Fencing and music are taught, but those athletic exercises which led to

the victories of Marathon and Salamis are not much in vogue—_mens sana

in corpore sana_ is clearly not the ideal of the place; fighting among

the boys is reprobated as “savagery,” and corporal punishment

forbidden. There is no playground or workshop, and their sole exercise

consists in dull promenades along the high road under the supervision

of one or more teachers, during which the

youngsters indulge in attempts at games by the wayside which are truly

pathetic. So the old “Inviolable Constitutions” ordain that “the

scholars must not play outside the college, and if they meet any one,

they should lower their voices.” A rule of recent introduction is that

in this warm weather they must all lie down to sleep for two hours

after the midday meal; it may suit the managers, but the boys consider

it a great hardship and would prefer being allowed to play. Altogether,

whatever the intellectual results may be, the moral tendency of such an

upbringing is damaging to the spirit of youth and must make for

precocious frivolity and brutality. But the pedagogues of Italy are

like her legislators: theorists. They close their eyes to the cardinal

principles of all education—that the waste products and toxins of the

imagination are best eliminated by motor activities, and that the

immature stage of human development, far from being artificially

shortened, should be prolonged by every possible means.

If the internal arrangement of this institution is not all it might be

as regards the healthy development of youth, the situation of the

college resembles the venerable structures of Oxford in that it is too

good, far too good, for mere youngsters. This building, in its

seclusion from the world, its pastoral surroundings and soul-inspiring

panorama, is an abode not for boys but for philosophers; a place to

fill with a wave of deep content the sage who has outgrown earthly

ambitions. Your eye embraces the snow-clad heights of Dolcedorme and

the Ionian Sea, wandering over forests, and villages, and rivers, and

long reaches of fertile country; but it is not the variety of the

scene, nor yet the historical memories of old Sybaris which kindle the

imagination so much as the spacious amplitude of the whole prospect. In

England we think something of a view of ten miles. Conceive, here, a

grandiose valley wider than from Dover to Calais, filled with an

atmosphere of such impeccable clarity that there are moments when one

thinks to see every stone and every bush on the mountains yonder,

thirty miles distant. And the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such

as would inspire the brush of Turner or Claude Lorraine. . . .

For the college, as befits its grave academic character, stands by

itself among fruitful fields and backed by a chestnut wood, at ten

minutes’ walk from the crowded streets. It is an imposing edifice—the

Basilean convent of St. Adrian, with copious modern additions; the

founders may well have selected this particular site on account of its

fountain of fresh water, which flows on as in days of yore. One thinks

of those communities of monks in the Middle Ages, scattered over this

wild region and holding rare converse with

one another by gloomy forest paths—how remote their life and ideals! In

the days of Fiore (1691) the inmates of this convent still practised

their old rites.

The nucleus of the building is the old chapel, containing a remarkable

font; two antique columns sawn up (apparently for purposes of

transportation from some pagan temple by the shore)—one of them being

of African marble and the other of grey granite; there is also a

tessellated pavement with beast-patterns of leopards and serpents akin

to those of Patir. Bertaux gives a reproduction of this serpent; he

assimilates it, as regards technique and age, to that which lies before

the altar of Monte Cassino and was wrought by Greek artisans of the

abbot Desiderius. The church itself is held to be two centuries older

than that of Patir.

The library, once celebrated, contains musty folios of classics and

their commentators, but nothing of value. It has been ransacked of its

treasures like that of Patir, whose _disjecta membra_ have been tracked

down by the patience and acumen of Monsignor Batiffol.

Batiffol, Bertaux—Charles Diehl, Jules Gay (who has also written on San

Demetrio)—Huillard-Bréholles—Luynes—Lenor-mant. . . here are a few

French scholars who have recently studied these regions and their

history. What have we English done in this direction?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Such thoughts occur inevitably.

It may be insinuated that researches of this kind are gleanings; that

our English genius lies rather in the spade-work of pioneers like Leake

or Layard. Granted. But a hard fact remains; the fact, namely, that

could any of our scholars have been capable of writing in the large and

profound manner of Bertaux or Gay, not one of our publishers would have

undertaken to print his work. Not one. They know their business; they

know that such a book would have been a dead loss. Therefore let us

frankly confess the truth: for things of the mind there is a smaller

market in England than in France. _How much smaller_ only they can

tell, who have familiarized themselves with other departments of French

thought.

Here, then, I have lived for the past few days, strolling among the

fields, and attempting to shape some picture of these Albanians from

their habits and such of their literature as has been placed at my

disposal. So far, my impression of them has not changed since the days

when I used to rest at their villages, in Greece. They remind me of the

Irish. Both races are scattered over the earth and

seem to prosper best outside their native country; they have the same

songs and bards, the same hero-chieftains, the same combativeness and

frank hospitality; both are sunk in bigotry and broils; they resemble

one another in their love of dirt, disorder and display, in their

enthusiastic and adventurous spirit, their versatile brilliance of

mind, their incapacity for self-government and general (Keltic) note of

inspired inefficiency. And both profess a frenzied allegiance to an

obsolete tongue which, were it really cultivated as they wish, would

put a barrier of triple brass between themselves and the rest of

humanity.

Even as the Irish despise the English as their worldly and effete

relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks—even those of

Pericles—with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their

writers, are “the oldest people upon earth,” and their language is the

“divine Pelasgic mother-tongue.” I grew interested awhile in Stanislao

Marchianò’s plausibly entrancing study on this language, as well as in

a pamphlet of de Rada’s on the same subject; but my ardour has cooled

since learning, from another native grammarian, that these writers are

hopelessly in the wrong on nearly every point. So much is certain, that

the Albanian language already possesses more than _thirty different

alphabets_ (each of them with nearly fifty letters). Nevertheless they

have not yet, in these last four (or forty) thousand years, made up

their minds which of them to adopt, or whether it would not be wisest,

after all, to elaborate yet another one—a thirty-first. And so

difficult is their language with any of these alphabets that even after

a five days’ residence on the spot I still find myself puzzled by such

simple passages as this:

. . . Zilji,

mosse vet, ce asso mbremie

te ngcriret me iljiζ, praa

gjiθ e miegculem, mhi ζiaarr

rriij i sgjuat. Nje voogh e keljbur

ζorrevet te ljosta

ndjej se i oχtenej

e pisseroghej. Zuu shiu

menes; ne mee se ljinaar

chish ljeen pa-shuatur

sκiotta, e i ducheje per moon.

I will only add that the translation of such a passage—it contains

twenty-eight accents which I have omitted—is mere child’s play to its

pronunciation.

XXIV

AN ALBANIAN SEER

Sometimes I find my way to the village of Macchia, distant about three

miles from San Demetrio. It is a dilapidated but picturesque cluster of

houses, situate on a projecting tongue of land which is terminated by a

little chapel to Saint Elias, the old sun-god Helios, lover of peaks

and promontories, whom in his Christian shape the rude Albanian

colonists brought hither from their fatherland, even as, centuries

before, he had accompanied the Byzantines on the same voyage and,

fifteen centuries yet earlier, the Greeks.

At Macchia was born, in 1814, of an old and relatively wealthy family,

Girolamo de Rada,[1] a flame-like patriot in whom the tempestuous

aspirations of modern Albania took shape. The ideal pursued during his

long life was the regeneration of his country; and if the attention of

international congresses and linguists and folklorists is now drawn to

this little corner of the earth—if, in _1902,_ twenty-one newspapers

were devoted to the Albanian cause (eighteen in Italy alone, and one

even in London)—it was wholly his merit.

[1] Thus his friend and compatriot, Dr. Michele Marchianò, spells the

name in a biography which I recommend to those who think there is no

intellectual movement in South Italy. But he himself, at the very

close of his life, in 1902, signs himself Ger. de Rhada. So this

village of Macchia is spelt indifferently by Albanians as Maki or

Makji. They have a fine Elizabethan contempt for orthography—as well

they may have, with their thirty alphabets.

He was the son of a Greco-Catholic priest. After a stern religious

upbringing under the paternal roof at Macchia and in the college of San

Demetrio, he was sent to Naples to complete his education. It is

characteristic of the man that even in the heyday of youth he cared

little for modern literature and speculations and all that makes for

exact knowledge, and that he fled from his Latin teacher, the

celebrated Puoti, on account of his somewhat exclusive love of

grammatical rules. None the less, though con-genitally averse to the

materialistic and subversive theories that were then seething in

Naples, he became entangled in the anti-Bourbon movements of the late

thirties, and narrowly avoided the

death-penalty which struck down some of his comrades. At other times

his natural piety laid him open to the accusation of reactionary

monarchical leanings.

