by John Keahey
1945
Anti-Fascist Carlo Levi publishes Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), his memoir of the year he was exiled to southern Italy before World War II
1946
Despite strong opposition by southern Italians, who have monarchist and authoritarian sentiments, Italians vote—twelve million to ten million—to abolish the monarchy, which supported the Fascists
1948–1964
Prewar industrial production levels are achieved by 1948, and the country enjoys industrial growth rates of more than 8 percent per annum. In fewer than two decades, the country is transformed from a largely agricultural backwater into one of the world’s most dynamic industrial nations; this is referred to as Italy’s “economic miracle”
1958
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), a historical novel about life and culture in mid-nineteenth century Sicily, is published a year after the death of its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; it is his only novel and brings Lampedusa international recognition
c. 1960s
Archaeologists intensify efforts to excavate ruins in southern Italy that are eventually identified as Greek-Roman cities of Sybaris/Thurii/Copia, built one on top of the other
c. 1970s
Italian Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades—an extreme left-wing terrorist organization—gains notoriety for kidnappings, murders, and sabotage; its self-proclaimed aim is to undermine the Italian state and pave the way for a Marxist upheaval led by a “revolutionary proletariat”
c. 1980s
The Italian Mafia networks controlled from southern Italy continue their heavy involvement in extortion rackets and government contracts, but increasingly control most of the world’s heroin trade; much publicized trials of Mafia leaders from 1986 onward succeed in imprisoning some of the leaders
1992–Present
Investigating magistrates in Milan begin uncovering a series of bribery scandals. The city becomes known as Tangentopoli (Bribesville), and under Mani pulite (Operation Clean Hands) many leading politicians, civil servants, and businessmen are arrested
Introduction
Sometime during the early fall of 1997, I read a newspaper article about the death of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales. It mentioned paparazzi, the celebrity photographers who pursued her on the night of her death in a car crash in Paris. A short article, placed adjacent to the one I had been reading, caught my attention. It told of the origin of the word paparazzi, about how a celebrity photographer in Federico Fellini’s great movie La dolce vita was named Paparazzo, and how the name, in its Italian plural with an i substituted for the singular ending o and with a lowercase p, was used to denote all such photographers during and after the celebrity-ridden 1960s.
Fellini and his scriptwriter, the article said, got the name from a travel narrative, first published in 1901, by the Victorian writer George Gissing: By the Ionian Sea—Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy. The book’s Italian edition is titled Sulle rive dello Ionio—Un vittoriano al Sud (Along the Ionian Coast—A Victorian in the South).
I did not, and still do not, care about paparazzi, but being an Italophile, I wanted to locate a copy of By the Ionian Sea, read it, and add it to my collection of books on Italy. It was a passing thought. I was buying and reading everything I could find about Italy, especially nonfiction travel and expatriate accounts. I was going through a spate of books that seemed to hash over the same themes: They were about the better-known Italian North, or about the Mafia; or about Americans, Central Europeans, or Britons buying and restoring farmhouses in Tuscany, then writing books about their experiences and introducing readers to “a colorful cast of characters.” A handful—such as Eric Newby’s A Small Place in Italy and his Love and War in the Apennines, along with Paolo Tullio’s North of Naples, South of Rome and Harry Clifton’s On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi—are superb, capturing realistic insights into the Italian people.
Some books extol the comfortable life that foreigners of means can have among Italians. Few, I noticed—except in books about the Mafia—were writing about the poorer, economically depressed South, beyond Naples.
I eventually came across an edition of Gissing’s work—a well-used 1986 trade edition—at my favorite local bookseller’s. I brought the thin paperback home and placed it at the bottom of the stack of books on my bed stand. It was late November 1997 by the time I worked my way down to By the Ionian Sea and discovered I was reading one of the most enchanting travel narratives I had come across in years of seeking out such books.
