One Might Do Worse Than Spend A Quiet Month Or Two At Cotrone In The
Spring, For The Place Grows Upon One:
It is so reposeful and orderly.
But not in winter.
Gissing committed the common error of visiting south
Italy at that season when, even if the weather will pass, the country
and its inhabitants are not true to themselves. You must not come to
these parts in winter time.
Nor yet in the autumn, for the surrounding district is highly malarious.
Thucydides already speaks of these coastlands as depopulated (relatively
speaking, I suppose), and under the Romans they recovered but little;
they have only begun to revive quite lately. [Footnote: Between
1815 - 1843, and in this single province of Catanzaro, there was an
actual decline in the population of thirty-six towns and villages.
Malaria!] Yet this town must have looked well enough in the twelfth
century, since it is described by Edrisius as "a very old city,
primitive and beautiful, prosperous and populated, in a smiling
position, with walls of defence and an ample port for anchorage." I
suspect that the history of Cotrone will be found to bear out Professor
Celli's theory of the periodical recrudescences and abatements of
malaria. However that may be, the place used to be in a deplorable
state. Riedesel (1771) calls it "la ville la plus affreuse de l'Italie,
et peut-etre du monde entier"; twenty years later, it is described as
"sehr ungesund ... so aermlich als moeglich"; in 1808 it was "reduite a
une population de trois mille habitants ronges par la misere, et les
maladies qu'occasionne la stagnation des eaux qui autrefois
fertilisaient ces belles campagnes." In 1828, says Vespoli, it contained
only 3932 souls.
I rejoice to cite such figures. They show how vastly Cotrone, together
with the rest of Calabria, has improved since the Bourbons were ousted.
The sack of the town by their hero Cardinal Ruffo, described by Pepe and
others, must have left long traces. "Horrible was the carnage
perpetrated by these ferocious bands. Neither age nor sex nor condition
was spared. . . . After two days of pillage accompanied by a multitude
of excesses and cruelties, they erected, on the third day, a magnificent
altar in the middle of a large square" - and here the Cardinal, clothed
in his sacred purple, praised the good deeds of the past two days and
then, raising his arms, displayed a crucifix, absolving his crew from
the faults committed during the ardour of the sack, and blessed them.
I shall be sorry to leave these regions for the north, as leave them I
must, in shortest time. The bathing alone would tempt me to prolong my
stay, were it possible. Whereas Taranto, despite its situation,
possesses no convenient beach, there are here, on either side of the
town, leagues of shimmering sand lapped by tepid and caressing waves; it
is a sunlit solitude; the land is your own, the sea your own, as far as
eye can reach. One may well become an amphibian, at Cotrone.
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