A Sweet and Glorious Land (17 page)

I was the
museo
's only patron at that moment. A curator greeted me and enthusiastically answered my halting questions, asked in poor Italian, about excavations in the area. He guided me through all the rooms, speaking his language and southern dialect so rapidly and excitedly that I couldn't keep up.

The museum displays artifacts from the Apollo Lycaeus dig a few miles north of the museum, and from the tombs unearthed on the museum grounds—the unmarked tomb of Pythagoras?—and elsewhere throughout the area: pottery, tools, jewelry.

The curator unlocked one room, showing me a series of aerial photographs of the area, one set taken in 1943 by British bombers and another taken in 1973. From one to the other, I could see the hidden ruins slowly emerging from where they had been secreted twenty feet below the fields across which the unaware Gissing trudged.

I left the museum and walked, in the warm Italian sun, the one or two miles along a narrow country road to the archaeological park and what has been identified as the Sanctuary of Apollo Lycaeus. The route was through land rapidly turning green and full of those yellow wildflowers, patches sprinkled occasionally with reds and blues. It was classic Italian-spring scenery: a series of wonderful stone farm buildings, some modern, some crumbling and overrun with vines.

The Apollo Lycaeus site, with its columnless temple, was marked at the far end by rows of temporary low-slung wooden warehouses full of artifacts unearthed from the ancient city. Workers were busy cataloging pottery and pieces of columns and capitals. It was a supermarket of structures, row upon row, inside the buildings, along the porches and out in the courtyard. There was no admission fee and no guidebook—a true archaeological work-in-progress.

*   *   *

Many of the treasures of Metaponto can be found in the archaeological museum in Taranto. This large nineteenth-century structure is located in the new city, south of the drawbridge, and is, I believe, the very museum Gissing walked through near the end of his visit here.

On my final morning in Italy's heel, after my usual
cornetto
and
caffè doppio,
I walked the few blocks from my hotel to the museum, which contained by far the most extensive collection of Greek and Roman pottery I had come across. Not only were there numerous examples of the different periods in its evolution, but much of it was intact. It is amazing to see a giant vase, done in the Hellenistic period so many thousands of years ago, in its original wholeness.

I was disappointed that a visitor was not guided, by the museum's floor plan, through successive periods of time. The prehistoric material from the ancient Italic tribes native to the region was on a different, higher, floor. And the Greek and Roman materials are not displayed in order of their progression, say, from archaic to Hellenic. Other museums establish this progression well, like the displays do in, for example, Síbari, farther to the south, or at Siracusa on the southeast coast of Sicily.

On this day, I was lucky. Just like Gissing, I had the museum to myself. It was just the guards and me. I spent three or four hours combing the displays. I heard only the footsteps of passing guards and museum personnel, rushing past without a glance at the displays I lingered over, their leather shoes clicking against the tile floor and the sound bouncing off the fifteen-or-twenty-foot-high walls.

It was almost as if nothing had changed in this display area over the intervening century. What Gissing described, I saw.

“Upon the shelves are seen innumerabble [sic] busts, carved in some kind of stone; thought to be simply portraits of private persons. One peers into the faces of men, women and children, vaguely conjecturing their date, their circumstances; some of them may have dwelt in the old time on this very spot of ground now covered by the Museum.”

Rereading that passage just before entering the museum, I was struck by how much alike Gissing and I thought. Since childhood, I would go someplace historic and imagine stepping on the ground in the very places historic people had stepped. As an adult, I put my hand on a banister in George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, Virginia, wondering if his hand had ever rested on that very spot. I stood beneath the Arch of Titus in the Roman forum, wondering if Titus, who had made his name by the destruction of Jerusalem, had ever walked on the stones on which I was standing.

Another time, a friend in Rome told me he had once attended a reception at the Palazzo Venezia. Mussolini had stood on a small, narrow balcony of this palace, looking over the chanting and cheering million or so souls jammed into the piazza below. Today, the piazza is full of cars more often than cheering crowds, although politicians often hold rallies there. Across from the balcony on the piazza below where it connects with the head of the famous Corso, stands a beautifully uniformed traffic cop on a small round platform, his—and sometimes her—white-gloved hands orchestrating the movements of thousands of automobiles per hour.

