24 - Leslie Gardiner, "South to Calabria" (1968)

Leslie Gardiner, South to Calabria, William Blackwood, Edinburgh & London: 1968

 

Paola

“But where is Calabria exactly?” Amazing, how many people have to ask. The word seems to belong more to gothic fiction than geographical fact.

“The toe of Italy, more or less.”

A rather big toe, when you come to inspect it on the centimeter map with a view to walking over it: roughly a hundred miles round the coast. ‘Roughly’ is the word, too. The mountains churn their way to both seas, Tyrrhenian on the west and Ionian on the east, and all between looks hot, harsh country. The few roads which have started to penetrate it have more often than not stopped after about five miles of uphill fight.

Then you look more closely and see that what you are taking for Calabria is only the sub-province of Reggio, only a third of Calabria. North it stretches the sub-province of Catanzaro and north of that the sub-province of Cosenza. It must be almost three hundred miles round the coast. From southern tip to northern frontier is about a hundred and fifty, as the returning swallow flies. Calabria is larger than Wales—not only the toe of Italy but its boot-sole and upper as well.

Italy, said Napoleon, has one capital defect: her length is disproportionate to her breadth. He was looking at her from the military and political angle, but the defect has been an obstacle to travelers too. Civilized people up to a century ago were content to let Italy stop at Rome. Those who went beyond Naples took their lives in their hands. Determined explorers stopped at Eboli: there the road gave out altogether and the guide trebled his demands. But at that ultima Thule of the south you were still a long way from the beginnings of Calabria.

Nowadays one moves about in Italy much more freely. The trains have been running on time for years, and some of them keep very fast schedules. The autostrade are making a herring-bone of the landscape and if you are in the mood you can drive from top to bottom of the peninsula without a change of gear. Helicopters and hydrofoils whisk the tourists across the bays and all over the offshore islands, Italian domestic air services are comprehensive, country buses take you to almost any destination if you are in no especial hurry to get there.

And still you cannot escape the sensation, when you venture towards Calabria, of straying into lost territory, of crossing an invisible frontier into a land which breathes the perfumes of Arabia perhaps, or at least a bouquet d’Afrique. I do not include the venture on that coastal road down the Tyrrhenian and the railway which follows the sea to Sicily. On that road or railway you are skirting Calabria, no more aware of the real Calabria on your left hand than you are of the seabed on your right. The electrified railway, the new autostrada, the sidings of Reggio’s six stations, the docks and ferry-boats of Villa San Giovanni, the camping parks and youth hostels—these are part of the tourist and commercial world of the Mediterranean, nothing to do with the rough reality of Calabria. The trains pass, the cars hum through rock tunnels, the hydrofoils dart in and out, but Calabria hardly stirs in her sleep.

“Now we’re in Calabria,” the passenger-navigator says, as you swing down and clatter over a dusty torrent on a single-line bridge of wooden slats, and gaze up at the new bridge, sixty concrete columns cobwebbed in scaffolding, which in 1969 will take the Autostrada del Sole another hundred leagues south.

“That must be Calabria,” the hill-walker tells himself, looking south across the ravine at a broken cascade of cottages which might be Buonvicino in the top left-hand corner of his map.

“Pazienza, siamo nella Calabria,” the Roman father mutters to his little boy, who wants to know why the train keeps stopping.

It is the early morning train from Naples and naturally you are dozing—to be shaken alarmingly awake when the compartment fills with smoke. No, it is only dust, the limestone dust of the deep south. They are building tunnels and one day this line will be double-track all the way to Sicily, though in places the up-line will have to stray half a mile from the down, so impassably do the mountains crowd on the sea. Italian trains tell you ‘è pericoloso sporgersi’, it is dangerous to lean out. The coaches used on Calabrian routes say ‘è pericolosissimo sporgersi’, it is highly dangerous. They squeeze into mole-runs through the mountains and under shelves among the close-set rock-stacks on the coast with millimeters to spare.

