A Sweet and Glorious Land (19 page)

From my vantage point in the Italia/Concordia hallway, I could only imagine such conversations. I looked behind me, back toward the far wall of the pleasant hotel lobby. On it hung a glass-framed page from a local newspaper, describing how in recent times the Italia took over the space once occupied by the historic Concordia—where the “British poet” Gissing once recovered from a serious illness; where the French writer Lenormant, whose journey Gissing was following, had stayed a decade before the Englishman; and where a Scottish writer, Douglas, had overnighted in the early 1900s while following a portion of Gissing's trail.

“The shade of George Gissing haunts these chambers and passages,” writes Douglas of the Concordia, in his seminal work on southern Italy,
Old Calabria,
first published in 1915. Gissing had been disturbed by the squalor of the place and the bad food. Roughly fifteen years later, Douglas found a much-changed place: “The food is good and varied, the charges moderate; the place is spotlessly clean in every part.… ‘One cannot live without cleanliness,' as the housemaid, assiduously scrubbing, remarked to me.”

All the people from Gissing's Cotrone, except for Dr. Sculco, were dead when Douglas arrived: the mayor whose written permission Gissing sought to allow him to visit the orange groves along the Esaro River; the housemaid who would occasionally look in on him; the “domestic serf with dark and flashing eyes,” and the hostess of 1897, “the stout, slatternly, sleepy woman who seemed surprised at my [Gissing's] demand for food, but at length complied with it.”

Douglas spoke with the good doctor, who remembered his patient. “I remember him quite well; the young English poet who was quite ill here. I prescribed for him. Yes-yes! He wore his hair long,” Douglas quoted Dr. Sculco, who had been only four years older than Gissing. The doctor was unwilling to say more about his long-haired charge. Douglas surmised that Sculco was following his oath never to reveal anything about patients, alive or dead.

*   *   *

Now here I was, several decades after Dr. Sculco and Douglas each had gone to their rest: Sculco, who died in 1931 at age seventy-six, likely buried in the city cemetery Gissing once visited; and Douglas, who, a suicide in 1952 at age eighty-three, went to his grave on Capri, off the coast of Naples. I stood in the Italia/Concordia one hundred years and approximately three months after Gissing paced this very hallway—one hundred ten years after François Lenormant passed along the street outside on donkey-back and stayed here while researching his masterwork
La Grande-Grèce: Paysages et Histoire,
the definitive late-nineteenth-century work study of Greek archaeological sites in southern Italy, and eighty-some years after Norman Douglas came via train to follow his fellow Brit's footsteps and write his own book about this region of southern Italy—a travel classic equal to Gissing's
By the Ionian Sea.

At this moment I realized that my journey was part of a continuing trek connected to three people, much better read and steeped in the classics than I, but who shared my passion for Italy's South and for its colonial Greek heritage. The native Italic peoples, the Greeks, the Romans, Hannibal, the Saracens, the Normans, the Spanish, and other conquerors had laid out the geographic road map that we four, sharing this spot of floor in an old hotel, followed, each in our own era and with our unique perspective.

Now if I could just get to Capo Colonna and see what Gissing, gazing longingly across the bay at, failed to see up close because of growing illness: the remaining Doric column of a temple dedicated to Hera. The writer's caretaker, Dr. Sculco, had told his patient how he, as a schoolboy, would walk around and around the column near his parents' summer home, reciting out loud portions of classic literature he was memorizing.

Chapter 16

Bunkers, a Church with No Floor, a Lonely Column

The cylindrical concrete structure—a bleak, lichen-covered sentinel rooted in place for decades—greeted me as I entered Capo Colonna, the grounds just ten miles south of Crotone that hold Hera's column. I had seen, along the mountain road days earlier between Paola and Cosenza, an identical small building, also with its slotted windows wider inside than out, in a manner designed to discourage bullets and grenades from finding their way to the interior.

This mottled gray German bunker looked out from its perch over Crotone's tiny harbor, still waiting for an invasion that never came. Instead of pouring into Italy from southern Italy's Ionian coast, the Allies in 1943 invaded halfway up the peninsula—first the British at Reggio, then Americans and British at Salerno, then Anzio, both along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Today the machine-gun portals of this tiny bunker, barely big enough for two men, look across the small bay of Crotone to where joggers and dog-walkers meander.

It is always chilling to see these rounded bunkers. The first I had ever seen were in southern Sicily during a trip in 1986. I had climbed up through a farmer's field to stand on the dome, laughing and joking with a friend, until it occurred to me, looking across a small valley at similar bunkers on the other side, that from these portals blazed machine-gun fire that cut down American and British troops who came not as conquerors, but as liberators.

This bunker's open entrance, fixed on the land side of the harbor, looks in the direction of Hera's column, which rises out of the point of the cape (Capo Colonna), just a few feet from the sea.

I turned back and looked across the choppy water at the old town, today just a shimmer in the distance. I could barely make out the castle rampart where Gissing, and I, had stood a century apart. This day was frightfully, unseasonably, cold and windy, perhaps about the same as it was when he was here in late 1897. I wouldn't want to be in a boat threading my way through the raucous whitecaps. The road from the town, while narrow, was gentle and undulating. Arriving by automobile is much preferable in weather like this.

I turned around and gazed back toward the cape. Two-story houses blocked my view of the column from the German bunker. Could one of those houses—empty in winter and surrounded by high walls that also enclose growling, barking guard dogs—be the one in which Gissing's Dr. Sculco spent his youthful summers, memorizing lines from classical literature?

To the north of these homes stood a small church. It did not appear old, but it had been well maintained, and its age was difficult to determine. The front doors stood wide open. A man pushing a wheelbarrow along a plank came out of the door. The wheelbarrow was loaded with rich, dark soil destined for a growing pile a few feet from the entrance.

