Nature must be kept "in her place." Her
extrava-gances are not to be admired. This anthropocentric spirit has
made him what he is - the ideal anti-sentimentalist and anti-vulgarian.
For excess of sentiment, like all other intemperance, is the mark of
that unsober and unsteady beast - the crowd.
Things have changed since those days; in proportion as the world has
grown narrower and the element of fear and mystery diluted, our
sympathies have broadened; the Goth, in particular, has learnt the knack
of detecting natural charm where the Latin, to this day, beholds nothing
but confusion and strife.
On the spot, I observe, one is liable to return to the antique outlook;
to see the beauty of fields and rivers, yet only when subsidiary to
man's personal convenience; to appreciate a fair landscape - with a
shrewd worldly sense of its potential uses. "The garden that I love,"
said an Italian once to me, "contains good vegetables." This utilitarian
flavour of the south has become very intelligible to me during the last
few days. I, too, am thinking less of calceolarias than of cauliflowers.
A pilgrimage to the Bandusian Fount (if such it be) is no great
undertaking - a morning's trip. The village of San Gervasio is the next
station to Venosa, lying on an eminence only thirteen kilometres from
there.
Here once ran a fountain which was known as late as the twelfth century
as the Fons Bandusinus, and Ughelli, in his "Italia Sacra," cites a deed
of the year 1103 speaking of a church "at the Bandusian Fount near
Venosa." Church and fountain have now disappeared; but the site of the
former, they say, is known, and close to it there once issued a copious
spring called "Fontana Grande." This is probably the Horatian one; and
is also, I doubt not, that referred to in Cenna's chronicle of Venosa:
"At Torre San Gervasio are the ruins of a castle and an abundant spring
of water colder than all the waters of Venosa," Frigus amabile. . . .
I could discover no one in the place to show me where this now vanished
church stood. I rather think it occupied the site of the present church
of Saint Anthony, the oldest in San Gervasio.
As to the fountain - there are now two of them, at some considerable
distance from each other. Both of them are copious, and both lie near
the foot of the hill on which the village now stands. Capmartin de
Chaupy has reasons for believing that in former times San Gervasio did
not occupy its present exalted position (vol. iii, p. 538).
One of them gushes out on the plain near the railway station, and has
been rebuilt within recent times.
