October 10, 2012

Magna Graecia

Filed under: Travel — Mary Stampa @ 1:47 pm

I had been looking forward to staying a few days in the Monastery of Santa Maria di Polsi and talking with the Superior, who was known to be an expert on Calabrian history. As I descend­ed to it, I saw groups of people washing them­selves in the stream. I washed too and asked the reason for their visit. A big festa, they said. In the monastery kitchens people crowded round cauldrons of revolting-looking meat. After a quick chat with the Superior who promised to get me a mule for the remainder of my journey, I left. I had wanted to find a deserted monastery in the true romantic tradition, and the sight of so many people taking advantage of a well-earned festa would have interrupted my train of thought.

Monastery of Santa Maria

I passed through villages so primitive they seemed conjured up out of the imagination—clusters of crudely plastered houses huddling together on a slope, doors opening onto stone steps. In these narrow passage-ways, the conver­sation of the day was exchanged: it was the domain of the women. The men sat in the cafés and it was rare to find their wives accompanying them. In one village I was told how the priest would settle the engagement between a young couple. He would drop his spectacles in front of them—if they broke, the engagement was ended. I wondered with what force the priest dropped the spectacles and exactly what factor would influence his choice.

Journeying through Calabria is not the ideal holiday, as we find when reading Edward Lear’s Journals or Gissing and Norman Douglas. Its harshness, which promises yet even more beauty beyond, attracts the Englishman; he wants to prise open this oyster, however laborious it may be, and experience both the hostility and the hospitality of a remote country at first hand. They continually complained about Calabria, yet, as continually, they returned to it.

Crotone, on the Ionian Sea, the cradle of Greek civilization in Italy, is celebrated for its doctors and athletes rather than for wealth and riches. It was here that the basic principles of medicine were conceived and developed and where Pythagoras took refuge. The Greek love of beauty is found at its apex in Crotone, where it is said the excellent climate accounts for the beauty of its citizens. Here too lived Milo, the celebrated athlete, so victorious that he was forced to stop taking part in the Olympics.

Calabria beach

Milo not only excelled in athletics but also in philosophy. He was one of Pythagoras’s most devoted disciples and stood as a symbol of that harmony which Greeks believe existed between learning and athletics. Energy of the mind and energy of the body were coordinated in this ideal, and its universal appeal could easily be understood in Crotone.

`Near by,’ chants the chorus of the Trojan women of Euripides, ‘near by, as you voyage in the Ionian Sea, is the city nourished by that fairest of rivers, the Crathis. Its marvellous waters burnish the hair to a glowing chestnut.’ Alas, though I often tried, I could never find a place on the course of the Crati River, the ancient Crathis, which flows into the Gulf of Taranto, where I felt tempted to dip my hair and wait for the chestnut glow. Reduced to a muddy trickle by the deforestation of the mountains, the magni­ficence of the Crathis had become as legendary as the city of Sybaris which lies somewhere deep beneath the alluvial deposits at its mouth. But from the Sila Greca, the northern part of the mountain plateau to the east, one can still see why the Crathis became famous in the ancient world as much for its beauty as for forming a trade route from the Ionian to the Tyrrhenian, cutting short the journey between Greece and Etruria.

The view is at its most splendid from San Demetrio Corone, 1500 feet above the valley. This is one of the villages of the Albanian com­munity—they settled in Calabria in the 15th century, refugees from the Turks. Here each day, in the late afternoon, the villagers make their passeggiata along the main street, which forms a continuous belvedere. By that time the haze has slightly lifted and the sun is sinking towards the pale silhouette of the mountains that skirt the Tyrrhenian Sea; the mass of Mount Dolcedorme gains a few revealing shadows from the new light and seems to advance a little across the plain of Sybaris, a great shimmering apron attached to the blue and brown valley. It is in this light that the sea and the plain cease to merge into one—the graceful sweep of the Ionian coast is only lost in haze to the north towards Cape Spulico.

San Demetrio Corone

Each time I made this promenade I was unable to give the panorama as much attention as I would have wished; for unlike the severe inhabi­tants of most mountain villages in Calabria, the Albanians welcome a stranger with ceaseless attention, gather round him to chat as he eats in the trattoria, sing for him, introduce him to their families and delight in their knowledge of folk­lore and custom. The Albanians have none of that Italian love of smartness and brightness which has spread even into the Calabrian soul and gives to the most dilapidated village at least one chromium cafe, one well-established barber’s shop. The Albanians are not worried by a little dirt, would not want to change their dingy cafés and trattorias. Tall, fair and blue-eyed for the most part, they differ physically from their neighbours, and though all can speak Italian they use their national language among them­selves and have remained Greek Orthodox in religion in spite of one-time persecutions by the Roman Church. And even down to small matters like the tight-swaddling of babies and the extreme décolletage of the women’s national costume, their life is their own.

