the
archangel are enumerated. He is, among other things, Secretary of God,
Liberator from Infernal Chains, Defender in the Hour of Death,
Custodian of the Pope, Spirit of Light, Wisest of Magistrates, Terror
of Demons, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the Lord, Lash of
Heresies, Adorer of the Word
Incarnate, Guide of Pilgrims, Conductor of Mortals: Mars, Mercury,
Hercules, Apollo, Mithra—what nobler ancestry can angel desire? And
yet, as if these complicated and responsible functions did not suffice
for his energies, he has twenty others, among them being that of
“Custodian of the Holy Family “—who apparently need a protector, a
Monsieur Paoli, like any mortal royalties.

“Blasphemous rubbish!” I can hear some Methodist exclaiming. And one
may well be tempted to sneer at those pilgrims for the more enlightened
of whom such literature is printed. For they are unquestionably a
repulsive crowd: travel-stained old women, under-studies for the Witch
of Endor; dishevelled, anaemic and dazed-looking girls; boys, too weak
to handle a spade at home, pathetically uncouth, with mouths agape and
eyes expressing every grade of uncontrolled emotion—from wildest joy to
downright idiotcy. How one realizes, down in this cavern, the effect
upon some cultured ancient like Rutilius Namatianus of the
catacomb-worship among those early Christian converts, those _men who
shun the light,_ drawn as they were from the same social classes
towards the same dark underground rites! One can neither love nor
respect such people; and to affect pity for them would be more
consonant with their religion than with my own.

But it is perfectly easy to understand them. For thirteen centuries
this pilgrim-movement has been going on. Thirteen centuries? No. This
site was an oracle in heathen days, and we know that such were
frequented by men not a whit less barbarous and bigoted than their
modern representatives—nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose
that the crowds of old Rome and Athens were more refined than our own
(“Demosthenes, sir, was talking to an assembly of brutes”). For thirty
centuries then, let us say, a deity has attracted the faithful to his
shrine—Sant’ Angelo has become a vacuum, as it were, which must be
periodically filled up from the surrounding country. These pilgrimages
are in the blood of the people: infants, they are carried there;
adults, they carry their own offspring; grey-beards, their tottering
steps are still supported by kindly and sturdier fellow-wanderers.

Popes and emperors no longer scramble up these slopes; the spirit of
piety has abated among the great ones of the earth; so much is certain.
But the rays of light that strike the topmost branches have not yet
penetrated to the rank and seething undergrowth. And then—what else can
one offer to these Abruzzi
mountain-folk? Their life is one of miserable, revolting destitution.
They have no games or sports, no local racing, clubs, cattle-shows,
fox-hunting, politics, rat-catching, or any of those other joys that
diversify the lives of our peasantry. No touch of humanity reaches
them, no kindly dames send them jellies or blankets, no cheery doctor
enquires for their children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack
even the mild excitements of church _versus_ chapel, or the vicar’s
daughter’s love-affair, or the squire’s latest row with his
lady—nothing! Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness. I
know them—I have lived among them. For four months in the year they are
cooped up in damp dens, not to be called chambers, where an Englishman
would deem it infamous to keep a dog—cooped up amid squalor that must
be seen to be believed; for the rest of the time they struggle, in the
sweat of their brow, to wrest a few blades of corn from the ungrateful
limestone. Their visits to the archangel—these vernal and autumnal
picnics—are their sole form of amusement.

The movement is said to have diminished since the early nineties, when
thirty thousand of them used to come here annually. It may well be the
case; but I imagine that this is due not so much to increasing
enlightenment as to the depopulation caused by America; many villages
have recently been reduced to half their former number of inhabitants.

And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid
and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol,
their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting
full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy
extracts from “La Forza del Destino” or the Waltz out of Boito’s
“Mefistofele”... for sure, it must be a foretaste of Heaven! And likely
enough, these are “the poor in heart” for whom that kingdom is
reserved.

One may call this a debased form of Christianity. Whether it would have
been distasteful to the feelings of the founder of that cult is another
question, and, debased or not, it is at least alive and palpitating,
which is more than can be said of certain other varieties. But the
archangel, as was inevitable, has suffered a sad change. His fairest
attribute of Light-bringer, of Apollo, is no longer his own; it has
been claimed and appropriated by the “Light of the World,” his new
master. One by one, his functions have been stripped from him, all save
in name, as happens to men and angels alike, when they take service
under “jealous” lords.

What is now left of Saint Michael, the glittering hierarch? Can he
still endure the light of sun? Or has he not shrivelled into a spectral
Hermes, a grisly psychopomp, bowing his head in minished glory, and
leading men’s souls no longer aloft but downwards—down to the pale
regions of things that have been? And will it be long ere he, too, is
thrust by some flaming Demogorgon into these same realms of Minos, into
that shadowy underworld where dwell Saturn, and Kronos, and other
cracked and shivered ideals?

So I mused that afternoon, driving down the slopes from Sant’ Angelo
comfortably sheltered against the storm, while the generous mountain
wine sped through my veins, warming my fancy. Then, at last, the sun
came out in a sudden burst of light, opening a rift in the vapours and
revealing the whole chain of the Apennines, together with the peaked
crater of Mount Vulture.

The spectacle cheered me, and led me to think that such a day might
worthily be rounded off by a visit to Sipontum, which lies a few miles
beyond Manfredonia on the Foggia road. But I approached the subject
cautiously, fearing that the coachman might demur at this extra work.
Far from it. I had gained his affection, and he would conduct me
whithersoever I liked. Only to Sipontum? Why not to Foggia, to Naples,
to the ends of the earth? As for the horse, he was none the worse for
the trip, not a bit the worse; he liked nothing better than running in
front of a carriage; besides, _è suo dovere—_it was his duty.

Sipontum is so ancient that it was founded, they say, by that legendary
Diomed who acted in the same capacity for Beneven-tum, Arpi, and other
cities. But this record does not satisfy Monsignor Sarnelli, its
historian, according to whom it was already a flourishing town when
Shem, first son of Noah, became its king. He reigned about the year
1770 of the creation of the world. Two years after the deluge he was
100 years old, and at that age begat a son Arfaxad, after whose birth
he lived yet another five hundred years. The second king of Sipontum
was Appulus, who ruled in the year 2213. . . . Later on, Saint Peter
sojourned here, and baptized a few people.

Of Sipontum nothing is left; nothing save a church, and even that built
only yesterday—in the eleventh century; a far-famed church, in the
Pisan style, with wrought marble columns reposing on lions, sculptured
diamond ornaments, and other crafty stonework that gladdens the eye. It
used to be the seat
of an archbishopric, and its fine episcopal chairs are now preserved at
Sant’ Angelo; and you may still do homage to the authentic Byzantine
Madonna painted on wood by Saint Luke, brown-complexioned, long-nosed,
with staring eyes, and holding the Infant on her left arm. Earthquakes
and Saracen incursions ruined the town, which became wholly abandoned
when Manfredonia was built with its stones.

Of pagan antiquity there are a few capitals lying about, as well as
granite columns in the curious old crypt. A pillar stands all forlorn
in a field; and quite close to the church are erected two others—the
larger of cipollino, beautified by a patina of golden lichen; a marble
well-head, worn half through with usage of ropes, may be found buried
in the rank grass. The plain whereon stood the great city of Sipus is
covered, now, with bristly herbage. The sea has retired from its old
beach, and half-wild cattle browse on the site of those lordly quays
and palaces. Not a stone is left. Malaria and desolation reign supreme.

It is a profoundly melancholy spot. Yet I was glad of the brief vision.
I shall have fond and enduring memories of that sanctuary—the
travertine of its artfully carven fabric glowing orange-tawny in the
sunset; of the forsaken plain beyond, full of ghostly phantoms of the
past.

As for Manfredonia—it is a sad little place, when the south wind moans
and mountains are veiled in mists.

[Illustration: At Sipontum]




V
LAND OF HORACE


Venosa, nowadays, lies off the beaten track. There are only three
trains a day from the little junction of Rocchetta, and they take over
an hour to traverse the thirty odd kilometres of sparsely inhabited
land. It is an uphill journey, for Venosa lies at a good elevation.
They say that German professors, bent on Horatian studies, occasionally
descend from those worn-out old railway carriages; but the ordinary
travellers are either peasant-folk or commercial gentlemen from north
Italy. Worse than malaria or brigandage, against both of which a man
may protect himself, there is no escaping from the companionship of
these last-named—these pathologically inquisitive, empty-headed, and
altogether dreadful people. They are the terror of the south. And it
stands to reason that only the most incapable and most disagreeable of
their kind are sent to out-of-the-way places like Venosa.

One asks oneself whether this town has greatly changed since Roman
times. To be sure it has; domestic calamities and earthquakes (such as
the terrible one of 1456) have altered it beyond recognition. The
amphitheatre that seated ten thousand spectators is merged into the
earth, and of all the buildings of Roman date nothing is left save a
pile of masonry designated as the tomb of the Marcellus who was killed
here by Hannibal’s soldiery, and a few reticulated walls of the second
century or thereabouts known as the “House of Horace”—as genuine as
that of Juliet in Verona or the Mansion of Loreto. Yet the tradition is
an old one, and the builder of the house, whoever he was, certainly
displayed some poetic taste in his selection of a fine view across the
valley. There is an indifferent statue of Horace in the marketplace. A
previous one, also described as Horace, was found to be the effigy of
somebody else. Thus much I learn from Lupoli’s “Iter Venusinum.”

But there are ancient inscriptions galore, worked into the masonry of
buildings or lying about at random. Mommsen has collected numbers of
them in his _Corpus,_ and since that time some sixty new ones have been
discovered. And then—the
stone lions of Roman days, couched forlornly at street corners, in
courtyards and at fountains, in every stage of decrepitude, with broken
jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa is a veritable infirmary
for mutilated antiques of this species. Now the lion is doubtless a
nobly decorative beast, but—_toujours perdrix!_ Why not a few griffons
or other ornaments? The Romans were not an imaginative race.

The country around must have looked different in olden days. Horace
describes it as covered with forests, and from a manuscript of the
early seventeenth century which has lately been printed one learns that
the surrounding regions were full of “hares, rabbits, foxes, roe deer,
wild boars, martens, porcupines, hedgehogs, tortoises and
wolves”—wood-loving creatures which have now, for the most part,
deserted Venosa. Still, there are left some stretches of oak at the
back of the town, and the main lines of the land cannot change. Yonder
lies the Horatian Forense and “Acherontia’s nest”; further on, the
glades of Bantia (the modern Banzi); the long-drawn Garganian Mount, on
which the poet’s eye must often have rested, emerges above the plain of
Apulia like an island (and such it is: an island of Austrian stone,
stranded upon the beach of Italy). Monte Vulture still dominates the
landscape, although at this nearness the crater loses its shapely
conical outline and assumes a serrated edge. On its summit I perceive a
gigantic cross—one of a number of such symbols which were erected by
the clericals at the time of the recent rationalist congress in Rome.

From this chronicler I learn another interesting fact: that Venosa was
not malarious in the author’s day. He calls it healthy, and says that
the only complaint from which the inhabitants suffered was “ponture”
(pleurisy). It is now within the infected zone. I dare say the
deforestation of the country, which prevented the downflow of the
rivers—choking up their beds with detritus and producing stagnant pools
favourable to the breeding of the mosquito—has helped to spread the
plague in many parts of Italy. In Horace’s days Venosa was immune,
although Rome and certain rural districts were already malarious.
Ancient votive tablets to the fever-goddess Mephitis (malaria) have
been found not far from here, in the plain below the present city of
Potenza.