‘The very name of Calabria,’ said Edward Lear, ‘has in it no little romance. No other province of the Kingdom of Naples holds out such promise of interest, or so inspires us before we have set foot in it… Calabria! No sooner is the word uttered than a new world arises before the mind’s eye—torrents, fastnesses, all the prodigality of mountain scenery—caves, brigands and pointed hats—Mrs Radcliffe and Salvador Rosa—costumes and character—horrors and magnificence without end … Yet this land of pictorial and poetical interest has had but few explorers; and its scenery, excepting that on the high road or near it, has rarely been portrayed, at least by our own countrymen.’

Lear wrote in 1847. Since then a mere trio of English writers—Norman Douglas (Old Calabria, 1915), George Gissing (By the Ionian Sea, 1905) and F. Marion Crawford (The Rulers of the South, 1926)—have laid parts of Calabria bare on the printed page. In their time the railways had already come to Calabria, but the romance persisted. Today the autostrada is probing the fastnesses, three towns have their airports—and the ‘horrors and magnificence’ are no less striking, though more easily seen. Without wandering too far from the road you might still find yourself in a village whose inhabitants do not know, or will not tell, the name of the next village, and who have never in their lives set eyes on a foreigner—‘foreigner’, to them, meaning someone from north of Naples.

The train idles along. Its shadow skims gray pinnacles, vanishes in the shadow of a tunnel and next appears two hundred feet down, trailing over the surface of a pale, languid sea. In an olive grove a woman stands knitting, keeping her man company. He stumbles backwards, hoeing gray clods, wearing buskins that were fashionable when Virgil was a boy. Both are smothered in dust.

There is a clump of beehive huts on an islet, like the trully of Puglia but connected with white Moorish arches. You remember that Saracens once held this coast—there are places on the map like Sangineto and Morano to remind you. Near Praia a Mare, under the rock of Dino, there is supposed to be a grotto superior to the Blue Grotto of Capri, but if you got off to have a look you would find nobody to take you there and would perhaps wait a whole day for the next train. Except where the main road comes down, plastered with the familiar advertisements of tourist Italy, to straggle for a while alongside, you are journeying through a quiet land. This stretch between Diamante and Point Pellaro, however, is the densely populated ribbon of the south and there are numerous wayside halts for (but not exactly at) villages which were destroyed regularly for eight centuries by Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Saracens, Spaniards, Neapolitans, French, British, corsairs and bandits, and as regularly rebuilt. They look it. Those ruins on the cliff are all that remains of Cirella, lost in prickly pear, a monument to the accuracy of Sir Sidney Smith’s naval gunnery during the Napoleonic wars.

The Roman father, chubby, discontented and bald, has declined offers of coffee and sandwiches. After a brief inward struggle he accepts a jelly baby, half for his son, half for himself. A relationship is established.

He knows his Calabria, a province his Roman ancestors never knew. (The legions came down to Lucania, the next province northward, and their expectations of marvels were not disappointed. They saw elephants, the heavy guard of Pyrrhus’s army, and ever afterwards in Roman history the elephant was bos Luca, the Lucanian ox).

But the Roman father has traveled this coastline for forty years. Once he did it twice a week, Rome to Messina, a round trip of a thousand miles. “Why? To be at home with my wife, on Sunday. My first job was at the University of Messina, she of course could not accompany me. Even thirty years ago it wasn’t considered proper to bring your wife to Calabria, among the savages.”

The south, he says, is the depressed and neglected region of Europe, the withered toe. “Now we have the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Fund for the South. It builds the roads, replaces the slums, encourages industry and tourism. In Calabria it’s been slow to do that, but Calabrians are slow to accept improvements. The Cassa helps some of them to save money—and when they’ve saved it, what do they to with it? Emigrate!”

The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno’s development plan, or series of plan, launched in August 1950, provided in the main for public works: roads, aqueducts, housing for mountain communities, railways, training schemes, tourism. One quarter of the funds was set aside for private works: subsidies on crops, loans to farmers, hoteliers and fishermen. Originally the Cassa administered only the south, from the Abruzzi to Sicily. Then Sardinia was brought in, then the Latina province, then the Tuscan islands and some agricultural districts with particular problems in other parts of the peninsula.

