A Sweet and Glorious Land (22 page)

I moved higher up into the town, toward the Norman castle that Gissing saw on its perch at the town's highest point. It was fenced off and its gate locked. I had wanted to climb its rampart and view the valley below. I turned and walked toward a small group of people. The oldest of the group, a middle-aged man, was pointing out the homes and sights. “Did you see the castle?” he asked me in Italian.
“Sì,”
I said.
“Ma è chiuso”
(But it is closed).

I turned to make my way back down to my car. The man, Giuseppe Cerullo, grabbed my arm and asked me to stay. “Go with us,” he said, explaining that the three young people with him were students and he was giving them a tour of his historic village. My Italian was not up to full comprehension, but I gleaned enough to make the unexpected diversion worthwhile.

We passed a nondescript house, and Giuseppe pointed to its Arabic-style window. This was a house built by Saracens in the Middle Ages, he said. The house had been stuccoed and painted dozens of times in the centuries since, but the distinctive window and its North African design endured. He pointed to a giant boulder under the corner of another house. The Saracens built their homes on such rocks, he said, that are embedded deep into the earth, on “natural” foundations.

We walked past another home, with a round circle of earth in the midst of the pavement in front, about four or five feet in diameter. Here, Giuseppe said, stood a giant palm tree, “for many, many, many decades, perhaps a century.”

Finally, he took us to a tiny abandoned structure jammed between restored Saracen-era homes. This, he said, was a Christian church, dating back to the Middle Ages. “It has been deconsecrated,” he said, meaning it is no longer an active church. The building was locked, but Giuseppe knocked on the door of a nearby house. A man, who had seen us out the window, opened his door and walked out, holding a large, rusty key. The man unlocked the empty church's door, using both hands to turn the key, then swinging the door open as wide as his proud smile.
“Molto vecchio”
(Very old), he said to us as we walked into the dim interior lit only by sunlight edging its way in through narrow, vertical windows.

All ornamentation, of course, had been removed, including the tiles from the floor. In one spot, just in front of where the tiny altar would have sat, was a disturbed area that looked like the rectangular shape of a grave.
“Forse una tomba”
(Perhaps a tomb), Giuseppe said. I did not have the language ability to ask if the excavation was being done by archaeologists or by the owners. Perhaps I did not want to know.

Near the tiny town's main square, I said good-bye to Giuseppe and his three young friends. I asked him if I could reimburse him for his services. No, no, he said quickly. “It is my pleasure to show you my village.”

Such is the passion I find in Italy. Particularly, I find it in little towns far off the tourist track. Squillace is not a tourist town; Crotone seems to cater only to locals and some Italian tourists; Taranto is little known to the outside world except to German travelers, my cab-driver friend had told me days earlier.

In each city—even in clogged and smoky Catanzaro where a night clerk politely listened to my story about Signor Paparazzo and made me feel as though I had just enriched his life by telling the tale—I found unexpected adventure and people whose pride in their home cities flows through every pore. It is what keeps me coming back.

*   *   *

I still had one more stop to make before I reached Squillace's train
stazione
miles away along the coast. Before I had left Giuseppe and his group of students, we had stood along the ramparts of the closed and austere Norman castle that dominated the town, looking across the small, narrow valley below. There, just off the road that would take me from the town, standing across a tiny stream and next to an olive grove filled with ancient trees, lay an arched bridge, with grass growing on the top.

There was no road going to either side of the bridge. Giuseppe had seen that I saw it. “It was built in the twelfth century,” he had said. That means it could have been a Norman bridge. An old road, now buried beneath a farmer's fields, must have once gone over the top of it.
“Interessante, eh?”
Giuseppe said to me, with a wink.

This twelfth century C.E. bridge, likely built by the Normans, sits in a farmer's field below the town of Squillace. High on the hill is a Norman castle. Much of the town's architecture was influenced by the Normans and their predecessors, the Saracens. Gissing only spent a few unhappy hours in this small Calabrian village. He was drawn here because it was the home of his beloved Cassiodorus, the monk who served one of the last Roman Gothic kings during the fall of the western Empire, and who initiated the monastic tradition of copying ancient texts, thereby preserving them for later generations.    
Photo by John Keahey

Now I drove out of the town, rounding the first curve of the road that would take me toward the sea. Just above the olive grove, I parked the car and stood, looking down at the bridge. It definitely appeared to be on private property. I hesitated, but the urge was too great. I walked down, along the side of the grove, through a field that had lain fallow through the winter. I reached the stream, crossed the corner of the grove, and climbed on top of a low concrete wall that skirted the front of the arched, stone bridge.

I knelt down and looked at it closely. Knowing nothing about architecture, I could only surmise that the Normans, or perhaps Saracens who had earlier created much of Squillace, had built it. I knew from history books that the Normans had pushed westward from Italy's heel and conquered much of Calabria by the eleventh century
C.E.
Here it was, on a farmer's property. Untouched and intact after centuries. What a thing for a child to play on! I thought. Surely the owners knew what they had here.

After a few moments, I turned and began the quarter-mile trudge back up along the fallow field. Then I heard one low bark, looked up, and saw the farmer's dog straining at a taut chain, trying to come toward me. There was no growling, no frenzied barking, just one low warning bark. This was not a dog to mess with. Carrying my innate fear up the hill with me, the same fear that earlier had visited me in Táranto, I made it back to the car in record time. I did not want to find out if that dog could break its sturdy chain.

With my pulse rate slowly returning to normal, I began to think about Reggio, for centuries an outpost on Italy's bumpy toe. It was Gissing's, and my, last stop before each of us, a century apart, would return to Rome.

