The Pillars of Hercules

It was a one-hour crossing of the Straits of Messina, and then the train was slung out of the ferry in sections and reconnected at Villa San Giovanni, which was just a ferry port and a mass of chanting signs, Al Treno, To the Train, Au Train, Zum Zug.

At a certain hour of the day in Italy, one of the more demoralizing aspects of being in a forlorn little station like Villa San Giovanni was seeing a big comfortable express train that would be departing in ten minutes for Rome, arriving tomorrow, just as the shutters were being flung up in the bookstores and restaurants. The passengers on the Rome Express looked out at me, probably thinking, Poor sucker, because they knew that I was just another peasant waiting for the branch line train to Reggio, fifteen minutes down the line, on the toe of Italy’s boot.

Twenty-three Italian soldiers, wearing maroon nightcaps with dangling blue pompoms, stood with me, and soon after the Rome Express moved importantly north, our little choo-choo went clinkety-clank south, to Reggio, which was dark and cold and windy. It was Sunday night in this poor town—it had once been the capital of Calabria but it had fallen on hard times like most of the south. It too had been flattened by the 1908 earthquake that had destroyed Messina. Strangely, even after pacing up and down, the only hotel that I could find open in Reggio turned out to be the most expensive one of my trip, so far ($81), though hardly better than the rest of them.

Almost a hundred years ago the English writer George Gissing (born poor, wrote New Grub Street, married a prostitute) made a solitary and often melancholy trip around southern Italy, which he called By the Ionian Sea. He stopped in Reggio and saw “few signs of activity; the one long street, Corso Garibaldi, has little traffic; most of the shops close shortly after nightfall, and then there is no sound of wheels … the town is strangely quiet, considering its size and aspect.”

That was precisely what I reported to my diary, until around seven in the evening I heard a loud commotion, and howl of human voices, and I asked a man in the doorway of the hotel, “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” he said in the local dialect, not niente but ninte.

So accustomed was he to the sound, it meant nothing to him. But I should have known.

“You from around here?”

“Squillace,” he said, and it seemed a very grim name.

“And you?”

“United States.”

“Good. I got relatives there.” From his agitated hand gesture, and his pursed lips, I was to understand that there were very many of them.

It was Sunday night in Reggio and that meant the parade of locals, great and small, old and young, male and female, the ritual of the passeggiata—that was the sound I heard. It fascinated me, more there than in Siracusa, because the weather was colder. On this foul, windy night in the small town of Reggio, in the depths of winter dampness, the whole populace turned out to march, bundled up against the weather. It was a gentle mob scene, the loud scuffing of their shoes, their chattering voices, up and down Corso Garibaldi, or milling around the piazza, on street corners, talking, laughing, walking three or four abreast, about a quarter of a mile and then back again, commandeering the main street.

The most remarkable thing to me was the controlled fury of it, all the voices creating one loud, almost deafening drone, everyone talking at once; that and the motion of the people in the street, on which there were no cars—not that they were specifically excluded, but who in a little Fiat would risk facing all those tramping arm-swinging Calabrians? This was a cheery event. It started round about seven, and by ten everyone had gone home.

Obviously, George Gissing had not seen Reggio on a weekend (though he had seen it just before the earthquake brought it down). It was still true almost a century later that Reggio was a just a little lighted place with darkness all around it—not wilderness or woods but dry tiny villages set amid the strange and infertile landscape of rocks and ravines, in the dusty hills of Calabria. They were remote and forgotten places even now. People in the nearby village of Bova spoke a dialect that was nearer Greek than it was Italian, and it has been suggested that the people in this region had been yakking happily in Greek during the whole Roman era, speaking Latin to officials only when they had to. When Roman rule was supplanted by the Byzantines, Greek came back into vogue and was once again the language of commerce and the greater empire. Nonetheless, for all this classicism and all the civilizations that had come and gone, there were villages in Calabria that still had no electricity or running water.