A Sweet and Glorious Land (9 page)

The fountain in Páola's Piazza del Popolo sits in the middle of the old town's one street. This view looks to the south, down via Giuseppe Valitutti. Turn north toward a second, larger fountain with several individual spigots and the street becomes the Corso Garibaldi. The inn Gissing knew as the
Leone
was near this spot.    
Photo by John Keahey

I returned to the second fountain—my favorite—and devoured
la mia merenda:
crisp bread holding salami and cheese, a bottle of sparkling water,
con gas
(with bubbles), an orange with its peel streaked dark red—a “blood” orange from the far South, perhaps Sicily. I, like Gissing sitting at his window, was in heaven.

Too soon, I was back at the train station, gathering my luggage and getting ready to board the
locale
for Cosenza. On this trip, the train entered the mountain immediately south of the town, bore through a black tunnel for twenty minutes, and erupted on the east side of the Apennines just north of Cosenza. Disappointing and certainly not a picturesque trip.

Months later, in another journey to this village, I had a car. It made all the difference in following Gissing's trail. The car would keep me out of that dark, uninviting train tunnel. It would allow me to find the old road Gissing followed in his rented carriage. That road, in good repair and still used by locals, appears on some of the more detailed road maps.

Chapter 6

The Missing Madonna, and Concrete Bunkers with a View

The day promised rain. I was looking for the old highway to Cosenza, and the weather was cold. The air had that chilly, wet bite to it that could mean rain might turn to snow. Rain would be no problem, but snow over the tops of the coastal mountains could make the old highway treacherous. With some searching, helpful directions from obliging residents, and a lot of backtracking, I found the road Gissing used, his small carriage drawn by “three little horses” and his driver accompanied by a “half-naked lad” who, apparently for the fun of it, would leap off the carriage, take “a short-cut up some rugged footway between the loops of the road,” and reappear a few minutes later.

Gissing set off from in front of the Leone, where “a considerable number of loafers had assembled to see me off, and of these some half dozen were persevering mendicants [beggars.] It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume; all wore the common, colorless garb of our destroying age.… With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just ten o'clock.”

The road his carriage driver followed up and over the mountains is the old S107, probably created by the Romans more than one thousand years ago. In recent years, it has been replaced by a new four-lane, freeway-style highway that quickly cuts through the mountains nineteen miles inland to Cosenza, like the train, through its own series of tunnels.

The old road turns sharply off the new highway just a mile or so to the south of Paola. It heads immediately back north and leads a traveler up the incredibly steep mountain, the Catena Costiera, in a series of hairpin curves, climbing higher and higher until I felt almost like I was hanging over the Tyrrhenian coast. The road is paved but extremely narrow, barely wide enough for two cars passing in opposite directions. Some of the hairpin curves are even narrower, so that if two vehicles meet, one would have to stop and wait for the other to pass. And many of the curves are blind where they move around the nose of a promontory.

On this trip over the mountain, I met perhaps four other vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Often, when I stopped to survey the view, I could hear car after car humming along the new highway farther south, their engine noise filtering through the oak, chestnut, beech, and pine trees that, thankfully, shielded them from my view. Except for that distant humming, once over the initial crest of the tall coastal range, I was lost in a deep, silent forest that fascinated me as much as it had the Englishman.

On the steep mountainside, well before I got to the trees, cattle grazed, their bells clanking like deep, hollow-toned wind chimes as they moved through the short grass. The slope was so steep that I imagined those cows must have longer legs on their downhill side.

The new S107 can be seen from the old S107 that carried Gissing in a small three-horse carriage across the coastal mountains from Paola to Cosenza. The lichen-covered dome of a German bunker is in the foreground.    
Photo by Paul Paolicelli

Midway up, just before the mountain reached a plateau near where the trees began—Gissing writes that it took three hours to reach this point; I made it in about twenty minutes—I stopped at one of the infrequent wide spots along the twisting, narrow roadway. I beheld the Tyrrhenian Sea. The little town of Paola, far below and to the north, was shimmering in that light in such a way that I couldn't separate the modern buildings from the aging, yellow-tinged, centuries-old ones. Gissing saw such a view, but he did not see in November 1897 what lay at my feet, just over the edge: a moss-covered, speckled-gray, cement World War II German machine-gun bunker.

I looked down on the lichen-mottled chamber's rounded dome just a few feet below me. Then I heard voices behind me. A group of Italian men, in what appeared to be hunting clothes, stood on top of a much larger German bunker on the road's opposite side. They were scanning the mountainside with field glasses, as the Germans must have done fifty-five years earlier. In a few minutes, they climbed into a handful of trucks and cars and sped away down the hill, seemingly oblivious to the blind curves.

The roar of those engines faded. In a few moments the sound of birds came back, and a light wind ruffled the scrubby tops of plants dotting the hillside. Carefully I climbed down into the tiny, doorless bunker. A brown beer bottle lay in the broken rubble on a round floor that perhaps was only a few feet across. The machine-gun portals, of course, looked out toward the sea and the steep hillside below. As far as I know, no battle was fought here: the bulk of the Allied invasion occurred farther north, between Salerno, south of Naples, and Rome. The South suffered a lot of bombing, but not much hand-to-hand combat like farther north.

