A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  A drawbridge connects Taranto’s old town on the left to the new town. A medieval fort sits near the spot where a Roman garrison held off the Carthaginian general Hannibal for two years. The canal was dug in the Middle Ages, making the point of the peninsula first occupied by the Greeks in the late eighth century B.C.E. into an island. Photo by Paul Paolicelli

  Taranto, hundreds of miles to the south at the other end of Italy and, as far as northerners are concerned, another world away, was no different. I turned away from the direction of my hotel and plunged into the crowd along Via T. D’Aquino. It was less than two weeks before Easter. Jovial Tarantans sold, from sidewalk stands, giant, elaborately decorated chocolate eggs, a traditional dolce, or sweet, found all over Italy during the Easter season.

  A church tucked in along a tiny square was so full of people that the crowd was overflowing down the steps and into the street. I wedged my way in and saw a procession of young Catholic boys who appeared to be about fourteen years old, garbed head to foot in white fabric, complete with hoods and tiny holes for the eyes. Barefoot, they were making their agonizingly slow way down the church aisle, two by two, moving ahead only inches at a time, arms locked, and swaying side to side, as one.

  Finally, each twosome reached the altar, where an older colleague stood with a large, body-sized crucifix. Each pair knelt before the crucified wooden figure of Christ and kissed the carved feet. Then the boys removed their masks, revealing themselves to the congregation and their proud parents, friends, and relatives: an ancient rite of passage marking the coming of age. The procession must have gone on for hours. The lineup of boys awaiting their turns at the back of the church disappeared into a side room. In the thirty minutes or so I was there, I watched only three pairs of young men make their way along the aisle.

  I left to resume my personal passeggiata along via T. D’Aquino and stopped for a gelato—my evening ration of a remarkable ice cream–like Italian confection unmatched just about anywhere outside of Italy. A pretty teenaged girl, a ragazza, behind the counter took my order, which I offered in halting Italian. She responded in very proper English: “Where are you from in America?” I told her, in Italian. “Is it beautiful there?” she asked. I said it was. She said, “You speak excellent Italian! Your pronunciation is perfect.”

  “And you speak excellent English,” I said, laboriously searching for the proper Italian words, knowing that her command of English was far superior to my efforts at her language.

  I was in Taranto four nights. Each night I went into that shop and each time the young woman and I conversed in each other’s language, together experiencing a short lesson mixed with geography.

  Once she said, “I know about California. Have you been there?” I told her I had, that my grandparents had lived in a tiny beach community north of Los Angeles and, a long time ago, I would go there with my parents to visit during summer vacations.

  “It seems it would be so warm and pleasant there,” she said, looking, and sounding, wistful.

  “But isn’t it warm and pleasant here?” I asked. “People travel from all over the world to come here, and you have it all the time.”

  “Yes,” she said, “the summers are hot, the winters, as you see, are mild. “But California! It is better, yes?”

  “Not better, not worse. Just different,” I responded.

  “Perhaps,” she said, showing wise insight, “it is the ‘difference’ I want.”

  Her dark eyes set in olive skin, framed by long, dark hair, and her enthusiasm for her job, life, language, and travel, reminded me of my daughter oceans away, anxious always to move on toward the different and the unexpected, no matter where she has landed.

  “I leave tomorrow,” I told la ragazza.

  “See, you move on always, too.”

  “Sì,” I said.

  Chapter 12

  Line in the Sand

  The next day sparkled under shocking blue skies. No clouds. The sea-level light was intense. The greening trees seemed greener. The washed blues of door frames seemed bluer. The air tasted delicious and I felt myself bounce with each step. I knew I was in a wonderful place.

  The chill of the threatening weather of the day before was gone. I spent the morning at the archaeological digs at Metaponto south along the Gulf of Taranto shoreline. After lunch, with a clearer idea of distance and location, I set out to spend more time along the banks of the Galeso, unimpeded by a taxi’s ticking meter.

