Old Calabria — A Reader’s Guide

man than that he was a kind of pilgrim-warrior, and that his cult here is of recent date; it was imported or manufactured some four years ago by a rich merchant who, tired of the old local saints, built a church in honour of this new one, and thereby enrolled him among the city gods.

On this occasion the square was seething with people: few women, and the men mostly in dark clothes; we are already under Moorish and Spanish influences. A young boy addressed me with the polite question whether I could tell him the precise number of the population of London.

That depended, I said, on what one described as London. There was what they called greater London——

It depended! That was what he had always been given to understand. . . . And how did I like Lucera? Rather a dull little place, was it not? Nothing like Paris, of course. Still, if I could delay my departure for some days longer, they would have the trial of a man who had murdered three people: it might be quite good fun. He was informed that they hanged such persons in England, as they used to do hereabouts; it seemed rather barbaric, because, naturally, nobody is ever responsible for his actions; but in England, no doubt_——_

That is the normal attitude of these folks towards us and our institutions. We are savages, hopeless savages; but a little savagery, after all, is quite endurable. Everything is endurable if you have lots of money, like these English.

As for myself, wandering among that crowd of unshaven creatures, that rustic population, fiercely gesticulating and dressed in slovenly hats and garments, I realized once again what the average Anglo-Saxon would ask himself: Are they _all_ brigands, or only some of them? That music, too—what is it that makes this stuff so utterly unpalatable to a civilized northerner? A soulless cult of rhythm, and then, when the simplest of melodies emerges, they cling to it with the passionate delight of a child who has discovered the moon. These men are still in the age of platitudes, so far as music is concerned; an infantile aria is to them what some foolish rhymed proverb is to the Arabs: a thing of God, a portent, a joy for ever.

You may visit the cathedral; there is a fine _verde antico_ column on either side of the sumptuous main portal. I am weary, just now, of these structures; the spirit of pagan Lucera—“Lucera dei Pagani” it used to be called—has descended upon me; I feel inclined to echo Carducci’s “_Addio, nume semitico!_” One sees so many of these sombre churches, and they are all alike in their stony elaboration of mysticism and wrong-headedness; besides, they have been described, over and over again, by enthusiastic connaisseurs who dwell lovingly upon their artistic quaintnesses but forget the grovelling herd that reared them, with the lash at their backs, or the odd type of humanity—the gargoyle type—that has since grown up under their shadow and influence. I prefer to return to the sun and stars, to my promenade beside the castle walls.

But for the absence of trees and hedges, one might take this to be some English prospect of the drowsy Midland counties—so green it is, so golden-grey the sky. The sunlight peers down dispersedly through windows in this firmament of clouded amber, alighting on some mouldering tower, some patch of ripening corn or distant city—Troia, lapped in Byzantine slumber, or San Severo famed in war. This in spring. But what days of glistering summer heat, when the earth is burnt to cinders under a heavenly dome that glows like a brazier of molten copper! For this country is the Sahara of Italy.

One is glad, meanwhile, that the castle does not lie in the natal land of the Hohenstaufen. The interior is quite deserted, to be sure; they have built half the town of Lucera with its stones, even as Frederick quarried them out of the early Roman citadel beneath; but it is at least a harmonious desolation. There are no wire-fenced walks among the ruins, no feeding-booths and cheap reconstructions of draw-bridges and police-notices at every corner; no gaudy women scribbling to their friends in the “Residenzstadt” post cards illustrative of the “Burgruine,” while their husbands perspire over mastodontic beer-jugs. There is only peace.