A good deal of old Roman blood and spirit seems to survive here. After
the noise of the Neapolitan provinces, where chattering takes the place
of thinking, it is a relief to find oneself in the company of these
grave self-respecting folks, who really
converse, like the Scotch, in disinterested and impersonal fashion.
Their attitude towards religious matters strikes me as peculiarly
Horatian; it is not active scepticism, but rather a bland tolerance or
what one of them described as “indifferentismo”—submission to acts of
worship and all other usages (whatever they may be) consecrated by
time: the _pietàs—_the conservative, law-abiding Roman spirit. And if
you walk towards sunset along any of the roads leading into the
country, you will meet the peasants riding home from their field
labours accompanied by their dogs, pigs and goats; and among them you
will recognize many types of Roman physiognomies—faces of orators and
statesmen—familiar from old coins. About a third of the population are
of the dark-fair complexion, with blue or green eyes. But the women are
not handsome, although the town derives its name from Benoth (Venus).
Some genuine Roman families have continued to exist to this day, such
as that of Cenna (Cinna). One of them was the author of the chronicle
above referred to; and there is an antique bas-relief worked into the
walls of the Trinità abbey, depicting some earlier members of this
local family.

One is astonished how large a literature has grown up around this small
place—but indeed, the number of monographs dealing with every one of
these little Italian towns is a ceaseless source of surprise. Look
below the surface and you will find, in all of them, an undercurrent of
keen spirituality—a nucleus of half a dozen widely read and thoughtful
men, who foster the best traditions of the mind. You will not find them
in the town council or at the café. No newspapers commend their
labours, no millionaires or learned societies come to their assistance,
and though typography is cheap in this country, they often stint
themselves of the necessities of life in order to produce these
treatises of calm research. There is a deep gulf, here, between the
mundane and the intellectual life. These men are retiring in their
habits; and one cannot but revere their scholarly and almost ascetic
spirit that survives like a green oasis amid the desert of “politics,”
roguery and municipal corruption.

The City Fathers of Venosa are reputed rich beyond the dreams of
avarice. Yet their town is by no means a clean place—it is twice as
dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but
testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of
cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down
into subterranean family bedrooms that must be insufferably damp in
winter, and filled, during the hot months, with an odour hard to
conceive. There is electric lighting,
of course—a paternal government having made the price of petroleum so
prohibitive that the use of electricity for street-lighting became
quite common in the lowliest places; but the crude glare only serves to
show up the general squalor. One reason for this state of affairs is
that there are no quarries for decent paving-stones in the
neighbourhood. And another, that Venosa possesses no large citizen
class, properly so called. The inhabitants are mostly peasant
proprietors and field labourers, who leave the town in the morning and
return home at night with their beasts, having learned by bitter
experience to take up their domiciles in the towns rather than in the
country-side, which was infested with brigandage and in an unsettled
state up to a short time ago. The Cincinnatus note dominates here, and
with an agricultural population no city can be kept clean.

But Venosa has one inestimable advantage over Lucera and most Italian
towns: there is no octroi.

Would it be believed that Naples is surrounded by a towering Chinese
wall, miles upon miles of it, crowned with a complicated apparatus of
alarm-bells and patrolled night and day by a horde of _doganieri_ armed
to the teeth—lest some peasant should throw a bundle of onions into the
sacred precincts of the town without paying the duty of half a
farthing? No nation with any sense of humour would endure this sort of
thing. Every one resents the airs of this army of official loafers who
infest the land, and would be far better employed themselves in
planting onions upon the many miles of Italy which now lie fallow; the
results of the system have been shown to be inadequate, “but,” as my
friend the Roman deputy once asked me, “if we dismiss these fellows
from their job, how are we to employ them?”

“Nothing is simpler,” I replied. “Enrol them into the Town Council of
Naples. It already contains more _employes_ than all the government
offices of London put together; a few more will surely make no
difference?”

“By Bacchus,” he cried, “you foreigners have ideas! We could dispose of
ten or fifteen thousand of them, at least, in the way you suggest. I’ll
make a note of that, for our next session.”

And so he did.

But the _Municipio_ of Naples, though extensive, is a purely local
charity, and I question whether its inmates will hear of any one save
their own cousins and brothers-in-law figuring as colleagues in office.

Every attempt at innovation in agriculture, as in industry,
is forthwith discouraged by new and subtle impositions, which lie in
wait for the enterprising Italian and punish him for his ideas. There
is, of course, a prohibitive duty on every article or implement
manufactured abroad; there is the octroi, a relic of medisevalism, the
most unscientific, futile, and vexatious of taxes; there are municipal
dues to be paid on animals bought and animals sold, on animals kept and
animals killed, on milk and vine-props and bricks, on timber for
scaffolding and lead and tiles and wine—on every conceivable object
which the peasant produces or requires for his existence. And one
should see the faces of the municipal _employes_ who extort these
tributes. God alone knows from what classes of the populace they are
recruited; certain it is that their physiognomy reflects their
miserable calling. One can endure the militarism of Germany and the
bureaucracy of Austria; but it is revolting to see decent Italian
countryfolk at the mercy of these uncouth savages, veritable cave-men,
whose only intelligible expression is one of malice striving to break
through a crust of congenital cretinism.

We hear much of the great artists and speculative philosophers of old
Italy. The artists of modern Italy are her bureaucrats who design and
elaborate the taxes; her philosophers, the peasants who pay them.

In point of method, at least, there is nothing to choose between the
exactions of the municipal and governmental ruffians. I once saw an old
woman fined fifty francs for having in her possession a pound of
sea-salt. By what logic will you make it clear to ignorant people that
it is wrong to take salt out of the sea, whence every one takes fish
which are more valuable? The waste of time employed over red tape alone
on these occasions would lead to a revolution anywhere save among men
inured by long abuses to this particular form of tyranny. No wonder the
women of the country-side, rather than waste three precious hours in
arguments about a few cheeses, will smuggle them past the authorities
under the device of being _enceintes;_ no wonder their wisest old men
regard the paternal government as a successfully organized swindle,
which it is the citizen’s bounden duty to frustrate whenever possible.
Have _you_ ever tried to convey—in legal fashion—a bottle of wine from
one town into another; or to import, by means of a sailing-boat, an old
frying-pan into some village by the sea? It is a fine art, only to be
learnt by years of apprenticeship. The regulations on these subjects,
though ineffably childish, look simple enough on paper; they take no
account of that “personal element” which is everything
in the south, of the ruffled tempers of those gorgeous but inert
creatures who, disturbed in their siestas or mandolin-strummings, may
keep you waiting half a day while they fumble ominously over some
dirty-looking scrap of paper. For on such occasions they are liable to
provoking fits of conscientiousness. This is all very well, my dear
sir, but—Ha! Where, where is that certificate of origin, that stamp,
that _lascia-passare?_

And all for one single sou!

No wonder even Englishmen discover that law-breaking, in Italy, becomes
a necessity, a rule of life.

And, soon enough, much more than a mere necessity. . . .

For even as the traveller new to Borneo, when they offer him a
durian-fruit, is instantly brought to vomiting-point by its odour, but
after a few mouthfuls declares it to be the very apple of Paradise, and
marvels how he could have survived so long in the benighted lands where
such ambrosial fare is not; even as the true connaisseur who, beholding
some rare scarlet idol from the Tingo-Tango forests, at first casts it
aside and then, light dawning as he ponders over those monstrous
complexities, begins to realize that they, and they alone, contain the
quintessential formulae of all the fervent dreamings of Scopas and
Michelangelo; even as he who first, upon a peak in Darien, gazed
awestruck upon the grand Pacific slumbering at his feet, till presently
his senses reeled at the blissful prospect of fresh regions unrolling
themselves, boundless, past the fulfilment of his fondest hopes———

Even so, in Italy, the domesticated Englishman is amazed to find that
he possesses a sense hitherto unrevealed, opening up a new horizon, a
new zest in life—the sense of law-breaking. At first, being an honest
man, he is shocked at the thought of such a thing; next, like a
sensible person, reconciled to the inevitable; lastly, as befits his
virile race, he learns to play the game so well that the horrified
officials grudgingly admit (and it is their highest praise):

Inglese italianizzato—
Diavolo incarnato.

Yes; slowly the charm of law-breaking grows upon the Italianated Saxon;
slowly, but surely. There is a neo-barbarism not only in matters of
art.




VI
AT VENOSA


There has always, no doubt, been a castle at Venosa. Frederick
Barbarossa lived here oftener than in Sicily; from these regions he
could look over to his beloved East, and the security of this
particular keep induced him to store his treasures therein. The
indefatigable Huillard Bréholles has excavated some account of them
from the Hohenstaufen records. Thus we learn that here, at Venosa, the
Emperor deposited that marvel, that _tentorium,_ I mean, _mirifica arte
constructum, in quo imagines solis et lunæ artificialiter motæ, cursum
suum certis et debitis spatiis peragrant, et horas diei et noctis
infallibiliter indicant. Cuius tentorii valor viginti millium marcarum
pretium dicitur transcendisse._ It was given him by the Sultan of
Babylonia. Always the glowing Oriental background!

The present castle, a picturesque block with moat and corner towers,
was built in 1470 by the redoubtable Pierro del Balzo. A church used to
occupy the site, but the warrior, recognizing its strategic advantages,
transplanted the holy edifice to some other part of the town. It is now
a ruin, the inhabitable portions of which have been converted into
cheap lodgings for sundry poor folk—a monetary speculation of some
local magnate, who paid 30,000 francs for the whole structure. You can
climb up into one of the shattered towers whereon reposes an old cannon
amid a wind-sown garden of shrubs and weeds. Here the jackdaws
congregate at nightfall, flying swiftly and noiselessly to their
resting-place. Odd, how quiet Italian jackdaws are, compared with those
of England; they have discarded their voices, which is the best thing
they could have done in a land where every one persecutes them. There
is also a dungeon at this castle, an underground recess with cunningly
contrived projections in its walls to prevent prisoners from climbing
upwards; and other horrors.

The cathedral of Venosa contains a chapel with an unusually fine portal
of Renaissance work, but the chief architectural beauty of the town is
the decayed Benedictine abbey of La Trinità. The building is roofless;
it was never completed, and the ravages
of time and of man have not spared it; earthquakes, too, have played
sad tricks with its arches and columns, particularly that of 1851,
which destroyed the neighbouring town of Melfi. It stands beyond the
more modern settlement on what is now a grassy plain, and attached to
it is a Norman chapel containing the bones of Alberada, mother of
Boemund, and others of her race. Little of the original structure of
this church is left, though its walls are still adorned, in patches,
with frescoes of genuine angels—attractive creatures, as far removed
from those bloodless Byzantine anatomies as from the plethoric and
insipid females of the _settecento._ There is also a queenly portrait
declared to represent Catherine of Siena. I would prefer to follow
those who think it is meant for Sigilgaita.

Small as it is, this place—the church and the abbey—is not one for a
casual visit. Lenormant calls the Trinità a “_Musée épigraphique”—_so
many are the Latin inscriptions which the monks have worked into its
masonry. They have encrusted the walls with them; and many antiquities
of other kinds have been deposited here since those days. The ruin is
strewn with columns and capitals of fantastic devices; the inevitable
lions, too, repose upon its grassy floor, as well as a pagan
altar-stone that once adorned the neighbouring amphitheatre. One thinks
of the labour expended in raising those prodigious blocks and fitting
them together without mortar in their present positions—they, also,
came from the amphitheatre, and the sturdy letterings engraved on some
of them formed, once upon a time, a sentence that ran round that
building, recording the names of its founders.

[Illustration: Ruin of Trinità: East front]

Besides the Latin inscriptions, there are Hebrew funereal stones of
great interest, for a colony of Jews was established here between the
years 400 and 800; poor folks, for the most part; no one knows whence
they came or whither they went. One is apt to forget that south Italy
was swarming with Jews for centuries. The catacombs of Venosa were
discovered in 1853. Their entrance lies under a hill-side not far from
the modern railway station, and Professor Mueller, a lover of Venosa,
has been engaged for the last twenty-five years in writing a ponderous
tome on the subject. Unfortunately (so they say) there is not much
chance of its ever seeing the light, for just as he is on the verge of
publication, some new Jewish catacombs are discovered in another part
of the world which cause the Professor to revise all his previous
theories. The work must be written anew and brought up to date, and
hardly is this accomplished when
fresh catacombs are found elsewhere, necessitating a further revision.
The Professor once more rewrites the whole. . . .

