Nothing Whatever Prevented Them
From Being Near Each Other; The Room Never Contained More Than Half
A Dozen Persons; Yet Thus They Sat, Evening After Evening, Many
Yards Apart, Straining Their Voices To Be Mutually Audible.
Me they
delighted; to the other guests, more familiar with them and their
talk, they must have been a serious nuisance.
But I should have
liked to see the civilian who dared to manifest his disapproval of
these fine old warriors.
They sat interminably, evidently having no idea how otherwise to
pass the evening. In the matter of public amusements Catanzaro is
not progressive; I only once saw an announcement of a theatrical
performance, and it did not smack of modern enterprise. On the
dining-room table one evening lay a little printed bill, which made
known that a dramatic company was then in the town. Their
entertainment consisted of two parts, the first entitled: "The Death
of Agolante and the Madness of Count Orlando"; the second: "A
Delightful Comedy, the Devil's Castle with Pulcinella as the
Timorous Soldier." In addition were promised "new duets and
Neapolitan songs." The theatre would comfortably seat three hundred
persons, and the performance would be given twice, at half-past
eighteen and half-past twenty-one o'clock. It was unpardonable in me
that I did not seek out the Teatro delle Varieta; I might easily
have been in my seat (with thirty, more likely than three hundred,
other spectators) by half-past twenty-one. But the night was
forbidding; a cold rain fell heavily. Moreover, just as I had
thought that it was perhaps worth while to run the risk of another
illness - one cannot see the Madness of Count Orlando every day -
there came into the room a peddler laden with some fifty volumes of
fiction and a fine assortment of combs and shirt-studs. The books
tempted me; I looked them through. Most, of course, were
translations from the vulgarest French feuilletonistes; the
Italian reader of novels, whether in newspaper or volume, knows, as
a rule, nothing but this imported rubbish. However, a real Italian
work was discoverable, and, together with the unfriendly sky, it
kept me at home. I am sorry now, as for many another omission on my
wanderings, when lack of energy or a passing mood of dullness has
caused me to miss what would be so pleasant in the retrospect.
I spent an hour one evening at the principal cafe, where a pianist
of great pretensions and small achievement made rather painful
music. Watching and listening to the company (all men, of course,
though the Oriental system regarding women is not so strict at
Catanzaro as elsewhere in the south), I could not but fall into a
comparison of this scene with any similar gathering of middle-class
English folk. The contrast was very greatly in favour of the
Italians. One has had the same thought a hundred times in the same
circumstances, but it is worth dwelling upon. Among these
representative men, young and old, of Catanzaro, the tone of
conversation was incomparably better than that which would rule in a
cluster of English provincials met to enjoy their evening leisure.
They did, in fact, converse - a word rarely applicable to English
talk under such conditions; mere personal gossip was the exception;
they exchanged genuine thoughts, reasoned lucidly on the surface of
abstract subjects. I say on the surface; no remark that I heard
could be called original or striking; but the choice of topics and
the mode of viewing them was distinctly intellectual. Phrases often
occurred such as have no equivalent on the lips of everyday people
in our own country. For instance, a young fellow in no way
distinguished from his companions, fell to talking about a leading
townsman, and praised him for his ingenio simpatico, his bella
intelligenza, with exclamations of approval from those who
listened. No, it is not merely the difference between homely
Anglo-Saxon and a language of classic origin; there is a radical
distinction of thought. These people have an innate respect for
things of the mind, which is wholly lacking to a typical Englishman.
One need not dwell upon the point that their animation was supported
by a tiny cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade; this is a matter of
climate and racial constitution; but I noticed the entire absence of
a certain kind of jocoseness which is so naturally associated with
spirituous liquors; no talk could have been less offensive. From
many a bar-parlour in English country towns I have gone away heavy
with tedium and disgust; the cafe at Catanzaro seemed, in
comparison, a place of assembly for wits and philosophers.
Meanwhile a season of rain had begun; heavy skies warned me that I
must not hope for a renewal of sunny idleness on this mountain top;
it would be well if intervals of cheerful weather lighted my further
course by the Ionian Sea. Reluctantly, I made ready to depart.
CHAPTER XIV
SQUILLACE
In meditating my southern ramble I had lingered on the thought that
I should see Squillace. For Squillace (Virgil's "ship-wrecking
Scylaceum") was the ancestral home of Cassiodorus, and his retreat
when he became a monk; Cassiodorus, the delightful pedant, the
liberal statesman and patriot, who stands upon the far limit of his
old Roman world and bids a sad farewell to its glories. He had
niched himself in my imagination. Once when I was spending a silent
winter upon the shore of Devon, I had with me the two folio volumes
of his works, and patiently read the better part of them; it was
more fruitful than a study of all the modern historians who have
written about his time. I saw the man; caught many a glimpse of his
mind and heart, and names which had been to me but symbols in a
period of obscure history became things living and recognizable.
I could have travelled from Catanzaro by railway to the sea-coast
station called Squillace, but the town itself is perched upon a
mountain some miles inland, and it was simpler to perform the whole
journey by road, a drive of four hours, which, if the weather
favoured me, would be thoroughly enjoyable.
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