He attributed his escape from this and every other peril to the hand of

God. Throughout life he was a zealous reader of the Bible, a firm and

even ascetic believer, forever preoccupied, in childlike simplicity of

soul, with first causes. His spirit moved majestically in a world of

fervent platitudes. The whole Cosmos lay serenely distended before his

mental vision; a benevolent God overhead, devising plans for the

prosperity of Albania; a malignant, ubiquitous and very real devil,

thwarting these His good intentions whenever possible; mankind on

earth, sowing and reaping in the sweat of their brow, as was ordained

of old. Like many poets, he never disabused his mind of this

comfortable form of anthropomorphism. He was a firm believer, too, in

dreams. But his guiding motive, his sun by day and star by night, was a

belief in the “mission” of the Pelasgian race now scattered about the

shores of the Inland Sea—in Italy, Sicily, Greece, Dalmatia, Roumania,

Asia Minor, Egypt—a belief as ardent and irresponsible as that which

animates the _Lost Tribe_ enthusiasts of England. He considered that

the world hardly realized how much it owed to his countryfolk;

according to his views, Achilles, Philip of Macedon, Alexander the

Great, Aristotle, Pyrrhus, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate—they were

all Albanians. Yet even towards the end of his life he is obliged to

confess:—

“But the evil demon who for over four thousand years has been hindering

the Pelasgian race from collecting itself into one state, is still

endeavouring by insidious means to thwart the work which would lead it

to that union.”

Disgusted with the clamorous and intriguing bustle of Naples, he

retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia,

throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He

describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the “facile fatuity” of

Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist

has called the _function of the real;_ his temperament was not of the

kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his

life—it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward he loses personal touch

with thinking humanity. At Macchia he remained, brooding on Albanian

wrongs, devising remedies, corresponding with foreigners and

writing—ever writing; consuming his patrimony in the cause of Albania,

till the direst poverty dogged his footsteps.

I have read some of his Italian works. They are curiously

oracular, like the whisperings of those fabled Dodonian oaks of his

fatherland; they heave with a darkly-virile mysticism. He shares

Blake’s ruggedness, his torrential and confused utterance, his

benevolence, his flashes of luminous inspiration, his moral background.

He resembles that visionary in another aspect: he was a consistent and

passionate adorer of the _Ewig-weibliche._ Some of the female

characters in his poems retain their dewy freshness, their exquisite

originality, even after passing through the translator’s crucible.

At the age of 19 he wrote a poem on “Odysseus,” which was published

under a pseudonym. Then, three years later, there appeared a collection

of rhapsodies entitled “Milosao,” which he had garnered from the lips

of Albanian village maidens. It is his best-known work, and has been

translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia

followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially

during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became

prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology,

ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals—nothing came amiss to his

gifted pen, and he was fruitful, say his admirers, even in his errors,

Like other men inflamed with one single idea, he boldly ventured into

domains of thought where specialists fear to tread. His biographer

enumerates forty-three different works from his pen. They all throb

with a resonant note of patriotism; they are “fragments of a heart,”

and indeed, it has been said of him that he utilized even the grave

science of grammar as a battlefield whereon to defy the enemies of

Albania. But perhaps he worked most successfully as a journalist. His

“Fiamuri Arberit” (the Banner of Albania) became the rallying cry of

his countrymen in every corner of the earth.

These multifarious writings—and doubtless the novelty of his central

theme—attracted the notice of German philologers and linguists, of all

lovers of freedom, folklore and verse. Leading Italian writers like

Cantù praised him highly; Lamartine, in 1844, wrote to him: “Je suis

bien-heureux de ce signe de fraternité poétique et politique entre vous

et moi. La poésie est venue de vos rivages et doit y retourner. . . .”

Hermann Buchholtz discovers scenic changes worthy of Shakespeare, and

passages of Æschylean grandeur, in his tragedy “Sofonisba.” Carnet

compares him with Dante, and the omniscient Mr. Gladstone wrote in

1880—a post card, presumably—belauding his disinterested efforts on

behalf of his country. He was made the subject of many articles and

pamphlets, and with reason. Up to his time, Albania had been a

myth. He it was who divined the relationship between the Albanian and

Pelasgian tongues; who created the literary language of his country,

and formulated its political ambitions.

Whereas the hazy “Autobiologia” records complicated political intrigues

at Naples that are not connected with his chief strivings, the little

“Testamento politico,” printed towards the end of his life, is more

interesting. It enunciates his favourite and rather surprising theory

that the Albanians cannot look for help and sympathy save only to their

_brothers,_ the Turks. Unlike many Albanians on either side of the

Adriatic, he was a pronounced Turco-phile, detesting the “stolid

perfidy” and “arrogant disloyalty” of the Greeks. Of Austria, the most

insidious enemy of his country’s freedom, he seems to have thought

well. A year before his death he wrote to an Italian translator of

“Milosao” (I will leave the passage in the original, to show his cloudy

language):

“Ed un tempo propizio la accompagna: la ricostituzione dell’ Epiro nei

suoi quattro vilayet autonomi quale è nei propri consigli e nei propri

desideri; ricostituzione, che pel suo Giornale, quello dell’ ottimo A.

Lorecchio—cui precede il principe Nazionale Kastriota, Chini—si

annuncia fatale, e quasi fulcro della stabilità dello impero Ottomano,

a della pace Europea; preludio di quella diffusione del regno di Dio

sulla terra, che sarà la Pace tra gli Uomini.”

Truly a remarkable utterance, and one that illustrates the

disadvantages of living at a distance from the centres of thought. Had

he travelled less with the spirit and more with the body, his opinions

might have been modified and corrected. But he did not even visit the

Albanian colonies in Italy and Sicily. Hence that vast confidence in

his mission—a confidence born of solitude, intellectual and

geographical. Hence that ultra-terrestrial yearning which tinges his

apparently practical aspirations.

He remained at home, ever poor and industrious; wrapped in bland

exaltation and oblivious to contemporary movements of the human mind.

Not that his existence was without external activities. A chair of

Albanian literature at San Demetrio, instituted in 1849 but suppressed

after three years, was conferred on him in 1892 by the historian and

minister Pasquale Villari; for a considerable time, too, he was

director of the communal school at Corigliano, where, with

characteristic energy, he set up a printing press; violent journalistic

campaigns succeeded one another; in 1896 he arranged for the first

congress of Albanian language in that town, which brought together

delegates from every part of Italy and elicited a warm telegram of

felicitation from the minister

Francesco Crispi, himself an Albanian. Again, in 1899, we find him

reading a paper before the twelfth international congress of

Orientalists at Rome.

But best of all, he loved the seclusion of Macchia.

Griefs clustered thickly about the closing years of this unworldly

dreamer. Blow succeeded blow. One by one, his friends dropped off; his

brothers, his beloved wife, his four sons—he survived them all; he

stood alone at last, a stricken figure, in tragic and sublime

isolation. Over eighty years old, he crawled thrice a week to deliver

his lectures at San Demetrio; he still cultivated a small patch of

ground with enfeebled arm, composing, for relaxation, poems and

rhapsodies at the patriarchal age of 88! They will show you the trees

under which he was wont to rest, the sunny views he loved, the very

stones on which he sat; they will tell you anecdotes of his poverty—of

an indigence such as we can scarcely credit. During the last months he

was often thankful for a crust of bread, in exchange for which he would

bring a sack of acorns, self-collected, to feed the giver’s pigs.

Destitution of this kind, brought about by unswerving loyalty to an

ideal, ceases to exist in its sordid manifestations: it exalts the

sufferer. And his life’s work is there. Hitherto there had been no

“Albanian Question” to perplex the chanceries of Europe. He applied the

match to the tinder; he conjured up that phantom which refuses to be

laid.

He died, in 1903, at San Demetrio; and there lies entombed in the

cemetery on the hill-side, among the oaks.

But you will not easily find his grave.

His biographer indulges a poetic fancy in sketching the fair monument

which a grateful country will presently rear to his memory on the snowy

Acroceraunian heights. It might be well, meanwhile, if some simple

commemorative stone were placed on the spot where he lies buried. Had

he succumbed at his natal Macchia, this would have been done; but death

overtook him in the alien parish of San Demetrio, and his remains were

mingled with those of its poorest citizens. A microcosmic illustration

of that clannish spirit of Albania which he had spent a lifetime in

endeavouring to direct to nobler ends!

He was the Mazzini of his nation.

A Garibaldi, when the crisis comes, may possibly emerge from that

tumultuous horde.

Where is the Cavour?

