The Pillars of Hercules

No wonder so many Italians said good-bye here. Near the port of Messina, in the poorest region of Italy, Reggio was the last landscape tens of thousands of emigrants saw, before they boarded ships for America; Reggio was less a town than a jumping-off place.

The ones in the passeggiata were the ones who had stayed behind. Eating pasta, drinking wine, I watched them from the window of a restaurant, while I scribbled. The idea that most of them had relatives in the United States made them seem resolute, if not defiant, to me, and it was as though they were celebrating the fact that they were still there, carrying on, after all these years, proudly rooted in the peculiarly stony soil of their native land.

Again, I seemed to be the only guest of the hotel. That suited me. The empty foyer, the shadowy corridors, my gloomy cubicle—this was an appropriate setting. I was reading the copy of Frankenstein I had bought in Siracusa, to put myself in the mood for the gothic darkness of Calabria. And that night I read how Dr. Frankenstein had been born in Naples, when his parents were passing through.

I was not heading for Naples. The next day I bought a ticket to Metaponto, half a day’s train ride in the other direction, in the arch of the Italian boot. Usually I just rattled to a new place and hoped for the best; but today I had a specific objective at Metaponto.

After Reggio there were a succession of straggling settlements by the sea, some dilapidated vineyards crowded by factories and junk heaps. It was a view of the Mediterranean that was new to me, mile upon mile of empty stony beaches, here and there some fishermen venturing out in small wooden dinghies. Inland on the sea-facing slopes there were hamlets of houses, some of them ancient-looking, and many of them had great cracks in their walls which could have been produced by the 1908 earthquake. There were newer houses, but they seemed as ruinous as the old ones. The soil looked infertile, much of it white chalky clay plowed into clods at Brancaleone, and sluiced into stony gullies at Bova.

The beaches were littered but there was no one on them, even at Locri, one of the bigger towns. Albichiara was one of those old yellow villages built high on a ridge, almost at the skyline (“against the barbarians”), and in the plains below it were fruit trees and olive groves. The station at Soverato was crowded with people clamoring to board this train—which was going to the distant provincial capital, Taranto, and terminating at the city of Bari on the Adriatic. But not all the people were boarding; many were there to say good-bye.

“Have a good trip!”

“Bye, Grandma!”

A priest joined me in my empty compartment. He had the evil eye, of course. So no one else came in, and those who passed in the corridor averted their eyes and hurried past.

Squillace was not as ugly as its name suggested. It was Virgil’s “shipwrecking Scylaceum” and in Gissing’s time was squalid: “Under no conditions could inhabited Squillace be other than an offense to eye or nostril.” But I saw only the settlement around the station. The village itself was five miles inland and was perhaps still offensive.

Spivs, little old women in black, nuns whose noses were longer than their bonnets, salesmen with crates, and fussing couples got on at Catanzaro, which was a good-sized town among ferocious-looking cliffs of dusty clay. After the desolate grandeur of the great sweeping fields and valleys, littered with stones, the hills near Cutro were so scored with erosion they seemed covered with heavy folded drapes of clay. The redeeming feature was the glittering sea; no waves, no swell, just placid water nudging and sloshing at this arid edge of Italy.

Crotone was a port with fields and factories around it, and a statue of the Virgin at the station. Cape Colonna just at the south side of town was also known as Capo di Nau, a corruption of the Greek word naos, meaning temple. The Greek Temple of Hera, made up of forty-eight marble columns, had stood on the headland for hundreds of years, but was torn down in a fit of militant piety in the sixteenth century by the Bishop of Crotone. The columns were then broken up and used to build the bishop’s palace. The earthquake of 1783, which had devastated this whole area and much of Sicily, knocked down the palace, and the remainder of the temple was used to strengthen Crotone’s harbor. Many of those marble slabs were still in place.

“This squalid little town of today has nothing left from antiquity.” What George Gissing said of Crotone could have been said of hundreds of places in Sicily and Calabria.