  I found a city bus that followed the general route my taxi driver had taken the day before. We left from the stazione, rumbled through Taranto’s suburban streets along the north shore of the Little Sea, and sped onto the main highway cutting northeastward across Italy’s heel. We crossed the bridge over the Galeso and, a mile or so farther along, the bus driver dropped me off, pointing to where I could catch a ride back.

  “But hurry,” he said. “You have only two hours before the final bus.” En route, he had been intrigued about my desire to see the Galeso. “It is not much,” he said. “Very short.” I asked him if he knew about its reputation in antiquity, and he thought a moment, as if trying to remember a long-ago school lesson. “Sì, sì.” He laughed. “I Greci!”

  I left the bus and walked along a narrow roadway through a decrepit warehouse district. There was some kind of naval base there, also probably a target of British bombs more than a half century earlier. I cani liberi lined portions of the roadway that led to the rail line just ahead. I am terrified by dogs running free. My hand unconsciously went up to where I felt the small scar under my right eye, left by a neighbor’s dog that caught me by surprise when I was eight. I moved past each group gingerly. Sometimes the dogs would sit up, look at me, and, as I went by, lie down again. They didn’t bark; they just watched.

  Relieved and repeatedly looking over my shoulder, I reached the rail line. Then, just before crossing under the rails so I could turn left and follow a rain-puddled road to the Galeso bridge, I saw an unusual stone monument. On it were listed names with a carving of the Star of David next to each one. What appeared to be birth dates by each name ranged from 1912 to 1924, and the monument had been dedicated, out here in the countryside several miles from the city, in the mid 1960s.

  It was plain, simple, and surrounded by pots that once held bright, vibrant flowers. What could it denote? Was it a marker commemorating a family of Italian Jews lost in the war? Was it in memory of a family who may have lived at the tiny farm located just off the road? Were people lined up and shot at this spot, as they had been by the Nazis in so many places in Italy?

  Italy is like that: full of monuments and small remembrances, in the form of crosses by a roadside with pictures of the deceased attached or a name painted on the horizontal arm of each cross. Someday, I thought, I would return and seek out the story of this monument, beautifully carved in stone and freshened periodically with flowers.

  Just across the narrow dirt road, directly opposite the marker, were the ruins of a strikingly familiar structure. It looked like an ancient way station, the kind built by the Romans every few miles or so along the various roads they carved out of the then Italian wilderness. I knew the Via Appia came through this area, but ancient geographer Strabo said it entered Tarentum a few miles away, closer to the gulf. This dirt road skirted this shore of the Little Sea in the direction of the Adriatic port city now called Bríndisi. This route matched maps I had seen showing how the Appia kissed the edge of the Mare Piccolo. Perhaps the road Strabo described was only an ancient “off-ramp” into the city.

  Could this dirt country road cover a portion of the stone highway built by the Romans more than two thousand years ago? Just a few miles inland of where I stood was the Italian highway S7 that follows much of the original Via Appia through the mountains of modern-day Basilicata, once the Roman, and later Italian Fascist, province of Lucania. My map was not detailed enough to tell me precisely whether this dirt road is in a direct line with S7, the old Via Appia.

  So many mysteries and
not enough time to discover the answers! Perhaps a search for the monument’s origins and the Roman road could be an excuse for another trip.

  * * *

  I thought about Romans and their roads. At the empire’s height, these strade ribbed the Mediterranean world, reaching far north into England and across North Africa, spanning the entire southern shore of the Mediterranean. In all, the Romans built about fifty-three thousand miles of hard-surfaced highways made from giant paving stones, laid so they became slightly convex, or rounded up, in the middle—the origin of “high” way?—to allow rain to run off.

  They were built for military reasons—a fast, easy way to move large armies into the provinces. And they were generally straight. Men walking in formation did not need gradual curves as modern vehicles do to make it across a rolling countryside.

