What Jocund Friendships Were Made, What Songs And Tales
Applauded, During Those Interminable Hours In The Lumbering Chaise!
You must choose Sunday for Tiriolo, on account of the girls, whose
pretty faces and costumes are worth coming any distance to see.
A good
proportion of them have the fair hair which seems to have been
eliminated, in other parts of the country, through the action of malaria.
Viewed from Catanzaro, one of the hills of Tiriolo looks like a broken
volcanic crater. It is a limestone ridge, decked with those
characteristic flowers like Campanula fragilis which you will vainly
seek on the Sila. Out of the ruins of some massive old building they
have constructed, on the summit, a lonely weather-beaten fabric that
would touch the heart of Maeterlinck. They call it a seismological
station. I pity the people that have to depend for their warnings of
earthquakes upon the outfit of a place like this. I could see no signs
of life here; the windows were broken, the shutters decaying, an old
lightning-rod dangled disconsolately from the roof; it looked as
abandoned as any old tower in a tale. There is a noble view from this
point over both seas and into the riven complexities of Aspromonte, when
the peak is not veiled in mists, as it frequently is. For Tiriolo lies
on the watershed; there (to quote from a "Person of Quality ") "where
the Apennine is drawn into so narrow a point, that the rain-water which
descendeth from the ridge of some one house, falleth on the left in the
Terrene Sea, and on the right into the Adriatick.
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