Strange, is it not, sir? They used to fight like
fiends, and now - she sings to him night and day to come back."
Love - so the Greeks fabled - was the child of Chaos.
In this part of the town stands the civic museum, which all readers of
Gissing's "Ionian Sea" will remember as the closing note of those
harmonious pages. It is shattered, like everything else that he visited
in Reggio; like the hotel where he lodged; like the cathedral whose
proud superscription Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium impressed him so
deeply; like that "singular bit of advanced civilization, which gave me
an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who
forecast the future - a public slaughter-house of tasteful architecture,
set in a grove of lemon trees and palms, suggesting the dreamy ideal of
some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism." We went the
round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the
tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting
against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a rope
by which the inmates may have tried to let themselves down.
A friend of mine, Baron C - - of Stilo, is a member of that same
patriotic family, and gave me the following strange account. He was
absent from Reggio at the time of the catastrophe, but three others of
them were staying there. On the first shock they rushed together,
panic-stricken, into one room; the floor gave way, and they suddenly
found themselves sitting in their motor-car which happened to be placed
exactly below them. They escaped with a few cuts and bruises.
An inscription on a neighbouring ruin runs to the effect that the
mansion having been severely damaged in the earthquake of 1783, its
owner had rebuilt it on lines calculated to defy future shattering!
Whether he would rebuild it yet again?
Nevertheless, there seems to be some chance for the revival of Reggio;
its prognosis is not utterly hopeless.
But Messina is in desperate case.
That haughty sea-front, with its long line of imposing edifices - imagine
a painted theatre decoration of cardboard through which some sportive
behemoth has been jumping with frantic glee; there you have it. And
within, all is desolation; the wreckage reaches to the windows; you must
clamber over it as best you can. What an all-absorbing post-tertiary
deposit for future generations, for the crafty antiquarian who deciphers
the history of mankind out of kitchen-middens and deformed heaps of
forgotten trash! The whole social life of the citizens, their arts,
domestic economy, and pastimes, lies embedded in that rubbish. "A
musical race," he will conclude, observing the number of decayed
pianofortes, guitars, and mandolines. The climate of Messina, he will
further arene, must have been a wet one, inasmuch as there are umbrellas
everywhere, standing upright among the debris, leaning all forlorn
against the ruins, or peering dismally from under them.
