The Arsenal Brings Movement Into The Town;
It Has Appropriated The Lion's Share Of Building Sites In The "New"
Town.
Is it a ripple on the surface of things, or will it truly stir the
spirits of the city?
So many arsenals have come and gone, at Taranto!
This arsenal quarter is a fine example of the Italian mania of fare
figura - everything for effect. It is an agglomeration of dreary
streets, haunted by legions of clamorous black swifts, and constructed
on the rectangular principle dear to the Latin mind. Modern, and
surpassingly monotonous. Are such interminable rows of stuccoed barracks
artistic to look upon, are they really pleasant to inhabit? Is it
reasonable or even sanitary, in a climate of eight months' sunshine, to
build these enormous roadways and squares filled with glaring limestone
dust that blows into one's eyes and almost suffocates one; these Saharas
that even at the present season of the year (early June) cannot be
traversed comfortably unless one wears brown spectacles and goes veiled
like a Tuareg? This arsenal quarter must be a hell during the really not
season, which continues into October.
For no trees whatever are planted to shade the walking population, as in
Paris or Cairo or any other sunlit city.
And who could guess the reason? An Englishman, at least, would never
bring himself to believe what is nevertheless a fact, namely, that if
the streets are converted into shady boulevards, the rents of the houses
immediately fall. When trees are planted, the lodgers complain and
finally emigrate to other quarters; the experiment has been tried, at
Naples and elsewhere, and always with the same result. Up trees, down
rents. The tenants refuse to be deprived of their chief pleasure in
life - that of gazing at the street-passengers, who must be good enough
to walk in the sunshine for their delectation. But if you are of an
inquisitive turn of mind, you are quite at liberty to return the
compliment and to study from the outside the most intimate details of
the tenants' lives within. Take your fill of their domestic doings;
stare your hardest. They don't mind in the least, not they! That feeling
of privacy which the northerner fosters doggedly even in the centre of a
teeming city is alien to their hearts; they like to look and be looked
at; they live like fish in an aquarium. It is a result of the whole
palazzo-System that every one knows his neighbour's business better than
his own. What does it matter, in the end? Are we not all "Christians "?
The municipality, meanwhile, is deeply indebted for the sky-piercing
ambitions which have culminated in the building of this new quarter. To
meet these obligations, the octroi prices have been raised to the
highest pitch by the City Fathers. This octroi is farmed out and
produces (they tell me) 120 pounds a day; there are some hundred
toll-collecting posts at the outskirts of the town, and the average
salary of their officials is three pounds a month. They are supposed to
be respectable and honest men, but it is difficult to see how a family
can be supported on that wage, when one knows how high the rents are,
and how severely the most ordinary commodities of life are taxed.
I endeavoured to obtain photographs of the land as it looked ere it was
covered by the arsenal quarter, but in vain. Nobody seems to have
thought it worth while preserving what would surely be a notable
economic document for future generations. Out of sheer curiosity I also
tried to procure a plan of the old quarter, that labyrinth of
thick-clustering humanity, where the Streets are often so narrow that
two persons can barely squeeze past each other. I was informed that no
such plan had ever been drawn up; it was agreed that a map of this kind
might be interesting, and suggested, furthermore, that I might undertake
the task myself; the authorities would doubtless appreciate my labours.
We foreigners, be it understood, have ample means and unlimited leisure,
and like nothing better than doing unprofitable jobs of this kind.
[Footnote: here is a map of old Taranto in Lasor a Varea (Savonarola)
Universus terrarum etc., Vol. II, p. 552, and another in J. Blaev's
Theatrum Civitatum (1663). He talks of the "rude houses" of this
town.]
One is glad to leave the scintillating desert of this arsenal quarter,
and enter the cool stone-paved streets of the other, which remind one
somewhat of Malta. In the days of Salis-Marschlins this city possessed
only 18,000 inhabitants, and "outdid even the customary Italian filth,
being hardly passable on account of the excessive nastiness and stink."
It is now scrupulously clean - so absurdly clean, that it has quite
ceased to be picturesque. Not that its buildings are particularly
attractive to me; none, that is, save the antique "Trinita" column of
Doric gravity - sole survivor of Hellenic Taras, which looks wondrously
out of place in its modern environment. One of the finest of these
earlier monuments, the Orsini tower depicted in old prints of the place,
has now been demolished.
Lovers of the baroque may visit the shrine of Saint Cataldo, a jovial
nightmare in stone. And they who desire a literary pendant to this
fantastic structure should read the life of the saint written by Morone
in 1642. Like the shrine, it is the quintessence of insipid exuberance;
there is something preposterous in its very title "Cataldiados," and
whoever reads through those six books of Latin hexameters will arise
from the perusal half-dazed. Somehow or other, it dislocates one's whole
sense of terrestrial values to see a frowsy old monk [Footnote: This
wandering Irish missionary is supposed to have died here in the seventh
century, and they who are not satisfied with his printed biographies
will find one in manuscript of 550 pages, compiled in 1766, in the Cuomo
Library at Naples.] treated in the heroic style and metre, as though he
were a new Achilles.
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