XXV

SCRAMBLING TO LONGOBUCCO

A driving road to connect San Demetrio with Acri whither I was now

bound was begun, they say, about twenty years ago; one can follow it

for a considerable distance beyond the Albanian College. Then,

suddenly, it ends. Walking to Acri, however, by the old track, one

picks up, here and there, conscientiously-engineered little stretches

of it, already overgrown with weeds; these, too, break off as abruptly

as they began, in the wild waste. For purposes of wheeled traffic these

picturesque but disconnected fragments are quite useless.

Perhaps the whole undertaking will be completed some day—_speriamo!_ as

the natives say, when speaking of something rather beyond reasonable

expectation. But possibly not; and in that case—_pazienza!_ meaning,

that all hope may now be abandoned. There is seldom any great hurry,

with non-governmental works of this kind.

It would be interesting if one could learn the inner history of these

abortive transactions. I have often tried, in vain. It is impossible

for an outsider to pierce the jungle of sordid mystery and intrigue

which surrounds them. So much I gathered: that the original contract

was based on the wages then current and that, the price of labour

having more than doubled in consequence of the “discovery” of America,

no one will undertake the job on the old terms. That is sufficiently

intelligible. But why operations proceeded so slowly at first, and why

a new contract cannot now be drawn up—who can tell! The persons

interested blame the contractor, who blames the engineer, who blames

the dilatory and corrupt administration of Cosenza. My private opinion

is, that the last three parties have agreed to share the swag between

them. Meanwhile everybody has just grounds of complaint against

everybody else; the six or seven inevitable lawsuits have sprung up and

promise to last any length of time, seeing that important documents

have been lost or stolen and that half the original contracting parties

have died in the interval: nobody knows what is going to happen in the

end. It all depends upon whether some patriotic

person will step forward and grease the wheels in the proper quarter.

And even then, if he hails from Acri, they of San Demetrio will

probably work against the project, and vice versa. For no love is lost

between neighbouring communities—wonderful, with what venomous feudal

animosity they regard each other! United Italy means nothing to these

people, whose conceptions of national and public life are those of the

cock on his dung-hill. You will find in the smallest places intelligent

and broad-minded men, tradespeople or professionals or landed

proprietors, but they are seldom members of the _municipio;_ the

municipal career is also a money-making business, yes; but of another

kind, and requiring other qualifications.

Foot-passengers like myself suffer no inconvenience by being obliged to

follow the shorter and time-honoured mule-track that joins the two

places. It rises steeply at first, then begins to wind in and out among

shady vales of chestnut and oak, affording unexpected glimpses now

towards distant Tarsia and now, through a glade on the right, on to the

ancient citadel of Bisignano, perched on its rock.

I reached Acri after about two and a half hours’ walking. It lies in a

theatrical situation and has a hotel; but the proprietor of that

establishment having been described to me as “the greatest brigand of

the Sila” I preferred to refresh myself at a small wineshop, whose

manageress cooked me an uncommonly good luncheon and served some of the

best wine I had tasted for long. Altogether, the better-class women

here are far more wideawake and civilized than those of the Neapolitan

province; a result of their stern patriarchal up-bringing and of their

possessing more or less sensible husbands.

Thus fortified, I strolled about the streets. One would like to spend a

week or two in a place like this, so little known even to Italians, but

the hot weather and bad feeding had begun to affect me disagreeably and

I determined to push on without delay into cooler regions. It would

never do to be laid up at Acri with heatstroke, and to have one’s last

drops of life drained away by copious blood-lettings, relic of

Hispano-Arabic practices and the favourite remedy for every complaint.

Acri is a large place, and its air of prosperity contrasts with the

slumberous decay of San Demetrio; there is silk-rearing, and so much

emigration into America that nearly every man I addressed replied in

English. New houses are rising up in all directions, and the place is

celebrated for its rich citizens.

But these same wealthy men are in rather a dilemma. Some local

authority, I forget who, has deduced from the fact that there are so

many forges and smiths’ shops here that this must be the spot to which

the over-sensitive inhabitants of Sybaris banished their workers in

metal and other noisy professions. Now the millionaires would like to

be thought Sybarites by descent, but it is hardly respectable to draw a

pedigree from these outcasts.

They need not alarm themselves. For Acri, as Forbiger has shown, is the

old Acherontia; the river Acheron, the Mocone or Mucone of to-day,

flows at its foot, and from one point of the town I had a fine view

into its raging torrent.

A wearisome climb of two hours brought me to the _Croce Greca,_ the

Greek Cross, which stands 1185 metres above sea-level. How hot it was,

in that blazing sun! I should be sorry to repeat the trip, under the

same conditions. A structure of stone may have stood here in olden

days; at present it is a diminutive wooden crucifix by the roadside. It

marks, none the less, an important geographical point: the boundary

between the “Greek” Sila which I was now leaving and the Sila Grande,

the central and largest region. Beyond this last-named lies the lesser

Sila, or “Sila Piccola”; and if you draw a line from Rogliano (near

Cosenza) to Cotrone you will approximately strike the watershed which

divides the Sila Grande from this last and most westerly of the three

Sila divisions. After that comes Catanzaro and the valley of the

Corace, the narrowest point of the Italian continent, and then the

heights of Serra and Aspromonte, the true “Italy” of old, that continue

as far as Reggio.

Though I passed through some noble groves of chestnut on the way up,

the country here was a treeless waste. Yet it must have been forest up

to a short time ago, for one could see the beautiful vegetable mould

which has not yet had time to be washed down the hill-sides. A driving

road passes the Croce Greca; it joins Acri with San Giovanni, the

capital of Sila Grande, and with Cosenza.

It was another long hour’s march, always uphill, before I reached a

spacious green meadow or upland with a few little buildings. The place

is called Verace and lies on the watershed between the upper Crati

valley and the Ionian; thenceforward my walk would be a descent along

the Trionto river, the Traeis of old, as far as Longobucco which

overlooks its flood. It was cool here at last, from the altitude and

the decline of day; and hay-making was going on, amid the pastoral din

of cow-bells and a good deal of blithe love-making and chattering.

After some talk with these amiable folks, I passed on to where

the young Traeis bubbles up from the cavernous reservoirs of the earth.

Of those chill and roguish wavelets I took a draught, mindful of the

day when long ago, by these same waters, an irreparable catastrophe

overwhelmed our European civilization. For it was the Traeis near whose

estuary was fought the battle between 300,000 Sybarites (I refuse to

believe these figures) and the men of Croton conducted by their

champion Milo—a battle which led to the destruction of Sybaris and,

incidentally, of Hellenic culture throughout the mainland of Italy.

This was in the same fateful year 510 that witnessed the expulsion of

the Tarquins from Rome and the Pisistratidae from Athens.

Pines, the characteristic tree of the Sila, now begin to appear.

Passing through Verace I had already observed, on the left, a high

mountain entirely decked with them. It is the ridge marked Paleparto on

the map; the Trionto laves its foot. But the local pronunciation of

this name is Palépite, and I cannot help thinking that here we have a

genuine old Greek name perpetuated by the people and referring to this

covering of hoary pines—a name which the cartographers, arbitrary and

ignorant as they often are, have unconsciously disguised. (It occurs in

some old charts, however, as Paleparto.) An instructive map of Italy

could be drawn up, showing the sites and cities wrongly named from

corrupt etymology or falsified inscriptions, and those deliberately

miscalled out of principles of local patriotism. The whole country is

full of these inventions of _litterati_ which date, for the most part,

from the enthusiastic but undisciplined Cinque-Cento.

The minute geographical triangle comprised between Cosenza, Longobucco

and San Demetrio which I was now traversing is one of the least known

corners of Italy, and full of dim Hellenic memories. The streamlet

“Calamo” flows through the valley I ascended from Acri, and at its

side, a little way out of the town, stands the fountain “Pompeio” where

the brigands, not long ago, used to lie in wait for women and children

coming to fetch water, and snatch them away for ransom. On the way up,

I had glimpses down a thousand feet or more into the Mucone or Acheron,

raging and foaming in its narrow valley. It rises among the mountains

called “Fallistro” and “Li Tartari”—unquestionably Greek names.

On this river and somewhere above Acri stood, according to the

scholarly researches of Lenormant, the ancient city of Pandosia. I do

not know if its site has been determined since his day. It was “very

strong” and rich and at its highest prosperity in the fourth century

B.C.; after the fall of Sybaris it passed under the supremacy

of Croton. The god Pan was figured on some of its coins, and

appropriately enough, considering its sylvan surroundings; others bear

the head of the nymph Pandosia with her name and that of the river

Crathis, under the guise of a young shepherd: they who wish to learn

his improper legend will find it in the pages of Aelian, or in chapter

xxxii of the twenty-fifth book of Rhodiginus, beginning _Quae sit

brutorum affectio,_ etc.[1] We have here not the Greece of mediæval

Byzantine times, much less that of the Albanians, but the sunny Hellas

of the days when the world was young, when these ardent colonists

sailed westwards to perpetuate their names and legends in the alien

soil of Italy.