At one moment, halfway through my reading of this classic, I turned to my wife and said that I wanted to visit Italy and follow in the footsteps Gissing made in 1897 during his third and final trip to Italy: from Naples where he boarded the coastal steamer south to Paola; and from there, in a horse-drawn carriage, through the Calabrian mountains to Cosenza. From Cosenza, he went by train to Taranto and, using a combination of trains and carriages, made it all the way to Reggio di Calabria. It was a journey that covered much of the foot of Italy, principally along the coastal instep of the Ionian Sea.
I wanted to see, one hundred years after Gissing, how these ancient lands looked. They had been settled for millennia by native Italic peoples and then colonized by the Greeks long before the Romans arrived.
His book was not a diary and the chapters were not dated, but I had the sense the journey must have taken him several weeks, if not a few months. To be sure, I called my rare-book dealer, who found an out-of-print copy of George Gissing—A Critical Biography, by Jacob Korg.
This same dealer also found a first edition of By the Ionian Sea, published in 1901, and the book dazzled me. It is bound in pale-colored linen, its spine darkened from years of sitting on a bookshelf in a house that must have been heated by a coal furnace or a peat fire. Its creamy pages are deeply embossed with printing that could only have been done with an old letter-press. Periodically a page would be devoted to a full-color reproduction of a watercolor of an Italian scene, the plate covered, for its protection, by a translucent tissue. Gissing’s simple drawings of peasant dress, water jugs, and the like punctuated the narrative.
I reread the book, using this first edition. Then I got on the Internet and found that according to the Library of Congress there have been eight or nine U.S. editions of the book over the years. The book has almost always been available in one edition or another since its turn-of-the-century debut.
I also found several Web sites dedicated to George Gissing. There is even a quarterly journal—The Gissing Journal—devoted to scholarly works about his life. In this journal I found not one, but two articles detailing Gissing’s connection with paparazzi!
Despite my earlier guess that his trip took months, Gissing’s biography said that he made the journey into southern Italy, his Magna Graecia, over what appears to be only a one-month period, from early November to early December 1897. His diary reports that Gissing spent his fortieth birthday, November 22, 1897, in the South, while visiting Taranto, a milestone he did not mention in his book. His birthday, just one year short of the age at which his father had died when young George was barely a teenager, came just before his visit to the town then known as Cotrone, and today as Crotone. There George became ill and, at least in his mind, lay near death in his shabby hotel bed, wreathed in sweat and suffering fevered hallucinations. He described his hallucinations immediately after his recovery, according to biographer Korg, in a diary entry dated November 29, 1897.
It was about this time—sometime during the last two weeks of November 1997 and one hundred years to the month of his journey—that I decided to act upon my first inclination and actually follow in Gissing’s footsteps. I would go in March 1998, a little more than three months later. I had spent several springs and some falls traveling in Italy. Spending March in the south, I figured, would be delightful. A wonderful excuse for another trip!
The journal I kept of the trip, while nothing like Gissing’s detailed diary, became the seed
for this book. I conjured up the idea precisely one hundred years to the moment of his travels, and retraced his route one hundred years and three months later. My most-used modes of transportation were the same—trains and foot-power—with the exception of the few jaunts Gissing made by carriage and the overnight trip in a coastal steamer from Naples to Paola.
When I was not studying maps or guidebooks, I was reading Gissing’s short stories and one of his last books, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, which many scholars believe is a slightly fictional autobiography. I hoped it would give me insight into the inner workings of this lonely, chronically depressed author who seemed to yearn for inner peace—or perhaps escape—as he walked over the ruins of what used to be glorious cities established so long ago in what was, and continues to be, the economically depressed South of Italy.
I understood that feeling. I recalled that in the mid-1980s, during a particularly painful period of my own life, I stood in a Paris street, in front of the first apartment of American writer Ernest Hemingway. As I stared at its facade, I longed to be transported magically to the early 1920s and see the cobblestones he walked on and the goatherd he saw clicking down those stones with his flock, delivering freshly pulled milk in a bucket on a rope to Hemingway’s upstairs neighbor lady. I opened my eyes, as I now suspect Gissing did on such occasions, and found myself right where I had started, in the here and now.