You will find accounts of the Trinità in Bertaux, Schulz and other
writers. Italian ones tell us what sounds rather surprising, namely,
that the abbey was built after a Lombard model, and not a French one.
Be that as it may—and they certainly show good grounds for their
contention—the ruin is a place of rare charm. Not easily can one see
relics of Roman, Hebrew and Norman life crushed into so small a space,
welded together by the massive yet fair architecture of the
Benedictines, and interpenetrated, at the same time, with a
Mephistophelian spirit of modern indifference. Of cynical
_insouciance;_ for although this is a “national monument,” nothing
whatever is done in the way of repairs. Never a month passes without
some richly carven block of stonework toppling down into the weeds,[1]
and were it not for the zeal of a private citizen, the interior of the
building would long ago have become an impassable chaos of stones and
shrubbery. The Trinità cannot be _restored_ without enormous outlay;
nobody dreams of such a thing. A yearly expenditure of ten pounds,
however, would go far towards arresting its fall. But where shall the
money be found? This enthusiastic nation, so enamoured of all that is
exquisite in art, will spend sixty million francs on a new Ministry of
Justice which, barely completed, is already showing signs of
disrupture; it will cheerfully vote _(vide_ daily press) the small item
of eighty thousand francs to supply that institution with pens and
ink—lucky contractor!—while this and a hundred other buildings of
singular beauty are allowed to crumble to pieces, day by day.

[1] The process of decay can be seen by comparing my photograph of the
east front with that taken to illustrate Giuseppe de Lorenzo’s
monograph “Venosa e la Regione del Vulture” (Bergamo, 1906).

Not far from the abbey there stands a church dedicated to Saint Roque.
Go within, if you wish to see the difference between Benedictine
dignity and the buffoonery which subsequently tainted the Catholicism
of the youth. On its gable sits a strange emblem: a large stone dog,
gazing amiably at the landscape. The saint, during his earthly career,
was always accompanied by a dog, and now likes to have him on the roof
of his sanctuary.

The Norman church attached to the Trinità lies at a lower level than
that building, having been constructed, says Lupoli, on the foundations
of a temple to Hymenæus. It may be so; but one distrusts Lupoli. A
remarkable Norman capital, now wrought into a font, is preserved here,
and I was interested in
watching the behaviour of a procession of female pilgrims in regard to
it. Trembling with emotion, they perambulated the sacred stone, kissing
every one of its corners; then they dipped their hands into its basin,
and kissed them devoutly. An old hag, the mistress of the ceremonies,
muttered: “tutti santi—tutti santi!” at each osculation. Next, they
prostrated themselves on the floor and licked the cold stones, and
after wallowing there awhile, rose up and began to kiss a small fissure
in the masonry of the wall, the old woman whispering, “Santissimo!” A
familiar spectacle, no doubt; but one which never fails of its effect.
This anti-hygienic crack in the wall, with its suggestions of
yoni-worship, attracted me so strongly that I begged a priest to
explain to me its mystical signification. But he only said, with a
touch of mediæval contempt:

“_Sono femine!_”

He showed me, later on, a round Roman pillar near the entrance of the
church worn smooth by the bodies of females who press themselves
between it and the wall, in order to become mothers. The notion caused
him some amusement—he evidently thought this practice a speciality of
Venosa.

In my country, I said, pillars with a contrary effect would be more
popular among the fair sex.

Lear gives another account of this phallic emblem. He says that
perambulating it hand in hand with another person, the two are sure to
remain friends for life.

This is pre-eminently a “Victorian” version.

[Illustration: Roman Altar-stone]




VII
THE BANDUSIAN FOUNT


The traveller in these parts is everlastingly half-starved. Here, at
Venosa, the wine is good—excellent, in fact; but the food monotonous
and insufficient. This improper dieting is responsible for much
mischief; it induces a state of chronic exacerbation. Nobody would
believe how nobly I struggle, day and night, against its evil
suggestions. A man’s worst enemy is his own empty stomach. None knew it
better than Horace.

And yet he declared that lettuces and such-like stuff sufficed him. No
doubt, no doubt. “Olives nourish me.” Just so! One does not grow up in
the school of Maecenas without learning the subtle delights of the
simple life. But I would wager that after a week of such feeding as I
have now undergone at his native place, he would quickly have
remembered some urgent business to be transacted in the capital—Caesar
Augustus, me-thinks, would have desired his company. And even so, I
have suddenly woke up to the fact that Taranto, my next resting-place,
besides possessing an agreeably warm climate, has some passable
restaurants. I will pack without delay. Mount Vulture must wait. The
wind alone, the Vulturnus or south-easterly wind, is quite enough to
make one despair of climbing hills. It has blown with objectionable
persistency ever since my arrival at Venosa.

To escape from its attentions, I have been wandering about the secluded
valleys that seam this region. Streamlets meander here amid rustling
canes and a luxuriant growth of mares’ tails and creepers; their banks
are shaded by elms and poplars—Horatian trees; the thickets are loud
with songs of nightingale, black-cap and oriole. These humid dells are
a different country from the uplands, wind-swept and thriftily
cultivated.

It was here, yesterday, that I came upon an unexpected sight—an army of
workmen engaged in burrowing furiously into the bowels of Mother Earth.
They told me that this tunnel would presently become one of the
arteries of that vast system, the
Apulian Aqueduct. The discovery accorded with my Roman mood, for the
conception and execution alike of this grandiose project are worthy of
the Romans. Three provinces where, in years of drought, wine is cheaper
than water, are being irrigated—in the teeth of great difficulties of
engineering and finance. Among other things, there are 213 kilometres
of subterranean tunnellings to be built; eleven thousand workmen are
employed; the cost is estimated at 125 million francs. The Italian
government is erecting to its glory a monument more durable than brass.
This is their heritage from the Romans—this talent for dealing with
rocks and waters; for bridling a destructive environment and making it
subservient to purposes of human intercourse. It is a part of that
practical Roman genius for “pacification.” Wild nature, to the Latin,
ever remains an obstacle to be overcome—an enemy.

Such was Horace’s point of view. The fruitful fields and their hardy
brood of tillers appealed to him;[1] the ocean and snowy Alps were
beyond the range of his affections. His love of nature was heartfelt,
but his nature was not ours; it was nature as we see it in those Roman
landscapes at Pompeii; nature ancillary to human needs, in her
benignant and comfortable moods. Virgil’s _lachrymae rerum_ hints at
mystic and extra-human yearnings; to the troubadours nature was
conventionally stereotyped—a scenic decoration to set off sentiments
more or less sincere; the romanticists wallow in her rugged aspects.
Horace never allowed phantasy to outrun intelligence; he kept his feet
on earth; man was the measure of his universe, and a sober mind his
highest attribute. Nature must be kept “in her place.” Her
extravagances are not to be admired. This anthropocentric spirit has
made him what he is—the ideal anti-sentimentalist and anti-vulgarian.
For excess of sentiment, like all other intemperance, is the mark of
that unsober and unsteady beast—the crowd.

[1] See next chapter.

Things have changed since those days; in proportion as the world has
grown narrower and the element of fear and mystery diluted, our
sympathies have broadened; the Goth, in particular, has learnt the
knack of detecting natural charm where the Latin, to this day, beholds
nothing but confusion and strife.

[Illustration: Norman Capital at Venosa]

On the spot, I observe, one is liable to return to the antique outlook;
to see the beauty of fields and rivers, yet only when subsidiary to
man’s personal convenience; to appreciate a fair landscape—with a
shrewd worldly sense of its potential uses. “The garden that I love,”
said an Italian once to me, “contains
good vegetables.” This utilitarian flavour of the south has become very
intelligible to me during the last few days. I, too, am thinking less
of calceolarias than of cauliflowers.

A pilgrimage to the Bandusian Fount (if such it be) is no great
undertaking—a morning’s trip. The village of San Gervasio is the next
station to Venosa, lying on an eminence only thirteen kilometres from
there.

Here once ran a fountain which was known as late as the twelfth century
as the Fons Bandusinus, and Ughelli, in his “Italia Sacra,” cites a
deed of the year 1103 speaking of a church “at the Bandusian Fount near
Venosa.” Church and fountain have now disappeared; but the site of the
former, they say, is known, and close to it there once issued a copious
spring called “Fontana Grande.” This is probably the Horatian one; and
is also, I doubt not, that referred to in Cenna’s chronicle of Venosa:
“At Torre San Gervasio are the ruins of a castle and an abundant spring
of water colder than all the waters of Venosa,” _Frigus amabile. . . ._

I could discover no one in the place to show me where this now vanished
church stood. I rather think it occupied the site of the present church
of Saint Anthony, the oldest in San Gervasio.

As to the fountain—there are now two of them, at some considerable
distance from each other. Both of them are copious, and both lie near
the foot of the hill on which the village now stands. Capmartin de
Chaupy has reasons for believing that in former times San Gervasio did
not occupy its present exalted position (vol. iii, p. 538).

One of them gushes out on the plain near the railway station, and has
been rebuilt within recent times. It goes by the name of “Fontana
rotta.” The other, the “Fontana del Fico,” lies on the high road to
Spinazzola; the water spouts out of seven mouths, and near at hand is a
plantation of young sycamores. The basin of this fount was also rebuilt
about ten years ago at no little expense, and has now a thoroughly
modern and businesslike aspect. But I was told that a complicated
network of subterranean pipes and passages, leading to “God knows
where,” was unearthed during the process of reconstruction. It was
magnificent masonry, said my informant, who was an eye-witness of the
excavations but could tell me nothing more of interest.

The problem how far either of these fountains fulfils the conditions
postulated in the last verse of Horace’s ode may be solved by every one
according as he pleases. In fact, there is
no other way of solving it. In my professorial mood, I should cite the
cavern and the “downward leaping” waters against the hypothesis that
the Bandusian Fount stood on either of these modern sites; in favour of
it, one might argue that the conventional rhetoric of all Roman art may
have added these embellishing touches, and cite, in confirmation
thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals
that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a
cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not
always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and
water, even the Thames at London Bridge, always leaps downhill—more or
less. Of more importance is old Chaupy’s discovery of the northerly
aspect of one of these springs—“thee the fierce season of the blazing
dog-star cannot touch.” There may have been a cave at the back of the
“Fontana del Fico”; the “Fontana rotta” is hopelessly uncavernous.

For the rest, there is no reason why the fountain should not have
changed its position since ancient days. On the contrary, several
things might incline one to think that it has been forced to abandon
the high grounds and seek its present lower level. To begin with, the
hill on which the village stands is honeycombed by hives of caves which
the inhabitants have carved out of the loose conglomerate (which, by
the way, hardly corresponds with the poet’s _saxum);_ and it may well
be that a considerable collapse of these earth-dwellings obstructed the
original source of the waters and obliged them to seek a vent lower
down.

Next, there are the notorious effects of deforestation. An old man told
me that in his early days the hill was covered with timber—indeed, this
whole land, now a stretch of rolling grassy downs, was decently wooded
up to a short time ago. I observed that the roof of the oldest of the
three churches, that of Saint Anthony, is formed of wooden rafters (a
rare material hereabouts). Deforestation would also cause the waters to
issue at a lower level.

Lastly, and chiefly—the possible shatterings of earthquakes.
Catastrophes such as those which have damaged Venosa in days past may
have played havoc with the water-courses of this place by choking up
their old channels. My acquaintance with the habits of Apulian
earthquakes, with the science of hydrodynamics and the geological
formation of San Gervasio is not sufficiently extensive to allow me to
express a mature opinion. I will content myself with presenting to
future investigators the plausible theory—plausible because
conveniently difficult to refute—that
some terrestrial upheaval in past days is responsible for the present
state of things.

But these are merely three hypotheses. I proceed to mention three facts
which point in the same direction; i.e. that the water used to issue at
a higher level. Firstly, there is that significant name “Fontana
rotta”—“the broken fountain.” . . . Does not this suggest that its flow
may have been interrupted, or intercepted, in former times?