[1] _Brunii a brutis moribus:_ so say certain spiteful writers, an

accusation which Strabo and Horace extend to all Calabrians. As to the

site of Pandosia, a good number of scholars, such as old Prosper

Parisius and Luigi Maria Greco, locate it at the village of Mendicino

on the river Merenzata, which was called Arconte (? Acheron) in the

Middle Ages. So the Trionto is not unquestionably the Traeis, and in

Marincola Pistoia’s good little “Cose di Sibari” (1845) the

distinction is claimed for one of four rivers—the Lipuda, Colognati,

Trionto, or Fiuminicà.

The Mucone has always been known as a ferocious and pitiless torrent,

and maintains to this day its Tartarean reputation. Twenty persons a

year, they tell me, are devoured by its angry waters: _mangia venti

cristiani all’ anno!_ This is as bad as the Amendolea near Reggio. But

none of its victims have attained the celebrity of Alexander of

Molossus, King of Epirus, who perished under the walls of Pandosia in

326 B.C. during an excursion against the Lucanians. He had been warned

by the oracle of Dodona to avoid the waters of Acheron and the town of

Pandosia; once in Italy, however, he paid small heed to these words,

thinking they referred to the river and town of the same name in

Thesprotia. But the gods willed otherwise, and you may read of his

death in the waters, and the laceration of his body by the Lucanians,

in Livy’s history.

It is a strange caprice that we should now possess what is in every

probability the very breastplate worn by the heroic monarch on that

occasion. It was found in 1820, and thereafter sold—some fragments of

it, at least—to the British Museum, where under the name of “Bronze of

Siris” it may still be admired: a marvellous piece of repoussée work,

in the style of Lysippus, depicting the combat of Ajax and the Amazons.

. . .

The streamlet Trionto, my companion to Longobucco, glides along between

stretches of flowery meadow-land—fit emblem of placid rural

contentment. But soon this lyric mood is spent. It enters a winding

gorge that shuts out the sunlight and the landscape abruptly assumes an

epic note; the water tumbles wildly

downward, hemmed in by mountains whose slopes are shrouded in dusky

pines wherever a particle of soil affords them foothold. The scenery in

this valley is as romantic as any in the Sila. Affluents descend on

either side, while the swollen rivulet writhes and screeches in its

narrow bed, churning the boulders with hideous din. The track,

meanwhile, continues to run beside the water till the passage becomes

too difficult; it must perforce attack the hill-side. Up it climbs,

therefore, in never-ending ascension, and then meanders at a great

height above the valley, in and out of its tributary glens.

I was vastly enjoying this promenade—the shady pines, whose fragrance

mingled with that of a legion of tall aromatic plants in full

blossom—the views upon the river, shining far below me like the thread

of silver—when I observed with surprise that the whole mountain-side

which the track must manifestly cross had lately slipped down into the

abyss. A cloud-burst two or three days ago, as I afterwards learned,

had done the mischief. On arrival at the spot, the path was seen to be

interrupted—clean gone, in fact, and not a shred of earth or trees

left; there confronted me a bare scar, a wall of naked rock which not

even a chamois could negotiate. Here was a dilemma. I must either

retrace my steps along the weary road to Verace and there seek a

night’s shelter with the gentle hay-makers, or clamber down into the

ravine, follow the river and—chance it! After anxious deliberation, the

latter alternative was chosen.

But the Trionto was now grown into a formidable torrent of surging

waves and eddies, with a perverse inclination to dash from one side to

the other of its prison, so as to necessitate frequent fordings on my

part. These watery passages, which I shall long remember, were not

without a certain danger. The stream was still swollen with the recent

rains, and its bed, invisible under the discoloured element,

sufficiently deep to inspire respect and studded, furthermore, with

slippery boulders of every size, concealing insidious gulfs. Having

only a short walking-stick to support me through this raging flood, I

could not but picture to myself the surprise of the village maidens of

Cropolati, lower down, on returning to their laundry work by the

river-side next morning and discovering the battered anatomy of an

Englishman—a rare fish, in these waters—stranded upon their familiar

beach. Murdered, of course. What a galaxy of brigand legends would have

clustered round my memory!

[Illustration: The Trionto Valley]

Evening was closing in, and I had traversed the stream so often and

stumbled so long amid this chaos of roaring waters and

weirdly-tinted rocks, that I began to wonder whether the existence of

Longobucco was not a myth. But suddenly, at a bend of the river, the

whole town, still distant, was revealed, upraised on high and framed in

the yawning mouth of the valley. After the solitary ramble of that

afternoon, my eyes familiarized to nothing save the wild things of

nature, this unexpected glimpse of complicated, civilized structures

had all the improbability of a mirage. Longobucco, at that moment,

arose before me like those dream-cities in the Arabian tale, conjured

by enchantment out of the desert waste.

The vision, though it swiftly vanished again, cheered me on till after

a good deal more scrambling and wading, with boots torn to rags, lame,

famished and drenched to the skin, I reached the bridge of the Rossano

highway and limped upwards, in the twilight, to the far-famed “Hotel

Vittoria.”

Soon enough, be sure, I was enquiring as to supper. But the manageress

met my suggestions about eatables with a look of blank astonishment.

Was there nothing in the house, then? No cheese, or meat, or

maccheroni, or eggs—no wine to drink?

“Nothing!” she replied. “Why should you eat things at this hour? You

must find them yourself, if you really want them. I might perhaps

procure you some bread.”

_Avis aux voyageurs,_ as the French say.

Undaunted, I went forth and threw myself upon the mercy of a citizen of

promising exterior, who listened attentively to my case. Though far too

polite to contradict, I could see that nothing in the world would

induce him to credit the tale of my walking from San Demetrio that

day—it was tacitly relegated to the regions of fable. With considerable

tact, so as not to wound my feelings, he avoided expressing any opinion

on so frivolous a topic; nor did the reason of his reluctance to

discuss my exploit dawn upon me till I realized, later on, that like

many of the inhabitants he had never heard of the track over Acri, and

consequently disbelieved its existence. They reach San Demetrio by a

two or even three days’ drive over Rossano, Corigliano, and Vaccarizza.

He became convinced, however, that for some reason or other I was

hungry, and thereupon good-naturedly conducted me to various places

where wine and other necessities of life were procured.

The landlady watched me devouring this fare, more astonished than

ever—indeed, astonishment seemed to be her chronic condition so long as

I was under her roof. But the promised bread was

not forthcoming, for the simple reason that there was none in the

house. She had said that she could procure it for me, not that she

possessed it; now, since I had given no orders to that effect, she had

not troubled about it.

Nobody travels south of Rome. . . .

Strengthened beyond expectation by this repast, I sallied into the

night once more, and first of all attended an excellent performance at

the local cinematograph. After that, I was invited to a cup of coffee

by certain burghers, and we strolled about the piazza awhile, taking

our pleasure in the cool air of evening (the town lies 794 metres above

sea-level). Its streets are orderly and clean; there are no Albanians,

and no costumes of any kind. Here, firm-planted on the square, and

jutting at an angle from the body of the church, stands a massive

bell-tower overgrown from head to foot with pendent weeds and grasses

whose roots have found a home in the interstices of its masonry; a

grimly venerable pile, full of character.

Weary but not yet satiated, I took leave of the citizens and

perambulated the more ignoble quarters, all of which are decently

lighted with electricity. Everywhere in these stiller regions was the

sound of running waters, and I soon discerned that Longobucco is an

improvement on the usual site affected by Calabrian hill-towns—the

Y-shaped enclosure, namely, at the junction of two rivers—inasmuch as

it has contrived to perch itself on a lofty platform protected by no

less than three streams that rush impetuously under its walls: the

Trionto and two of its affluents. On the flank inclined towards the

Ionian there is a veritable chasm; the Trionto side is equally

difficult of approach—the rear, of course, inaccessible. No wonder the

brigands chose it for their chief citadel.

I am always on the look-out for modern epigraphical curiosities;

regarding the subject as one of profound social significance (postage

stamps, indeed!) I have assiduously formed a collection, the envy of

connaisseurs, about one-third of whose material, they tell me, might

possibly be printed at Brussels or Geneva. Well, here is a mural

_graffito_ secured in the course of this evening’s walk:

_Abaso [sic] questo paese sporco incivile:_ down with this dirty savage

country!

There is food for thought in this inscription. For if some bilious

hyper-civilized stranger were its author, the sentiments might pass.