Calabria, says the Roman, complains that Italy has forgotten her, that the credits dispatched to her from Rome somehow trickle away before they reach Cosenza, Catanzaro and Reggio. “But I say the south is unacquainted with the north, it makes no effort to understand our interest, to participate in our enterprises, no, not even to remember that everything is different in the north. Everything, including the climate. Because of Calabria we are saddled with the siesta, which every progressive country of the world has abandoned. Italy doesn’t need the siesta, it’s not hot enough for siesta. Calabria, yes, let Calabria keep her siesta, but don’t let her inflict it on the whole nation.”

Ten minutes later, having picked the last of the jelly babies out of his teeth, he is fast asleep with a blue silk handkerchief over his face and the small boy curled up beside him, taking the siesta.

South of Diamante and Belvedere—magical-sounding riviera resorts which do not at present show much ambition to live up to their names—the tunnels grow blacker, longer, a tighter fit and more closely spaced. The crest of the mountain chain draws nearer to the sea. For the last hundred and forty miles to Reggio the highest ridges of Italy’s boot are all to one side, never more than about five miles from the western shore. They are gray and precipitous and laced with fiumare, the almost-vertically-descending torrents which are the peculiarity and the ruination of riverine Calabria. Three or four times a year they burst with tremendous spates, carrying away the farmer’s substance, his flocks and maize crop, his olives and lemon trees and perhaps his cottage. Sometimes they destroy a concrete or iron viaduct on the railway or the road.

In a few hours, as much water would have irrigated the province for half a summer has poured into the sea, which boils brown round the outfall. Over in Sicily the agriculturist’s problem has always been to bring the water to the surface of the land; in Calabria the difficulty is to stop it running away. But there are dozens of these vicious fiumare. Destitute farmers besiege the government for help—but it would take something like a Kariba or Nile project to bring the fiumare under control. Fiumara: a Calabrian country word, not encountered elsewhere, but a word the visitor soon learns.

I went along the train in search of a woman, whose gorgeously clad back had taken my breath away as she passed down the corridor. She stood far back in the second-class section, among the narrow-slatted, straight-backed benches of old-fashioned carriages which disappeared from most Italian lines before the war. She stood, although there were vacant seats; stood in the gangway, chewed broad beans and scattered the pods at her feet. Close up, the costume was less than gorgeous. Her red and green wrap-around skirt seemed to be made of some thin papery material, not cloth—or it may have been paper-thin with age. Dirt helped to hold the tattered lace of blouse and neck-cloth together. A man’s vest, inexpressibly filthy, showed through where a button was missing. Food stains and wine had given the front of the garments a kaleidoscopic design they were never meant to have. She was a short, black-eyed, tough little customer.

She must have got on at Belvedere Marittimo, a terminus for one of the mountain roads which descend from the intact strongholds of the Albanian communities in Calabria. She looked darkly about her, and spat out her bean-strings. I tried a couple of phrases, in Italian and Albanian, and she ignored them both. In the minority enclaves, they say, the peasants speak a patois as individualistic as their dress and use expressions and a pronunciation which—like their dress—have not changed in centuries. They are noted for keeping themselves to themselves.

We were approaching Paola, from which a branch railway puts you in touch with another access road to that lost land—plunges you into Calabria at the deep end, as it were. I lowered my luggage on to the platform and left the train, while the Roman boy murmured in his sleep and the blue handkerchief rose and fell silently on his Roman father’s nose.

Paola is the northern traveler’s entrance-gate to a Calabrian hinterland. There the catena costiera, the coastal chain, which has been rolling down like a wind-chopped billow from afar, prepares to break over his head. The Crocetta Pass behind Paola is four thousand yards from the sea and 3700 feet high; Monte Cucuzzo nearby is six thousand yards from the sea and rises to 5055 feet.