Next, if you climb up from this “Fontana rotta” to the village by the
footpath, you will observe, on your right hand as you ascend the slope,
at about a hundred yards below the Church of Saint Anthony, an old well
standing in a field of corn and shaded by three walnuts and an oak.
This well is still running, and was described to me as “molto antico.”
Therefore an underground stream—in diminished volume, no doubt—still
descends from the heights.

Thirdly, in the village you will notice an alley leading out of the
Corso Manfredi (one rejoices to find the name of Manfred surviving in
these lands)—an alley which is entitled “Vico Sirene.” The name arrests
your attention, for what have the Sirens to do in these inland regions?
Nothing whatever, unless they existed as ornamental statuary: statuary
such as frequently gives names to streets in Italy, witness the “Street
of the Faun” in Ouida’s novel, or that of the “Giant” in Naples (which
has now been re-christened). It strikes me as a humble but quite
scholarly speculation to infer that, the chief decorative uses of
Sirens being that of fountain deities, this obscure roadway keeps alive
the tradition of the old “Fontana Grande”—ornamented, we may suppose,
with marble Sirens—whose site is now forgotten, and whose very name has
faded from the memory of the countryfolk.

What, then, does my ramble of two hours at San Gervasio amount to? It
shows that there is a possibility, at least, of a now vanished fountain
having existed on the heights where it might fulfil more accurately the
conditions of Horace’s ode. If Ughelli’s church “at the Bandusian
Fount” stood on this eminence—well, I shall be glad to corroborate, for
once in the way, old Ughelli, whose book contains a deal of dire
nonsense. And if the Abbe Chaupy’s suggestion that the village lay at
the foot of the hill should ever prove to be wrong—well, his amiable
ghost may be pleased to think that even this does not necessitate the
sacrifice of his Venosa theory in favour of that of the scholiast
Akron; there is still a way out of the difficulty.

But whether this at San Gervasio is the actual fountain hymned by
Horace—ah, that is quite another affair! Few poets, to be sure, have
clung more tenaciously to the memories of their childhood than did he
and Virgil. And yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his
imagination—the very word Bandusia may have been coined by him. Who can
tell? Then there is the Digentia hypothesis. I know it, I know it! I
have read some of its defenders, and consider _(entre nous)_ that they
have made out a pretty strong case. But I am not in the mood for
discussing their proposition—not just now.

Here at San Gervasio I prefer to think only of the Roman singer, so
sanely jovial, and of these waters as they flowed, limpid and cool, in
the days when they fired his boyish fancy. Deliberately I refuse to
hear the charmer Boissier. Deliberately, moreover, I shut my eyes to
the present condition of affairs; to the herd of squabbling laundresses
and those other incongruities that spoil the antique scene. Why not?
The timid alone are scared by microscopic discords of time and place.
The sage can invest this prosaic water-trough with all its pristine
dignity and romance by an unfailing expedient. He closes an eye. It is
an art he learns early in life; a simple art, and one that greatly
conduces to happiness. The ever alert, the conscientiously wakeful—how
many fine things they fail to see! Horace knew the wisdom of being
genially unwise; of closing betimes an eye, or an ear; or both.
_Desipere in loco. . . ._




VIII
TILLERS OF THE SOIL


I remember watching an old man stubbornly digging a field by himself.
He toiled through the flaming hours, and what he lacked in strength was
made up in the craftiness, _malizia,_ born of long love of the soil.
The ground was baked hard; but there was still a chance of rain, and
the peasants were anxious not to miss it. Knowing this kind of labour,
I looked on from my vine-wreathed arbour with admiration, but without
envy.

I asked whether he had not children to work for him.

“All dead—and health to you!” he replied, shaking his white head
dolefully.

And no grandchildren?

“All Americans (emigrants).”

He spoke in dreamy fashion of years long ago when he, too, had
travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes,
and to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his
mind; he remembered only our men.

“_Che bella gioventù—che bella gioventù!_” (“a sturdy brood”), he kept
on repeating. “And lately,” he added, “America has been discovered.” He
toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.

Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant _in fabula_ whom we
all know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose
talk and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing
save the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying
tasks and rewards. None save a Cincinnatus or Garibaldi can be ennobled
by the spade. In spleenful moments, it seems to me that the most
depraved of city-dwellers has flashes of enthusiasm and self-abnegation
never experienced by this shifty, retrogressive and ungenerous brood,
which lives like the beasts of the field and has learnt all too much of
their logic. But they have a beast-virtue hereabouts which compels
respect—contentment in adversity. In this point they resemble the
Russian peasantry. And yet, who can pity the
moujik? His cheeks are altogether too round, and his morals too
superbly bestial; he has clearly been created to sing and starve by
turns. But the Italian peasant who speaks in the tongue of Homer and
Virgil and Boccaccio is easily invested with a halo of martyrdom; it is
delightful to sympathize with men who combine the manners of Louis
Quatorze with the profiles of Augustus or Plato, and who still recall,
in many of their traits, the pristine life of Odyssean days. Thus, they
wear to-day the identical “clouted leggings of oxhide, against the
scratches of the thorns” which old Laertes bound about his legs on the
upland farm in Ithaka. They call them “galandrine.”

On occasions of drought or flood there is not a word of complaint. I
have known these field-faring men and women for thirty years, and have
yet to hear a single one of them grumble at the weather. It is not
indifference; it is true philosophy—acquiescence in the inevitable. The
grievances of cultivators of lemons and wholesale agriculturalists,
whose speculations are often ruined by a single stroke of the human pen
in the shape of new regulations or tariffs, are a different thing;
_their_ curses are loud and long. But the bean-growers, dependent
chiefly on wind and weather, only speak of God’s will. They have the
same forgiveness for the shortcomings of nature as for a wayward child.
And no wonder they are distrustful. Ages of oppression and misrule have
passed over their heads; sun and rain, with all their caprice, have
been kinder friends to them than their earthly masters. Some day,
presumably, the government will wake up to the fact that Italy is not
an industrial country, and that its farmers might profitably be taken
into account again.

But a change is upon the land. Types like this old man are becoming
extinct; for the patriarchal system of Coriolanus, the glory of
southern Italy, is breaking up.

This is not the fault of conscription which, though it destroys old
dialects, beliefs and customs, widens the horizon by bringing fresh
ideas into the family, and generally sound ones. It does even more; it
teaches the conscripts to read and write, so that it is no longer as
dangerous to have dealings with a man who possesses these
accomplishments as in the days when they were the prerogative of
_avvocati_ and other questionable characters. A countryman, nowadays,
may read and write and yet be honest.

What is shattering family life is the speculative spirit born of
emigration. A continual coming and going; two-thirds of the adolescent
and adult male population are at this moment in Argentina or the United
States—some as far afield as New
Zealand. Men who formerly reckoned in sous now talk of thousands of
francs; parental authority over boys is relaxed, and the girls, ever
quick to grasp the advantages of money, lose all discipline and
steadiness.

“My sons won’t touch a spade,” said a peasant to me; “and when I thrash
them, they complain to the police. They simply gamble and drink,
waiting their turn to sail. If I were to tell you the beatings _we_
used to get, sir, you wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t believe me, not
if I took my oath, you wouldn’t! I can feel them still—speaking with
respect—here!”

These emigrants generally stay away three or four years at a stretch,
and then return, spend their money, and go out again to make more.
Others remain for longer periods, coming back with huge incomes—twenty
to a hundred francs a day. Such examples produce the same effect as
those of the few lucky winners in the State lottery; every one talks of
them, and forgets the large number of less fortunate speculators.
Meanwhile the land suffers. The carob-tree is an instance. This
beautiful and almost eternal growth, the “hope of the southern
Apennines” as Professor Savastano calls it, whose pods constitute an
important article of commerce and whose thick-clustering leaves yield a
cool shelter, comparable to that of a rocky cave, in the noonday heat,
used to cover large tracts of south Italy. Indifferent to the scorching
rays of the sun, flourishing on the stoniest declivities, and
sustaining the soil in a marvellous manner, it was planted wherever
nothing else would grow—a distant but sure profit. Nowadays carobs are
only cut down. Although their produce rises in value every year, not
one is planted; nobody has time to wait for the fruit.[1]

[1] There are a few laudable exceptions, such as Prince Belmonte, who
has covered large stretches of bad land with this tree. (See Consular
Reports, Italy, No. 431.) But he is not a peasant!

It is nothing short of a social revolution, depopulating the country of
its most laborious elements. 788,000 emigrants left in one year alone
(1906); in the province of Basilicata the exodus exceeds the birthrate.
I do not know the percentage of those who depart never to return, but
it must be considerable; the land is full of chronic grass-widows.

Things will doubtless right themselves in due course; it stands to
reason that in this acute transitional stage the demoralizing effects
of the new system should be more apparent than its inevitable benefits.
Already these are not unseen; houses are springing up round villages,
and the emigrants return
home with a disrespect for many of their country’s institutions which,
under the circumstances, is neither deplorable nor unjustifiable. A
large family of boy-children, once a dire calamity, is now the soundest
of investments. Soon after their arrival in America they begin sending
home rations of money to their parents; the old farm prospers once
more, the daughters receive decent dowries. I know farmers who receive
over three pounds a month from their sons in America—all under military
age.

“We work, yes,” they will then tell you, “but we also smoke our pipe.”

Previous to this wholesale emigration, things had come to such a pass
that the landed proprietor could procure a labourer at a franc a day,
out of which he had to feed and clothe himself; it was little short of
slavery. The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are
impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own
terms for work to be done, wages being trebled. A new type of peasant
is being evolved, independent of family, fatherland or traditions—with
a sure haven of refuge across the water when life at home becomes
intolerable.

Yes; a change is at hand.

And another of those things which emigration and the new order of
affairs are surely destroying is that ancient anthropomorphic way of
looking at nature, with its expressive turns of speech. A small boy,
whom I watched gathering figs last year, informed me that the fig-tree
was _innamorato delle pietre e cisterne—_enamoured of stones and
cisterns; meaning, that its roots are searchingly destructive to
masonry and display a fabulous intuition for the proximity of water. He
also told me, what was news to me, that there are more than two or
three varieties of figs. Will you have his list of them? Here it is:

There is the _fico arnese,_ the smallest of all, and the _fico
santillo,_ both of which are best when dried; the _fico vollombola,_
which is never dried, because it only makes the spring fruit; the _fico
molegnano,_ which ripens as late as the end of October and must be
eaten fresh; the _fico coretorto (“_ wry-heart”—from its shape), which
has the most leathery skin of all and is often destroyed by grubs after
rain; the _fico troiano;_ the _fico arzano;_ and the _fico vescovo,_
which appears when all the others are over, and is eaten in February
(this may be the kind referred to in Stamer’s “Dolce Napoli” as
deriving from Sorrento, where the first tree of its kind was discovered
growing out of the garden wall of the bishop’s palace, whence the
name). All these are _neri—_black.
Now for the white kinds. The _fico paradiso_ has a tender skin, but is
easily spoilt by rain and requires a ridiculous amount of sun to dry
it; the _fico vottato_ is also better fresh; the _fico pez-zottolo_ is
often attacked by grubs, but grows to a large size every two or three
years; the _fico pascarello_ is good up till Christmas; the _fico
natalino;_ lastly, the _fico ——_, whose name I will not record, though
it would be an admirable illustration of that same anthropomorphic turn
of mind. The _santillo_ and _arnese,_ he added, are the varieties which
are cut into two and laid lengthwise upon each other and so dried
(Query: Is not this the “duplex ficus” of Horace?).

“Of course there are other kinds,” he said, “but I don’t remember them
just now.” When I asked whether he could tell these different fig-trees
apart by the leaves and stems alone and without the fruit, he said that
each kind, even in winter, retained its peculiar “faccia” (face), but
that some varieties are more easy to distinguish than others. I
enquired into the mysteries of caprification, and learned that
artificial ripening by means of a drop of oil is practised with some of
them, chiefly the _santillo, vollombola, pascarello_ and _natalino._
Then he gave me an account of the prices for the different qualities
and seasons which would have astonished a grocer.