But coming from a native, to what depths of morbid discontent do they

testify! Considering the recent progress of these regions that has led

to a security and prosperity formerly undreamed of, one is driven to

the conjecture that these words can only have been

penned by some cantankerous churl of an emigrant returning to his

native land after an easeful life in New York and compelled—“for his

sins,” as he would put it—to reside at the “Hotel Vittoria.”

Towards that delectable hostelry I now turned, somewhat regretfully, to

face a bedroom whose appearance had already inspired me with anything

but confidence. But hardly were the preliminary investigations begun,

when a furious noise in the street below drew me to the window once

more. Half the town was passing underneath in thronged procession, with

lighted torches and flags, headed by the municipal band discoursing

martial strains of music.

Whither wending, at this midnight hour?

To honour a young student, native of the place, now returning up the

Rossano road from Naples, where he had distinguished himself

prominently in some examination. I joined the crowd, and presently we

were met by a small carriage whence there emerged a pallid and frail

adolescent with burning eyes, who was borne aloft in triumph and

cheered with that vociferous, masculine heartiness which we Englishmen

reserve for our popular prize-fighters. And this in the classic land of

brigandage and bloodshed!

The intellectual under-current. . . .

It was an apt commentary on my _graffito._ And another, more personally

poignant, not to say piquant, was soon to follow: the bed. But no. I

will say nothing about the bed, nothing whatever; nothing beyond this,

that it yielded an entomological harvest which surpassed my wildest

expectations.

XXVI

AMONG THE BRUTTIANS

Conspicuous among the wise men of Longobucco in olden days was the

physician Bruno, who “flourished” about the end of the thirteenth

century. He called himself _Longoburgensis Calaber,_ and his great

treatise on anatomical dissection, embodying much Greek and Arabic

lore, was printed many years after his death. Another was Francesco

Maria Labonia; he wrote, in 1664, “De vera loci urbis Timesinae

situatione, etc.,” to prove, presumably, that his birthplace occupied

the site whence the Homeric ore of Temese was derived. There are modern

writers who support this view.

The local silver mines were exploited in antiquity; first by Sybaris,

then by Croton. They are now abandoned, but a good deal has been

written about them. In the year 1200 a thousand miners were employed,

and the Anjous extracted a great deal of precious metal thence; the

goldsmiths of Longobucco were celebrated throughout Italy during the

Middle Ages. The industrious H. W. Schulz has unearthed a Royal

rescript of 1274 charging a certain goldsmith Johannes of Longobucco

with researches into the metal and salt resources of the whole kingdom

of Naples.

Writing from Longobucco in 1808 during a brigand-hunt, Duret de Tavel

says:

“The high wooded mountains which surround this horrible place spread

over it a sombre and savage tint which saddens the imagination. This

borough contains a hideous population of three thousand souls, composed

of nail-makers, of blacksmiths and charcoal-burners. The former

government employed them in working the silver mines situated in the

neighbourhood which are now abandoned.”

He tells a good deal about the brigandage that was then rife here, and

the atrocities which the repression of this pest entailed. Soon after

his arrival, for instance, four hundred soldiers were sent to a village

where the chiefs of the brigand “insurrection” were supposed to be

sheltered. The soldiers, he says, “poured into the streets like a

torrent in flood, and there began a horrible massacre,

rendered inevitable by the obstinacy of the insurgents, who fired from

all the houses. This unhappy village was sacked and burnt, suffering

all the horrors inseparable from a capture by assault.” Two hundred

dead were found in the streets. But the brigand chiefs, the sole

pretext of this bloodshed, managed to escape. Perhaps they were not

within fifty miles of the place.

Be that as it may, they were captured later on by their own

compatriots, after the French had waited a month at Longobucco. Their

heads were brought in, still bleeding, and “l’identité ayant été

suffisamment constatée, la mort des principaux acteurs a terminé cette

sanglante tragédie, et nous sommes sortis de ces catacombes apénnines

pour revoir le plus brillant soleil.”

Wonderful tales are still told of the brigands in these forests. They

will show you notches on the trees, cut by such and such a brigand for

some particular purpose of communication with his friends; buried

treasure has been found, and even nowadays shepherds sometimes discover

rude shelters of bark and tree trunks built by them in the thickest

part of the woods. There are legends, too, of caverns wherein they

hived their booty—caverns with cleverly concealed entrances—caverns

which (many of them, at least) I regard as a pure invention modelled

after the authentic brigand caves of Salerno and Abruzzi, where the

limestone rock is of the kind to produce them. Bourbonism fostered the

brood, and there was a fierce recrudescence in the troubled sixties.

They lived in bands, _squadrigli,_ burning and plundering with

impunity. Whoever refused to comply with their demands for food or

money was sure to repent of it. All this is over, for the time being;

the brigands are extirpated, to the intense relief of the country

people, who were entirely at their mercy, and whose boast it is that

their district is now as safe as the streets of Naples. Qualified

praise, this. . . .[1]

[1] See next chapter.

It is an easy march of eight hours or less, through pleasing scenery

and by a good track, from Longobucco to San Giovanni in Fiore, the

capital of the Sila. The path leaves Longobucco at the rear of the town

and, climbing upward, enters a valley which it follows to its head. The

peasants have cultivated patches of ground along the stream; the slopes

are covered, first with chestnuts and then with hoary firs—a rare

growth, in these parts—from whose branches hangs the golden bough of

the mistletoe. And now the stream is ended and a dark ridge blocks the

way; it is overgrown with beeches, under whose shade you ascend in

steep curves. At

the summit the vegetation changes once more, and you find yourself

among magnificent stretches of pines that continue as far as the

governmental domain of Galoppano, a forestal station, two hours’ walk

from Longobucco.

This pine is a particular variety _(Pinus lancio,_ var. _Calabra),_

known as the “Pino della Sila”—it is found over this whole country, and

grows to a height of forty metres with a silvery-grey trunk, exhaling a

delicious aromatic fragrance. In youth, especially where the soil is

deep, it shoots up prim and demure as a Nuremberg toy; but in old age

grows monstrous. High-perched upon some lonely granite boulder, with

roots writhing over the bare stone like the arms of an octopus, it sits

firm and unmoved, deriding the tempest and flinging fantastic limbs

into the air—emblem of tenacity in desolation. From these trees, which

in former times must have covered the Sila region, was made that

Bruttian pitch mentioned by Strabo and other ancient writers; from them

the Athenians, the Syracusans, Tarentines and finally the Romans built

their fleets. Their timber was used in the construction of Caserta

palace.

A house stands here, inhabited by government officials the whole year

round—one may well puzzle how they pass the long winter, when snow lies

from October to May. So early did I arrive at this establishment that

the more civilized of its inhabitants were still asleep; by waiting, I

might have learnt something of the management of the estate, but gross

material preoccupations—the prospect of a passable luncheon at San

Giovanni after the “Hotel Vittoria” fare—tempted me to press forwards.

A boorish and unreliable-looking individual volunteered three pieces of

information—that the house was built thirty years ago, that a large

nursery for plants lies about ten kilometres distant, and that this

particular domain covers “two or four thousand hectares.” A young

plantation of larches and silver birches—aliens to this region—seemed

to be doing well.

Not far from here, along my track, lies Santa Barbara, two or three

huts, with corn still green—like Verace (above Acri) on the watershed

between the Ionian and upper Grati. Then follows a steep climb up the

slopes of Mount Pettinascura, whose summit lies 1708 metres above

sea-level. This is the typical landscape of the Sila Grande. There is

not a human habitation in sight; forests all around, with views down

many-folded vales into the sea and towards the distant and fairy-like

Apennines, a serrated edge, whose limestone precipices gleam like

crystals of amethyst between the blue sky and the dusky woodlands of

the foreground.

[Illustration: Longobucco]

Here I reposed awhile, watching the crossbills, wondrously tame, at

work among the branches overhead, and the emerald lizard peering out of

the bracken at my side. This _lucertone,_ as they call it, is a local

beast, very abundant in some spots (at Venosa and Patirion, for

example); it is elsewhere conspicuous by its absence. The natives are

rather afraid of it, and still more so of the harmless gecko, the

“salamide,” which is reputed highly poisonous.

Then up again, through dells and over uplands, past bubbling streams,

sometimes across sunlit meadows, but oftener in the leafy shelter of

maples and pines—a long but delightful track, winding always high above

the valleys of the Neto and Lese. At last, towards midday, I struck the

driving road that connects San Giovanni with Savelli, crossed a bridge

over the foaming Neto, and climbed into the populous and dirty streets

of the town—the “Siberia of Calabria,” as it may well be, for seven

months of the year.

At this season, thanks to its elevation of 1050 metres, the temperature

is all that could be desired, and the hotel, such as it is, compares

favourably indeed with the den at Longobucco. Instantly I felt at home

among these good people, who recognized me, and welcomed me with the

cordiality of old friends.