Chapter 19

In the Lair of Cassiodorus

I reached Squillace
stazione,
along the coast and miles below the old town, and found it bathed in sunlight. The Ionian Sea beyond was placid, and turning before my eyes from gray to blue. A passing storm, which had scattered rain throughout the morning, had moved far out to sea. Far away, I could see dark gray clouds in the sky that touched the water. But here the sun was warm, and the train for Reggio di Calabria, mine and Gissing's last stop in our Ionian odyssey, was waiting.

I have a regret here. I walked into the station and saw the southbound train sitting there. I had only a few minutes before it left and, too hurriedly, decided that rather than wait an hour or two for the next one as Gissing had done, I would climb on and settle in, expecting to arrive at Reggio in the late afternoon.

As the train moved slowly out of the station and south toward Reggio along the coastline, which makes up the front half of the bottom of Italy's foot, I reread Gissing's description of his two-hour layover at this very station. He had had an adventure here, one that I could try to re-create. Quickly, I thought about getting off at the next station, heading back to Squillace station, and taking the walk he did.

Alas, I succumbed to the rigors of being on the road and alone for three weeks, sat back in my comfortable seat, and watched the rain squall far out in the Ionian.

From the
stazione,
Gissing had filled his two hours by walking along the tracks “towards the black furrowed mountain side.” There is a tunnel here, now as then, that allows the train to shoot through the final ridge of the Apennine range—a point that Gissing called the promontory of the Mons Moscius. I never saw that name on any of my maps, but it is the spot, according to Gissing and my Italian Touring Club map, where the Apennines, which run nearly the length of Italy from high up in the boot, disappear into the sea. Both he and I had crisscrossed these mountains for weeks and, each in our own time, now were at the end of this historic mountain range and our respective journeys.

In these mountains, and in the hills beyond this ridge well into Italy's toe where the high mass of the Aspromonte dominates, early Greeks pushed upward from the coast during the fifth century
B.C.E.
and onto high promontories and mountaintops all along this bottom of Italy. They were driven there by the fierce Italic tribes, and mosquitoes, and isolated for centuries. This isolation preserved their Greek language, and, I am told, an archaic form of Greek is still spoken in places here by the people known as Grecanici.

But like those remaining in the coastal cities, this barrier of language did not protect them from the successive sweeps of invaders. Despite these influences, these ancient Greeks continued to practice their Greek Orthodox faith, I have read, resisting Catholicism well into the fourteenth century
C.E.

But Gissing's thoughts during his two-hour layover did not turn to the Greeks. He was still thinking about the time of Cassiodorus and early Christianity's ascendancy in the city of Rome, with popes replacing emperors and kings as the western Roman Empire crumbled. Near here, Gissing believed, was the monastery of Cassiodorus, where the monks piously copied their Latin manuscripts. The railroad tracks he walked along—the very path my train was taking—crossed the Fiume di Squillace, the river known in Cassiodorus's time as the Pellena, which flowed, full of fish, along the monastery's grounds.

In fact, his monastic compound has been called the Vivarium, a word that today refers to a container or place that contains small animals. In his day, it referred to the fish ponds he reputedly built along the river—a place where fish could be kept in a natural habitat.

“Here, then, I stood in full view of the spot which I had so often visioned in my mind's eye. Much of the land hereabout—probably an immense tract of hill and valley—was the old monk's patrimonial estate,” Gissing wrote. Because of my foolish, impulsive decision, I had to content myself with flashing by on the coastal train rather than ambling along the tracks toward the tunnel through the Mons Moscius as Gissing had done. I saw the tunnel coming up and quickly glanced through my compartment window down toward the water.

It was along the tracks, here at this point, where Gissing met a group of railway workers who climbed with him down the rocky shoreline to the sea. These men, though illiterate, all knew of Cassiodorus and showed Gissing a small cave along the shore that Gissing speculated once must have connected with the Squillace, then Pellena, River. Over the centuries, he surmised, the river, like the Coscile and the Crati Rivers to the north at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia, had changed course, wandering away from the cave and far away from where it was nearly fifteen hundred years earlier along the ancestral lands of Cassiodorus.

Gissing tried to pay the men for their help and information. “They refused with entire dignity—grave, courteous, firm.… With handshaking, we took kindly leave of each other. Such self-respect is the rarest thing in Italy south of Rome, but in Calabria I found it more than once.”

I thought, once again, about the many times I, too, had found such graciousness and self-respect. I remember the guide in Squillace just a few miles away from this spot. He, like the railroad workers one hundred years earlier, had smilingly and kindly rebuffed my offer of grateful remuneration. He had shaken my hand warmly, telling me how it pleased him that someone cared about this town. I remember the man who came out of his house with the huge iron key to let us into the abandoned church, happy to divert his attention, for no monetary reward, for a group of strangers. I remember my guide at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia who spent a morning trudging with me through the water-soaked ruins, explaining with enthusiasm how the ancient cities were unfolding before her and her colleagues' eyes. I remember the fisherman along Taranto's Little Sea who calmed his pack of guard dogs and talked to me for half an hour about catching crabs and shrimp, the cab driver who pointed out my dropped one-hundred-thousand-lira note, the young Pugliese bus driver telling me about wild dogs and life in the South.

I reflected on all this, alone again in my train compartment, as I zipped through the tunnel that took me out of the Apennines and along the coast of the Aspromonte, the last great spur of mountain massif that rises, in a series of terraces, above the Ionian Sea. For someone who spoke little Italian and had spent three weeks talking with people who spoke little English, I had learned a great deal about graciousness and pride.