Now The
Lion Is Doubtless A Nobly Decorative Beast, But - Toujours Perdrix!
Why
not a few griffons or other ornaments?
The Romans were not an
imaginative race.
The country around must have looked different in olden days. Horace
describes it as covered with forests, and from a manuscript of the early
seventeenth century which has lately been printed one learns that the
surrounding regions were full of "hares, rabbits, foxes, roe deer,
wild boars, martens, porcupines, hedgehogs, tortoises and wolves" -
wood-loving creatures which have now, for the most part, deserted
Venosa. Still, there are left some stretches of oak at the back
of the town, and the main lines of the land cannot change. Yonder lies
the Horatian Forense and "Acherontia's nest"; further on, the glades of
Bantia (the modern Banzi); the long-drawn Garganian Mount, on which the
poet's eye must often have rested, emerges above the plain of Apulia
like an island (and such it is: an island of Austrian stone, stranded
upon the beach of Italy). Monte Vulture still dominates the landscape,
although at this nearness the crater loses its shapely conical outline
and assumes a serrated edge. On its summit I perceive a gigantic
cross - one of a number of such symbols which were erected by the
clericals at the time of the recent rationalist congress in Rome.
From this chronicler I learn another interesting fact: that Venosa was
not malarious in the author's day. He calls it healthy, and says that
the only complaint from which the inhabitants suffered was "ponture"
(pleurisy). It is now within the infected zone.
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