A Sweet and Glorious Land (23 page)

What I did not notice—and apparently Gissing did not notice it either—was that just on the other side of that tunnel, at the end of a short road that drops off to the left, is the purported tomb of Cassiodorus. At least that is what the inscription says, a friend told me long after I returned home.

Knowing how myth often becomes “reality,” I do not know if the bones of Cassiodorus truly are there. It does make for an appealing tourist attraction.

I recall visiting the spot in Idaho where a marker designates the final resting place of my mother's ashes, and discovering—after dozens of visits, complete with flowers and tearful remembrances—that her ashes had never actually been placed there. They were several hundred feet away, in a tiny storage room, locked behind the cemetery offices.

I wasn't present when, much later, the cemetery custodian over the telephone promised me that he placed them beneath the marker. Short of reopening the small box beneath the plaque, I have to take his word for it, just like modern visitors to European shrines have to take it on faith that Napoleon's bones, say, really are in that tomb in Paris, or that Cassiodorus's remains really are under that stone slab near the train tunnel in Calabria.

Chapter 20

The End of the Toe

It was late in the day when the train pulled into Reggio. I walked outside of the station and into the warm, tree-lined square full of city buses waiting to begin their routes. I had a map, and it appeared that I wanted to move north several blocks toward the city center, about a mile away. The first bus driver I talked to told me where to catch a bus for the center, and said I could find a hotel there. Within minutes, I was lodged in a moderately priced room, complete with television and all the amenities. By this time, I was desperate for an English-speaking news station. But only Italian-language stations were represented. I went out and wandered the streets, joining the crowds of pedestrians along the traffic-free Corso Garibaldi.

What a delight Reggio is, with its orderly streets and strict limitations on automobiles. The Corso, except for certain times of day, is off limits to cars. Only buses and people can use the wide boulevard during the afternoon and evening hours.

I did see one horrifying scene here: A young miniskirted mother, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, sitting on a tiny scooter, her tiny daughter standing between the knees of the mother, who was weaving in and out among the pedestrians and buses.

The cathedral in Reggio di Calabria, Gissing's last stop on his tour of Magna Graecia, is newly restored. The city was heavily damaged by a major earthquake a few years after his visit and was bombed during World War II. Little of what Gissing saw here remains.    
Photo by John Keahey

Ah, Italy. The land where seat belts are sat on and a toddler stands on a scooter's floorboard, holding on for dear life and shrieking with joy at the wind in her hair!

*   *   *

Not much of the city Gissing saw remains. He was there during December 1897. It was razed by an earthquake in 1908, and rebuilt with wider streets and low, reinforced-concrete buildings. Centuries earlier, unlike most conquerors, the Romans treated the city well; after all, Rhegion, so named by the Greeks and later named Rhegium by the Romans, had remained loyal to Rome during the Punic Wars, including Hannibal's invasion.

Along the Lungomare Matteotti, the street along the harbor just down from the Corso Garibaldi, are only a dribbling of Greek ruins—a short wall. Just a few hundred feet away are the remains of a Roman bath. Not much else of the ancient city exists. But standing here with my back to the city, after dropping down from the traffic-free Corso during my early evening walk, I could gaze across, as Gissing did, to the east coast of Sicily, just a few miles away.

To the northwest blinked the lights of Messina; to the southwest, shrouded in haze and out of sight, would be the slopes of Etna, a volcano, like Vesuvius, that still threatens all life on its fertile Sicilian slopes.

Reggio has a poor harbor, but it must have been chosen by the ancients for its commanding position along the Strait of Messina. It was an ideal trading spot, bringing together ships from the Greek world south of Italy, the colonists in Sicily just a few hundred yards across the strait, and those plying the waters along Italy's west coast. The original Greek settlers here were always under threat of invasion, first by fellow Greek colonists from other cities, later by the other nationalities that foraged along this impressive coastline.

Eventually, the Siracusans from the southeast coast of Sicily needed Rhegion as a bridgehead for the defense of their island. After a long siege that ended in 386
B.C.E.
, the Greeks from Syrakusai, modern Siracusa, dismantled the wall I saw the remains of, and built a palace along the waterfront. Eventually, after the Romans took over following Hannibal's departure from Kroton farther north, new colonists were sent by the Roman emperor Augustus just before the birth of Christ to newly renamed Rhegium, which flourished throughout the imperial Roman period.

*   *   *

My first morning here was spent in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Graecia. Gissing toured these displays. He had flipped back through the pages of the museum's guest book and discovered the name, on its first page, of “François Lenormant, Membre de l'Institut de France,” the date 1882. There was no such book for me to flip back through, to see if I could discover Gissing's name, or to record my own. I later found out that the old one is filed away. But it was hard to determine whether the building he visited was the same one I saw. So much has changed here in the last one hundred years, particularly after the giant earthquake eleven years following his visit.

Gissing talked about seeing a plaque on a sidewalk honoring a war hero, a common soldier. It would be impossible to find it, even if it still existed. Gissing scholars, who delve into such minutiae, have found a street in Reggio named for the soldier—perhaps they got the name “Emilio Cuzzocrea” from Gissing's diary—although it would appear that the plaque Gissing saw no longer exists.

