We Started At
Last, In The Hot Hours Of The Morning, And The Road At First Skirts The
Banks Of The Alaro, The Sagra Of Old, On Whose Banks Was Fought The
Fabled Battle Between The Men Of Croton And Locri.
Then it begins to
climb upwards.
My companion was a poor peasant woman, nearly blind (from
malaria, possibly). Full of my impressions of yesterday, I promptly led
the conversation towards the subject of Musolino. She had never spoken
to him, she said, or even seen him. But she got ten francs from him, all
the same. In dire distress, some years ago, she had asked a friend in
the mountains to approach the brigand on her behalf. The money was long
in coming, she added, but of course it came in the end. He always helped
poor people, even those outside his own country. The site of the
original Caulonia is quite uncertain. Excavations now going on at
Monasterace, some ten miles further on, may decide that the town lay
there. Some are in favour of the miserable village of Foca, near at
hand; or of other sites. The name of Foca seems to point, rather, to a
settlement of the regenerator Nicephorus Phocas. Be that as it may, the
present town of Caulonia used to be called Castelvetere, and it
appropriated the Greek name in accordance with a custom which has been
largely followed hereabouts. [Footnote: It is represented with two
towers in Peutinger's Tables. But these, says an editor, should have
been given to the neighbouring Scilatio, for Caulon was in ruins at the
time of Pliny, and is not even mentioned by Ptolemy.
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