All of which proves how easy it is to misjudge of folks who, although
they do not know that Paris is the capital of France, yet possess a
training adapted to their present needs. They are specialists for
things of the grain-giving earth; it is a pleasure to watch them
grafting vines and olives and lemons with the precision of a trained
horticulturist. They talk of “governing” _(governare}_ their soil; it
is the word they use in respect to a child.

Now figs are neither white nor black, but such is the terminology.
Stones are white or black; prepared olives are white or black; wine is
white or black. Are they become colour-blind because impregnated, from
earliest infancy, with a perennial blaze of rainbow
hues—colour-blinded, in fact; or from negligence, attention to this
matter not bringing with it any material advantage? Excepting that
sign-language which is profoundly interesting from an artistic and
ethnological point of view—why does not some scholar bring old Iorio’s
“Mimica degli Antichi” up to date?—few things are more worthy of
investigation than the colour-sense of these people. Of blue they have
not the faintest conception, probably because there are so few blue
solids in nature; Max Mueller holds the idea of blue to be quite
a modern acquisition on the part of the human race. So a cloudless sky
is declared to be “quite white.” I once asked a lad as to the colour of
the sea which, at the moment, was of the most brilliant sapphire hue.
He pondered awhile and then said:

“Pare come fosse un colore morto” (a sort of dead colour).

Green is a little better known, but still chiefly connected with things
not out of doors, as a green handkerchief. The reason may be that this
tint is too common in nature to be taken note of. Or perhaps because
their chain of association between green and grass is periodically
broken up—our fields are always verdant, but theirs turn brown in
summer. Trees they sometimes call yellow, as do some ancient writers;
but more generally “half-black” or “tree-colour.” A beech in full leaf
has been described to me as black. _“Rosso”_ does not mean red, but
rather dun or dingy; earth is _rosso._ When our red is to be signified,
they will use the word “turco,” which came in with the well-known
dye-stuff of which the Turks once monopolized the secret. Thus there
are “Turkish” apples and “Turkish” potatoes. But “turco” may also mean
black—in accordance with the tradition that the Turks, the Saracens,
were a black race. Snakes, generally greyish-brown in these parts, are
described as either white or black; an eagle-owl is half-black; a
kestrel _un quasi bianco._ The mixed colours of cloths or silks are
either beautiful or ugly, and there’s an end of it. It is curious to
compare this state of affairs with that existing in the days of Homer,
who was, as it were, feeling his way in a new region, and the propriety
of whose colour epithets is better understood when one sees things on
the spot. Of course I am only speaking of the humble peasant whose
blindness, for the rest, is not incurable.

One might enlarge the argument and deduce his odd insensibility to
delicate scents from the fact that he thrives in an atmosphere
saturated with violent odours of all kinds; his dullness in regard to
finer shades of sound—from the shrieks of squalling babies and other
domestic explosions in which he lives from the cradle to the grave.
That is why these people have no “nerves”; terrific bursts of din, such
as the pandemonium of Piedigrotta, stimulate them in the same way that
others might be stimulated by a quartette of Brahms. And if they who
are so concerned about the massacre of small birds in this country
would devote their energies to the invention of a noiseless and yet
cheap powder, their efforts would at last have some prospects of
success. For it is not so much the joy of killing, as the pleasurable
noise of the gun, which creates these local sportsmen; as the sagacious
“Ultramontain” observed long ago. “Le napolitain est passionné pour la
chasse,” he says, “parce que les coups de fusil flattent son
oreille.”[2] This ingenuous love of noise may be connected, in some
way, with their rapid nervous discharges.

[2] I have looked him up in Jos. Blanc’s “Bibliographic.” His name was
C. Haller.

I doubt whether intermediate convulsions have left much purity of Greek
blood in south Italy, although emotional travellers, fresh from the
north, are for ever discovering “classic Hellenic profiles” among the
people. There is certainly a scarce type which, for want of a better
hypothesis, might be called Greek: of delicate build and below the
average height, small-eared and straight-nosed, with curly hair that
varies from blonde to what Italians call _castagno chiaro._ It differs
not only from the robuster and yet fairer northern breed, but also from
the darker surrounding races. But so many contradictory theories have
lately been promulgated on this head, that I prefer to stop short at
the preliminary question—did a Hellenic type ever exist? No more,
probably, than that charming race which the artists of Japan have
invented for our delectation.

Strains of Greek blood can be traced with certainty by their track of
folklore and poetry and song, such as still echoes among the vales of
Sparta and along the Bosphorus. Greek words are rather rare here, and
those that one hears—such as _sciusciello, caruso, crisommele,_
etc.—have long ago been garnered by scholars like De Grandis, Moltedo,
and Salvatore Mele. So Naples is far more Hellenic in dialect, lore,
song and gesture than these regions, which are still rich in pure
latinisms of speech, such as surgere (to arise); scitare (excitare—to
arouse); è (est—yes); fetare (foetare); trasete (transitus—passage of
quails); titillare (to tickle); craje (cras—to-morrow); pastena (a
plantation of young vines; Ulpian has “pastinum instituere”). A woman
is called “muliera,” a girl “figliola,” and children speak of their
fathers as “tata” (see Martial, epig. I, 101). Only yesterday I added a
beautiful latinism to my collection, when an old woman, in whose
cottage I sometimes repose, remarked to me, “Non avete virtù oggi”—you
are not _up to the mark_ to-day. The real, antique virtue! I ought to
have embraced her. No wonder I have no “virtue” just now. This savage
Vulturnian wind—did it not sap the Roman virtue at Cannae?

All those relics of older civilizations are disappearing under the
standardizing influence of conscription, emigration and national
schooling.

And soon enough the _Contranome-_system will become a thing of the
past. I shall be sorry to see it go, though it has often driven me
nearly crazy.

What is a _contranome?_

The same as a _sopranome._ It is a nickname which, as with the Russian
peasants, takes the place of Christian and surname together. A man will
tell you: “My name is Luigi, but they call me, by _contranome,_
O’Canzirro. I don’t know my surname.” Some of these nicknames are
intelligible, such as O’Sborramurella, which refers to the man’s
profession of building those walls without mortar which are always
tumbling down and being repaired again; or O’Sciacquariello (acqua—a
leaking—one whose money leaks from his pocket—a spendthrift); or San
Pietro, from his saintly appearance; O’Civile, who is so uncivilized,
or Cristoforo Colombo, because he is so very wideawake. But eighty per
cent of them are quite obscure even to their owners, going back, as
they do, to some forgotten trick or incident during childhood or to
some pet name which even in the beginning meant nothing. Nearly every
man and boy has his contranome by which, and _by which alone,_ he is
known in his village; the women seldomer, unless they are conspicuous
by some peculiarity, such as A’Sbirra (the spy), or A’Paponnessa (the
fat one)—whose counterpart, in the male sex, would be O’Tripone.

Conceive, now, what trouble it entails to find a man in a strange
village if you happen not to know his contranome (and how on earth are
you to discover it?), if his surname means nothing to the inhabitants,
and his Christian name is shared by a hundred others. For they have an
amazing lack of inventiveness in this matter; four or five Christian
names will include the whole population of the place. Ten to one you
will lose a day looking for him, unless something like this takes
place:

THE HAPPY HAZARDS OF THE CONTRANOME

You set forth your business to a crowd of villagers that have collected
around. It is simple enough. You want to speak to Luigi So-and-so. A
good-natured individual, who seems particularly anxious to help,
summarizes affairs by saying:

“The gentleman wants Luigi So-and-so.”

There is evidently some joke in the mere suggestion of such a thing;
they all smile. Then a confused murmur of voices goes up:

“Luigi—Luigi. . . . Now which Luigi does he mean?”

You repeat his surname in a loud voice. It produces no effect, beyond
that of increased hilarity.

“Luigi—Luigi. . . .”

“Perhaps O’Zoccolone?”

“Perhaps O’Seticchio?”

“Or the figlio d’ O’Zibalocchio?”

The good-natured individual volunteers to beat the surrounding district
and bring in all the Luigis he can find. After half an hour they begin
to arrive, one by one. He is not among them. Dismissed with cigars, as
compensation for loss of time.

Meanwhile half the village has gathered around, vastly enjoying the
fun, which it hopes will last till bedtime. You are getting bewildered;
new people flock in from the fields to whom the mysterious joke about
Luigi must be explained.

“Luigi—Luigi,” they begin again. “Now, which of them can he mean?”

“Perhaps O’Marzariello?”

“Or O’Cuccolillo?”

“I never thought of him,” says the good-natured individual. “Here, boy,
run and tell O’Cuccolillo that a foreign gentleman wants to give him a
cigar.”

By the time O’Cuccolillo appears on the scene the crowd has thickened.
You explain the business for the fiftieth time; no—he is Luigi, of
course, but not the right Luigi, which he regrets considerably. Then
the joke is made clear to him, and he laughs again. You have lost all
your nerve, but the villagers are beginning to love you,

“Can it be O’Sciabecchino?”

“Or the figlio d’ O’Chiappino?”

“It might be O’Busciardiello (the liar).”

“He’s dead.”

“So he is. I quite forgot. Well, then it must be the husband of
A’Cicivetta (the flirt).”

“He’s in prison. But how about O’Caccianfierno?”

Suddenly a withered hag croaks authoritatively:

“I know! The gentleman wants OTentillo.”

Chorus of villagers:

“Then why doesn’t he say so?”

O’Tentillo lives far, far away. An hour elapses; at last he comes, full
of bright expectations. No, this is not your Luigi, he is another
Luigi. You are ready to sink into the earth, but there is no escape.
The crowd surges all around, the news having evidently spread to
neighbouring hamlets.

_“_Luigi—Luigi. . . . Let me see. It might be O’Rappo.”

“O’Massassillo, more likely.”

“I have it! It’s O’Spennatiello.”

“I never thought of him,” says a well-known voice. “Here, boy, run and
tell——”

“Or O’Cicereniello.”

“O’Vergeniello.”

“O’Sciabolone. ...”

“Never mind the G—— d—— son of b——,” says a cheery person in excellent
English, who has just arrived on the scene. “See here, I live fifteen
years in Brooklyn; damn fine! ’Ave a glass of wine round my place. Your
Luigi’s in America, sure. And if he isn’t, send him to Hell.”

Sound advice, this.

“What’s his surname, anyhow?” he goes on.

You explain once more.

“Why, there’s the very man you’re looking for. There, standing right in
front of you! He’s Luigi, and that’s his surname right enough. He don’t
know it himself, you bet.”

And he points to the good-natured individual. . . .

These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake
that was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and
then a plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the
uncooked fat of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week
afterwards); another one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks,
claws and feathers. Such deeds are sternly reprobated as savagery;
still, they occur, and nearly always as the result of wagers. I wish I
could couple them with equally heroic achievements in the drinking
line, but, alas! I have only heard of one old man who was wont
habitually to en-gulph twenty-two litres of wine a day; eight are
spoken of as “almost too much” in these degenerate days. . . .

Mice, says Movers, were sacrificially eaten by the Babylonians. Here,
as in England, they are cooked into a paste and given to children, to
cure a certain complaint. To take away the dread of the sea from young
boys, they mix into their food small fishes which have been devoured by
larger ones and taken from their stomachs—the underlying idea being
that these half-digested fry are thoroughly familiar with the storms
and perils of the deep, and will communicate these virtues to the boys
who eat them. It is the same principle as that of giving chamois blood
to the goat-boys of the Alps, to strengthen their nerves against
giddiness—pure sympathetic magic, of which there is this, at least, to
be said, that “its fundamental conception is identical with that of
modern science—a faith in the order or uniformity of nature.”

I have also met persons who claim to have been cured of rachitic
troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But
only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from
those foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are
taken as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the
discomfort caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a
certain kind of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them _in loco
infantis._ These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally
destroyed after performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for
curing the scrofulous tendencies of other children. Swallows’ hearts
are also used for another purpose; so is the blood of tortoises—for
strengthening the backs of children (the tortoise being a _hard_
animal). So is that of snakes, who are held up by head and tail and
pricked with needles; the greater their pain, the more beneficial their
blood, which is soaked up with cotton-wool and applied as a liniment
for swollen glands. In fact, nearly every animal has been discovered to
possess some medicinal property.