I looked inside. The once-tiled floor of the tiny chapel was gone. Pieces of tile poked out of the growing mound of dirt outside. People were midway into the open space where heavy sheets of plastic covered portions of the dirt floor not being worked on. Workers were on their knees, scraping soil with small trowels. Their presence there became obvious: It was not a renovation but an archaeological dig.

I walked inside, using a long, sloping wooden ramp. Stop! a young man, obviously in charge, said in a loud voice. Everyone looked up, including the middle-aged priest who was wrapped in a black cloak and standing on a sheet of plastic, puffing on a cigarette.
“Non è permesso!”
the young man said.
“Archeologia?”
I asked.
“Sì,”
he responded abruptly, turning back to his work. I watched for a minute longer and walked back up the plank and out of the door just in time to see a passerby pull a piece of tile from the pile of dirt and tuck it into his coat pocket.

*   *   *

A short distance from the church, around the approaches to the two or three large stone summer homes, I found the fenced-in area surrounding Hera's column, the single remaining surface remnant of a temple that originally contained forty-eight columns. This temple was originally established in the fifth century
B.C.E.
Not much has been excavated here in modern times. Now all that is protected is the single column itself, its base reinforced by modern brick footings.

The grass-covered area where the once intact temple stood, once the most splendid Doric temple in southern Italy, is accessible, and though it is fenced in, there is nothing to see on the surface there except dirt paths crisscrossing through the grass.

This lonely sentinel, with the Ionian Sea in the background, is all that remains of Hera's temple at Capo Colonna, ten miles south of Crotone. Gissing longed to see this shattered Doric column, but never made it here. This is near the spot where Hannibal departed Italy to return to North Africa after failing to defeat the Romans. It is the site where his troops allegedly slaughtered four thousand native mercenaries who fought with Hannibal but who did not want to accompany him to Carthage.    
Photo by John Keahey

The temple reportedly had a sculptured marble frieze, and its roof was layered in white marble, or so the ancient writers tell us. Supposedly, there was a gold column inside, along with a painting of Helen of Troy painted from a model chosen from among the fair female residents of Kroton.

The single column is a lonely sight. It and its base must be nearly all that remains of the massive structure that, over the centuries, was torn apart, stone by stone, and used to build palazzi for the rich in old Cotrone and perhaps to reinforce Pietro of Toledo's Renaissance castle. Gissing knew this, and he muttered in print about such folks who would despoil ancient sites for their own building blocks.

I wondered how long the column would stand, without further intervention from humans. To see archaeological work at the church was heartening. All over the South there seems to be a resurgence in work of this sort at many ancient sites. But not much has been done in the area of Hera's temple here. Except for a few modern buildings, the paved road, and the fence enclosing the site, the Capo Colonna must look about the same as it did one hundred, or even two hundred, years ago.

And I wonder if the sea has been rising here over the centuries. At Sybaris, farther to the north, the shoreline, built up by alluvial deposits that filled in the ancient harbor, has moved away from the ancient city. Here at Capo Colonna, the Ionian is lapping to within ten or fifteen feet of the single column's brick-reinforced base. Would the ancient Greeks have built such a temple so close to the water? A heavy storm from the southeast could dash against the column and undermine it.

But the column has indeed stood for centuries, despite raging tempests and people's best efforts at destruction. Its enemy has not been the sea, but the wealthy Cotronians who hauled away the temple's massive stones in an orgy of barbaric recycling of ready-made, and free-for-the-taking, building stones.

Since reading Gissing's work, I had always been bothered by his obsessive melancholy, expressed both in his
By the Ionian Sea
and in most of his fiction. For the first time, here at Capo Colonna with the cold wind blowing across the fluted column, I could feel some sympathy for his despair over how the modern world has turned its back on the ancient.

Sitting at its base, my back to the sea, I looked once more around the temple enclosure. It could have been on this very spot that Hannibal sat, agonizing in his disappointment and humiliation at being forced to retreat to Carthage after nearly two decades of wreaking death and destruction on the Romans and on his own men. I wondered how many of those who started with him on that long winter journey across the Alps sixteen years earlier were still with him at the end. Damn few, probably.

*   *   *

Hannibal's rage against the Romans dipped back into his childhood as he watched his father, Hamilcar Barca, devastated by Roman demands to abandon Sicily at the end of the First Punic War. Carthage and Rome, once allies, were struggling to fill the vacuum of power throughout the Mediterranean created by the death of Alexander the Great, a century earlier.

Hamilcar took his son to Spain to rebuild Carthage's empire. Hannibal took over the army at his father's untimely death, fought for a few years against native Spanish tribes, and then besieged Roman ally Saguntum (now Sagunto, sixteen miles north of Valencia in Spain). Hannibal knew that act would provoke war with his father's longtime enemy.

So, in 218
B.C.E.
, Hannibal assembled ninety thousand men, twelve thousand horses, and thirty-seven elephants, moved west-to-east through southern France, and eventually crossed the Alps, invading Italy and catching the Romans by surprise. It was at a heavy cost. He crossed the Alps, in winter, in fifteen days, and at a considerable loss of life.

After a handful of victories and an especially decisive battle at Cannae, in southeast Italy about five and a half miles southwest of modern Barletta on the Adriatic coast, he won the military support of many cities in the South for his cause against the Romans.

But the Roman army played a waiting game, and the years passed. Hannibal once got to the gates of Rome, but unlike Alaric six centuries later, mysteriously retreated back to the South. The ancient writers tell us that one of Hannibal's generals bitterly remarked during that retreat that the Carthaginian knew how to win a battle but did not know how to win a war.