A Sweet and Glorious Land (14 page)

In Greek times, the ancient city of Taras, founded in about 706
B.C.E.
by colonists from the Greek city of Sparta, ended at a defensive wall near the neck of the peninsula with a ditch located near the point where the canal and drawbridge now sit. Later, after 275
B.C.E.
, the Romans took over the city, naming it Tarentum.

Before the ditch was widened into a canal in the Middle Ages, making the city an island, the old city had once been part of the peninsula to the south, between the
Mare Piccolo,
(the Little Sea) and the Gulf of Taranto. It was across this peninsula that Hannibal's soldiers, in 212
B.C.E.
, used mules to haul ships lashed to wagons from the Little Sea to the Gulf of Taranto and surprise the city's Roman defenders. After Hannibal, the Romans once again re-established their control over the city.

The writer Margaret Guido credits the ancient geographer Strabo with a fine description of the city around the time of the first millennium:

“Evidently the town had a fine gymnasium and a spacious forum still dominated by the huge bronze figure of Zeus. But the acropolis (the upper fortified part of an ancient Greek city), between the forum and the harbor mouth, had already been shorn of most of its former glories. The
via Appia
approached the town by a bridge across the harbor mouth and, having crossed the present
Città Vecchia
and
Città Nuova,
left by a gateway through the walls on the east, just beyond the [cemetery].”

Strabo, a Roman citizen who wrote in Greek and likely was Greek by birth, described the whole of the known world during the reigns of the first two Roman emperors, Augustus and Tiberius. He apparently saw Tarentum long after the Romans had despoiled much of the older Taras to rebuild their own city. Ever the dispassionate observer, I wonder how Strabo must have felt about his older Greek culture's former glories being stripped away at Tarentum.

Taranto became an island some fifteen hundred years later, in
C.E.
480, under Aragonese rulers, far away from their native Spain. The peninsula was breached near the site of the old Greek and Roman defensive walls. It allows a second way into and out of the Little Sea, and it enhanced the city's defenses.

*   *   *

It was precisely that kind of act—the breaching of the peninsula—that would have disturbed the ancient historian Herodotus. I am sure he would have commented on what he considered such an unnatural act had the breach taken place before his time, instead of centuries later, during the Middle Ages.

Herodotus's reaction to a similar act centuries earlier is detailed in his
Histories
and discussed at length in the book
Herodotus
written by James Romm. Herodotus would have considered creating an island from a peninsula to be an act contrary to the structure of the earth, Romm asserts.

What had drawn Herodotus's distaste was the decision by the Persian king Xerxes, who cut a canal across the isthmus of Athos, located in Macedonia, to the northwest of Greece. The king, according to Herodotus, “ordered it to be dug on account of his pridefulness, wishing to display his power and leave a memorial behind; for the Persians could have dragged their ships across the isthmus without taking any trouble at all”—much as Hannibal did at Tarentum. As Romm says, Herodotus “clearly registers disapproval of this alteration of the structure of the earth.”

Interestingly, the ancient historian also opposed the structural inverse of such an act. Romm says: It is just as wrong to bridge a strait or a river, since water forms natural boundaries between peoples and territories, “so that to render crossable those that formerly could not be crossed seriously upsets the earth's natural order.”

For Herodotus, like many historians since, saw a great struggle over the ages between East and West. When people crossed boundaries between the two, they transgressed “a moral law embedded in the very structure of the earth.”

Perhaps Herodotus, who thought nothing of crossing by ship many water boundaries during his travels, had the answer to the question: Why, over so many tens of centuries, has mankind struggled, and continues to struggle, over issues of territory? Perhaps this upsetting of natural balance is why Persia failed to cross from the East into the West effectively and be successful against the Romans. The Romans, dominant in the West, after a period of time also struggled in the East so far away—and across large bodies of water from Rome.

Rome was doomed to fail in Asia. Asia never effectively conquered any significant portion of the West. This certainly remains true today. Herodotus would believe, Romm says, that attempts “to make political geography supersede what is natural” would fail. The Persians perhaps should have stayed in the East, where Herodotus believed they had a more normal and natural place.

“By contrast,” Romm says, “the yoking of continents is their [the Persians'] great sin and invites retribution from the gods.”

*   *   *

I do not know if the breaching of this peninsula doomed this city to the wrath of the gods, but the island makes Taranto truly unique. I certainly like its atmosphere. On the other side of Taranto's drawbridge, across from the medieval citadel that had been built on top of the Roman citadel where legionnaires held off the invading Hannibal for two years, is the more modern portion of this city. In ancient times, the area contained a necropolis, or burial ground. It eventually became absorbed within the boundaries of the Greek, then Roman, town.

Its tall buildings and wider-than-usual-for-Italy boulevards have developed on a grand scale over the last century since Gissing's visit. In this area one hundred years ago was “a tract of olive orchards and of seedland.” This was the land that in ancient times contained Greek tombs.