Paola, typical coastal town of western Calabria, shows the bored passenger (this being the junction for Cosenza, the train stops a while) a clean sea, no birds, a strip of beige sand beneath the railway embankment. They are building a retaining wall along the seafront and putting purple strip lighting in the access underpasses below the railway: electricity is an amenity few parts of Calabria are short of. The town is emerging from the sottosviluppata class. (‘Under-developed’ is another word you are always coming across down south.)

Paola proper rises flat against the hills. The streets go up in zigzags, the houses are jumbled boxes like a cubist painting, at about two thousand feet the gardens are still untidy masses of sub-tropical fruits and rank flowers and vegetables. Above that height you are on a scrub, and above that you enter the beech forests which still clothe, but not so warmly as they used to, the crests of Calabrian Apennine.

I asked for a hotel, a cheap one and, if possible, near the station. I had meant to put the luggage away and go walking, but the Paola baggage-master had put his foot down. No lock on the valigia! Nowhere in Calabria, he declared, would I find an official willing to take responsibility for an unlocked suitcase. He found the appropriate paragraph in the Railway Bible and read it out with formidable emphasis, then closed the book with a bang. “I regolamenti sono regolamenti, vero?”

Rain fell lightly on Paola, a passing shower on a mild spring day, and everyone wore raincoats and woollens and carried umbrellas. But it was only a couple of hundred yards to the Rinascimento Hotel, which consisted of the upper floor of a decaying palace constructed, in the southern style, round a square flagstoned courtyard.

The proprietress, aged and rheumaticky, resisted my efforts to help her drag chair, table and inkwell on to the balcony, to give the signing-in arrangements an official air. The place was falling down—which Renaissance, I wondered, did the Rinascimento commemorate?—but was not dirty and not without an air of dignity and simplicity. Big square rooms with lofty ceilings—a high antediluvian bed with brass knobs—sticks of outmoded furniture—a picture of Margherita, first Queen of Italy, cut out of a nineteenth-century magazine and stuck to the wall—no water, running or otherwise. “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day,” said the old lady.

“That’s all right.”

“But the lavatory doesn’t work. You must go down to the courtyard and through… I will show you. The lavatory is all right in case of some piccola necessità during the night, otherwise you must descend…”

“That’s all right. I don’t have to share this bed with anyone, do I?”

According to the writings of travelers in Calabria, you had to be prepared to. But the old lady was affronted. There was no one else in the whole building, I was her first guest for weeks. And the price would be five hundred lire, six shillings a night.

At midnight—we are taking my first night in Calabria step by step, because the Rinascimento offered exactly the kind of reception any stranger will receive if he is fending for himself in the towns of the south—at midnight the police forced their way in, the old lady apologetic at their heels. I had filled up the form, but forgotten to put the date on. No, it had to be done in the foreigner’s own handwriting. I regolamenti! Handshakes, apologies, reassurances, admiration of a dressing gown (“Com’è bella, la stoffa inglese!”)—they went off with my passport and I lay awake wondering if I should have asked for their credentials.

It was dawn, not midnight. I eased the ancient shutters open and they fell off their hinges. My room looked on to another balcony, too worn and flimsy to be stepped on, and on to the railway track. A green-and-white pullman train, Roma-Napoli-Reggio-Palermo, was pulling out of Paola station: the Freccia del Sud, possibly—Southern Arrow—or Treno del Sol, Train of the Sun. In the romantic railway escape of the south you recover your boyish enthusiasm for the trains. ‘My Hornby and Meccano long ago’—the narrow-gauge Calabrian mountain railways recreate all the toyland layouts of the Christmas shops, all the model tracks of your childhood dreams.

Knots of inhabitants stood at street corners, waiting for something to happen. I strolled among them, toward the top of the town, to get a bird’s-eye view of the procession. It was in order to be in Paola that day, 2nd April, that I had foregone a night’s sleep in Naples. The guide-books tell you that it is devoted to Calabria’s greatest saint, Francesco di Paola, of whom fabolous tales are told and of whom it is said that, during his lifetime, ‘it was a miracle when a day passed without him performing a miracle.’

