"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.
The inhabitants of this town are well-mannered and devoid of the
"ineffable" air of the Tarentines. But they are not a handsome race.
Gissing says, a propos of the products of a local photographer, that it
was "a hideous exhibition; some of the visages attained an incredible
degree of vulgar ugliness." That is quite true. Old authors praise the
beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for
my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of
Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the
Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are
decidedly centripetal.
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