But of the charm of such creatures the people know nothing. How
different from the days of old! These legendary and gracious beasts,
that inspired poets and artists and glyptic engravers—these things of
beauty have now descended into the realm of mere usefulness, into the
pharmacopoeia.

The debasement is quite intelligible, when one remembers what
accumulated miseries these provinces have undergone. Memories of
refinement were starved out of the inhabitants by centuries of misrule,
when nothing was of interest or of value save what helped to fill the
belly. The work of bestialization was carried on by the despotism of
Spanish Viceroys and Bourbons. They, the Spaniards, fostered and
perhaps imported the Camorra, that monster of many heads which has
established itself in nearly every town of the south. Of the
deterioration in taste coincident with this period, I lately came
across this little bit of evidence, curious and conclusive:—In 1558 a
number of the country-folk were captured in one of the usual Corsair
raids; they were afterwards ransomed, and among the Christian names of
the women I note: Livia, Fiula, Cassandra, Aurelia, Lucrezia, Verginia,
Medea, Violanta, Galizia, Vittoria, Diamanta, etc. Where were these
full-sounding noble names two centuries
later—where are they nowadays? Do they not testify to a state of
culture superior to that of the present time, when Maria, Lucia, and
about four others of the most obvious catholic saints exhaust the list
of all female Christian names hereabouts?

All this is changing once more; a higher standard of comfort is being
evolved, though relics of this former state of insecurity may still be
found; such as the absence, even in houses of good families, of clocks
and watches, and convenient storage for clothes and domestic utensils;
their habits of living in penury and of buying their daily food by
farthings, as though one never knew what the next day might bring;
their dread of going out of doors by night (they have a proverb which
runs, _di notte, non parlar forte; di giorno, guardati attorno],_ their
lack of humour. For humour is essentially a product of ease, and nobody
can be at ease in unquiet times. That is why so few poets are humorous;
their restlessly querulous nature has the same effect on their outlook
as an insecure environment.

But it will be long ere these superstitions are eradicated. The magic
of south Italy deserves to be well studied, for the country is a
cauldron of demonology wherein Oriental beliefs—imported direct from
Egypt, the classic home of witchcraft—commingled with those of the
West. A foreigner is at an unfortunate disadvantage; if he asks
questions, he will only get answers dictated by suspicion or a
deliberate desire to mislead—prudent answers; whoso accepts these
explanations in good faith, might produce a wondrous contribution to
ethnology.

Wise women and wizards abound, but they are not to be compared with
that _santa_ near Naples whom I used to visit in the nineties, and who
was so successful in the magics that the Bishop of Pozzuoli, among
hundreds of other clients, was wont to drive up to her door once a week
for a consultation. These mostly occupy themselves with the manufacture
of charms for gaining lucky lottery numbers, and for deluding fond
women who wish to change their lovers.

The lore of herbs is not much studied. For bruises, a slice of the
Opuntia is applied, or the cooling parietaria (known as “pareta” or
“paretone”); the camomile and other common remedies are in vogue; the
virtues of the male fern, the rue, sabina and (home-made) ergot of rye
are well known but not employed to the extent they are in Russia, where
a large progeny is a disaster. There is a certain respect for the
legitimate unborn, and even in cases of illegitimacy some neighbouring
foundling hospital, the house of the Madonna, is much more convenient.
It is a true monk’s expedient; it avoids the risk of criminal
prosecution; the only difference being that the Mother of God, and not
the natural mother of the infant, becomes responsible for its prompt
and almost inevitable destruction.[3]

[3] The scandals that occasionally arise in connection with that
saintly institution, the Foundling Hospital at Naples, are enough to
make humanity shudder. Of 856 children living under its motherly care
during 1895, 853 “died” in the course of that one year—only three
survived; a wholesale massacre. These 853 murdered children were
carried forward in the books as still living, and the institution,
which has a yearly revenue of over 600,000 francs, was debited with
their maintenance, while 42 doctors (instead of the prescribed number
of 19) continued to draw salaries for their services to these
innocents that had meanwhile been starved and tortured to death. The
official report on these horrors ends with the words: “There is no
reason to think that these facts are peculiar to the year 1895.”

That the moon stands in sympathetic relations with living vegetation is
a fixed article of faith among the peasantry. They will prune their
plants only when the satellite is waxing—_al sottile della luna,_ as
they say. Altogether, the moon plays a considerable part in their lore,
as might be expected in a country where she used to be worshipped under
so many forms. The dusky markings on her surface are explained by
saying that the moon used to be a woman and a baker of bread, her face
gleaming with the reflection of the oven, but one day she annoyed her
mother, who took up the brush they use for sweeping away the ashes, and
smirched her face. . . .

Whoever reviews the religious observances of these people as a whole
will find them a jumble of contradictions and incongruities, lightly
held and as lightly dismissed. Theirs is the attitude of mind of little
children—of those, I mean, who have been so saturated with Bible
stories and fairy tales that they cease to care whether a thing be true
or false, if it only amuses for the moment. That is what makes them an
ideal prey for the quack physician. They will believe anything so long
as it is strange and complicated; a straightforward doctor is not
listened to; they want that mystery-making “priest-physician”
concerning whom a French writer—I forget his name—has wisely
discoursed. I once recommended a young woman who was bleeding at the
nose to try the homely remedy of a cold key. I thought she would have
died of laughing! The expedient was too absurdly simple to be
efficacious.

The attitude of the clergy in regard to popular superstitions is the
same here as elsewhere. They are too wise to believe them, and too
shrewd to discourage the belief in others; these things can be turned
to account for keeping the people at
a conveniently low level of intelligence. For the rest, these priests
are mostly good fellows of the live-and-let-live type, who would rather
cultivate their own potatoes than quarrel about vestments or the
Trinity. Violently acquisitive, of course, like most southerners. I
know a parish priest, a son of poor parents, who, by dint of sheer
energy, has amassed a fortune of half a million francs. He cannot
endure idleness in any shape, and a fine mediæval scene may be
witnessed when he suddenly appears round the corner and catches his
workmen wasting their time and his money—

“Ha, loafers, rogues, villains, vermin and sons of _bastardi cornuti!_
If God had not given me these garments and thereby closed my lips to
all evil-speaking (seizing his cassock and displaying half a yard of
purple stocking)—wouldn’t I just tell you, spawn of adulterous
assassins, what I think of you!”

But under the new regime these priests are becoming mere decorative
survivals, that look well enough in the landscape, but are not taken
seriously save in their match-making and money-lending capacities.

The intense realism of their religion is what still keeps it alive for
the poor in spirit. Their saints and devils are on the same familiar
footing towards mankind as were the old gods of Greece. Children do not
know the meaning of “Inferno”; they call it “casa del diavolo” (the
devil’s house); and if they are naughty, the mother says, “La Madonna
strilla”—the Madonna will scold. Here is a legend of Saint Peter,
interesting for its realism and because it has been grafted upon a very
ancient _motif:—_

The apostle Peter was a dissatisfied sort of man, who was always
grumbling about things in general and suggesting improvements in the
world-scheme. He thought himself cleverer even than “N. S. G. C.” One
day they were walking together in an olive orchard, and Peter said:

“Just look at the trouble and time it takes to collect all those
miserable little olives. Let’s have them the size of melons.”

“Very well. Have your way, friend Peter! But something awkward is bound
to happen. It always does, you know, with those improvements of yours.”
And, sure enough, one of these enormous olives fell from the tree
straight on the saint’s head, and ruined his new hat.

“I told you so,” said N. S. G. C.

I remember a woman explaining to me that the saints in Heaven took
their food exactly as we do, and at the same hours.

“The same food?” I asked. “Does the Madonna really eat

beans?”

“Beans? Not likely! But fried fish, and beefsteaks of veal.” I tried to
picture the scene, but the effort was too much for my hereditary
Puritan leanings. Unable to rise to these heights of realism, I was
rated a pagan for my ill-timed spirituality.

_Madame est servie. . . ._




IX
MOVING SOUTHWARDS


The train conveying me to Taranto was to halt for the night at the
second station beyond Venosa—at Spinazzola. Aware of this fact, I had
enquired about the place and received assuring reports as to its hotel
accommodation. But the fates were against me. On my arrival in the late
evening I learnt that the hotels were all closed long ago, the
townsfolk having gone to bed “with the chickens”; it was suggested that
I had better stay at the station, where the manageress of the
restaurant kept certain sleeping quarters specially provided for
travellers in my predicament.

Presently the gentle dame lighted a dim lantern and led me across what
seemed to be a marsh (it was raining) to the door of a hut which was to
be my resting-place. At the entrance she paused, and after informing me
that a band of musicians had taken all the beds save one which was at
my disposal if I were good enough to pay her half a franc, she placed
the lantern in my hand and stumbled back into the darkness.

I stepped into a low chamber, the beds of which were smothered under a
profusion of miscellaneous wraps. The air was warm—the place exhaled an
indescribable _esprit de corps._ Groping further, I reached another
apartment, vaulted and still lower than the last, an old-fashioned
cow-stable, possibly, converted into a bedroom. One glance sufficed me:
the couch was plainly not to be trusted. Thankful to be out of the rain
at least, I lit a pipe and prepared to pass the weary hours till 4 a.m.

It was not long ere I discovered that there was another bed in this
den, opposite my own; and judging by certain undulatory and saltatory
movements within, it was occupied. Presently the head of a youth
emerged, with closed eyes and flushed features. He indulged in a series
of groans and spasmodic kicks, that subsided once more, only to
recommence. A flute projected from under his pillow.

“This poor young man,” I thought, “is plainly in bad case. On account
of illness, he has been left behind by the rest of the
band, who have gone to Spinazzola to play at some marriage festival. He
is feverish, or possibly subject to fits—to choriasis or who knows what
disorder of the nervous system. A cruel trick, to leave a suffering
youngster alone in this foul hovel.” I misliked his symptoms—that
anguished complexion and delirious intermittent trembling, and began to
run over the scanty stock of household remedies contained in my bag,
wondering which of them might apply to his complaint. There was court
plaster and boot polish, quinine, corrosive sublimate and Worcester
sauce (detestable stuff, but indispensable hereabouts).

Just as I had decided in favour of the last-named, he gave a more than
usually vigorous jerk, sat up in bed and, opening his eyes, remarked:

“Those fleas!”

This, then, was the malady. I enquired why he had not joined his
companions.

He was tired, he said; tired of life in general, and of flute-playing
in particular. Tired, moreover, of certain animals; and with a
tiger-like spring he leapt out of bed.

Once thoroughly awake, he proved an amiable talker, though oppressed
with an incurable melancholy which no amount of tobacco and Venosa wine
could dispel. In gravely boyish fashion he told me of his life and
ambitions. He had passed a high standard at school, but—what would
you?—every post was crowded. He liked music, and would gladly take it
up as a profession, if anything could be learnt with a band such as
his; he was sick, utterly sick, of everything. Above all things, he
wished to travel. Visions of America floated before his mind—where was
the money to come from? Besides, there was the military service looming
close at hand; and then, a widowed mother at home—the inevitable
mother—with a couple of little sisters; how shall a man desert his
family? He was born on a farm on the Murge, the watershed between this
country and the Adriatic. Thinking of the Murge, that shapeless and
dismal range of limestone hills whose name suggests its sad monotony, I
began to understand the origin of his pagan wistfulness.

“Happy foreigners!”—such was his constant refrain—“happy foreigners,
who can always do exactly what they like! Tell me something about other
countries,” he said.

“Something true?”

“Anything—anything!”

To cheer him up, I replied with improbable tales of Indian life, of
rajahs and diamonds, of panthers whose eyes shine like
moonbeams in the dark jungle, of elephants huge as battleships, of
sportive monkeys who tie knots in each others’ tails and build
themselves huts among the trees, where they brew iced lemonade, which
they offer in friendliest fashion to the thirsty wayfarer, together
with other light refreshment——

“Cigarettes as well?”