  These ancient roads were often built of concrete the Romans made from volcanic ash and lime, in addition to the large flat stones. Authoritative sources report that the Romans learned much about road building from the peoples they conquered early in their drive for empire: the Etruscans, who used cement and paved streets throughout their cities and villages before the Romans became a regional power; the Greeks, who taught Romans masonry skills; Cretans and Carthaginians, who knew how to lay down paving stones; and Egyptians and Phoenicians, who perfected the art of surveying.

  The magnificent roads were carried over marshes, lakes, ravines, and mountains. The depth of the road and its base varied from three to six feet; the Via Appia one of the earliest of these roads, was thirty-five feet wide.

  * * *

  I crossed under the small bridge that carried rails over the dirt road, turned south, and followed along the tracks an even narrower road pocked with deep mud puddles. Within a few moments, I was under the bridge where Giuseppe said the British bomb had fallen fifty-eight years earlier.

  An elderly man was walking toward me, his cane tapping the worn and battered roadway. He was slightly bent and dressed in tan pants, a light brown, well-worn sweater over a checkered shirt, and a cap—traditional, middle-aged Italian-male attire. We nodded and I struck up a conversation about the river. Did he live nearby? Did he know il Galeso?

  “Sì.” And then he asked me, “Do you know that this is a very famous river?” I said I did and that I had traveled a long distance to see it. He seemed amused. “Why is it famous?” I asked, knowing the answer and anxious to hear his response. He did not disappoint me. “I Greci,” he said with a shrug, adding, “and the Roman poet Horace.”

  “Lo conosco” (I know him), I said.

  I studied the water. Under the rail bridge, it comes up in the reeds just beyond, squeezes through a narrow concrete slot, then spreads out into a ten-foot-wide channel full of more reeds and smooth, green moss. Here, the single rows of towering trees along each bank began. If I framed the river and its banks toward where it emptied into the Little Sea a few hundred feet beyond, and eliminated the surrounding littered fields from my vision, it truly is an idyllic sight.

  At our feet were swirling masses of fish of all sizes.

  The old man pointed to a school and commented that the fish in this river were the best around. They are much sought after, he said. I could see why. Despite the river’s location in a trashy area that is crossed, a few hundred feet apart, by a superhighway and railroad, the water appeared clean. The fish moved in and out of the moss along the river bottom.

  We said good-bye. I began walking along the river to the Little Sea, and the old man headed off toward the reeds where the Galeso springs out of the ground. Ahead of me, in the distance where the tops of crab pots stuck darkly out of the water, I saw small, colorful fishing boats painted in bright blues, reds, and yellows. They were moored across the Galeso’s mouth.

  I could hear dogs barking and caught glimpses of them running together, back and forth along the shore. I saw a fisherman standing on a dock, untangling his nets. He looked at me and we nodded. I pointed to the dogs and asked if I was safe. He shouted at them and they immediately calmed down, backing away from me.

  I walked to where the tiny river flowed into the Little Sea, took photographs, and watched the dusk settle over the water and shoreline. I looked toward the city and thought of Gissing’s words, written about his few moments of sitting at this very spot: “There was a good view of Taranto across the water; the old town on its little island, compact of white houses, contrasting with the yellowish tints of the great new buildings which spread over the peninsula.” This was precisely what I was seeing, standing here at dusk, the fisherman beside me working on his nets.

  Gissing continues: “Far away, the boats of fishermen floated silently. I heard a rustle as an old fig tree hard by dropped its latest leaves. On the sea bank of yellow crumbling earth, lizards flashed about me in the sunshine. After a dull morning, the day had passed into golden serenity; a stillness as of eternal peace held earth and sky.”

  With one last look, I walked back to my bus stop, at least a mile away. As I stood there, waiting for the orange Italian bus Numero 9, I noticed still another pack of i cani libri in the distance. They were heading toward where I was standing out in the open, no cars or houses in sight. I nervously shifted from one foot to the other, glancing about and wondering where I could go, what I could do, if they attacked me. I remembered the movie Never Cry Wolf about a scientist studying wolves in the far north of North America. He had staked out his territory the way he had observed a male wolf do—by urinating in spots around his camp.