But the museum I visited is one of the best in Italy. It, joined with the new ones at Sibari and Metaponto, and the venerable one in Taranto, provides a great repository for the wonders of Magna Graecia. In linear fashion, the Reggio museum covers Bronze Age and Iron Age Calabria, the archaic and Hellenic Greek civilizations, and the Roman period. I had seen a great deal of these types of antiquities elsewhere and moved quickly through the displays.

One of two Riace Bronzes, pulled out of the sea in the 1970s from the shallow harbor of Calabria's Riace Marina on the underside of Italy's toe, is housed in Reggio's archaeological museum. The two bronzes were restored here and have their own earthquake-proof display area in the vast museum.    
Photo by John Keahey

Here, I was more eager to see the Riace Bronzes, those incredible life-size statues pulled out of twenty-five feet of seawater nearly one thousand yards off the coast at nearby Riace Harbor in 1972. Riace is where modern-day immigrants, Kurds and North Africans, poured into Italy every year during the late 1990s, but it also is where a Greek ship, carrying goods to and from Greece, must have wrecked thousands of years ago.

These bronzes were painstakingly restored over a five-year period in this museum, and toured the world before being lodged permanently in the amphitheater where the restoration took place. Now they stand, in their own large, bright, humidity-controlled room, with their own guard, who obligingly let me take photographs, as long as I did not use my flash.
“Senza flash!”
he told me politely, wagging his index finger.

The statues are not behind protective glass but out in the open, positioned on a special platform-fixture system designed to keep them upright during an earthquake—a frequent event in this southern Calabrian city. Once again, as in Táranto and Síbari, I had the museum, and this room, to myself. Just me, the guard, and the bronze representation of two fierce, golden Greek warriors or athletes. They have similar outlines and their measurements are nearly the same, but each stance is different, and the heads are held at different angles. Scientists speculate they may have been part of a cluster of heroic statues; they may have been done by different artists and at different dates.

The restored statues, even after centuries in the sea, have vivid features. The pupils of their eyes are inlaid with ivory and limestone, the corneas are glassy, their lips, nipples, and eye-lashes are copper, their teeth silver. With smooth “skin” and bulging veins, they appear as if Michelangelo, the Renaissance sculptor of the sixteenth century
C.E.
, who more than one thousand years later gave birth out of marble to the magnificent
David,
had a hand in their creation.

These bronzes are a fine example of how advanced the 500
B.C.E.
Greek sculptors really were, the ancient anonymous equivalents of Michelangelo. It took centuries after this glorious period for artisans to recapture the techniques that had been used to create the Riace Bronzes.

*   *   *

My trip through a small part of Magna Graecia, like Gissing's one hundred years before, was ending.

On my last morning, before catching the train to Sicily where I would spend a few days and then head for Rome and an airplane home, the desk clerk at my hotel offered to take me to the roof. There, he said, I would get a clear, unobstructed view of the city to the east and of Sicily across the Strait of Messina to the west. He quietly, and patiently, waited at the doorway while I paced along the roof's edge.

The city rises up in concentric circles, ringing the tip of the Aspromonte that makes up the toe of Italy. The
centro
is strung out, like pearls on a necklace around the base of this giant massif. Reggio is quiet, pleasant.

I find it hard to believe that in recent years the
‘ndrangheta,
or Calabrian Mafia, has had so much power in the city's construction rackets and is deeply involved in fierce extortion scams, and in international drug dealing and arms trafficking.

I have read about the years of misguided central-government policies, as I have seen elsewhere throughout the South, that have led to huge unemployment levels—roughly fifty percent in Reggio alone for those under age twenty-five. I did not see them, but I understand there are open sewers in some of this quiet city's poorer neighborhoods, and that tap water here is undrinkable.

The day before, I had looked for a wonderful old building that Gissing had described, the slaughterhouse he said was south of the train station, but I could not find it. Perhaps today's train station is in a different location. Perhaps the slaughterhouse was destroyed in the 1908 earthquake or during World War II bombing runs.

Many of the owners of the shops I entered during my walks pay tribute, protection money, to the crime syndicate. In the mid-1990s, an energetic prosecutor found a decapitated cat impaled on the gate of his country house. A journalist with
La Gazzetta del Sud
has been the owner of three cars destroyed in separate car bombings. According to an in-depth article published in Britain's
Independent
in 1996, the crime families have more licensing power for small businesses than the city government. All of the shops in the city's market in Piazza del Popolo, the article said, are illegal, “licensed” by the
‘ndrangheta.
Thankfully, most of this is missed by the casual tourist here for the warmth, the culture, the sense of history, and the spectacular views.

Instead we see typical Italian “street theater.” I am reminded of this by Luigi Barzini's
The Italians,
his 1964 classic that beautifully describes the nature of the Italian people—characterizations that got him into trouble, I understand, with his fellow countrymen. Barzini talks about how Italians “perform” when talking to one another, how they raise their voices, gesture with hands, arms, the entire body.