By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy

exists somewhere near Cosenza a treasure-house more alluring than any

pictured in Arabian tale. It is not easy to conjecture what “spoils and

trophies” the Goths buried with their king; if they sacrificed masses

of precious metal, then perchance there still lies in the river-bed

some portion of that golden statue of Virtus, which the Romans melted

down to eke out the ransom claimed by Alaric. The year 410 A.D. was no

unfitting moment to break into bullion the figure personifying Manly

Worth. “After that,” says an old historian, “all bravery and honour

perished out of Rome.”

CHAPTER IV

TARANTO

Cosenza is on a line of railway which runs northward up the Crati

valley, and joins the long seashore line from Taranto to Reggio. As it

was my wish to see the whole of that coast, I had the choice of

beginning my expedition either at the northern or the southern end; for

several reasons I decided to make straight for Taranto.

The train started about seven o’clock in the morning. I rose at six in

chill darkness, the discomfort of my room seeming worse than ever at

this featureless hour. The waiter—perhaps he was the landlord, I left

this doubt unsolved—brought me a cup of coffee; dirtier and more

shabbily apparelled man I have never looked upon; viler coffee I never

drank. Then I descended into the gloom of the street. The familiar

odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted hither and

thither on a mountain breeze. A glance upwards at the narrow strip of

sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared, of a dull day.

Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just

laden I saw somebody else’s luggage, and at the same moment there came

forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself, began to

look about for the porter. We exchanged greetings, and on our walk to

the station I learned that my companion, also bound for Taranto, had

been detained by illness for several days at the Lionetti, where, he

bitterly complained, the people showed him no sort of attention. He was

a commercial traveller, representing a firm of drug merchants in North

Italy, and for his sins (as he put it) had to make the southern journey

every year; he invariably suffered from fever, and at certain

places—of course, the least civilized—had attacks which delayed him

from three days to a week. He loathed the South, finding no

compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the

inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity. Interested by the

doleful predicament of this vendor of drugs (who dosed himself very

vigorously), I found him a pleasant companion during the day; after our

lunch he seemed to shake off the last shivers of his malady, and was as

sprightly an Italian as one could wish to meet—young, sharp-witted,

well-mannered, and with a pleasing softness of character.

We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so

called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria.

The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names,

where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is

much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains above ground; five hundred

years before Christ it was destroyed by the people of Croton, who

turned the course of the river Crathis so as to whelm the city’s ruins.

Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, La Grande Grece, was my

companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful

and important than that of Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site;

he held it certain that here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial

mud, lay the temples and the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when

Crathis first flowed over them. A little digging has recently been

done, and things of interest have been found; but discovery on a wide

scale is still to be attempted.

Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of “incomparable beauty”;

unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at unfavourable moments I

was strongly reminded of the Essex coast—grey, scrubby fiats, crossed

by small streams, spreading wearily seaward. One had only to turn

inland to correct this mood; the Calabrian mountains, even without

sunshine, had their wonted grace. Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent

in the foreground, preserved the southern character of the scene. The

great plain between the hills and the sea grows very impressive; so

silent it is, so mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of

vanished glory. I looked at the Crathis—the Crati of Cosenza—here

beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow

over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the

children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned

by their own vapours.

The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with

eucalyptus. Great bushes of flowering rosemary scented the air, and a

fine cassia tree, from which I plucked blossoms, yielded a subtler

perfume. Our lunch was not luxurious; I remember only, as at all worthy