In olden days I used to visit south Italy armed with introductions to
merchants, noblemen and landed proprietors.
I have quite abandoned that
system, as these people, bless their hearts, have such cordial notions
of hospitality that from morning to night the traveller has not a moment
he can call his own. Letters to persons in authority, such as syndics or
police officers, are useless and worse than useless. Like Chinese
mandarins, these officials are so puffed up with their own importance
that it is sheer waste of time to call upon them. If wanted, they can
always be found; if not, they are best left alone. For besides being
usually the least enlightened and least amiable of the populace, they
are inordinately suspicious of political or commercial designs on the
part of strangers - God knows what visions are fermenting in their turbid
brains - and seldom let you out of their sight, once they have known you.
Excepting at Cosenza, Cotrone and Catanzaro, an average white man will
seldom find, in any Calabrian hostelry, what he is accustomed to
consider as ordinary necessities of life. The thing is easily
explicable. These men are not yet in the habit of "handling" civilized
travellers; they fail to realize that hotel-keeping is a business to be
learnt, like tailoring or politics. They are still in the patriarchal
stage, wealthy proprietors for the most part, and quite independent of
your custom. They have not learnt the trick of Swiss servility.
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