Old Calabria by Norman Douglas

First published: 1915

Type of work: Travel book

Critical Evaluation:

Old Calabria, it is generally agreed, is the best travel book ever written about Italy. Norman Douglas was particularly well suited to write such a book. He was well traveled, knew six languages, and was an enthusiastic amateur zoologist and geologist. He was an aristocrat and a skeptic who thought knowledge was not only power but good fun. With people he was direct and unsentimental, yet he had an understanding of the geographical, political, economic, and religious factors that had made them what they were. As an observer he was precise and objective, and as a writer he was able to communicate his great zest for life by his humorous, vigorous style.

His account is the result of several tours of southern Italy made by train, by cart, by walking, in 1907 and 1911. He begins near the east coast, in Saracen Lucera. In Lucera the people had a passion for monuments which they erected and then changed with every political change. From Lucera he went to Manfredonia on the coast, a peculiar city whose streets ran into the sea instead of alongside it, possibly for ease in defense as the city had been sacked and burnt on several occasions. Here there were no trees and Douglas speculates on the results of this denuding of the land. Centuries before the buildings had been made of wood; now all were of stone, bare and grim-looking. Nowhere was there shade from the intense sunlight. Because of their hard life in a burning limestone desert, the people had no charm or sense of humor and their faces appeared to be cut out with a hatchet.

Northeast of Manfredonia the archangel Michael is supposed to have appeared on top of a mountain, at the bottom of which there is now a sacred but gloomy and odiferous cave where thousands of pilgrims come to worship. Douglas found the pilgrims repulsive, inept, dazed and weak; their very existence was bestial in its blankness. He felt unable to love or respect them; to pity them would be in accord with their religion but not with his. He felt that once divinity is comprehended by the masses it ceases to be efficacious, and that fanatics such as these are more to be feared than criminals, for they will commit any enormity in the name of their religion.

Venosa, in the land of Horace, he called a dirty city, full of mutilated stone lions. It is a city of peasant proprietors and field laborers who have little to do with one another, and no middle class: As a result the city suffers. The tax system here, as everywhere in Calabria is oppressive; every conceivable item is taxed so that law breaking becomes a virtual necessity. Nearby is a decayed Benedictine abbey remarkable for containing relics of Hebrew, Norman and Roman origin. Men were digging tunnels to create an aqueduct system. Douglas recalls that Horace liked his nature tame, subservient to man, and that in fact all southern Italians have a utilitarian view of nature. They prefer a garden or cultivated area to a wild one and a vegetable garden to a flower garden. He tried in vain to locate various sites mentioned by Horace and concluded that the wise man learns to close an eye and thus sees many fine things.

As he moved southward, Douglas observed the peasants and found that generally there was little to admire in this whole class of men; they were retrogressive and ungenerous and lived like beasts. In one region the peasants had profiles like Plato and Augustus and the manners of Louis Quatorze. These people he found to be truly philosophic in the face of adversity and he sympathized with them. Emigration, he thought, had both good and bad results. It shattered family life, but the sons who went to America and Argentina sent back money every month and sometimes returned with large sums. With this aid their families flourished. Meanwhile the landlords remained impoverished. These peasants spoke of “governing” the soil, a word they used when speaking of rearing children. Douglas was amazed to discover that they had little or no color sense. Everything was either black or white. He asked a boy what color the sea was on a day when it was sparkling sapphire. The boy pondered a moment and then said that the water was a dirty gray. Clear blue sky the peasants called white. Douglas found the peasant also lacked a sense of the beauty around him; to him things were either useful or not useful. His life was hard and thus he had no sense of humor, which comes only with ease.

Taranto, on the gulf, was a clean and modern-looking city but was quite treeless because the inhabitants preferred to live like fish in a bowl, looking out the windows at what went on in the street or looking unashamedly in others’ windows. Wherever trees were planted, the rents went down. Moving on around the inland sea, Douglas hunted for Virgil’s river but found it difficult to identify because so many streams had dried up as a result of deforestation. In these treeless, torrid towns the upper classes were mellowed and enlightened, civilized without being commercialized. The middle class was ignorant of the outside world, know nothing of other countries or manners and were even separated from their own country folk. They had no new ideas and no ambitions. It was said that the middle class was like mules: they had to be worked thirteen hours out of twelve. Lacking trees and water, the soil was extremely dry and the dust lay inches thick. Douglas felt that this condition was in large part responsible for these people staying shut-in from the world. He himself, a large and strong man, needed heavy walking boots and a stout stick to move about on the roads. Had the soil been granitic, perhaps the people would not have been so sluggish and divorced from nature.

Douglas found humor in their pattern of courtship. In the cool evenings young men would walk out and gaze at young women, on balconies, who gazed back. Passionate letters were exchanged, suicides threatened and sometimes carried out, because to kill oneself for love was considered to be manly; but these suicides were always carefully calculated and family, doctor, and friends were informed beforehand so that no one ever died. The young people indulged themselves in these ways until the time came for marriage; then there was no sentiment but a cash transaction. No credit was allowed.

Douglas endured poor accommodations and poorer food on his ramblings. He believed that all the people were misfed and that a proper diet would change their outlook and character. As it was, they had a tigerish temperament—a simple person would be quickly destroyed—and the look of envy and sheer hunger. Utilitarianism, he felt, is the shadow of starvation, whereas romance is the vapor of repletion. It is simply a question of nutrition.

In Cosenza, Douglas had one aim only: to find a book by Francesco Zicari, published in Naples in 1845, in which Zicari showed that Milton took much of Paradise Lost from a sacred tragedy called Adamo Caduto, written in 1647 by Serafino della Salandra, a Franciscan monk. Douglas had had an article on this subject published by Bliss Perry in the Atlantic Monthly. He had once seen the book in the Naples library, but he never found a copy in a bookstore.

In the Sila region Douglas found many Albanians. They were hospitable but hotheaded and liberal, constantly embroiled with one another and the government. Their language had thirty alphabets.

Douglas described the religious attitude of the southern Italian and the rise of the Madonna cults. These were spread by the monks and took the place of the Greek nymphs and Venus cults. The Madonna and women-saints were peculiarly suited to a pastoral people and also to a settled society, whereas man-saints were separatists and fighters for their towns. To the southern Italian the Trinity was Mary, Joseph, and Child. The Vatican encouraged the growth of these cults for political reasons and for money. At no one other time had there been so many ecclesiastics and brigands in this country, often one and the same. Thousands of miracles were claimed, such as flying monks, these being attested by princes and popes. In 1784 even the bishop was a brigand chief and seven thousand homicides a year were listed for the kingdom of Naples. Justice was a mockery, to be had only for money; the reading of Voltaire was punished with three years of slavery in the galleys and several thousand citizens were hanged for expressing liberal opinions. No one was on the side of the policemen; old farmers used to advise their sons to shoot one whenever possible.

For two thousand years the entire coastline of Calabria had been subject to malaria. The deforestation and blocking up of rivers had contributed to its growth, a disease which Douglas thought helped explain the people, their habits, and their history.

Douglas last stopped at Cotrone, a city visited by George Gissing, stayed at the same hotel, saw some of the same people. He reflected that southern Italy was no place to travel alone. One needed company in that fierce, uncompromising land.