The old church, he told me, was built in the middle of the seventeenth
century; this new one, he agreed, might have been constructed on more
ambitious lines, "but nowadays - - " and he broke off, with eloquent
aposiopesis.
It was the same, he went on, with the road to the cemetery; why should
it not be continued right up to the cape of the Column as in olden days,
over ground dove ogni passo e una memoria: where every footstep is a
memory?
"Rich Italians," he said, "sometimes give away money to benefit the
public. But the very rich - never! And at Cotrone, you must remember,
every one belongs to the latter class."
We spoke of the Sila, which he had occasionally visited.
"What?" he asked incredulously, "you have crossed the whole of that
country, where there is nothing to eat - nothing in the purest and most
literal sense of that word? My dear sir! You must feel like Hannibal,
after his passage of the Alps."
Those barren clay-hills on our right of which Gissing speaks (they are
like the baize of the Apennines) annoyed him considerably; they were
the malediction of the town, he declared. At the same time, they
supplied him with the groundwork of a theory for which there is a good
deal to be said.
