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 Man-fredonia 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.
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.
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