My friend said he looked out through the draped windows leading onto Mussolini's balcony and searched for the likely spot where he thought Mussolini must have stood. He could hear the jarring maelstrom of traffic below. I wish I could have seen that sight and stood in the spot where Mussolini, his jutting jaw and head bobbing up and down as he received the crowd's adoration, was portrayed in newsreel after newsreel.

So, once again, I found myself walking across a floor in a museum that a Victorian writer, and who knows who else, once trod upon.

*   *   *

Sound did carry in this museum! As I rounded the second turn on the floor containing the most magnificent Greek pieces, I could hear loud talking at the far end. A group of custodians and guards were engrossed in loud banter—the kind that visitors to Italy often mistake for arguing; in reality, it is only passionate discussion among members of a passionate culture. It is charming to watch such intense conversation in cafés or on the street corner, but not in a museum.

I selfishly wanted my uninterrupted privacy to look at the objects and reflect on who made them and how they were made. Day after day, workers in such a museum could become oblivious to the antiquity surrounding them; I had a few hours left here and did not want to be so distracted, as I had once been in Florence. This had been in the late 1980s, and I had wandered into a museum—I do not remember where it was—but it housed wonderful bronze statues and marvelous paintings. The room was nearly empty—I seem to luck into uncrowded places—and the staff was at the end having a heated discussion, Italian style. The noise was unbearable and I had no phrase book or knowledge of the language to help me. I simply left after only a few moments, unable to stand the intensity of the Great Debate at the end of the room.

This time, though, I was not deterred. Consulting my pocket Italian-English dictionary, I walked to the end of the room where the cluster of three or four museum personnel gathered around a tiny desk, gesturing at one another, talking rapidly and loudly about the latest state lottery and what each would do if he or she was the winner. I stood there a moment. They noticed me, and the snatches of conversation drifted off. In my most reasonable voice I said:
“Mi scusate. Taciate, per favore”
(Excuse me. Please, be quiet). Instantly, the group fell silent. The woman sitting at the desk looked sincerely apologetic and said,
“Sì. Scusi, signore.”

From then on, for most of the next hour I was in the area, this group huddled closer together, speaking in excited, very low stage whispers. Occasionally one voice would grow loud, and I would hear a quick series of shushes and the conversation level would drop once again. As I left the room, I could hear their voices rising. No visitor was in the room behind me. The workers once again had it all to themselves.

*   *   *

I was at the end of my visit in Taranto—this charming city high on the inside of Italy's heel. Like Gissing, I had seen the Galeso and trudged the picturesque road to the digs at Metaponto. I had been circled by dogs and held them off—an experience Gissing did not mention—and had walked through the old city, still with its medieval structures built on top of Roman and Greek foundations.

Taranto's only problem as far as drawing greater numbers of tourists is that it is isolated in the far South, well out of the way of the North's larger tourist appeal, and therefore it is often bypassed. A pity. This land is dotted with palm trees and its cities are as old as recorded time itself. Perhaps, for the selfish, occasional visitor, this isolation from mainstream tourism is not so bad after all.

A few hours after visiting the museum, I walked back to the train station, thinking about the next major town on my Gissing agenda: Crotone. From this city, then called Kroton, Hannibal embarked for Carthage in North Africa, near modern Tunis and just across the Ionian Sea from Sicily, where the Ionian once again becomes the Mediterranean. He left in shame after sixteen years in Italy, ultimately failing to defeat Rome.

Some ancient writings suggest it was on the beaches near today's Crotone—beaches where locals and tourists walk their dogs and play soccer—that before climbing into their boats, Hannibal's men slaughtered four thousand native Italian mercenaries who had loyally fought with him against the Romans but, not wanting to leave their homeland, refused the Carthaginian's offer to take them with him to a strange and foreign land.

