They used to fight like
fiends, and now - she sings to him night and day to come back."
Love - so the Greeks fabled - was the child of Chaos.
In this part of the town stands the civic museum, which all readers of
Gissing's "Ionian Sea" will remember as the closing note of those
harmonious pages. It is shattered, like everything else that he visited
in Reggio; like the hotel where he lodged; like the cathedral whose
proud superscription Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium impressed him so
deeply; like that "singular bit of advanced civilization, which gave me
an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who
forecast the future - a public slaughter-house of tasteful architecture,
set in a grove of lemon trees and palms, suggesting the dreamy ideal of
some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism." We went the
round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the
tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting
against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a rope
by which the inmates may have tried to let themselves down.
A friend of mine, Baron C - - of Stilo, is a member of that same
patriotic family, and gave me the following strange account. He was
absent from Reggio at the time of the catastrophe, but three others of
them were staying there. On the first shock they rushed together,
panic-stricken, into one room; the floor gave way, and they suddenly
found themselves sitting in their motor-car which happened to be placed
exactly below them.
