At This Station Another Travelling Companion Took The School-Boy's
Place; A Priest, Who Soon Addressed Me In Courteous Talk.
He
journeyed only for a short way, and, when alighting, pointed skyward
through the dark (night had fallen) to indicate his mountain parish
miles inland.
He, too, offered me his card, adding a genial
invitation; I found he was Parroco (parish priest) of San Nicola at
Badolato. I would ask nothing better than to visit him, some
autumn-tide, when grapes are ripening above the Ionian Sea.
It was a wild night. When the rain at length ceased, lightning
flashed ceaselessly about the dark heights of Aspromonte; later, the
moon rose, and, sailing amid grandly illumined clouds, showed white
waves rolling in upon the beach. Wherever the train stopped, that
sea-music was in my ears - now seeming to echo a verse of Homer,
now the softer rhythm of Theocritus. Think of what one may in
day-time on this far southern shore, its nights are sacred to the
poets of Hellas. In rounding Cape Spartivento, I strained my eyes
through the moonlight - unhappily a waning moon, which had shone
with full orb the evening I ascended to Catanzaro - to see the
Sicilian mountains; at length they stood up darkly against the paler
night. There came back to my memory a voyage at glorious sunrise,
years ago, when I passed through the Straits of Messina, and all day
long gazed at Etna, until its cone, solitary upon the horizon, shone
faint and far in the glow of evening - the morrow to bring me a
first sight of Greece.
CHAPTER XVIII
REGGIO
By its natural situation Reggio is marked for an unquiet history. It
was a gateway of Magna Graecia; it lay straight in the track of
conquering Rome when she moved towards Sicily; it offered points of
strategic importance to every invader or defender of the peninsula
throughout the mediaeval wars. Goth and Saracen, Norman, Teuton and
Turk, seized, pillaged, and abandoned, each in turn, this stronghold
overlooking the narrow sea. Then the earthquakes, ever menacing
between Vesuvius and Etna; that of 1783, which wrought destruction
throughout Calabria, laid Reggio in ruins, so that to-day it has the
aspect of a newly-built city, curving its regular streets,
amphitheatre-wise, upon the slope that rises between shore and
mountain. Of Rhegium little is discernible above ground; of the ages
that followed scarce anything remains but the Norman fortress, so
shaken by that century-old disaster that huge gaps show where its
rent wall sank to a lower level upon the hillside.
At first, one has eyes and thoughts for nothing but the landscape.
From the terrace road along the shore, Via Plutino, beauties and
glories indescribable lie before one at every turn of the head.
Aspromonte, with its forests and crags; the shining straits,
sail-dotted, opening to a sea-horizon north and south; and, on the
other side, the mountain-island, crowned with snow. Hours long I
stood and walked here, marvelling delightedly at all I saw, but in
the end ever fixing my gaze on Sicily.
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