They were all discovered at Stromboli.
"Those coins - whence?"
"Stromboli!"
Noticing some neolithic celts similar to those I obtained at Vaccarizza,
I would gladly have learnt their place of origin. Promptly came the answer:
"Stromboli!"
"Nonsense, my good woman. I've been three times to Stromboli; it is an
island of black stones where the devil has a house, and such things are
not found there." (Of course she meant Strangoli, the ancient Petelia.)
This vigorous assertion made her more circumspect. Thenceforward
everything was declared to come from the province - dalla provincia; it
was safer.
"That bad picture - whence?"
"Dalla provincia!"
"Have you really no catalogue?"
"I know everything."
"And this broken statue - whence?"
"Dalla provincia!"
"But the province is large," I objected.
"So it is. Large, and old."
I have also revisited Tiriolo, once celebrated for the "Sepulchres of
the Giants" (Greek tombs) that were unearthed here, and latterly for a
certain more valuable antiquarian discovery. Not long ago it was a
considerable undertaking to reach this little place, but nowadays a
public motor-car whirls you up and down the ravines at an alarming pace
and will deposit you, within a few hours, at remote Cosenza, once an
enormous drive. It is the same all over modern Calabria. The diligence
service, for instance, that used to take fourteen hours from San
Giovanni to Cosenza has been replaced by motors that cover the distance
in four or five. One is glad to save time, but this new element of
mechanical hurry has produced a corresponding kind of traveller - a
machine-made creature, devoid of the humanity of the old; it has done
away with the personal note of conviviality that reigned in the
post-carriages. What jocund friendships were made, what songs and tales
applauded, during those interminable hours in the lumbering chaise!
You must choose Sunday for Tiriolo, on account of the girls, whose
pretty faces and costumes are worth coming any distance to see. A good
proportion of them have the fair hair which seems to have been
eliminated, in other parts of the country, through the action of malaria.
Viewed from Catanzaro, one of the hills of Tiriolo looks like a broken
volcanic crater. It is a limestone ridge, decked with those
characteristic flowers like Campanula fragilis which you will vainly
seek on the Sila. Out of the ruins of some massive old building they
have constructed, on the summit, a lonely weather-beaten fabric that
would touch the heart of Maeterlinck. They call it a seismological
station. I pity the people that have to depend for their warnings of
earthquakes upon the outfit of a place like this. I could see no signs
of life here; the windows were broken, the shutters decaying, an old
lightning-rod dangled disconsolately from the roof; it looked as
abandoned as any old tower in a tale. There is a noble view from this
point over both seas and into the riven complexities of Aspromonte, when
the peak is not veiled in mists, as it frequently is. For Tiriolo lies
on the watershed; there (to quote from a "Person of Quality ") "where
the Apennine is drawn into so narrow a point, that the rain-water which
descendeth from the ridge of some one house, falleth on the left in the
Terrene Sea, and on the right into the Adriatick. . . ."
My visits to the provincial museum have become scandalously frequent
during the last few days. I cannot keep away from the place. I go there
not to study the specimens but to converse with their keeper, the woman
who, in her quiet way, has cast a sort of charm over me. Our relations
are the whispered talk of the town; I am suspected of matrimonial
designs upon a poor widow with the ulterior object of appropriating the
cream of the relics under her care. Regardless of the perils of the
situation, I persevere; for the sake of her company I forswear the
manifold seductions of Catan-zaro. She is a noteworthy person, neither
vicious nor vulgar, but simply the dernier mot of incompetence. Her
dress, her looks, her children, her manners - they are all on an even
plane with her spiritual accomplishments; at no point does she sink, or
rise, beyond that level. They are not as common as they seem to be,
these harmoniously inefficient females.
Why has she got this job in a progressive town containing so many folks
who could do it creditably? Oh, that is simple enough! She needs it. On
the platform of the Reggio station (long before the earthquake) I once
counted five station-masters and forty-eight other railway officials,
swaggering about with a magnificent air of incapacity. What were they
doing? Nothing whatever. They were like this woman: they needed a job.
We are in a patriarchal country; work is pooled; it is given not to
those who can do it best, but to those who need it most - given, too, on
pretexts which sometimes strike one as inadequate, not to say recondite.
So the street-scavengering in a certain village has been entrusted to a
one-armed cripple, utterly unfit for the business - why? Because his
maternal grand-uncle is serving a long sentence in gaol. The poor family
must be helped! A brawny young fellow will be removed from a
landing-stage boat, and his place taken by some tottering old peasant
who has never handled an oar - why? The old man's nephew has married
again; the family must be helped. A secretarial appointment was
specially created for an acquaintance of mine who could barely sign his
own name, for the obvious reason that his cousin's sister was rheumatic.
One must help that family.
A postman whom I knew delivered the letters only once every three days,
alleging, as unanswerable argument in his defence, that his brother's
wife had fifteen children.