Like Gissing, I met friends in Rome before and after my 1998 southern ramble. He had returned there on December 15, 1897, following a leisurely five-day journey from Reggio, on the far southern edge of Calabria; through Naples for one last look; and then a brief two-day stopover at the monastery at Monte Cassino, occupied four decades later by Germans and destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.
He stayed on in Rome for four months of socializing, sightseeing, and correcting proofs of his critical study of the works of Charles Dickens. Gissing had finished the manuscript in Siena, a Tuscan city northeast of Rome, just a few weeks before he headed south. The proofs of the Dickens book had caught up with him in the midst of his Ionian Sea adventure.
In Rome, he helped arrange lodgings to house his good friends H. G. Wells and Wells’s wife, Catherine. Gissing also renewed an acquaintance with a budding, nineteen-year-old American journalist, Brian Ború Dunne, with whom Gissing had shared lodgings in Siena a few months earlier. Decades after Gissing’s death, Dunne wrote a remarkable memoir, edited later by three Gissing scholars and published in 1999, about his friendship with Gissing and their Italian days together (With Gissing in Italy: The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne).
It must have been a heady time for the young American Dunne, who suddenly found himself in the presence of Gissing, Wells, and, later, Arthur Conan Doyle—three giants of late Victorian literature. In 1959, when Dunne was a frail old man living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was visited by English newspaperman Anthony Curtis. Dunne recalled having lunch in Rome with Wells, who had just published War of the Worlds, and Gissing, fresh from his return from the Ionian Sea. Later, Dunne took the famous pair to his room. Curtis records Dunne’s recollections of the moment: “As they climbed the five flights of stairs … Wells paused to say, ‘Now here’s a young man [Dunne] who wants to write. Here I am who have written a little,’ then, pointing to Gissing: ‘And there is someone who has mastered the art.’”
In addition to the frenetic period in Rome of socializing and proofreading the Dickens work, Gissing scoured the city, laying the groundwork for what would be his final work, Veranilda, a romance set in Rome shortly after the Western Empire’s downfall. He never finished the book’s last five chapters, dying in France in 1903. His death came two years after By the Ionian Sea was published, and a year or so before Veranilda was published in unfinished form.
* * *
I worked on this book during most of 1998, realizing after plowing through a mass of additional reading that I had to return to southern Italy for two more weeks of seeking out places I missed earlier. During that first journey I had traveled almost exclusively by train, and did not, for example, go over the mountain road Gissing traveled between Paola and Cosenza, or up into Squillace, several miles away from its train station on the Ionian coast. These places required visits if Gissing’s journey was to be retraced properly.
In January 1999, friend and fellow Italophile and author Paul Paolicelli and I headed by car into the Calabrian hills. He read aloud from Gissing’s account in between glances at a detailed Touring Club Italiano road map, while I drove. He also took many of the photographs that grace these pages.
In writing this book, the only literary license I have taken is occasionally to combine the two journeys as one. The automobile journeys to Paestum, through the mountains between Paola and Cosenza, to Squillace, to the archaeological dig at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia, and my time at Capo Colonna came during the January 1999 trip. Everything else took place in March–April 1998.
This book, like Gissing’s account, is a personal narrative and a work of journalism, not a footnoted history or a scholarly work. All of the knowledge I pass on comes from my own experiences of observing Italians and from traveling through Italy for the past thirteen years, or from other writers, ranging from the ancient historians Herodotus and Livy to modern historians, archaeologists, Gissing scholars, and journalists. They all wrote in a way that allows us to appreciate and understand either George Gissing or this ancient land and the contribution to Western culture made by the original native peoples of Italy, and later Greek and Roman settlers.
