A Sweet and Glorious Land (16 page)

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I crossed under the small bridge that carried rails over the dirt road, turned south, and followed along the tracks an even narrower road pocked with deep mud puddles. Within a few moments, I was under the bridge where Giuseppe said the British bomb had fallen fifty-eight years earlier.

An elderly man was walking toward me, his cane tapping the worn and battered roadway. He was slightly bent and dressed in tan pants, a light brown, well-worn sweater over a checkered shirt, and a cap—traditional, middle-aged Italian-male attire. We nodded and I struck up a conversation about the river. Did he live nearby? Did he know
il Galeso?

“Sì.”
And then he asked me, “Do you know that this is a very famous river?” I said I did and that I had traveled a long distance to see it. He seemed amused. “Why is it famous?” I asked, knowing the answer and anxious to hear his response. He did not disappoint me.
“I Greci,”
he said with a shrug, adding, “and the Roman poet Horace.”

“Lo conosco”
(I know him), I said.

I studied the water. Under the rail bridge, it comes up in the reeds just beyond, squeezes through a narrow concrete slot, then spreads out into a ten-foot-wide channel full of more reeds and smooth, green moss. Here, the single rows of towering trees along each bank began. If I framed the river and its banks toward where it emptied into the Little Sea a few hundred feet beyond, and eliminated the surrounding littered fields from my vision, it truly is an idyllic sight.

At our feet were swirling masses of fish of all sizes.

The old man pointed to a school and commented that the fish in this river were the best around. They are much sought after, he said. I could see why. Despite the river's location in a trashy area that is crossed, a few hundred feet apart, by a superhighway and railroad, the water appeared clean. The fish moved in and out of the moss along the river bottom.

We said good-bye. I began walking along the river to the Little Sea, and the old man headed off toward the reeds where the Galeso springs out of the ground. Ahead of me, in the distance where the tops of crab pots stuck darkly out of the water, I saw small, colorful fishing boats painted in bright blues, reds, and yellows. They were moored across the Galeso's mouth.

I could hear dogs barking and caught glimpses of them running together, back and forth along the shore. I saw a fisherman standing on a dock, untangling his nets. He looked at me and we nodded. I pointed to the dogs and asked if I was safe. He shouted at them and they immediately calmed down, backing away from me.

I walked to where the tiny river flowed into the Little Sea, took photographs, and watched the dusk settle over the water and shoreline. I looked toward the city and thought of Gissing's words, written about his few moments of sitting at this very spot: “There was a good view of Taranto across the water; the old town on its little island, compact of white houses, contrasting with the yellowish tints of the great new buildings which spread over the peninsula.” This was precisely what I was seeing, standing here at dusk, the fisherman beside me working on his nets.

Gissing continues: “Far away, the boats of fishermen floated silently. I heard a rustle as an old fig tree hard by dropped its latest leaves. On the sea bank of yellow crumbling earth, lizards flashed about me in the sunshine. After a dull morning, the day had passed into golden serenity; a stillness as of eternal peace held earth and sky.”

With one last look, I walked back to my bus stop, at least a mile away. As I stood there, waiting for the orange Italian bus
Numero 9,
I noticed still another pack of
i cani libri
in the distance. They were heading toward where I was standing out in the open, no cars or houses in sight. I nervously shifted from one foot to the other, glancing about and wondering where I could go, what I could do, if they attacked me. I remembered the movie
Never Cry Wolf
about a scientist studying wolves in the far north of North America. He had staked out his territory the way he had observed a male wolf do—by urinating in spots around his camp.

I looked around. No bus yet, no cars, no people. Like the scientist, I scurried from spot to spot, leaving my “mark” in a semicircle around the bus stop. Then, hands in pockets so I wouldn't appear aggressive, I waited. The dogs noticed me and started to spread out in front of me. They hit my territorial line. They stopped, sniffed, looked at me, looked at one another, and then, as if on cue, regrouped and gaily trotted off toward the Little Sea.

In a few moments, my bus, right on time, lumbered into sight.

Chapter 13

A Walk in the Sun

My second visit to the Galeso had followed a half-day trip to Metaponto, established by the Greeks as Metapontion and renamed Metapontum by the Romans. The village is located south along the gulf coast, and on its outskirts is the site of a Greek temple that Gissing had walked to with a young Italian boy as his guide. This ancient spot was colonized by people from Sybaris and Kroton, back in the eighth century
B.C.E.
, when the two cities were much friendlier than they were two hundred years later. The Sybarites may have wanted to create a buffer town between their city and Taras (Taranto) to the northeast.

Metapontion was where Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher who created a religious order, lived after he was banished from his home city of Kroton. He died in Metapontion in 498
B.C.E.
His tomb, which has disappeared, reportedly was visited by the Roman orator Cicero in the first century
B.C.E.

I vaguely knew the name of Pythagoras from high-school geometry classes. But what drove him out of Kroton and exiled him to Metaponto was not his theories about triangles: “The square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.” Rather, historians say he was driven out for his beliefs that reality is mathematical in nature, philosophy can be used for spiritual purification, the soul can rise to union with the divine, and that certain symbols have mystical significance.

Pythagoras created an order of followers committed to strict loyalty and secrecy. The order also got involved in politics, and that signaled its banishing to Metapontion, just a few miles inland from the Gulf of Taranto. In the middle of the fifth century
B.C.E.
, the order was violently suppressed.