“Well,” they asked, “and have you found it at last?”

They remembered my looking for the double flute, the _tibiae pares,_

some years ago.

It will not take you long to discover that the chief objects of

interest in San Giovanni are the women. Many Calabrian villages still

possess their distinctive costumes—Marcellinara and Cimigliano are

celebrated in this respect—but it would be difficult to find anywhere

an equal number of handsome women on such a restricted space. In olden

days it was dangerous to approach these attractive and mirthful

creatures; they were jealously guarded by brothers and husbands. But

the brothers and husbands, thank God, are now in America, and you may

be as friendly with them as ever you please, provided you confine your

serious attentions to not more than two or three. Secrecy in such

matters is out of the question, as with the Arabs; there is too much

gossip, and too little coyness about what is natural; your friendships

are openly recognized, and tacitly approved. The priests do not

interfere; their hands are full.

To see these women at their best one must choose a Sunday or a

feast-day; one must go, morever, to the favourite fountain of Santa

Lucia, which lies on the hill-side and irrigates some patches of corn

and vegetables. Their natural charms are enhanced by

elaborate and tasteful golden ornaments, and by a pretty mode of

dressing the hair, two curls of which are worn hanging down before

their ears with an irresistibly seductive air. Their features are

regular; eyes black or deep gentian blue; complexion pale; movements

and attitudes impressed with a stamp of rare distinction. Even the

great-grandmothers have a certain austere dignity—sinewy,

indestructible old witches, with tawny hide and eyes that glow like

lamps.

And yet San Giovanni is as dirty as can well be; it has the accumulated

filth of an Eastern town, while lacking all its glowing tints or

harmonious outlines. We are disposed to associate squalor with certain

artistic effects, but it may be said of this and many other Calabrian

places that they have solved the problem how to be ineffably squalid

without becoming in the least picturesque. Much of this sordid look is

due to the smoke which issues out of all the windows and blackens the

house walls, inside and out—the Calabrians persisting in a prehistoric

fashion of cooking on the floor. The buildings themselves look crude

and gaunt from their lack of plaster and their eyeless windows; black

pigs wallowing at every doorstep contribute to this slovenly

_ensemble._ The City Fathers have turned their backs upon civilization;

I dare say the magnitude of the task before them has paralysed their

initiative.

Nothing is done in the way of public hygiene, and one sees women

washing linen in water which is nothing more or less than an open

drain. There is no street-lighting whatever; a proposal on the part of

a North Italian firm to draw electric power from the Neto was

scornfully rejected; one single tawdry lamp, which was bought some

years ago “as a sample” in a moment of municipal recklessness, was

lighted three times in as many years, and on the very day when it was

least necessary—to wit, on midsummer eve, which happens to be the

festival of their patron saint (St. John). “It now hangs”—so I wrote

some years ago—“at a dangerous angle, and I doubt whether it will

survive till its services are requisitioned next June.” Prophetic

utterance! It was blown down that same winter, and has not yet been

replaced. This in a town of 20,000 (?) inhabitants—and in Italy, where

the evening life of the populace plays such an important role. No

wonder North Italians, judging by such external indications, regard all

Calabrians as savages.

Some trees have been planted in the piazza since my last stay here; a

newspaper has also been started—it is called “Co-operation: Organ of

the Interests of San Giovanni in Fiore,” and its first and possibly

unique number contains a striking article on the public

health, as revealed in the report of two doctors who had been

despatched by the provincial sanitary authorities to take note of local

conditions of hygiene. “The illustrious scientists” (thus it runs)

“were horrified at the filth, mud and garbage which encumbered, and

still encumbers, our streets, sending forth in the warm weather a

pestilential odour. . . . They were likewise amazed at the vigorously

expressed protest of our mayor, who said: ‘_My people cannot live

without their pigs wallowing in the streets. San Giovanni in Fiore is

exempt from earthquakes and epidemics because it is under the

protection of Saint John the Baptist, and because its provincial

councillor is a saintly man.’_” Such journalistic plain speaking, such

lack of sweet reasonableness, cannot expect to survive in a world

governed by compromise, and if the gift of prophecy has not deserted

me, I should say that “Co-operation” has by this time ended its useful

mission upon earth.

This place is unhealthy; its water-supply is not what it should be, and

such commodities as eggs and milk are rather dear, because “the

invalids eat everything” of that kind. Who are the invalids? Typhoid

patients and, above all, malarious subjects who descend to the plains

as agricultural labourers and return infected to the hills, where they

become partially cured, only to repeat the folly next year. It is the

same at Longobucco and other Sila towns. Altogether, San Giovanni has

grave drawbacks. The streets are too steep for comfort, and despite its

height, the prospect towards the Ionian is intercepted by a ridge; in

point of situation it cannot compare with Savelli or the neighbouring

Casino, which have impressive views both inland, and southward down

undulating slopes that descend in a stately procession of four thousand

feet to the sea, where sparkles the gleaming horn of Cotrone. And the

surroundings of the place are nowise representative of the Sila in a

good sense. The land has been so ruthlessly deforested that it has

become a desert of naked granite rocks; even now, in midsummer, the

citizens are already collecting fuel for their long winter from

enormous distances. As one crawls and skips among these unsavoury

tenements, one cannot help regretting that Saint John the Baptist, or

the piety of a provincial councillor, should have hindered the

earthquakes from doing their obvious duty.

Were I sultan of San Giovanni, I would certainly begin by a general

bombardment. Little in the town is worth preserving from a cataclysm

save the women, and perhaps the old convent on the summit of the hill

where the French lodged during their brigand-wars, and that other one,

famous in the ecclesiastical annals of Calabria—the monastery of

Floriacense, founded at the

end of the twelfth century, round which the town gradually grew up. Its

ponderous portal is much injured, having been burnt, I was told, by the

brigands in 1860. But the notary, who kindly looked up the archives for

me, has come to the conclusion that the French are responsible for the

damage. It contains, or contained, a fabulous collection of pious

lumber—teeth and thigh-bones and other relics, the catalogue of which

is one of my favourite sections of Father Fiore’s work. I would make an

exception, also, in favour of the doorway of the church, a finely

proportioned structure of the Renaissance in black stone, which looks

ill at ease among its ignoble environment. A priest, to whom I applied

for information as to its history, told me with the usual Calabrian

frankness that he never bothered his head about such things.

San Giovanni was practically unknown to the outside world up to a few

years ago. I question whether Lenormant or any of them came here.

Pacicchelli did, however, in the seventeenth century, though he has

left us no description of the place. He crossed the whole Sila from the

Ionian to the other sea. I like this amiable and loquacious creature,

restlessly gadding about Europe, gloriously complacent, hopelessly

absorbed in trivialities, and credulous beyond belief. In fact (as the

reader may have observed), I like all these old travellers, not so much

for what they actually say, as for their implicit outlook upon life.

This Pacicchelli was a fellow of our Royal Society, and his accounts of

England are worth reading; here, in Calabria (being a non-southerner)

his “Familiar Letters” and ”Memoirs of Travel” act as a wholesome

corrective. Which of the local historians would have dared to speak of

Cosenza as “città aperta, scomposta, e disordinata di fabbriche”?

That these inhabitants of the Sila are Bruttians may be inferred from

the superior position occupied by their women-folk, who are quite

differently treated to those of the lowlands. There—all along the

coasts of South Italy—the _cow-woman_ is still found, unkempt and

uncivilized; there, the male is the exclusive bearer of culture. Such

things are not seen among the Bruttians of the Sila, any more than

among the grave Latins or Samnites. These non-Hellenic races are,

generally speaking, honest, dignified and incurious; they are bigoted,

not to say fanatical; and their women are not exclusively beasts of

burden, being better dressed, better looking, and often as intelligent

as the men. They are the fruits of a female selection.

But wherever the mocking Ionic spirit has penetrated—and the Ionian

women occupied even a lower position than those of the

Dorians and Aeolians—it has resulted in a glorification of masculinity.

Hand in hand with this depreciation of the female sex go other

characteristics which point to Hellenic influences: lack of commercial

morality, of veracity, of seriousness in religious matters; a

persistent, light-hearted inquisitiveness; a levity (or sprightliness,

if you prefer it) of mind. The people are fetichistic, amulet-loving,

rather than devout. We may certainly suspect Greek or Saracen strains

wherever women are held in low estimation; wherever, as the god Apollo

himself said, “the mother is but the nurse.” In the uplands of Calabria

the mother is a good deal more than the nurse.

