A Sweet and Glorious Land (20 page)

The North African general was pressed farther and farther south. On the deaths of key officers, and without hope of reinforcements from North Africa, Hannibal left the peninsula. He had spent sixteen years in Italy, living off the land, trying to break the will of Rome's allies, and terrifying Roman citizens in the Eternal City, who many times believed all was lost.

His goal was to weaken Rome to the point where Carthage would be given Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. But despite being recognized as one of the greatest military leaders in history, he was too far away from home fighting a war unpopular among his countrymen, and he did not sustain the support of possible European allies, including the Gauls.

Livy, the Roman historian who lived two centuries after Rome's war with Hannibal, wrote in his ten-book history of the Second Punic War that “Hannibal has been conquered not by the Roman people whom he defeated so many times in battle and put to flight, but by the envy and continual disparagement of the Carthaginian senate.”

Roman propagandists painted Hannibal as bloodthirsty and cruel. Stories of his brutality against soldiers and prisoners abound. Many of the reports likely are true, since these were indeed cruel and savage times. But, as
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
puts it, “The record of Rome's treatment of defectors [the peoples and the cities that allied with Hannibal] makes for grimmer reading.”

Hannibal died, in 182
B.C.E.
, drinking poison as enemy soldiers closed in around him. He had spent the last years of his life seeking refuge in various countries, but was always forced out as Rome advanced. He was sixty-two and, at his painless death, had lived much longer than the tens of thousands of men—Romans, Carthaginians, and mercenaries—whose lives he was responsible for ending.

*   *   *

Around Hera's column at Capo Colonna burned the campfires of Hannibal's Carthaginian army and, if ancient accounts are true, of the mercenaries whose bodies would be left to rot along Kroton's beaches as the general sailed southwest to North Africa. Livy—was he a Roman propagandist?—tells us that the mercenaries tried to take refuge in the “hitherto inviolate shrine” of Hera's temple, but were “brutally butchered in [its] very precincts.” Some modern historians believe Hannibal slaughtered his army's horses—because there was no room for the animals in the boats that carried his troops to Carthage—not men.

Before he fled to North Africa, Hannibal reportedly set up a large bronze plaque within the temple grounds, which Livy said was “inscribed in Greek and Carthaginian to commemorate his many military exploits.” No one I talked to seems to know where that bronze plaque rests today, if it ever existed at all.

I sit in the midst of the temple that now, except for the single column at my back, is stoneless, at least on the grass-covered surface, trying to visualize what it must have been like. All I can conjure up is how Gissing, locked deep into delirium and fever in his room at the Concordia, saw it in his imagination. He wrote of these dreams:

“I saw the strand by [Kroton]; the promontory with its temple; not as I know the scene to-day, but as it must have looked to those eyes more than two thousand years ago. The soldiers of Hannibal doing massacre, the perishing mercenaries, supported my closest gaze, and left no curiosity unsatisfied.… When I spoke of the experience to Dr. Sculco, he was much amused, and afterwards he often asked me whether I had had any more
visioni.
That gate of dreams was closed, but I shall always feel that, for an hour, it was granted me to see the vanished life … a world known to me only in ruined fragments.”

I walked back to my car, drove past the German bunker and decided it was time to move on to lofty heights inland from the Ionian Sea. I would next go to Calabria's capital, Catanzaro, forty miles to Crotone's southwest, where the still feverish Gissing went, against his doctor's orders, to get out of the malarial and stagnant lower elevation, and to recover his health in fresh mountain air. Catanzaro was not a place for reflection about the Greeks; few, if any, likely stood on its high promontory. It was a place for recuperation.

Gissing certainly did not know then that the story of his visit to the mountaintop would give the world a southern Italian name that would live on: the last name of the proud owner of Hotel Centrale, Coriolano Paparazzo.

Chapter 17

Paparazzo's Kitchen

Catanzaro was Gissing's city of refuge and recuperation. Here he was bathed by the gentle breezes that swept away the cobwebs of illness he carried from the malarial plain of what was then called Cotrone. How things change in one hundred years!

Modern Crotone is now a healthy destination point. Its swamps were drained long ago and its water supply improved. Today, its beaches are regularly raked for the few tourists who venture this far south.

Catanzaro, meanwhile, still “the breezy height” Gissing described, is a much-changed, modern hilltop city with all the problems that designation implies. One of its great benefits is that it is the gateway to delightful villages higher up in the Calabrian Mountains.

I arrived, early afternoon, at Catanzaro Lido, the station that Gissing called the “marina,” located along the Ionian Sea and several miles below the upper town. I did not know there was another train station, still higher up at the base of the promontory that holds this capital of Calabria, so I took a taxi and relied upon the driver for a hotel recommendation. It did not appear that Gissing's hotel, at least in its 1890s incarnation, still existed.

We wove our way up the serpentine road into Catanzaro and, once we reached the summit, a jammed, noisy, urban maze lay before us. It was mid-morning. Traffic was packed onto the narrow streets; the cab's meter ticked as we barely moved. It seemed that as many city buses as cars were stretched along the main roadway through the town, at least here defeating the theory that mass transit alone solves congestion. It still takes people to leave their cars at home!

Schoolchildren and pedestrians streamed at will through the traffic, moving from one side of the street to the other. It was gridlock, and the cab driver told me it was common. “Most of the day it is like this,” he said.

Eventually, we made our way to a side street that swung around the brow of the hill. In between tall buildings that looked like they were built a century ago, I could look out and see where the Ionian Sea was supposed to be, my view stunned into submission by the coastal haze. We stopped at a small inn. I paid the driver and got a room for the night—a small, pathetic accommodation. I did not fight it since I figured I would be here only one night. I was in the third week of my journey and getting weary. Despite the poor quarters, the bed appeared comfortable and the room was warm.