  I looked around. No bus yet, no cars, no people. Like the scientist, I scurried from spot to spot, leaving my “mark” in a semicircle around the bus stop. Then, hands in pockets so I wouldn’t appear aggressive, I waited. The dogs noticed me and started to spread out in front of me. They hit my territorial line. They stopped, sniffed, looked at me, looked at one another, and then, as if on cue, regrouped and gaily trotted off toward the Little Sea.

  In a few moments, my bus, right on time, lumbered into sight.

  Chapter 13

  A Walk in the Sun

  My second visit to the Galeso had followed a half-day trip to Metaponto, established by the Greeks as Metapontion and renamed Metapontum by the Romans. The village is located south along the gulf coast, and on its outskirts is the site of a Greek temple that Gissing had walked to with a young Italian boy as his guide. This ancient spot was colonized by people from Sybaris and Kroton, back in the eighth century B.C.E., when the two cities were much friendlier than they were two hundred years later. The Sybarites may have wanted to create a buffer town between their city and Taras (Taranto) to the northeast.

  Metapontion was where Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher who created a religious order, lived after he was banished from his home city of Kroton. He died in Metapontion in 498 B.C.E. His tomb, which has disappeared, reportedly was visited by the Roman orator Cicero in the first century B.C.E.

  I vaguely knew the name of Pythagoras from high-school geometry classes. But what drove him out of Kroton and exiled him to Metaponto was not his theories about triangles: “The square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.” Rather, historians say he was driven out for his beliefs that reality is mathematical in nature, philosophy can be used for spiritual purification, the soul can rise to union with the divine, and that certain symbols have mystical significance.

  Pythagoras created an order of followers committed to strict loyalty and secrecy. The order also got involved in politics, and that signaled its banishing to Metapontion, just a few miles inland from the Gulf of Taranto. In the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., the order was violently suppressed.

  Nearly three hundred years after the death of Pythagoras, Metapontion’s inhabitants, known throughout ancient history as a people whose political alliances shifted with the winds, were friendly to Hannibal. There, the Carthaginian general made the town his base for two years while laying siege to the Romans
at Tarentum near the end of his sixteen-year, late-third-century-B.C.E. expedition that ran the length of the Italian peninsula—the Second Punic War. When Hannibal left Metapontion, he took the citizens with him in his retreat south to save them from the wrath of the Romans and, according to one historian, “to make use of [the city’s] manpower in his wars against the [native] Bruttians.”

  The city’s hospitality toward Rome’s enemy was the beginning of the end for renamed Metapontum, which declined after the Carthaginian general—with no support from his North African homeland and increasing Roman victories—made his dash south to Kroton, his jumping-off point for a humiliating retreat to Africa. Cicero reports that in the first century B.C.E., Metapontum, like all the Greek cities, was in decline. By the second century C.E., “nothing remained but the town walls and the theater; the rest was completely ruined.”

  The Tavole Palatine, the Tables of the Knights, was the only ruined temple Gissing saw during a day trip to Metaponto southwest of Taranto. In more recent times, a large Greek/Roman city has been uncovered near here. One hundred years ago, this temple sat abandoned in a farmer’s field, over-grown with high grass and vines. Today this dog, one of the area’s cani liberi (free-running dogs), appears to stand guard at the spot, believed dedicated to the Greek goddess Hera. Photo by John Keahey

  A century ago, Gissing did not know the location of these ruins, twenty feet or so below the farmers’ fields he walked across to get to the temple, known as the Tavole Palatine (Tables of the Knights), the only ruin that he knew existed above the ground’s surface, other than the Greek-era tombs that pepper the surrounding countryside.

  There, at the then hidden site of the original Greek, and later Roman, city, he must have walked over the top of the temple dedicated to Apollo Lycaeus, now the centerpiece of a late-twentieth-century archaeological exploration. Today, only that temple’s foundations remain in place. Archaeologists have erected some columns to show how some of the surrounding buildings might have looked, including a portion of an amphitheater, but the site still has much to reveal to modern eyes.