After That Comes Catanzaro And The Valley Of The Corace, The
Narrowest Point Of The Italian Continent, And Then The Heights Of Serra
And Aspromonte, The True "Italy" Of Old, That Continue As Far As Reggio.
Though I passed through some noble groves of chestnut on the way up, the
country here was a treeless waste.
Yet it must have been forest up to a
short time ago, for one could see the beautiful vegetable mould which
has not yet had time to be washed down the hill-sides. A driving road
passes the Croce Greca; it joins Acri with San Giovanni, the capital of
Sila Grande, and with Cosenza.
It was another long hour's march, always uphill, before I reached a
spacious green meadow or upland with a few little buildings. The place
is called Verace and lies on the watershed between the upper Crati
valley and the Ionian; thenceforward my walk would be a descent along
the Trionto river, the Traeis of old, as far as Longo-bucco which
overlooks its flood. It was cool here at last, from the altitude and the
decline of day; and hay-making was going on, amid the pastoral din of
cow-bells and a good deal of blithe love-making and chattering.
After some talk with these amiable folks, I passed on to where
the young Traeis bubbles up from the cavernous reservoirs of the earth.
Of those chill and roguish wavelets I took a draught, mindful of the day
when long ago, by these same waters, an irreparable catastrophe
overwhelmed our European civilization. For it was the Traeis near whose
estuary was fought the battle between 300,000 Sybarites (I refuse to
believe these figures) and the men of Croton conducted by their champion
Milo - a battle which led to the destruction of Sybaris and,
incidentally, of Hellenic culture throughout the mainland of Italy. This
was in the same fateful year 510 that witnessed the expulsion of the
Tarquins from Rome and the Pisistratidae from Athens.
Pines, the characteristic tree of the Sila, now begin to appear. Passing
through Verace I had already observed, on the left, a high mountain
entirely decked with them. It is the ridge marked Pale-parto on the map;
the Trionto laves its foot. But the local pronunciation of this name is
Palepite, and I cannot help thinking that here we have a genuine old
Greek name perpetuated by the people and referring to this covering of
hoary pines - a name which the cartographers, arbitrary and ignorant as
they often are, have unconsciously disguised. (It occurs in some old
charts, however, as Paleparto.) An instructive map of Italy could be
drawn up, showing the sites and cities wrongly named from corrupt
etymology or falsified inscriptions, and those deliberately miscalled
out of principles of local patriotism. The whole country is full of
these inventions of litterati which date, for the most part, from the
enthusiastic but undisciplined Cinque-Cento.
The minute geographical triangle comprised between Cosenza, Longobucco
and San Demetrio which I was now traversing is one of the least known
corners of Italy, and full of dim Hellenic memories. The streamlet
"Calamo" flows through the valley I ascended from Acri, and at its side,
a little way out of the town, stands the fountain "Pompeio" where the
brigands, not long ago, used to lie in wait for women and children
coming to fetch water, and snatch them away for ransom. On the way up, I
had glimpses down a thousand feet or more into the Mucone or Acheron,
raging and foaming in its narrow valley. It rises among the mountains
called "Fallistro" and "Li Tartari" - unquestionably Greek names.
On this river and somewhere above Acri stood, according to the scholarly
researches of Lenormant, the ancient city of Pandosia. I do not know if
its site has been determined since his day. It was "very strong" and
rich and at its highest prosperity in the fourth century B.C.; after the
fall of Sybaris it passed under the supremacy of Croton. The god Pan was
figured on some of its coins, and appropriately enough, considering its
sylvan surroundings; others bear the head of the nymph Pandosia with her
name and that of the river Crathis, under the guise of a young shepherd:
they who wish to learn his improper legend will find it in the pages of
Aelian, or in chapter xxxii of the twenty-fifth book of Rhodiginus,
beginning Quae sit brutorum affectio, etc. [Footnote: Brunii a
brutis moribus: so say certain spiteful writers, an accusation which
Strabo and Horace extend to all Calabrians. As to the site of Pandosia,
a good number of scholars, such as old Prosper Parisius and Luigi Maria
Greco, locate it at the village of Mendicino on the river Merenzata,
which was called Arconte (? Acheron) in the Middle Ages. So the Trionto
is not unquestionably the Traeis, and in Marincola Pistoia's good little
"Cose di Sibari" (1845) the distinction is claimed for one of four
rivers - the Lipuda, Colognati, Trionto, or Fiuminica.]
We have here not the Greece of mediaeval Byzantine times, much less that
of the Albanians, but the sunny Hellas of the days when the world was
young, when these ardent colonists sailed westwards to perpetuate their
names and legends in the alien soil of Italy.
The Mucone has always been known as a ferocious and pitiless torrent,
and maintains to this day its Tartarean reputation. Twenty persons a
year, they tell me, are devoured by its angry waters: mangia venti
cristiani all' anno! This is as bad as the Amendolea near Reggio. But
none of its victims have attained the celebrity of Alexander of
Molossus, King of Epirus, who perished under the walls of Pandosia in
326 B.C. during an excursion against the Lucanians. He had been warned
by the oracle of Dodona to avoid the waters of Acheron and the town of
Pandosia; once in Italy, however, he paid small heed to these words,
thinking they referred to the river and town of the same name in
Thesprotia.
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