Then, as is usual during undisciplined travel in Italy, when the traveler is willing to let things happen and not try to control events, I had a marvelous experience in an unexpected trip into the mountains.

It started after I left my squalid room, found an
osteria,
and ate a delicious meal. I climbed onto a city bus, just to let it carry me around Catanzaro so I could take in the sights. We wove through the outer perimeter, taking forever in the congestion. I could see that this mountaintop city had a more modern tinge to it than Gissing must have found.

There are certainly old buildings here, many containing upscale shops and what appeared to be much nicer hotels than the one my cab driver, in his hurry to get out of this city and back down to the coast, had deposited me in. But this town, I have read somewhere, has, over the centuries, been wracked by earthquakes and rebuilt several times. Gissing talked about one that hit the century before his visit—two centuries before mine—where not a house was left standing and people perished by the thousands.

So the buildings today bear scant resemblance to the town's medieval past. It was settled, probably during the ninth or tenth century
C.E.
, long after the Greeks and the Romans, and during a time when the coastal inhabitants were driven inland to escape malaria and a constant stream of invaders from the sea. You see these towns everywhere on high promontories, established centuries ago for protection from both humans and microbes.

As the bus went around the outer curves, I could look down into the gorge below and the road that winds its way up the side. Even there, automobiles and trucks were packed end to end on both sides of the narrow roadway. People were walking up the hill to conduct their business in the town above. Once again I thought of the phrase “tyranny of traffic.” Catanzaro, which started as a quiet mountain town, was, during this visit, a modern disaster of congestion and haze.

Eventually, the traffic thinned and the bus began following a ridge line that was turning from buildings into trees. The bus went up, up into the Calabrian mountains, and eventually I realized that it was not going to return to the city anytime soon. It had to at some point, I figured, so I merely sat back, enjoyed the view unfolding before me, and began to unwind from the traffic nightmare below. It was only the bus driver and me.

Ahead, a small church appeared at the bend in the road. The driver slowed and made a quick sign of the cross as he cranked the wheel to the left to make the turn. We passed along long ridges looking down into steep gorges with streams full of melted snow pouring off the high mountains above. It was paradise compared to where I had just come from. It was almost warm enough to open a window and enjoy the breeze.

About forty-five minutes into the trip, the bus pulled into a little village built up on the slopes. The driver told me he had a twenty-minute layover before resuming the journey back to Catanzaro. I got out and went into a small bar for a coffee. Its owner, a small, elderly Italian man, struck up a conversation as soon as he realized I was American. He spoke perfect English.

“I was in the U.S. Army,” he told me. He had lived in Brooklyn, Texas, and Germany for many years, he said, but came back here, to his family's home province, to retire. “This is home,” he said, waving his hand toward the still higher mountains that glistened through the windows of his bar.

I walked outside and sat on a bench overlooking a deep gorge, joining the bus driver, his gaze fixed in the distance as he smoked a cigarette. My Italian was not good enough to engage him in deep conversation, but I got the impression he cherished this part of his daily bus route: sitting in this little village with the name of Pentone, high on the Calabrian slopes and far, far away from the chaos of Catanzaro.

We returned, this time with one other passenger, a studious-looking young man who, along with the driver, made the sign of the cross as we passed the tiny church on the road below. I stepped off the bus in Catanzaro's main street, in the midst of hundreds of schoolchildren making their way home through bumper-to-bumper traffic, the cars honking and the children squealing with delight as they chased one another, dodging cars and giant orange buses.

Near one end of the town, I saw a small, freshly painted structure containing a new “car” for a funicular, one of those traction-driven contraptions one sees in some of the larger Italian cities, built along steep mountainsides. They hook onto steel rails and are propelled up and down the hills like the cable cars in San Francisco. Naples has at least three similar funicular systems plying the hills of that city's northwest crescent.

The sign on the door at the Catanzaro station said this funicular was closed. What a way to ease congestion. Commuters could park in the more open spaces below the town and ride the funicular up to work. Only in Italy, I thought, could something as helpful as this be shut down.

Several months later, in correspondence with an Italian friend who was born in Catanzaro, I learned the story. The local government when I was there had just finished restoring the funicular—hence the fresh paint and modern fixtures. The line had been closed for many years, in fact, several decades, because there was no money to run it. After restoration, officials still had to look for money to operate it.

I was told that nearly a year after my visit, the funicular is in full operation and doing much to ease the daily crush of traffic. The device is part of a grand tradition of mass transit in this town, my friend said, dating back to the early twentieth century. The older funicular took people up and down the hillside; at the top, a tram system on rails would take them from Piazza Roma to the very upper part of the city, an area known as Pontegrande. The tram tracks are long gone; the original tram station in Piazza Matteotti still stands, but it is now the site of a fast-food restaurant.

Signor Paparazzo's Hotel Centrale in Catanzaro once occupied the building on the right, across the street from Gissing's “wonderful pharmacy,” a place that still sports “a sort of griffin in wrought iron.” The former Hotel Centrale is located at Corso Mazzini, n. 181. Filmmaker Federico Fellini used Paparazzo's name for a celebrity photographer in the 1960s movie
La dolce vita
—and the English language gained the term
“paparazzi.”
In October 1999, Catanzaro officials installed a plaque commemorating Paparazzo, Gissing, Fellini and scriptwriter Ennio Flaiano.    
Photo by Wulfhard Stahl