As
It Was My Wish To See The Whole Of That Coast, I Had The Choice Of
Beginning My Expedition Either At The Northern Or The Southern End;
For Several Reasons I Decided To Make Straight For Taranto.
The train started about seven o'clock in the morning.
I rose at six
in chill darkness, the discomfort of my room seeming worse than ever
at this featureless hour. The waiter - perhaps he was the landlord,
I left this doubt unsolved - brought me a cup of coffee; dirtier
and more shabbily apparelled man I have never looked upon; viler
coffee I never drank. Then I descended into the gloom of the street.
The familiar odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted
hither and thither on a mountain breeze. A glance upwards at the
narrow strip of sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared,
of a dull day.
Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just
laden I saw somebody else's luggage, and at the same moment there
came forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself,
began to look about for the porter. We exchanged greetings, and on
our walk to the station I learned that my companion, also bound for
Taranto, had been detained by illness for several days at the
Lionetti, where, he bitterly complained, the people showed him no
sort of attention. He was a commercial traveller, representing a
firm of drug merchants in North Italy, and for his sins (as he put
it) had to make the southern journey every year; he invariably
suffered from fever, and at certain places - of course, the least
civilized - had attacks which delayed him from three days to a
week. He loathed the South, finding no compensation whatever for the
miseries of travel below Naples; the inhabitants he reviled with
exceeding animosity. Interested by the doleful predicament of this
vendor of drugs (who dosed himself very vigorously), I found him a
pleasant companion during the day; after our lunch he seemed to
shake off the last shivers of his malady, and was as sprightly an
Italian as one could wish to meet - young, sharp-witted,
well-mannered, and with a pleasing softness of character.
We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so
called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria.
The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical
place-names, where they have been lost, and occasionally the
incautious traveller is much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains
above ground; five hundred years before Christ it was destroyed by
the people of Croton, who turned the course of the river Crathis so
as to whelm the city's ruins. Francois Lenormant, whose delightful
book, La Grande Grece, was my companion on this journey, believed
that a discovery far more wonderful and important than that of
Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site; he held it certain that
here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial mud, lay the temples and
the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when Crathis first flowed over
them.
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