A Sweet and Glorious Land (10 page)

Alaric was leading his army, heavily laden with the Eternal City's remaining booty, toward Sicily, his proposed base for an attack into North Africa. He never made it; his story ends in Cosenza just ahead.

Gissing's feelings about following such a historic route were similar to the ones I had during this fine, clear moment—the clouds threatening rain had disappeared—on the slopes overlooking the Crati River valley. There is something ethereal about standing on a spot over which ancients passed millennia ago. I also had learned from the Englishman that this same route—the Via Popilia, now the A3—was followed by Carthaginian general Hannibal six hundred years before Alaric.

Ahead was Cosenza, known in Roman times as Consentia. Its founding goes back to the prehistoric hill tribe, the Bruttians, who were there thousands of years before the Greeks set foot on the southern part of the Italian peninsula. And through this Calabrian city flow two rivers: the Busento, which merges into the mighty Crati at the old town's base. From there, the Crati, famous since antiquity, flows past other, still buried, ancient cities on its way to the Ionian Sea.

Chapter 7

Cosenza

At precisely four in the afternoon, Cosenza loomed outside my window, the old town scurrying up the foothills of the Grand Sila, lit by the west-setting sun that was preparing to disappear behind the mountain range I had just crossed. This was the same time of day Gissing arrived, barely more than one hundred years earlier. He had left Paola, leaving by carriage from in front of the
Leone
at ten o'clock that morning. His journey along the old, winding Paola–Cosenza road took six hours; it now takes travelers about thirty minutes by train through a tunnel in the Catena Costiera mountains. I drove it in just over an hour by car, including several stops.

The Greeks had problems with the native peoples—the Bruttians—who made this their capital deep in the heart of Calabria. This region, in fact, was known as Bruttia in those days. It did not become known as Calabria until the Byzantine era, long after the Greeks were vanquished by the Romans and Rome itself was in decline.

According to Margaret Guido, who wrote
Southern Italy: An Archaeological Guide,
the tribes the Greeks encountered when they began establishing colonies along the south and west coasts of southern Italy had, over time, become less distinct from one another. Collectively, those who had been the Ausonians or the proto-Villanovans became known as the Bruttians. The Bruttians, from their capital at Cosenza, constantly harassed the Greeks. Later, when the Romans arrived, the conquerors wisely tried to assimilate these wild mountain people, but their plans, Guido tells us, were delayed while the Romans fought Hannibal, and assimilation “was only achieved after his withdrawal.”

Cosenza's
città nuova
(new town) developed over the decades after Gissing's visit in the fall of 1897, and much of it following World War II, when it was bombed heavily. Where modern buildings and streets now stand, he likely saw wide-open farmland sweeping northward through the center of the Italian peninsula's southern half.

Of course Gissing's inn in this high-mountain community, the
Due Leonetti,
or Two Little Lions, does not exist today in name, although the building likely survives. Gissing was not one for listing addresses—not unusual for someone writing a memoir rather than a guidebook.

After I unloaded baggage at my hotel room in the modern part of town, I crossed over the Busento River and into the old city, where I walked up streets still as narrow as one hundred years earlier. I hoped to see old, fading paint declaring the name, or at least representations in stone, of two tiny lions. No such luck.

But no doubt one of the buildings I passed had once contained the
Leonetti.
Gissing wrote that when his driver deposited him at the front door, “Over sloppy stones, in an atmosphere heavy with indescribable stenches, I felt rather than saw my way to the foot of a stone staircase.… The room itself was utterly depressing—so bare, so grimy, so dark. Quickly I examined the bed, and was rewarded. It is the good point of Italian inns; be the house and the room howsoever sordid, the bed is almost invariably clean and comfortable.”

Gissing did not like the looks of the railroad bridge over the confluence of the Busento and Crati Rivers at the bottom of Cosenza's old town. He alluded to its ugliness in front of the millennia-old Calabrian village. Now a modern building blocks the panorama of the old city near the spot originally settled by native Bruttian peoples. The Crati River flows in from the left; the Busento, where the bones of Alaric the Visigoth are believed buried, flows in from the right to fortify the Crati for its journey north-eastward to the Ionian Sea.    
Photo by John Keahey

Instead of the tiny hotel, I found a delightful old town with tall, multistoried structures that created dark caverns where the sun, briefly at high noon, struggles to enter. There were no stenches. My experience was a glorious blend of odors coming from bubbling pots of sauces, pasta, meat, and fish being tended deep inside these dark, frightfully old buildings.

Eventually, I walked out into a large, sunny square—the Piazza XV Marzo, a relief from the dark, narrow slots between the buildings of the old town below. It had to be the same wide-open square Gissing described, so dramatic is the transition from the deep caverns of the town to this promontory.

Workers were renovating a public building on the north edge, and a freshly painted theater, looking to be at least a century old, occupied a position opposite. Beyond lay a garden, with tall trees, still holding in winter their leafy canopy. The garden was terraced on a hillside, and small fountains with nymphs carved from white stone were positioned throughout. I found this park, so clearly described in Gissing's book, during my second visit, just a few months after the first. In that initial trip, I had mistakenly looked for this garden on the opposite side of town.

During that first foray into Calabria's interior, I had asked a fellow passenger on a Cosenza city bus which river we were crossing.
“Il Busento,”
he replied, not looking up from his paper. So for the rest of that journey, I believed that the Busento came out of the mountains east of the town and that the Crati flowed along the west side before the convergence of the two rivers at the city's north edge. The park simply was not where it should be if the man on the bus was correct. And why shouldn't he be? He lives here, I thought to myself.

