"Not that one. But I can raise two others. The platforms are
inconveniently arranged, and a traveller will often find it impossible
to wash his hands and face there; as to hot water - - "
"Granting a certain deplorable disposition of the lines - why on earth,
pray, should a man cleanse himself at the station when there are
countless hotels and lodging-houses in the city? O you English originals!"
"And supposing," I urged, "he is in a hurry to catch another train going
south, to Naples or Palermo?"
"There I have you, my illustrious friend! Nobody travels south of Rome."
Nobody travels south of Rome. . . .
Often have I thought upon those words.
This conversation was forcibly recalled to my mind by the fact that it
took our creaky old diligence two and a half hours (one of the horses
had been bought the day before, for six pounds) to drive from the
station of Castrovillari to the entrance of the town, where we were
delayed another twenty minutes, while the octroi zealots searched
through every bag and parcel on the post-waggon.
Many people have said bad things about this place. But my once
unpleasant impressions of it have been effaced by my reception at its
new and decent little hostelry. What a change after the sordid filth of
Rossano! Castrovillari, to be sure, has no background of hoary eld to
atone for such deficiencies. It was only built the other day, by the
Normans; or by the Romans, who called it Aprustum; or possibly by the
Greeks, who founded their Abystron on this particular site for the same
reasons that commended it in yet earlier times to certain bronze and
stone age primitives, whose weapons you may study in the British Museum
and elsewhere. [Footnote: Even so Taranto, Cumae, Paestum, Metapontum,
Monteleone and other southern towns were founded by the ancients on the
site of prehistoric stations.]
But what are the stone ages compared with immortal and immutable
Rossano? An ecclesiastical writer has proved that Calabria was inhabited
before the Noachian flood; and Rossano, we may be sure, was one of the
favourite haunts of the antediluvians. None the less, it is good to rest
in a clean bed, for a change; and to feed off a clean plate.
We are in the south. One sees it in sundry small ways - in the behaviour
of the cats, for instance. . . .
The Tarentines, they say, imported the cat into Europe. If those of
south Italy still resemble their old Nubian ancestors, the beast would
assuredly not have been worth the trouble of acclimatizing. On entering
these regions, one of the first things that strikes me is the difference
between the appearance of cats and dogs hereabouts, and in England or
any northern country; and the difference in their temperaments. Our dogs
are alert in their movements and of wideawake features; here they are
arowsy and degraded mongrels, with expressionless eyes.
