Do The Rivers Busento And Crati Still Keep The Secret Of That "Royal
Sepulchre, Adorned With The Splendid Spoils And Trophies Of Rome"?
It Seems Improbable That The Grave Was Ever Disturbed; To This Day
There Exists Somewhere Near Cosenza A Treasure-House More Alluring
Than Any Pictured In Arabian Tale.
It is not easy to conjecture what
"spoils and trophies" the Goths buried with their king; if they
sacrificed
Masses of precious metal, then perchance there still lies
in the river-bed some portion of that golden statue of Virtus,
which the Romans melted down to eke out the ransom claimed by
Alaric. The year 410 A.D. was no unfitting moment to break into
bullion the figure personifying Manly Worth. "After that," says an
old historian, "all bravery and honour perished out of Rome."
CHAPTER IV
TARANTO
Cosenza is on a line of railway which runs northward up the Crati
valley, and joins the long seashore line from Taranto to Reggio. 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. A little digging has recently been done, and things of
interest have been found; but discovery on a wide scale is still to
be attempted.
Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of "incomparable
beauty"; unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at
unfavourable moments I was strongly reminded of the Essex coast -
grey, scrubby fiats, crossed by small streams, spreading wearily
seaward. One had only to turn inland to correct this mood; the
Calabrian mountains, even without sunshine, had their wonted grace.
Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent in the foreground, preserved
the southern character of the scene. The great plain between the
hills and the sea grows very impressive; so silent it is, so
mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of vanished glory. I
looked at the Crathis - the Crati of Cosenza - here beginning to
spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow over golden
sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the children,
that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned by
their own vapours.
The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with
eucalyptus. Great bushes of flowering rosemary scented the air, and
a fine cassia tree, from which I plucked blossoms, yielded a subtler
perfume. Our lunch was not luxurious; I remember only, as at all
worthy of Sybaris, a palatable white wine called Muscato dei
Saraceni. Appropriate enough amid this vast silence to turn one's
thoughts to the Saracens, who are so largely answerable for the ages
of desolation that have passed by the Ionian Sea.
Then on for Taranto, where we arrived in the afternoon. Meaning to
stay for a week or two I sought a pleasant room in a well-situated
hotel, and I found one with a good view of town and harbour. The
Taranto of old days, when it was called Taras, or later Tarentum,
stood on a long peninsula, which divides a little inland sea from
the great sea without.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 7 of 40
Words from 6145 to 7160
of 40398