Through the portals, I could see a portion of the road I had already traveled, twisting serenely below, and the hazy town just beyond.

*   *   *

The curves became fewer as the road undulated, as if over a rolling sea, across the top of the range. Here, I entered the hardwood-and-pine forest. Streams flowed everywhere. Periodically, a religious icon, housed in a small wooden box along the road's side, would come into view. Here and there crosses would appear, shoved into the wet, mossy soil and surrounded by flowers, some dry and withered, some fresh. Each cross had the picture of a Calabrian wearing late-nineteenth or early-twentieth-century garb fastened at the intersection of the wood arms. Gissing wrote of seeing such crosses, but his carriage driver was spooked by them and wanted to hurry on, declining to talk about their origins. I assumed these crosses marked the spot of the honored person's death. By accident? By brigands? An Italian friend later told me that usually the deaths recorded by the crosses were indeed caused by accidents along the narrow, twisting roadway. “If the crosses were in memory of someone murdered in those dark mountains,” he said, “they would be as thick as a bamboo forest alongside the road!”

A roadside water fountain, deep in the beech and pine forests along the upper reaches of the old S107, depicts San Francesco of Paola, the area's patron saint. Gissing reports seeing a picture of a “blue-hooded” Madonna at this spot. The San Francesco icon appears to have been placed in more recent times.    
Photo by John Keahey

At one point, in a curve of the road deep in beeches and oak trees, a small fountain sat at the base of a tiny glen. A pipe, fed by a stream tumbling down through heavy winter foliage in a hillside gully behind, poked out of a large stone slab, and on the slab was a beautiful vertical, tiled image of San Francesco of Paola, the region's patron saint. Gissing wrote that he found such an image—but a different icon than the one I was seeing—at a spring where the young boy accompanying his driver drank eagerly from the pipe.

“Now and then he slaked his thirst at a stone fountain by the wayside, not without reverencing the blue-hooded Madonna painted over it.” The likeness I saw of San Francesco, set in brightly painted tiles, appeared to be of more recent origin. I hoped this was the same spot Gissing described and that only the icons had changed. Once again I could share a moment during this “long, wild ascent” with the English writer who died forty-two years before I was born, his thin, wiry Calabrian carriage driver, and a small boy whose “breath and muscle” Gissing envied while “[p]erspiring, even as I sat, in the blaze of the sun.”

I drank from the pipe. The water was so cold I could almost feel my teeth crack. What a treat this would be on a hot day following a climb up a dusty road in a three-horse carriage. I thought about the young boy, who now would be well over a century old, and I thought about a time when I was sixteen, attending a camp in the Idaho mountains. A group of friends and I ran straight up a mountainside for, what seems in the foggy memory of time, at least half an hour, without stopping. We reached a tall cross, as tall as a person, planted like the Italian boy's Madonna deep into the soil, touched it, and immediately turned around and headed downhill, leaping as we ran, springing from rock to rock, fallen tree trunk to tree trunk, like the gazelles on cable television's nature shows. I remember that time four decades ago with amazement, realizing that we were barely breathing hard when we reached our camp at the bottom.

Here, I felt perspiration rolling down my neck, despite the cold, cloudy day that still threatened rain, as I walked back up a slight incline a few hundred feet to my car, my legs aching from the effort. I climbed in and headed on the freshly paved road toward the summit and the Ionian Sea beyond.

*   *   *

Periodically, perhaps every ten miles or so, a structure of jumbled stones would appear, looking like the ruins of old Roman way stations that one occasionally finds while following modern highways that follow the same paths as the ancient roads. Did the Romans build this road to connect the sea with the Crati valley inland? It certainly is not straight, as Roman roads tend to be—even those that go straight up the sides of hills—the easier to move foot soldiers marching in formation. To make a nearly straight road in these mountains would have been impossible. Occasionally, there also would be abandoned structures of more recent origin. The faded word
RISTORANTE
was over the door, hanging from one hinge, of one such empty structure, its glass windows missing and heaps of rubble piled inside. These, I figured, were roadside businesses forced to close when old S107, Gissing's and my route, was replaced by the modern, faster, more efficient—but certainly less serene—new S107.

On the downhill side, heading toward the small village of San Fili, I passed two large trucks parked facing me just off the road. They were loaded with freshly cut beech logs, removed from the gently sloping hillside above. Every few feet or so, a tree had been left standing, to replenish, I assume, another harvest a few decades from now. Farther down the road, an elderly man was piling branches and other wooden refuse left by the loggers into a smaller truck. He looked up, his arms wrapped around a bundle of branches, and acknowledged my wave with a curt nod.

Eventually, I came down into San Fili, where Gissing's driver had dropped off a small wagon to be repaired. This is where the old road rejoins the new highway and heads nearly straight as an arrow past the village.

Near this point, the main A3 Autostrada into Cosenza follows the path of an old Roman road—a road over which passed the Visigoth Alaric, fresh from his most recent early-fifth-century-
C.E.
sack of weak and declining Rome, which was then the befuddled, decadent capital of the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire had earlier been moved to Constantinople, dividing the power of the once mighty Romans.