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.