Here the Englishman had one of his more lyrical encounters: “[T]here, alone amid great bare fields, a countryman was ploughing. The wooden plough, as regards its form, might have been thousands of years old; it was drawn by a little donkey.… Never have I seen a man so utterly patient, so primevally deliberate. The donkey's method of ploughing was to pull for one minute, and then rest for two; it excited in the ploughman not the least surprise or resentment. Though he held a long stick in his hand, he never made use of it; at each stoppage, he contemplated the ass, and then gave utterance to a long ‘Ah-h-h!' in a note of the most affectionate remonstrance. They were not driver and beast, but comrades in labour. It reposed the mind to look upon them.”

The first few streets southeast of the drawbridge look as though they were built in the 1800s. The farther to the southeast I went, across the “olive orchards and seedland” of Gissing's time, the more modern—and more cluttered—the city became.

Somewhere to the north from this spot, along the far shore of the Little Sea—beyond the glistening black sticks that, poking out of the calm water, mark the locations of fishermen's crab pots—was the mouth of the Galeso, a river famous in antiquity and a magnet for Gissing.

He walked to it, carrying visions of its serenity that he had imagined while reading the classical writers. These thoughts must have fed his depression as he yearned to escape into what he perceived to be a simpler, idealized past. I would find that river the next day.

*   *   *

The Galeso was on the tourist map I picked up the next morning. It was right where Gissing, in his chapter “Dulce Galaesi Flumen” (Sweet River Galeso), said it was. He had walked to the site, but I recruited a cab driver who professed knowledge of the area. The driver—the proud and honest southerner who later pointed to my dropped money—followed the road and rail line that pointed east toward the Adriatic coast. After a few short miles, he stopped on a bridge, raised a finger in the direction of the Little Sea, and said,
“Ecco, il Galeso.”

From this point, the little cattail-choked river lined by giant trees ran perhaps only a short distance to the inner sea. I looked in the opposite direction and saw where the river seemed to come out of nowhere, just a few hundred yards away. Smokestacks of some petroleum center poked up from behind the low hills beyond.

“It rises just over there, from the ground. No other source,” Giuseppe said, bending over and moving his open, flat hand up and down a few inches above the pavement.

The river is less than a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) long, from beginning to end, the cab driver pointed out, seemingly awestruck that such a short body of water could be so famous as to draw an American tourist to its banks.

Except for the giant trees along its length and the sound of humming automobiles from the nearby highway, it was the same river Gissing discovered.

The Englishman wrote that in late 1897, the Galeso flowed through “bare, dusty fields and a few hoary olives.” But what I was seeing, one hundred years later, with the trees added and a neatly cultivated farm on one side, was beautiful—more like what the Roman poet Horace might have seen when, in his second book of odes, he described the banks of the river Galaesus as a perfect place to retire, a place where sheep with fleece so fine browsed along its banks, their valuable coats protected by leather garments.

The Galeso River, looking north, springs out of a marsh shown by the reeds just beyond the concrete wall. A petroleum refinery, on the outskirts of nearby Taranto, is in the distance. Gissing marveled that this then-desolate spot and the short, narrow river were so famous in classical Greek times.    
Photo by Paul Paolicelli

Giuseppe motioned me back into his cab, breaking my daydream. “We go closer,” he said. Within a few moments we were bumping through deserted fields on a weathered dirt road. With a sudden jerk, he stopped the car. We crawled out of his tiny cab and stepped onto a concrete bank of the river, directly below a bridge holding Taranto's main rail line to the Adriatic. Looking southeast, we saw the river was beautiful, even with the highway bridge in the distance and the sound of humming cars floating down to us.

Turn south, and the mouth of the Galeso, about one-half mile from the river's origin in reeds, empties into Taranto's Little Sea, or
Mare Piccolo,
east of the town. These trees were not here in Gissing's time. He reported seeing only dry dusty fields and a few hoary olives. Along these banks, according to the classical poet Horace, the Greeks grazed their sheep with fleece so fine their coats had to be protected by leather garments.    
Photo by Paul Paolicelli

We stood silent for several moments. Then Giuseppe started talking softly, so softly that I had to ask him to repeat himself. He told me that in 1943, when he was six years old, a British bomb destroyed this rail bridge—at the spot where we were standing—to break this vital supply line to those key Adriatic ports.

“I remember it,” he said. “It was a time most unpleasant, but we were glad the British came and the Germans left.” After a quiet moment, he chuckled. “Now I drive more German tourists than British, or Americans like you. Only Germans seem to come here now.”

His meter was ticking. We left, and I felt the visit to this river had not been long enough. I wanted to walk its short length to where it flowed into the Little Sea.

*   *   *

For now, I wandered through the medieval city on Taranto's island, making my way back to the hotel across the island's drawbridge. I saw dogs,
i cani liberi,
sniffing through garbage being tossed to them by a man rummaging through a Dumpster. I thought of a line from the classic Sicilian novel
The Leopard,
written in the 1950s by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “In front of every habitation the rubbish from wretched tables piled up along the leprous walls. Shivering dogs rifled through it, their eagerness always disappointed.”

And, as the sky darkened, turning the deep, narrow streets into tunnels lined with faint window-lights, I passed small children shrieking in their games, bouncing balls off the medieval stones on the narrow, dark, and twisting streets. I got lost several times, backtracking repeatedly to regain my bearings.