Chapter 14

The Albergo Concordia

Leaving Taranto, the train crosses through rolling, sandy hills marked by short, stubby pines. The ground, in more open places, is carpeted with various low-lying wildflowers: the yellows I had seen earlier through the Crati valley, and others, a pink, delicate color, blooming heavily in the Ionian sun.

We crossed many rivers and streams, emptying their load from Basilicata's mountainous slopes into the Gulf of Taranto. These are many of the waterways that attracted the Greeks to this shoreline's fertile soils. Some of the streams are broad and smooth, lined by short stalks of dry reeds. Others are captured in concrete troughs, like the Busento and Crati just before they sweep past Cosenza, deeper inland.

All along the rail line grows flat-bladed cactus, some spiky, like sabers, others smooth and curved like thick slices of ham. Just as the terms for changes in weather mystify me, I have woefully inadequate knowledge about the plants I see. I do not even remember the names for many that I have planted deep into the rich, dark soil of my garden back home. Gissing knew the names of much of what he saw here, a habit he picked up from his voracious reading and his long, solitary walks back in his English home.

The shoreline speeding past my compartment window is not as sparse as it was in Gissing's time, ten decades earlier. All along the gulf's coast are little twentieth-century towns, marinas, and what appear to be summer homes and resorts. After Metaponto but before Marina di Ginosa, the land flattens out, perfect for farming. As we move farther inland, the land reminds me of the fertile Snake River plain of my childhood home in Idaho.

But in this very South of Italy, sweeping, curving, tiny marsh-lined rivers run through orange and lemon groves. It is early spring, but I see acres of land that are also filled with vegetables and grain. Some fields lie fallow. I wonder what rests twenty feet below these fields—ancient temples, columns, and stone burial vaults?

Past the train
stazione
at the tiny hamlet of Policoro-Tursi, I begin to see foothills to the northwest. Hill towns dot the tops of their brown promontories. We are still inland, but should move closer to the shore after we cross from Basilicata into Calabria. In a few moments, my train will reach Síbari, where Gissing lunched only a few miles from the then hidden ruins of what many believe are the Greek cities of Sybaris and Thurii, one on top of the other, and then, built over the same spot from the rubble of the first two, the Roman city of Copia. That which Gissing did unknowingly I do knowingly, riding the rails past the archaeological site that had to wait until the mid-twentieth century to begin yielding its wealth of ancient history.

*   *   *

Gissing's days in Crotone were perhaps his most introspective and spiritual, probably because of the intensity of his sickness and his fevered inability to get to his goal: the single column of a ruined Greek temple to Hera at Capo Colonna. He spent ten days there and many were passed in bed, lying on sweat-soaked sheets, burning with fever and hallucinating about life in these ancient colonies.

He knew the town, facing the Ionian Sea on the southwest coast of southern Italy, by the name of Cotrone, the name dating back to the Middle Ages. It was not changed to the modern, more Greek-like spelling—Crotone, based on the original Greek name Kroton—until 1928, some thirty years after his visit. I knew that the squalid hotel he had stayed in, the Concordia, no longer existed in name. But I wanted to find where it had been and see what was there now: an office for a lawyer, perhaps, or a new Standa, the Italian version of the American department store.

The Greeks founded Kroton about 710
B.C.E.
, a decade after Sybaris and only a year or two before Taras, both to the north. Like Sybaris, it was in its glory only a few hundred years. But instead of being washed away like Sybaris or abandoned as were successor cities Thurii and Copia, ancient Kroton simply evolved over successive generations, and the site has been in constant use.

A short time after the Krotonians destroyed Sybaris, about 510
B.C.E.
, they in turn were defeated by Greeks from Syrakusai, modern Siracusa in Sicily, as well as native tribes, foreign invaders, and finally the Romans. Later came the Normans, Saracens, and many others. Some of the city's conquerors were, over the previous centuries, from cities that were former allies. This was an era when Greeks, united all over the southern Mediterranean by cultural similarities, were still divided because they owed their first allegiance to their individual cities, which were in effect individual states.