“No. They are not allowed to cultivate tobacco.”

“Ah, that _monopolio,_ the curse of humanity!”

He was almost smiling when, at 2.30 a.m., there resounded a furious
knocking at the door, and the rest of the band appeared from their
unknown quarters in the liveliest of spirits. Altogether, a memorable
night. But at four o’clock the lantern was extinguished and the cavern,
bereft of its Salvator-Rosa glamour, resolved itself into a prosaic and
infernally unclean hovel. Issuing from the door, I saw those murky
recesses invaded by the uncompromising light of dawn, and shuddered. .
.

The railway journey soon dispelled the phantoms of the night. As the
train sped downhill, the sun rose in splendour behind the Murge hills,
devouring mists so thickly couched that, struck by the first beams,
they glistered like compact snow-fields, while their shaded portions
might have been mistaken for stretches of mysterious swamp, from which
an occasional clump of tree-tops emerged, black and island-like. These
dreamland effects lasted but a brief time, and soon the whole face of
the landscape was revealed. An arid region, not unlike certain parts of
northern Africa.

Yet the line passes through places renowned in history. Who would not
like to spend a day at Altamura, if only in memory of its treatment by
the ferocious Cardinal Ruffo and his army of cut-throats? After a
heroic but vain resistance comparable only to that of Saguntum or
Petelia, during which every available metal, and even money, was
converted into bullets to repel the assailers, there followed a three
days’ slaughter of young and old; then the cardinal blessed his army
and pronounced, in the blood-drenched streets, a general absolution.
Even this man has discovered apologists. No cause so vile, that some
human being will not be found to defend it.

So much I called to mind that morning from the pages of Colletta, and
straightway formed a resolution to slip out of the carriage and arrest
my journey at Altamura for a couple of days. But I must have been
asleep while the train passed through the station, nor did I wake up
again till the blue Ionian was in sight.

At Venosa one thinks of Roman legionaries fleeing from
Hannibal, of Horace, of Norman ambitions; Lucera and Manfredonia call
up Saracen memories and the ephemeral gleams of Hohenstaufen; Gargano
takes us back into Byzantine mysticism and monkery. And now from
Altamura with its dark record of Bourbon horrors, we glide into the
sunshine of Hellenic days when the wise Archytas, sage and lawgiver,
friend of Plato, ruled this ancient city of Tarentum. A wide sweep of
history! And if those Periclean times be not remote enough, yonder lies
Oria on its hilltop, the stronghold of pre-Hellenic and almost
legendary Messapians; while for such as desire more recent associations
there is the Albanian colony of San Giorgio, only a few miles distant,
to recall the glories of Scanderbeg and his adventurous bands.

Herein lies the charm of travel in this land of multiple
civilizations—the ever-changing layers of culture one encounters, their
wondrous juxtaposition.

My previous experiences of Taranto hotels counselled me to take a
private room overlooking the inland sea (the southern aspect is already
intolerably hot), and to seek my meals at restaurants. And in such a
one I have lived for the last ten days or so, reviving old memories.
The place has grown in the interval; indeed, if one may believe certain
persons, the population has increased from thirty to ninety thousand
in—I forget how few years. The arsenal brings movement into the town;
it has appropriated the lion’s share of building sites in the “new”
town. Is it a ripple on the surface of things, or will it truly stir
the spirits of the city? So many arsenals have come and gone, at
Taranto!

This arsenal quarter is a fine example of the Italian mania of _fare
figura—_everything for effect. It is an agglomeration of dreary
streets, haunted by legions of clamorous black swifts, and constructed
on the rectangular principle dear to the Latin mind. Modern, and
surpassingly monotonous. Are such interminable rows of stuccoed
barracks artistic to look upon, are they really pleasant to inhabit? Is
it reasonable or even sanitary, in a climate of eight months’ sunshine,
to build these enormous roadways and squares filled with glaring
limestone dust that blows into one’s eyes and almost suffocates one;
these Saharas that even at the present season of the year (early June)
cannot be traversed comfortably unless one wears brown spectacles and
goes veiled like a Tuareg? This arsenal quarter must be a hell during
the really not season, which continues into October.

For no trees whatever are planted to shade the walking population, as
in Paris or Cairo or any other sunlit city.

And who could guess the reason? An Englishman, at least, would never
bring himself to believe what is nevertheless a fact, namely, that if
the streets are converted into shady boulevards, the rents of the
houses immediately fall. When trees are planted, the lodgers complain
and finally emigrate to other quarters; the experiment has been tried,
at Naples and elsewhere, and always with the same result. Up trees,
down rents. The tenants refuse to be deprived of their chief pleasure
in life—that of gazing at the street-passengers, who must be good
enough to walk in the sunshine for their delectation. But if you are of
an inquisitive turn of mind, you are quite at liberty to return the
compliment and to study from the outside the most intimate details of
the tenants’ lives within. Take your fill of their domestic doings;
stare your hardest. They don’t mind in the least, not they! That
feeling of privacy which the northerner fosters doggedly even in the
centre of a teeming city is alien to their hearts; they like to look
and be looked at; they live like fish in an aquarium. It is a result of
the whole palazzo-system that every one knows his neighbour’s business
better than his own. What does it matter, in the end? Are we not all
“Christians”?

The municipality, meanwhile, is deeply indebted for the sky-piercing
ambitions which have culminated in the building of this new quarter. To
meet these obligations, the octroi prices have been raised to the
highest pitch by the City Fathers. This octroi is farmed out and
produces (they tell me) 120 pounds a day; there are some hundred
toll-collecting posts at the outskirts of the town, and the average
salary of their officials is three pounds a month. They are supposed to
be respectable and honest men, but it is difficult to see how a family
can be supported on that wage, when one knows how high the rents are,
and how severely the most ordinary commodities of life are taxed.

[Illustration: Sole Relic of old Taras]

I endeavoured to obtain photographs of the land as it looked ere it was
covered by the arsenal quarter, but in vain. Nobody seems to have
thought it worth while preserving what would surely be a notable
economic document for future generations. Out of sheer curiosity I also
tried to procure a plan of the old quarter, that labyrinth of
thick-clustering humanity, where the streets are often so narrow that
two persons can barely squeeze past each other. I was informed that no
such plan had ever been drawn up; it was agreed that a map of this kind
might be interesting, and suggested, furthermore, that I might
undertake the task myself; the authorities would doubtless appreciate
my labours. We foreigners, be it understood, have ample means and
unlimited leisure, and like nothing better than doing unprofitable jobs
of this kind.[1]

[1] There is a map of old Taranto in Lasor a Varea (Savonarola)
_Universus terrarum etc.,_ Vol. II, p. 552, and another in J. Blaev’s
_Theatrum Civitatum_ (1663). He talks of the “rude houses” of this
town.

One is glad to leave the scintillating desert of this arsenal quarter,
and enter the cool stone-paved streets of the other, which remind one
somewhat of Malta. In the days of Salis-Marschlins this city possessed
only 18,000 inhabitants, and “outdid even the customary Italian filth,
being hardly passable on account of the excessive nastiness and stink.”
It is now scrupulously clean—so absurdly clean, that it has quite
ceased to be picturesque. Not that its buildings are particularly
attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique “Trinità” column of
Doric gravity—sole survivor of Hellenic Taras, which looks wondrously
out of place in its modern environment. One of the finest of these
earlier monuments, the Orsini tower depicted in old prints of the
place, has now been demolished.

Lovers of the baroque may visit the shrine of Saint Cataldo, a jovial
nightmare in stone. And they who desire a literary pendant to this
fantastic structure should read the life of the saint written by Morone
in 1642. Like the shrine, it is the quintessence of insipid exuberance;
there is something preposterous in its very title “Cataldiados,” and
whoever reads through those six books of Latin hexameters will arise
from the perusal half-dazed. Somehow or other, it dislocates one’s
whole sense of terrestrial values to see a frowsy old monk[2] treated
in the heroic style and metre, as though he were a new Achilles. As a
_jeu d’esprit_ the book might pass; but it is deadly serious. Single
men will always be found to perpetrate monstrosities of literature; the
marvel is that an entire generation of writers should have worked
themselves into a state of mind which solemnly approved of such freaks.

[2] This wandering Irish missionary is supposed to have died here in
the seventh century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed
biographies will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in
1766, in the Cuomo Library at Naples.

Every one has heard of the strange position of this hoary
island-citadel (a metropolis, already, in neolithic days). It is of
oval shape, the broad sides washed by the Ionian Sea and an
oyster-producing lagoon; bridges connect it at one extremity with the
arsenal or new town, and at the other with the so-called commercial
quarter. It is as if some precious gem were set, in a ring, between two
others of minor worth. Or, to vary the simile, this acropolis, with its
close-packed alleys, is the throbbing heart
of Taranto; the arsenal quarter—its head; and that other one—well, its
stomach; quite an insignificant stomach as compared with the head and
corroborative, in so far, of the views of Metchnikoff, who holds that
this hitherto commendable organ ought now to be reduced in size, if not
abolished altogether. . . .

From out of this window I gaze upon the purple lagoon flecked with
warships and sailing-boats; and beyond it, upon the venerable land of
Japygia, the heel of Italy, that rises in heliotrope-tinted undulations
towards the Adriatic watershed. At night-time an exquisite perfume of
flowers and ripe corn comes wafted into my room over the still waters,
and when the sun rises, white settlements begin to sparkle among its
olives and vineyards. My eyes often rest upon one of them; it is
Grottaglie, distant a few miles from Taranto on the Brindisi line. I
must visit Grottaglie, for it was here that the flying monk received
his education.

The flying monk!

The theme is not inappropriate at this moment, when the newspapers are
ringing with the Paris-Rome aviation contest and the achievements of
Beaumont, Garros and their colleagues. I have purposely brought his
biography with me, to re-peruse on the spot. But let me first explain
how I became acquainted with this seventeenth-century pioneer of
aviation.

It was an odd coincidence.

I had arrived in Naples, and was anxious to have news of the
proceedings at a certain aviation meeting in the north, where a rather
inexperienced friend of mine had insisted upon taking a part; the
newspaper reports of these entertainments are enough to disturb
anybody. While admiring the great achievements of modern science in
this direction, I wished devoutly, at that particular moment, that
flying had never been invented; and it was something of a coincidence,
I say, that stumbling in this frame of mind down one of the unspeakable
little side-streets in the neighbourhood of the University, my glance
should have fallen upon an eighteenth-century engraving in a
bookseller’s window which depicted a man raised above the ground
without any visible means of support—flying, in short. He was a monk,
floating before an altar. A companion, near at hand, was portrayed as
gazing in rapturous wonder at this feat of levitation. I stepped within
and demanded the volume to which this was the frontispiece.

The salesman, a hungry-looking old fellow with incredibly dirty hands
and face, began to explain.

[Illustration: CanFishing at Tarantoyon]

“The Flying Monk, sir, Joseph of Copertino. A mighty saint and
conjuror! Or perhaps you would like some other book? I have many, many
lives of _santi_ here. Look at this one of the great Egidio, for
instance. I can tell you all about him, for he raised my mother’s
grand-uncle from the dead; yes, out of the grave, as one may say.
You’ll find out all about it in this book; and it’s only one of his
thousand miracles. And here is the biography of the renowned
Giangiuseppe, a mighty saint and——”

I was paying little heed; the flying monk had enthralled me. An
unsuspected pioneer of aviation . . . here was a discovery!

“He flew?” I queried, my mind reverting to the much-vaunted triumphs of
modern science.

“Why not? The only reason why people don’t fly like that nowadays is
because—well, sir, because they can’t. They fly with machines, and
think it something quite new and wonderful. And yet it’s as old as the
hills! There was Iscariot, for example—Icarus, I mean——”

“Pure legend, my good man.”

“Everything becomes legend, if the gentleman will have the goodness to
wait. And here is the biography of——”

“How much for Joseph of Copertino?” Cost what it may, I said to myself,
that volume must be mine.