For the rest, it stands to reason that in proportion as the

agricultural stage supplants that of pasturage, the superior strength

and utility of boys over girls should become more apparent, and this in

South Italy is universally proclaimed by the fact that everything large

and fine is laughingly described as “maschio” (male), and by some odd

superstitions in disparagement of the female sex, such as these: that

in giving presents to women, uneven numbers should be selected, lest

even ones “do them more good than they deserve”; that to touch the hump

of a female hunchback brings no luck whatever; that if a woman be the

first to drink out of a new earthenware pitcher, the vessel may as well

be thrown away at once—it is tainted for ever.[2] Yet the birth of a

daughter is no Chinese calamity; even girls are “Christians” and

welcomed as such, the populace having never sunk to the level of our

theologians, who were wont to discuss _an fæmina sint monstra._

[2] In Japan, says Hearn, the first bucketful of water to be drawn out

of a cleaned well must be drawn by a man; for if a woman first draw

water, the well will always hereafter remain muddy. Some of these

prejudices seem to be based on primordial misreadings of physiology.

There is also a strong feeling in favour of dark hair. No mother would

entrust her infant to a fair wet-nurse; the milk even of white cows is

considered “lymphatic” and not strengthening; perhaps the eggs of

white hens are equally devoid of the fortifying principle. There is

something to be said for this since, in proportion as we go south, the

risk of irritation, photophobia, and other complaints incidental to

the xanthous complexion becomes greater.

All over the Sila there is a large preponderance of women over men,

nearly the whole male section of the community, save the quite young

and the decrepit, being in America. This emigration brings much money

into the country and many new ideas; but the inhabitants have yet to

learn the proper use of their wealth, and to acquire a modern standard

of comfort. Together with the Sardinians, these Calabrians are the

hardiest of native races, and this is what makes them prefer the

strenuous but lucrative life in North American mines to the easier

career in Argentina, which Neapolitans favour. There they learn

English. They remember their

families and the village that gave them birth, but their patriotism

towards Casa Savoia is of the slenderest. How could it be otherwise? I

have spoken to numbers of them, and this is what they say:

“This country has done nothing for us; why should we fight its battles?

Not long ago we were almost devouring each other in our hunger; what

did they do to help us? If we have emerged from misery, it is due to

our own initiative and the work of our own hands; if we have decent

clothes and decent houses, it is because they drove us from our old

homes with their infamous misgovernment to seek work abroad.”

Perfectly true! They have redeemed themselves, though the new regime

has hardly had a fair trial. And the drawbacks of emigration (such as a

slight increase of tuberculosis and alcoholism) are nothing compared

with the unprecedented material prosperity and enlightenment. There has

also been—in these parts, at all events—a marked diminution of crime.

No wonder, seeing that three-quarters of the most energetic and

turbulent elements are at present in America, where they recruit the

Black Hand. That the Bruttian is not yet ripe for town life, that his

virtues are pastoral rather than civic, might have been expected; but

the Arab domination of much of his territory, one suspects, may have

infused fiercer strains into his character and helped to deserve for

him that epithet of _sanguinario_ by which he is proud to be known.

XXVII

CALABRIAN BRIGANDAGE

The last genuine bandit of the Sila was Gaetano Ricca. On account of

some trivial misunderstanding with the authorities, this man was

compelled in the early eighties to take to the woods, where he lived a

wild life _(alla campagna; alla macchia}_ for some three years. A price

was set on his head, but his daring and knowledge of the country

intimidated every one. I should be sorry to believe in the number of

carbineers he is supposed to have killed during that period; no doubt

the truth came out during his subsequent trial. On one occasion he was

surrounded, and while the officer in command of his pursuers, who had

taken refuge behind a tree, ordered him to yield, Ricca waited

patiently till the point of his enemy’s foot became visible, when he

pierced his ankle-bone with his last bullet and escaped. He afterwards

surrendered and was imprisoned for twenty years or so; then returned to

the Sila, where up to a short time ago he was enjoying a green old age

in his home at Parenti—Parenti, already celebrated in the annals of

brigandage by the exploit of the perfidious Francatripa (Giacomo

Pisani), who, under pretence of hospitality, enticed a French company

into his clutches and murdered its three officers and all the men, save

seven. The memoirs of such men might be as interesting as those of the

Sardinian Giovanni Tolù which have been printed. I would certainly have

paid my respects to Ricca had I been aware of his existence when, some

years back, I passed through Parenti on my way—a long day’s march!—from

Rogliano to San Giovanni. He has died in the interval.

But the case of Ricca is a sporadic one, such as may crop up anywhere

and at any time. It is like that of Musolino—the case of an isolated

outlaw, who finds the perplexed geographical configuration of the

country convenient for offensive and defensive purposes. Calabrian

brigandage, as a whole, has always worn a political character.

The men who gave the French so much trouble were political brigands,

allies of Bourbonism. They were commanded by

creatures like Mammone, an anthropophagous monster whose boast it was

that he had personally killed 455 persons with the greatest refinements

of cruelty, and who wore at his belt the skull of one of them, out of

which he used to drink human blood at mealtime; he drank his own blood

as well; indeed, he “never dined without having a bleeding human heart

on the table.” This was the man whom King Ferdinand and his spouse

loaded with gifts and decorations, and addressed as “Our good Friend

and General—the faithful Support of the Throne.” The numbers of these

savages were increased by shiploads of professional cut-throats sent

over from Sicily by the English to help their Bourbon friends. Some of

these actually wore the British uniform; one of the most ferocious was

known as “L’Inglese”—the Englishman.

One must go to the fountain-head, to the archives, in order to gain

some idea of the sanguinary anarchy that desolated South Italy in those

days. The horrors of feudalism, aided by the earthquake of 1784 and by

the effects of Cardinal Ruffo’s Holy Crusade, had converted the country

into a pandemonium. In a single year (1809) thirty-three thousand

crimes were recorded against the brigands of the Kingdom of Naples; in

a single month they are said to have committed 1200 murders in Calabria

alone. These were the bands who were described by British officers as

“our chivalrous brigand-allies.”

It is good to bear these facts in mind when judging of the present

state of this province, for the traces of such a reign of terror are

not easily expunged. Good, also, to remember that this was the period

of the highest spiritual eminence to which South Italy has ever

attained. Its population of four million inhabitants were then consoled

by the presence of no less than 120,000 holy persons—to wit, 22

archbishops, 116 bishops, 65,500 ordained priests, 31,800 monks, and

23,600 nuns. Some of these ecclesiastics, like the Bishop of Capaccio,

were notable brigand-chiefs.

It must be confessed that the French were sufficiently coldblooded in

their reprisals. Colletta himself saw, at Lagonegro, a man impaled by

order of a French colonel; and some account of their excesses may be

gleaned from Duret de Tavel, from Rivarol (rather a disappointing

author), and from the flamboyant epistles of P. L. Courier, a

soldier-scribe of rare charm, who lost everything in this campaign.

“J’ai perdu huit chevaux, mes habits, mon linge, mon manteau, mes

pistolets, mon argent (12,247 francs). . . . Je ne regrette que mon

Homère (a gift from the Abbé Barthélemy), et pour le ravoir, je

donnerais la seule chemise qui me reste.”

But even that did not destroy the plague. The situation called

for a genial and ruthless annihilator, a man like Sixtus V, who asked

for brigands’ heads and got them so plentifully that they lay “thick as

melons in the market” under the walls of Rome, while the Castel Sant’

Angelo was tricked out like a Christmas tree with quartered corpses—a

man who told the authorities, when they complained of the insufferable

stench of the dead, that the smell of living iniquity was far worse.

Such a man was wanted. Therefore, in 1810, Murat gave _carte blanche_

to General Manhes, the greatest brigand-catcher of modern times, to

extirpate the ruffians, root and branch. He had just distinguished

himself during a similar errand in the Abruzzi and, on arriving in

Calabria, issued proclamations of such inhuman severity that the

inhabitants looked upon them as a joke. They were quickly undeceived.