Nearly three hundred years after the death of Pythagoras, Metapontion's inhabitants, known throughout ancient history as a people whose political alliances shifted with the winds, were friendly to Hannibal. There, the Carthaginian general made the town his base for two years while laying siege to the Romans at Tarentum near the end of his sixteen-year, late-third-century-
B.C.E.
expedition that ran the length of the Italian peninsula—the Second Punic War. When Hannibal left Metapontion, he took the citizens with him in his retreat south to save them from the wrath of the Romans and, according to one historian, “to make use of [the city's] manpower in his wars against the [native] Bruttians.”

The city's hospitality toward Rome's enemy was the beginning of the end for renamed Metapontum, which declined after the Carthaginian general—with no support from his North African homeland and increasing Roman victories—made his dash south to Kroton, his jumping-off point for a humiliating retreat to Africa. Cicero reports that in the first century
B.C.E.
, Metapontum, like all the Greek cities, was in decline. By the second century
C.E.
, “nothing remained but the town walls and the theater; the rest was completely ruined.”

The
Tavole Palatine,
the Tables of the Knights, was the only ruined temple Gissing saw during a day trip to Metaponto southwest of Taranto. In more recent times, a large Greek/Roman city has been uncovered near here. One hundred years ago, this temple sat abandoned in a farmer's field, over-grown with high grass and vines. Today this dog, one of the area's
cani liberi
(free-running dogs), appears to stand guard at the spot, believed dedicated to the Greek goddess Hera.    
Photo by John Keahey

A century ago, Gissing did not know the location of these ruins, twenty feet or so below the farmers' fields he walked across to get to the temple, known as the
Tavole Palatine
(Tables of the Knights), the only ruin that he knew existed above the ground's surface, other than the Greek-era tombs that pepper the surrounding countryside.

There, at the then hidden site of the original Greek, and later Roman, city, he must have walked over the top of the temple dedicated to Apollo Lycaeus, now the centerpiece of a late-twentieth-century archaeological exploration. Today, only that temple's foundations remain in place. Archaeologists have erected some columns to show how some of the surrounding buildings might have looked, including a portion of an amphitheater, but the site still has much to reveal to modern eyes.

The
parco archeologico
was expanded during 1998. An area immediately to the south of the original dig has been fenced off along the approaching roadway, and some earth scraped away to prepare the land for careful excavation, which is expected to take place as the twentieth century draws to a close.

This is an area revealed by the careful study of the aerial photographs first presented by the British to the Italians after World War II. The photographs had been taken to guide British planes for bombing runs in 1943, just before the Italians surrendered and the Germans occupied Italy. Similar photographs surely pinpointed for British bombers the rail line over Gissing's beloved Galeso.

Photographs taken over Metaponto and other areas in southern Italy have proved invaluable to Italian archaeology, showing the outlines of ancient cities buried just under the surface and impossible to see at ground level.

“The result of this gift [from the British] was fantastic,” Professor Baldassare Conticello says. “They [the photos] were born out of violence and now are used for a greater good.”

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Gissing, one hundred years before my visit, saw only the city's second temple, the Tavole Palatine. It came to be known by that name during the Saracen wars that swept through this fertile area in the ninth and tenth centuries
C.E.
Built in the sixth century
B.C.E.
—with several of its original thirty-two Doric columns still standing—it is located a few miles to the northwest of the old city's center and hard against the south bank of the Bradano River.

Now, S106, the main north–south road along the Ionian coast, slips past the east edge of the site, giving motorists a dramatic view of this massive structure. Many believe the temple was dedicated to the Greek goddess Hera, wife of the mythical Zeus. The only clue that this was her temple was the inscription beginning “Hera…” found on a potsherd uncovered adjacent to it.

S106 did not exist in Gissing's time. The temple simply sat in the middle of a farmer's field, surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall “so that any view of [the columns] is no longer obtainable.” The lock “that has long been useless” failed to keep the gate closed, so “the ugly wall serves no purpose whatever save to detract from the beauty of the scene.”

He approached the site with a young guide via a “cart road, through fields just being ploughed for grain.… Ploughing was a fit sight at Metapontum, famous of old for the richness of its soil.” After the city was abandoned, the shore here became infested with malarial swamps, making it “too dangerous for habitation. Of all the cities upon the Ionian Sea, only Tarentum and [K]roton continued to exist through the Middle Ages, for they alone occupied a position strong for defence against pirates and invaders.”

Gissing despaired at the temple's condition, and at how many of the huge stone blocks that once completed the religious center had been hauled away over intervening centuries for use elsewhere.

Today, I believe, he would be pleased with what has happened here. While what Gissing saw then is what people can see today—the same upright columns—the nineteenth-century farmer's field has been transformed into a
parco
around the impressive Greek temple. There is no trace of the ugly wall. A tiny museum sits at the entrance, and the grounds are like a garden, the pride of the region's tourist industry.

The present-day village of Metaponto also has another museum, this one brand-new in the late 1990s. I was eager to see it.

I climbed off the train, probably at the same Metaponto
stazione
from which Gissing disembarked—it was old and battered, with peeling, lemon yellow paint, looking as if it had withstood at least a dozen or more decades of use and weather. I walked a half mile into the modern village. The proprietor of a coffee bar gave me directions to the new museum, a few blocks away.
“É bello!”
she said of the new structure, her eyes and smile demonstrating the pride she felt for her town and its prize.