Old Calabria

low but not undignified; the streets regular and clean; there is electric light and somewhat indifferent accommodation for travellers; an infinity of barbers and chemists. Nothing remarkab

ted a few years ago, and those stretches of brown earth, those half-finished walks and straggling pigmy shrubs, give the place a crude and embryonic appearance. One thinks that the designers might have done more in the way of variety; there are no conifers excepting a few cryptomerias and yews which will all be dead in a couple of years, and as for those yuccas, beloved of Italian municipalities, they will have gr

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y of Lucera, with its ordered walks drowned in the shade of cypress--roses and gl

nce must have been regarded as the key of Apulia. All round the outside of those turreted walls (they are nearly a mile in circumference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty thousand people) there runs a level space. This is my promenade, at all hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down below, a long unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees and sullen streamlets and white farmhouses--the whole vision fr

rge of it; a worthless old fellow, full of untruthful information which he imparts

is the King's tower. It

now that it was t

he Queen--sh

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lls which we found (sotto voce) in a subterranean crypt. They used to throw the poor dead folk in here by hundreds; and und

it the King's

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is because the

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't so much as set eyes on them! But I must now show you some round sli

n celebrities carved in marble or the recalcitrant local limestone. A dignified old lion--one of a pair (the other was stolen) that adorned the tomb of Aurelius, prastor of the Roman Colony of Luceria--has sought a refuge here, as well as many inscriptions, la

his favours! This is the tomb of the captain Jacchia Albosasso. God be merciful to him. He passed away towards noon on Saturd

necdote which shows Manfred's infatuation for these loyal aliens. In the year 1252 and in the sovereign's presence, a Saracen official gave a blow to a Neapolitan knight--a blow which was immediately returned; there was a tumult, and the upshot of it

y the historian Costanze for certain genealogical purposes of his own. Professor Bernh

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etter, they are printing a local halfpenny paper called "II Saraceno"--a ve

the chair once occupied by Ruggiero Bonghi. Dear Bonghi! From a sense of duty he used to visit a certain dull and pompous house in the capital and forthwith fall asleep on the nearest sofa; he slept sometimes for two hours at a stretch, while all the other visitors were solemnly marched to the spot to observe him--behold the great Bonghi: he slumbers! There is a statue erected to him here, and a street has likewise been named after another celebr

es of devout and dirty pilgrims that pour into the town from the fanatical fastnesses of the Abruzzi--picturesque, I suppose we should call them--the c

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 ric

e square was seethi

of

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and Spanish influences. A young boy addressed me with the polite questio

e described as London. There was

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 hang

are savages, hopeless savages; but a little savagery, after all, is quite end

ands, 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 d

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 en

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return to the sun and

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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.

arried 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 polic

vanished glories of such a place--happy they! I find the task increasingly difficult. One outgrows the youthful age of hero-worship; next, our really keen edges are so soon worn off by mundane trivialities and vexa

ere, he and his son the "Sultan of Lucera," and their friends and counsellors, who planted this garden of exotic culture! Was it some afterglow of the luminous wor

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you will behold nothing but a green lake, a waving field of grass. No matter. The ambitions of these men are fairly realiz

k's brother-in-law, returning from the Holy Land, rested awhile at his Italian court, and saw, among other diversions, "duas puellas Saracenicas formosas, quae in pavimenti planitie bini

and from some pools in the neighbourhood issued a loud croaking of frogs, while the pallid smoke of the furnaces, pressed down by the evening dew, trailed earthward in a long twisted wreath, like a dragon crawling sulkily to his den. But on the north side one could hear the nightingales singing in t

aureole of bigotry); Frangipani, huge in villainy; the princess Beatrix, tottering from the dungeon where she had been confined for nearly twenty years; her deliverer Roger de Lauria, without whose resourcefulness and audacity it might have gone ill with Aragon;

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lacking, Fate contrived that exquisite royal duel at Bordeaux where the two mighty potentates, calling each oth

march of this magnificent retribution without a shred of compassion for the gloomy papal hireling. Disaster follows disaster w

y did Costanza, who might have dealt with her enemy's son even as Conradin had been dealt with, not round her magnanimity by claiming her own flesh and blood, the last scions of a great house? Why were they not released during the subsequent peace, or at least in 1302? The reason is as plain as it is unlovely; nobody knew what to do with them. Political reasons c

from round the corner of one of the towers. It cams nearer stealthily, pausing

ngs, to see that no one should endeavour to raise the treasure which was hidden under these ruins; several people, he explained, had already made the attempt by

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raightway this incongruous and irresponsible old buffoon was invested with a new dignity; transformed into a thre