The general seems to have considered that the end justified the means,

and that the peace and happiness of a province was not to be disturbed

year after year by the malignity of a few thousand rascals; his threats

were carried out to the letter, and, whatever may be said against his

methods, he certainly succeeded. At the end of a few months’ campaign,

every single brigand, and all their friends and relations, were wiped

off the face of the earth—together with a very considerable number of

innocent persons. The high roads were lined with decapitated bandits,

the town walls decked with their heads; some villages had to be

abandoned, on account of the stench; the Crati river was swollen with

corpses, and its banks whitened with bones. God alone knows the

cruelties which were enacted; Colletta confesses that he “lacks courage

to relate them.” Here is his account of the fate of the brigand chief

Benincasa:

“Betrayed and bound by his followers as he slept in the forest of

Cassano, Benincasa was brought to Cosenza, and General Manhes ordered

that both his hands be lopped off and that he be led, thus mutilated,

to his home in San Giovanni, and there hanged; a cruel sentence, which

the wretch received with a bitter smile. His right hand was first cut

off and the stump bound, not out of compassion or regard for his life,

but in order that all his blood might not flow out of the opened veins,

seeing that he was reserved for a more miserable death. Not a cry

escaped him, and when he saw that the first operation was over, he

voluntarily laid his left hand upon the block and coldly watched the

second mutilation, and saw his two amputated hands lying on the ground,

which were then tied together by the thumbs and hung round his neck; an

awful and piteous spectacle. This happened at Cosenza. On the same day

he began his march to San Giovanni in Fiore, the escort resting at

intervals; one of them offered the man food, which he accepted;

he ate and drank what was placed in his mouth, and not so much in order

to sustain life, as with real pleasure. He arrived at his home, and

slept through the following night; on the next day, as the hour of

execution approached, he refused the comforts of religion, ascended the

gallows neither swiftly nor slowly, and died admired for his brutal

intrepidity.”[1]

[1] This particular incident was flatly denied by Manhes in a letter

dated 1835, which is quoted in the “Notizia storica del Conte C. A.

Manhes” (Naples, 1846)—one of a considerable number of pro-Bourbon

books that cropped up about this time. One is apt to have quite a

wrong impression of Manhes, that inexorable but incorruptible scourge

of evildoers. One pictures him a grey-haired veteran, scarred and

gloomy; and learns, on the contrary, that he was only thirty-two years

old at this time, gracious in manner and of surprising personal

beauty.

For the first time since long Calabria was purged. Ever since the

Bruttians, irreclaimable plunderers, had established themselves at

Cosenza, disquieting their old Hellenic neighbours, the recesses of

this country had been a favourite retreat of political malcontents.

Here Spartacus drew recruits for his band of rebels; here “King

Marcone” defied the oppressive Spanish Viceroys, and I blame neither

him nor his imitators, since the career of bandit was one of the very

few that still commended itself to decent folks, under that régime.

During the interregnum of Bourbonism between Murat and Garibaldi the

mischief revived—again in a political form. Brigands drew pensions from

kings and popes, and the system gave rise to the most comical

incidents; the story of the pensioned malefactors living together at

Monticello reads like an extravaganza. It was the spirit of Offenbach,

brooding over Europe. One of the funniest episodes was a visit paid in

1865 by the disconsolate Mrs. Moens to the ex-brigand Talarico, who was

then living in grand style on a government pension. Her husband had

been captured by the band of Manzi (another brigand), and expected to

be murdered every day, and the lady succeeded in procuring from the

chivalrous monster—“an extremely handsome man, very tall, with the

smallest and most delicate hands”—an exquisite letter to his colleague,

recommending him to be merciful to the Englishman and to emulate his

own conduct in that respect. The letter had no effect, apparently; but

Moens escaped at last, and wrote his memoirs, while Manzi was caught

and executed in 1868 after a trial occupying nearly a month, during

which the jury had to answer 311 questions.

His villainies were manifold. But they were put in the shade by those

of others of his calling—of Caruso, for example, who was known to have

massacred in one month (September, 1863) two

hundred persons with his own hands. Then, as formerly, the Church

favoured the malefactors, and I am personally acquainted with priests

who fought on the side of the brigands. Francis II endeavoured to

retrieve his kingdom by the help of an army of scoundrels like those of

Ruffo, but the troops shot them down. Brigandage, as a governmental

institution, came to an end. Unquestionably the noblest figure in this

reactionary movement was that of José Borjès, a brave man engaged in an

unworthy cause. You can read his tragic journal in the pages of M.

Monnier or Maffei. It has been calculated that during these last years

of Bourbonism the brigands committed seven thousand homicides a year in

the kingdom of Naples.

Schools and emigration have now brought sounder ideas among the people,

and the secularization of convents with the abolition of ecclesiastical

right of asylum (Sixtus V had wisely done away with it) has broken up

the prosperous old bond between monks and malefactors. What the

government has done towards establishing decent communications in this

once lawless and pathless country ranks, in its small way, beside the

achievement of the French who, in Algeria, have built nearly ten

thousand miles of road. But it is well to note that even as the

mechanical appliance of steam destroyed the corsairs, the external

plague, so this hoary form of internal disorder could have been

permanently eradicated neither by humanity nor by severity. A

scientific invention, the electric telegraph, is the guarantee of peace

against the rascals.

These brigand chiefs were often loaded with gold. On killing them, the

first thing the French used to do was to strip them. “On le dépouilla.”

Francatripa, for instance, possessed “a plume of white ostrich

feathers, clasped by a golden band and diamond Madonna” (a gift from

Queen Caroline)—Cerino and Manzi had “bunches of gold chains as thick

as an arm suspended across the breasts of their waistcoats, with

gorgeous brooches at each fastening.” Some of their wealth now survives

in certain families who gave them shelter in the towns in winter time,

or when they were hard pressed. These _favoreggiatori_ or _manutengoli_

(the terms are interconvertible, but the first is the legal one) were

sometimes benevolently inclined. But occasionally they conceived the

happy idea of being paid for their silence and services. The brigand,

then, was hoist with his own petard and forced to disgorge his

ill-gotten summer gains to these blood-suckers, who extorted heavy

blackmail under menaces of disclosure to the police, thriving on their

double infamy to such an extent that they acquired immense riches. One

of the wealthiest men in Italy descends from this

class; his two hundred million (?) francs are invested, mostly, in

England; every one knows his name, but the origin of his fortune is no

longer mentioned, since (thanks to this money) the family has been able

to acquire not only respectability but distinction.

XXVIII

THE GREATER SILA

A great project is afoot.

As I understand it, a reservoir is being created by damming up the

valley of the Ampollina; the artificial lake thus formed will be

enlarged by the additional waters of the Arvo, which are to be led into

it by means of a tunnel, about three miles long, passing underneath

Monte Nero. The basin, they tell me, will be some ten kilometres in

length; the work will cost forty million francs, and will be completed

in a couple of years; it will supply the Ionian lowlands with pure

water and with power for electric and other industries.

And more than that. The lake is to revolutionize the Sila; to convert

these wildernesses into a fashionable watering-place. Enthusiasts

already see towns growing upon its shores—there are visions of gorgeous

hotels and flocks of summer visitors in elegant toilettes,

villa-residences, funicular railways up all the mountains, sailing

regattas, and motor-boat services. In the place of the desert there

will arise a “Lucerna di Calabria.”

A Calabrian Lucerne. H’m. ...

It remains to be seen whether, by the time the lake is completed, there

will be any water left to flow into it. For the catchment basins are

being so conscientiously cleared of their timber that the two rivers

cannot but suffer a great diminution in volume. By 1896 already, says

Marincola San Fioro, the destruction of woodlands in the Sila had

resulted in a notable lack of moisture. Ever since then the vandalism

has been pursued with a zeal worthy of a better cause. One trembles to

think what these regions will be like in fifty years; a treeless and

waterless tableland—worse than the glaring limestone deserts of the

Apennines in so far as they, at least, are diversified in contour.

So the healthfulness, beauty, and exchequer value of enormous tracts in

this country are being systematically impaired, day by day. Italy is

ready, said D’Azeglio, but where are the Italians?

Let us give the government credit for any number of good ideas. It

actually plants bare spaces; it has instituted a “Festa degli alberi”

akin to the American Arbour Day, whereby it is hoped, though scarcely

believed, that the whole of Italy will ultimately be replenished with

trees; it encourages schools of forestry, supplies plants free of cost

to all who ask for them, despatches commissions and prints reports.

Above all, it talks prodigiously and very much to the purpose.

But it omits to administer its own laws with becoming severity. A few

exemplary fines and imprisonments would have a more salutary effect

than the commissioning of a thousand inspectors whom nobody takes

seriously, and the printing of ten thousand reports which nobody reads.

With a single stroke of the pen the municipalities could put an end to

the worst form of forest extirpation—that on the hill-sides—by

forbidding access to such tracts and placing them under the “vincolo

forestale.” To denude slopes in the moist climate and deep soil of

England entails no risk; in this country it is the beginning of the

end. And herein lies the ineptitude of the Italian regulations, which

entrust the collective wisdom of rapacious farmers with measures of

this kind, taking no account of the destructively utilitarian character

of the native mind, of that canniness which overlooks a distant profit

in its eagerness to grasp the present—that beast avarice which Horace

recognized as the root of all evil. As if provisions like this of the

“vincolo forestale” were ever carried out! Peasants naturally prefer to

burn the wood in their own chimneys or to sell it; and if a landslide

then crashes down, wrecking houses and vineyards—let the government

compensate the victims!