It took a second visit to solve the mystery. When I stumbled into the garden near the top of the sunny piazza, I was sure I had caught Gissing in a factual error. He said the garden looked over the Crati. The bus passenger months earlier told me this was the Busento.

A construction worker solved the puzzle. I asked if the Busento was indeed below the garden. “No, no,” he said. “It is the Crati.” Later, I asked schoolchildren playing along the river's bank: “What river is this?” “The Crati!” they shouted, one after the other. Then, I did the obvious: I consulted a map, something I had failed to do months earlier.

Indeed, the Crati flows from the east, the Busento from the southwest. I had been gazing upstream at the wrong river.

I walked back into the park. Regrettably, the view in the late 1990s was significantly different from that in the late 1890s. It is impossible, from the park's heavily wooded slopes, to catch a glimpse today of “the yellow gorge of the Crati.” Tall buildings are rooted along the park's base, between it and the river. And buildings are piled up on the opposite bank, masking the fact that the channel exists. The eye only sees one unbroken stretch of town. Over the flow of modern traffic below, I could not hear the gurgling river from the city garden, as Gissing did. Nor could I grab a view of its junction with the Busento, just barely a half mile away.

The newly reinforced Crati follows the valley northward toward the final battlefield of the Roman gladiator and rebel-slave leader Spartacus, and the narrow tract of land between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas.

*   *   *

Progress has left its mark on this town as elsewhere in the South. Cosenza periodically has been devastated by earthquakes, including one in 1905, eight years after Gissing's visit. That means new buildings forced on top of old, not to mention what must have replaced structures leveled during World War II bombing runs.

Disappointed at not being able to see the Crati from the same viewpoint Gissing used one hundred years earlier, I walked down and out of the garden and wove my way through twentieth-century streets toward the Crati and Busento junction. Gissing saw it “in the light of sunrise, the Busento flowing amid low, brown, olive-covered hills”—hills that now are covered by tall buildings.

Somewhere in the bed of the nearby Busento, probably within shouting distance, lay the grave of Alaric the Visigoth, who, after despoiling Rome, led his army along the Roman road, the Via Popilia, whose path I saw from San Fili. He died, likely of malaria. His story and his place in Cosenza's history are unique.

*   *   *

Gissing was well aware of Alaric and his impact on the Western world. The English writer, steeped in the classics since childhood and in Gibbon's great eighteenth-century work
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
knew that the chief of the Visigoths was born in what is now Romania in
C.E.
370 and led the final sack of Rome in August 410. That event, writes Gibbon, signified the fall of the Western Empire.

Alaric had been an officer in the Roman army, and later defected to become chief of his native tribe. Unhappy that his people had not received tribute promised by the Romans, he proceeded to ravage the eastern lands held by his former master.

Nine years before his death in 410
C.E.
at about age forty, Alaric invaded Italy for the first of two defeats at the hands of the Romans. The mistake Rome made in the third confrontation was to adopt an anti-barbarian political position—no negotiations, no surrender—and to launch a wholesale slaughter of wives and children of tribesmen serving in the Roman army. These soldiers defected to Alaric, and his army grew. Ancient writers say Alaric wanted peace, but the Roman emperor Flavius Honorius would have nothing to do with the Visigoth.

Alaric besieged Rome the first time in
C.E.
408, and the Senate sued for peace. When Honorius still balked at recognizing the Visigoth and paying tribute, Alaric surrounded the city again in 409. He cut off all supplies to the city, and widespread starvation hit the inhabitants.

Historian J. B. Bury reports that Rome was “reduced to such extremities of starvation, that someone cried in the circus,
Pretium impone carni humanae,
[Latin for] ‘set a price on human flesh.'” Negotiations resumed, breaking down a third time. So another siege was launched, and this time, on August 24,
C.E.
410, Alaric entered a city that had not been captured by a foreign enemy, Gibbon says, for six hundred and nineteen years. He was not benevolent. Bury reports: “He allowed his followers to slay, burn, and pillage at will. The sack lasted for two or three days.”

It had been brutal. Rome's walls in the early fifth century
C.E.
covered twenty-one miles. Gibbon dutifully reports there were 48,382 houses in the city. Alaric's troops had surrounded Rome, blocked all gates, and controlled the flow of commerce in the Tiber, effectively preventing provisions from reaching the citizens. Gibbon says: “The first emotions of the nobles and of the people were those of surprise and indignation that a vile barbarian should dare to insult the capital of the world; but their arrogance was soon humbled.”

A paragraph later, Gibbon reports: “The unfortunate city gradually experienced the distress of scarcity and at length the horrid calamities of famine.” As the third siege pressed on, “Many thousands of the inhabitants of Rome expired in their houses or in the streets for want of sustenance; and as the public [cemeteries] without the walls were in the power of the enemy, the stench which rose from so many putrid and unburied carcasses infected the air.”

Finally, the beleaguered Senate opened negotiations. Alaric's ransom to free the city eventually reached the payment of five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand robes of silk, three thousand pieces of fine scarlet cloth, and three thousand pounds of pepper. The Visigoths took these riches, went a short distance north to what is now Tuscany, and later turned south, hoping to reach Sicily and launch an attack on North Africa.

After overpowering towns en route to Sicily but abandoning an unsuccessful siege at Naples, Alaric and his army reached Rhegium (modern Reggio di Calabria), in Italy's toe. There, ships lay at anchor to carry the Visigoths to Sicily. But a storm hit, wrecking the ships in the strait. Alaric was forced to backtrack. Bury speculates that Alaric may have wanted to return to Naples, capture the city, and raise a fleet there. But when Alaric once again passed Cosenza on his return north, he died “before the end of the year (
C.E.
410).”