He took it up and began to turn over the pages lovingly, as though
handling some priceless Book of Hours.

“A fine engraving,” he observed, _sotto voce._ “And this is the best of
many biographies of the flying monk. It is by Rossi, the
Minister-General of the Franciscan order to which our monk belonged;
the official biography, it might be called—dedicated, by permission, to
His Holiness Pope Clemens XIII, and based on the documents which led to
the saint’s beatification. Altogether, a remarkable volume——”

And he paused awhile. Then continued:

“I possess a cheaper biography of him, also with a frontispiece, by
Montanari, which has the questionable advantage of being printed as
recently as 1853. And here is yet another one, by Antonio Basile—oh, he
has been much written about; a most celebrated _taumaturgo,_
(wonder-worker)! As to this _Life_ of 1767, I could not, with a good
conscience, appraise it at less than five francs.”

“I respect your feelings. But—five francs! I have certain scruples of
my own, you know, and it irks my sense of rectitude to pay five francs
for the flying monk unless you can supply me with six or seven
additional books to be included in that sum.
Twelve _soldi_ (sous) apiece—that strikes me as the proper price of
such literature, for foreigners, at least. Therefore I’ll have the
great Egidio as well, and Montanari’s life of the flying monk, and that
other one by Basile, and Giangiuseppe, and——”

“By all means! Pray take your choice.”

And so it came about that, relieved of a tenuous and very sticky
five-franc note, and loaded down with three biographies of the flying
monk, one of Egidio, two of Giangiuseppe—I had been hopelessly
swindled, but there! no man can bargain in a hurry, and my eagerness to
learn something of the life of this early airman had made me oblivious
of the natural values of things—and with sundry smaller volumes of
similar import bulging out of my pockets I turned in the direction of
the hotel, promising myself some new if not exactly light reading.

But hardly had I proceeded twenty paces before the shopkeeper came
running after me with another formidable bundle under his arm. More
books! An ominous symptom—the clearest demonstration of my defeat; I
was already a marked man, a good customer. It was humiliating, after my
long years’ experience of the south.

And there resounded an unmistakable note of triumph in his voice, as he
said:

“Some more biographies, sir. Read them at your leisure, and pay me what
you like. You cannot help being generous; I see it in your face.”

“I always try to encourage polite learning, if that is what you think
to decipher in my features. But it rains _santi_ this morning,” I
added, rather sourly.

“The gentleman is pleased to joke! May it rain _soldi_ tomorrow.”

“A little shower, possibly. But not a cloud-burst, like today. . . .”




X
THE FLYING MONK


As to the flying monk, there is no doubt whatever that he deserved his
name.

He flew. Being a monk, these feats of his were naturally confined to
convents and their immediate surroundings, but that does not alter the
facts of the case.

Of the flights that he took in the little town of Copertino alone, more
than seventy, says Father Rossi whom I follow throughout, are on record
in the depositions which were taken on oath from eye-witnesses after
his death. This is one of them, for example:

“Stupendous likewise was the _ratto_ (flight or rapture) which he
exhibited on a night of Holy Thursday. . . . He suddenly flew towards
the altar in a straight line, leaving untouched all the ornaments of
that structure; and after some time, being called back by his superior,
returned flying to the spot whence he had set out.”

And another:

“He flew similarly upon an olive tree . . . and there remained in
kneeling posture for the space of half an hour. A marvellous thing it
was to see the branch which sustained him swaying lightly, as though a
bird had alighted upon it.”

But Copertino is a remote little place, already famous in the annals of
miraculous occurrences. It can be urged that a kind of enthusiasm for
their distinguished brother-monk may have tempted the inmates of the
convent to exaggerate his rare gifts. Nothing of the kind. He performed
flights not only in Copertino, but in various large towns of Italy,
such as Naples, Rome, and Assisi. And the spectators were by no means
an assemblage of ignorant personages, but men whose rank and
credibility would have weight in any section of society.

“While the Lord High Admiral of Castille, Ambassador of Spain at the
Vatican, was passing through Assisi in the year 1645, the custodian of
the convent commanded Joseph to descend from the room into the church,
where the Admiral’s lady was waiting
for him, desirous of seeing him. and speaking to him; to whom Joseph
replied, ‘I will obey, but I do not know whether I shall be able to
speak to her.’ And, as a matter of fact, hardly had he entered the
church and raised his eyes to a statue . . . situated above the altar,
when he threw himself into a flight in order to embrace its feet at a
distance of twelve paces, passing over the heads of all the
congregation; then, after remaining there some time, he flew back over
them with his usual cry, and immediately returned to his cell. The
Admiral was amazed, his wife fainted away, and all the onlookers became
piously terrified.”

And if this does not suffice to win credence, the following will
assuredly do so:

“And since it was God’s wish to render him marvellous even in the sight
of men of the highest sphere, He ordained that Joseph, having arrived
in Rome, should be conducted one day by the Father-General (of the
Franciscan Order) to kiss the feet of the High Pontiff, Urban the
Eighth; in which act, while contemplating Jesus Christ in the person of
His Vicar, he was ecstatically raised in air, and thus remained till
called back by the General, to whom His Holiness, highly astonished,
turned and said that ‘if Joseph were to die during his pontificate, he
himself would bear witness to this _successo.’”_

But his most remarkable flights took place at Fossombrone, where once
“detaching himself in swiftest manner from the altar with a cry like
thunder, he went, like lightning, gyrating hither and thither about the
chapel, and with such an impetus that he made all the cells of the
dormitory tremble, so that the monks, issuing thence in consternation,
cried, ‘An earthquake! An earthquake!’” Here, too, he cast a young
sheep into the air, and took flight after it to the height of the
trees, where he “remained in kneeling posture, ecstatic and with
extended arms, for more than two hours, to the extraordinary marvel of
the clergy who witnessed this.” This would seem to have been his
outdoor record—two hours without descent to earth.

Sometimes, furthermore, he took a passenger, if such a term can
properly be applied.

So once, while the monks were at prayers, he was observed to rise up
and run swiftly towards the Confessor of the convent, and “seizing him
by the hand, he raised him from the ground by supernatural force, and
with jubilant rapture drew him along, turning him round and round in a
_violento ballo;_ the Confessor moved by Joseph, and Joseph by God.”

And what happened at Assisi is still more noteworthy, for here
was a gentleman, a suffering invalid, whom Joseph “snatched by the
hair, and, uttering his customary cry of ‘oh!’ raised himself from the
earth, while he drew the other after him by his hair, carrying him in
this fashion for a short while through the air, to the intensest
admiration of the spectators.” The patient, whose name was Chevalier
Baldassarre, discovered, on touching earth again, that he had been
cured by this flight of a severe nervous malady which had hitherto
afflicted him. . . .

Searching in the biography for some other interesting traits of Saint
Joseph of Copertino, I find, in marked contrast to his heaven-soaring
virtues, a humility of the profoundest kind. Even as a full-grown man
he retained the exhilarating, childlike nature of the pure in heart.
“_La Mamma mia_”—thus he would speak, in playful-saintly fashion, of
the Mother of God—“_la Mamma mia_ is capricious. When I bring Her
flowers, She tells me She does not want them; when I bring Her candles,
She also does not want them; and when I ask Her what She wants, She
says, ‘I want the heart, for I feed only on hearts.’” What wonder if
the “mere pronouncement of the name of Maria often sufficed to raise
him from the ground into the air”?

Nevertheless, the arch-fiend was wont to creep into his cell at night
and to beat and torture him; and the monks of the convent were
terrified when they heard the hideous din of echoing blows and jangling
chains. “We were only having a little game,” he would then say. This is
refreshingly boyish. He once induced a flock of sheep to enter the
chapel, and while he recited to them the litany, it was observed with
amazement that “they responded at the proper place to his verses—he
saying _Sancta Maria,_ and they answering, after their manner, _Bah!”_

I am not disguising from myself that an incident like the last-named
may smack of childishness to a certain austere type of northern
Puritan. Childishness! But to go into this question of the relative
hilarity and moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for
aught I know it may, at bottom, be a matter of climatic influences, and
there we can leave it. Under the sunny sky of Italy, who would not be
disposed to see the bright side of things?

Saint Joseph of Copertino performed a variety of other miracles. He
multiplied bread and wine, calmed a tempest, drove out devils, caused
the lame to walk and the blind to see—all of which are duly attested by
eye-witnesses on oath. Though “illiterate,” he had an innate knowledge
of ecclesiastical dogma; he detected persons of impure life by their
smell, and sinners were revealed to
his eyes with faces of black colour (the Turks believe that on judgment
day the damned will be thus marked); he enjoyed the company of two
guardian angels, which were visible not only to himself but to other
people. And, like all too many saints, he duly fell into the clutches
of the Inquisition, ever on the look-out for victims pious or
otherwise.

There is one little detail which it would be disingenuous to slur over.
It is this. We are told that Saint Joseph was awkward and backward in
his development. As a child his boy-comrades used to laugh at him for
his open-mouthed staring habits; they called him “bocca-aperta”
(gape-mouth), and in the frontispiece to Montanari’s life of him, which
depicts him as a bearded man of forty or fifty, his mouth is still
agape; he was, moreover, difficult to teach, and Rossi says he profited
very little by his lessons and was of _niuna letteratura._ As a lad of
seventeen he could not distinguish white bread from brown, and he used
to spill water-cans, break vases and drop plates to such an extent that
the monks of the convent who employed him were obliged, after eight
months’ probation, to dismiss him from their service. He was unable to
pass his examination as priest. At the age of twenty-five he was
ordained by the Bishop of Castro, without that formality.

All this points to a certain weak-mindedness or arrested development,
and were this an isolated case one might be inclined to think that the
church had made Saint Joseph an object of veneration on the same
principles as do the Arabs, who elevate idiots, epileptics, and
otherwise deficient creatures to the rank of marabouts, and credit them
with supernatural powers.

But it is not an isolated case. The majority of these southern saints
are distinguished from the vulgar herd by idiosyncrasies to which
modern physicians give singular names such as “gynophobia,”
“glossolalia” and “demonomania”[1]; even the founder of the flying
monk’s order, the great Francis of Assisi, has been accused of some
strange-sounding mental disorder because, with touching humility, he
doffed his vestments and presented himself naked before his Creator.
What are we to conclude therefrom?

[1] Good examples of what Max Nordau calls _Echolalie_ are to be found
in this biography (p. 22).

The flying monk resembles Saint Francis in more than one feature. He,
too, removed his clothes and even his shirt, and exposed himself thus
to a crucifix, exclaiming, “Here I am, Lord, deprived of everything.”
He followed his prototype, further, in that charming custom of
introducing the animal world into his
ordinary talk (“Brother Wolf, Sister Swallow,” etc.). So Joseph used to
speak of himself as _l’asinelio—_the little ass; and a pathetic scene
was witnessed on his death-bed when he was heard to mutter:
“_L’asinelio_ begins to climb the mountain; _l’asinelio_ is half-way
up; _l’asinelio_ has reached the summit; _l’asinelio_ can go no
further, and is about to leave his skin behind.”

It is to be noted, in this connection, that Saint Joseph of Coper-tino
was born in a stable.

This looks like more than a mere coincidence. For the divine Saint
Francis was likewise born in a stable.

But why should either of these holy men be born in stables?

A reasonable explanation lies at hand. A certain Japanese statesman is
credited with that shrewd remark that the manifold excellencies and
diversities of Hellenic art are due to the fact that the Greeks had no
“old masters” to copy from—no “schools” which supplied their
imagination with ready-made models that limit and smother individual
initiative. And one marvels to think into what exotic beauties these
southern saints would have blossomed, had they been at liberty, like
those Greeks, freely to indulge their versatile genius—had they not
been bound to the wheels of inexorable precedent. If the flying monk,
for example, were an ordinary mortal, there was nothing to prevent him
from being born in an omnibus or some other of the thousand odd places
where ordinary mortals occasionally are born. But—no! As a Franciscan
saint, he was obliged to conform to the school of Bethlehem and Assisi.
He was obliged to select a stable. Such is the force of tradition. . .

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