On 2nd April 1464 Francesco wanted to cross to Sicily but had no money for the fare, so he hoisted his gown in a small boat and the wind carried him there for nothing. Every year the townsfolk of Paola celebrate the event by rowing his statue out from the foreshore and indulging in various devout orgies. So the guide-book says.

The guide-book was wrong. You must be at Paola on 5th May, which is the anniversary of the voyage, to see the celebrations; not 2nd April, which is the saint’s name-day. The townsfolk of Paola stand around for nothing in particular. In fact, they do so all over Calabria, and it is only for the first few days that is strikes the visitor as remarkable.

The shops of the coastal towns are nearly all fruit shops. Idle crowds pick it over. Oranges are large and thick-skinned, three for tenpence; you can imagine their asbestos taste. A grocer waters his parsley from a plastic can—midday sun, even in early spring, is fierce. The chestnut rafters are hung with purple onions, apples and pears, all the citrus fruits, pumpkins, artichokes and huge garish peppers. Paola’s sun shines on their highly-polished surfaces and on the salesman who has just arrived in the main street and spread his handkerchief-ful of salami and Motta-bottled wine on the parapet overlooking the bay. His car is loaded with green and golden bicycles, four on the roof and four on the boot, and schoolchildren in blue smocks, black gowns and small white cravats cluster round. Within twenty miles of Paola you will not find one kilometer of level ground, but everyone owns, or aspires to own, one of those dainty sports machines.

Up above, on the esplanade in front of Saint Francesco’s sanctuary, they are selling bread baked in the molds of animals, fishes and Easter doves, while real white doves flutter about the arches of the gates. The basilica is all arches and alleyways, under charming blue and yellow pantiles. A red-faced monk denounces a grocer’s boy who has somehow managed to maneuver his tricycle-van round the last zigzags and into the courtyard. From the orchard at the back you could toss lemons among the fathers who lie sunning themselves on the flat roof between the cupolas, but the basilica itself is walled and barbed-wired against intruders.

I wandered up the stream which falls on Paola, no Fiumara but a tiny rivulet choked with bamboo cane and colored with the reflections of the gorse and wild cherry on its banks, and fell asleep. A mule-driver’s whip-crack woke me. He muttered an indifferent good-morning as he worked his team up the valley. In most parts of Italy they would stop and catechize a stranger; in Mezzogiorno provinces there is little curiosity, innocent or suspicious.

You find better hotels in Paola than the Rinascimento, but not much better. You can eat in restaurants of the transport café kind, where the cook’s boast of ‘fatti in casa’—done in the house—is a negative recommendation for the fastidious soul who has had a glimpse of the kitchen. One ought not to complain too loudly: prices suit the lightest pockets. In the billiards saloons you drink coffee at sixpence, double measure, which would cost half a crown on the Via Veneto or in Saint Mark’s Square. You must be a gourmand if your bill for dinner and wine amounts to more than fifteen shillings.

Retiring downhill after one such meal, I caught Paola wearing an unusually animated look. The streets were thronged, everyone pushing towards the music of a merry-go-round in an alleyway bright with strip-lighting and transparent plastic banners. People bathed in the warmth and life of the fairground imported from Naples: their eyes gleamed and their tongues were loosened. No one, however, patronized the shows and no attendant seemed to expect it. A public water-tap contributed its own abandon, splashing full blast and partly flooding the street. I turned it off. (Paola suffers from a chronic water shortage.) No one paid any attention. No one cared whether it was off or on.

A parish priest tapped his foot to the rhythm of the brassy tarantella and I asked him for an outline of the festival program.

“Festivities? You mean the fair?”

“This is the saint’s day, isn’t it? Are there no processions, ceremonies, that kind of thing?”

It had not occurred to him that there might be. “Come with me, we will enquire at the post office.” There were about three hundred official holidays in the Calabrian calendar, he said, and until recently the inhabitants observed them all. We ended up celebrating Saint Francesco’s day quietly on our own, in a bar-and-billiards hall, with a bottle of Verbiccara, the local wine. It tasted like diluted raspberry cordial. “In Calabria we are sufficiently modest about our wines,” the priest said. They are little known or appreciated outside the province, and for the best of reasons.