To appreciate the unique strangeness of Cala­bria one needs time to sit and talk, to share in the life of the villages, still fresh and untouched by our standards. The mountain peaks have proved a serious barrier to communication, but also a safe refuge for malcontents. One cannot expect to put Calabria on a two-week tourist itinerary—it is not an excursion, but an experi­ence.

October 5, 2012

The house of the dead

Filed under: Travel — Mary Stampa @ 1:48 pm

FOR thrice in a day she sends it out, and thrice she sucks it in’—this was how Homer wrote of the Straits of Messina in the Odyssey, not through any ignorance, but for tragic effect, even at a little expense of truth. The idea of his Charybdis was taken from the ebb and flow of the tide. The whirlpool is still there, but the danger has been diminished by knowledge, the myth is exposed and a little magic has gone from Calabrian folk-lore.

Mythology still lingers in men’s minds when they meditate on Calabria, a country closely bound up with learning, legend and athleticism.

Scilla

A whole unknown world lies behind mountain peaks, some rising 6000 feet straight from the sea, hiding its beauty from those who prefer to sit in a popular resort rather than make the tortuous journey, which after all is a vital part of seeing and understanding the character of a country. It is the thought of the inaccessible that makes man adventurous.

Finding a room at Scilla, a small Calabrian town opposite the eastern-most point of Sicily, gave me the unexpected experience of being offered a bed in ‘the house of the dead’. A mass of mourning women wanted to seize at the chance to make a little money from a bed which had recently held a corpse. I could not blame them but, having just returned from an exciting fishing trip, the sudden change frightened me into declining their offer and staying at a small whitewashed cottage owned by one of the fisher­men who had taken me out that morning. It lay near the beach, with the castle gleaming in the distance, and that evening, as the villagers gathered round to discuss the day’s catch, I again remembered lines of Homer that blended with the atmosphere of Scilla:

Plunged to her middle in the horrid den

She lurks, protruding from the black abyss

Her heads, with which the ravening monster dives In quest of dolphins, dog-fish, or of prey

Gambarie

More bulky.

It is here at• Scilla that the pesci spada or sword-fish are caught—the fish that some Italians believe protects their virility. During April, May, June and July special boats are sent out, directed by a fisherman in a look-out boat. Each boat is small, with two men and two oars; one rows, the other stands on the prow, his twelve-foot spear ready in his hand. As the fish passes the boat, the spear is thrown swiftly and then withdrawn, leaving the sharp, barbed point sticking in the flesh of the fish; this is done incessantly until the fish is exhausted. They then trail the fish behind them to the shore, or, if it is not too large, haul it into the boat. It has been known for a fisher­man to be wounded through the sides or bottom of the boat by the strength of the sword with which the fish is armed. I watched, with admira­tion and a little wariness, the skill which these men employed so naturally to make their kill. I was shown other look-outs in the hills, where a man would sit and wave his white kerchief at the sign of the fish approaching, and was told that ex-King Umberto used often to come and stay near Scilla during the pesci spada season and go out with the boats. The battle between man and fish was stimulating not only for the physical prowess displayed but for the swift coordination between thought and action.

Going on south and east to Bova, the largest of the Greek-speaking communities in Italy, I found the landscape similar to Andalusia but the life far more primitive. Brown, scorched grass crackled beneath the feet; a few oak trees stood listlessly trying to give some shade. It made me wonder how man could scrape any living from such soil; little patches on the slopes where some­thing might grow and a cottage is built, miles perhaps from water. An old woman passed, balancing a jar sideways on her head, her eyes fixed ahead, oblivious to strangers. It was a curious feeling to walk unmolested through this village where the peasants sat staring into space, too apathetic to bother with the outside world.

The Tyrrhenian

The Tyrrhenian, or western, side of the Aspro­monte, which is the backbone of southern Calabria, is far sweeter, more inhabited and cultivated than the Ionian side. I followed villagers making a pilgrimage to the mountain resort of Gambárie, 4300 feet above the valley. The road wound steeply, but at every turn the view made me long to go higher. The smooth silvery leaves of the olive trees glinted in the sun and lay like a lake beneath my feet. I left the pilgrims who were preparing a feast of roast lamb over a charcoal fire, and as I rode through pine and beech forests the call of the bagpipes echoed sweetly after me, and I was reminded of Berlioz, who had imitated this effect in Harold in Italy; high and penetrating it followed me, and it was only as the darkness came suddenly that I realized I was lost. My horse, sensitive and nervous, picked her way patiently until I found a bark-covered hut. With a few ferns, I threw to­gether a couch for the night, and in the morning

when I started off again I found I had made a complete circuit of the long ridge.