Chapter 1
Naples
Naples is chilly—unusual for late March. A cold wind blows constantly from the gulf toward land. It mocks the belief that early spring in the southern Mediterranean should be warm. I have a shirt on, covered by a flimsy windbreaker that I pulled out of the pouch I found tucked in a remote pocket in my luggage. No sweater, no overcoat. It must be in the high thirties or very low forties, barely warm enough to keep the frost off the gurgling fountain across the way. White exhaust pours out from behind cars. Steam rises out of grates in the sidewalk. My glasses fog up when I walk into a warm, crowded coffee bar.
I am foolish not to have dressed more warmly. In Italy in February and March, one can wear light shirts and still break a sweat as far north as Genoa. I remain too trusting of my beliefs about delightful Italian weather, honed over more than a decade of walking in the warm Italian sun.
My first morning here I awake to look over a foreground of tall umbrella pines and see a patch of new snow on Vesuvius, which the afternoon before stood brown over the Gulf of Naples. The giant volcano’s bulk dominates everything to the east, a sword hanging over the heads of Neapolitans. Scientists warn that at any moment Vesuvius could erupt, or spawn major earthquakes, potentially killing millions. Wind whips a plume of smoke—or is it a safe cloud?—hanging above its crater. The bluster could be a maestrale blowing southeastward from northern France, or a dust-laden sirocco from the deserts of Libya.
Weather terms defeat me, just as do most new Italian words that I want to add to my inconsiderable vocabulary. Perhaps it is a function of age, of corroded synapses. I am learning Italian in my fifties. For younger people, languages appear to hold no mystery. Years ago, my then teenage daughter seemed to become fluent in French overnight. Later, she picked up basic conversational Japanese in weeks. Now, in her mid-twenties, she is just as eagerly learning Latvian. I am amazed and envious.
I must constantly refer to my well-worn, and perpetually bent, pocket dictionary, speak agonizingly slowly in restaurants, hotels, and train stations. The words do not come automatically, even after I use them many, many times.
One of the great things about Italians is that, unlike Parisians, they appreciate a foreigner’s attempts at their language no matter how poor the pronunciation or syntax. The only time an Italian ever corrected my pronunciation was when I misspoke the name of his city. I used the word “Naples,” a perfectly acceptable English pronunciation. A man on a train
, proud to be a Neapolitan, instantly corrected me: “è Napoli!” he said emphatically, all the while ignoring my other mispronunciations and scattered syntax during a pleasing hour-long conversation.
Words describing weather are just as hard. I still do not understand how El Niño differs from La Niña. Italians seem to have a name for every type of breeze, every kind of storm. I only know “cold,” “hot,” “warm,” “chilly,” “breezy,” and “stormy.” In Italy, I vow to change, to become knowledgeable about the nuances of il tempo (the weather), and words that describe its subtle shifts.
Italians, even city-bred ones, appear on intimate terms with their land, and with the subtlety of how weather affects growing things and the people who cultivate them. In cities, even in the poorest quarters, potted gardens tumble their vines from window ledges packed with pots, and from balconies too narrow—or too crowded with plants—for a person to stand. Small patches along railroad tracks that in the United States would be full of wrecked cars, battered refrigerators, and rubble are cultivated, season after season, by city dwellers who spend their spring, summer, and fall weekends tilling soil and growing things.
I am sure that Italians have a name for this wind that whips through me as I huddle in the grand, open space of the Piazza del Plebiscito, cleared of automobiles in recent years by Naples’ progressive mayor; and I am sure that I am cold—and regret not packing a warmer coat.
Englishman George Gissing, a Victorian writer well known among his peers, was here one hundred years ago, perhaps standing on this very corner at the southwest edge of the Plebiscito where it connects to Via C. Console and where I am looking toward the bay and at the hazy outline of the island of Capri far across the water. If the wind was whipping through him as it is me, I am sure he did not mind. There is a passage from a chapter entitled “Winter” in one of his last books—The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft—that seems to capture what I perceive Gissing’s attitude to be about the natural forces of weather: “For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.” Somehow this knowledge did not make me feel better as I stood there shivering. I walked quickly up to the Via Toledo, found a store with inexpensive sweaters, and bought one.