Old Calabria

irty odd kilometres of sparsely inhabited land. It is an uphill journey, for Venosa lies at a good elevation. They say that German professors, bent on Horatian stu

ese last-named--these pathologically inquisitive, empty-headed, and altogether dreadful people. They are the terror of the south. An

ing is left save a pile of masonry designated as the tomb of the Marcellus who was killed here by Hannibal's soldiery, and a few reticulated walls of the second century or thereabouts known as the "House of Horace"--as genuine as that of Juliet in Verona or the Mansion of Loreto. Yet the tradition is an old one, and the

s or lying about at random. Mommsen has collected numbers of them in his Corpu

ld Ca

en jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa is a veritable infirmary for mutilated antiques of this species. Now the lion is doubt

he most part, deserted Venosa. Still, there are left some stretches of oak at the back of the town, and the main lines of the land cannot change. Yonder lies the Horatian Forense and "Acherontia's nest"; further on, the glades of Bantia (the modern Banzi); the long-drawn Garganian Mount, on which the poet's eye must often have rested, emerges above the plain of Apulia like an island (a

one. I dare say the deforestation of the country, which prevented the downflow of the rivers--choking up their beds with detritus and producing stagnant pools favourable to the breeding of the mosquito--has helped to spread the plague in many parts of I

the Neapolitan provinces, where chattering takes the place of thinking, it is a re

of Ho

n spirit. And if you walk towards sunset along any of the roads leading into the country, you will meet the peasants riding home from their field labours accompanied by their dogs, pigs and goats; and among them you will recognize many types of Roman physiognomies--faces of orators and statesmen--familiar from old coins. About a third of the population are of the dark-fair complexion, with bl

read and thoughtful men, who foster the best traditions of the mind. You will not find them in the town council or at the café. No newspapers commend their labours, no millionaires or learned societies come to their assistance, and though typography is cheap in this country, they often stint themselves of the necessities of life

tiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down

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re are no quarries for decent paving-stones in the neighbourhood. And another, that Venosa possesses no large citizen class, properly so called. The inhabitants are mostly peasant proprietors and field labourers, who leave the town in the morning and return home at night with their beasts, h

dvantage over Lucera and most It

nions into the sacred precincts of the town without paying the duty of half a farthing? No nation with any sense of humour would endure this sort of thing. Every one resents the airs of this army of official loafers who infest the land, and would be far better employ

Naples. It already contains more employes than all the government offi

ispose of ten or fifteen thousand of them, at least, in the wa

so h

rity, and I question whether its inmates will hear of any one save t

novation in agricul

of Ho

ht and animals sold, on animals kept and animals killed, on milk and vine-props and bricks, on timber for scaffolding and lead and tiles and wine--on every conceivable object which the peasant produces or requires for his existence. And one should see the faces of the municipal employes who extort these tributes. God alone knows from what classes of the populace they are re

d Italy. The artists of modern Italy are her bureaucrats who design

would lead to a revolution anywhere save among men inured by long abuses to this particular form of tyranny. No wonder the women of the country-side, rather than waste three precious hours in arguments about a few cheeses, will smuggle them past the authorities under the device of being enceintes; no wonder their wisest old men regard the paternal government as a successfully organized swindle, which it is the citizen's bounden dut

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you waiting half a day while they fumble ominously over some dirty-looking scrap of paper. For on such occasions they are liable to provoking fi

or one si

r that law-breaking, in Italy, be

much more than a m

not; even as the true connaisseur who, beholding some rare scarlet idol from the Tingo-Tango forests, at first casts it aside and then, light dawning as he ponders over those monstrous complexities, begins to realize that they, and they alone, contain the quintessential formulae of all the fervent

-the sense of law-breaking. At first, being an honest man, he is shocked at the thought of such a thing; next, like a sensible person, reconciled to the inev

anizzato--Dia

the Italianated Saxon; slowly, but surely. Ther

T VE

igable Huillard Bréholles has excavated some account of them from the Hohen-staufen records. Thus we learn that here, at Venosa, the Emperor deposited that marvel, that tentorium, I mean, mirifica arte constructum, in quo imagines solis et lunce artificialiter mot

lodgings for sundry poor folk--a monetary speculation of some local magnate, who paid 30,000 francs for the whole structure. You can climb up into one of the shattered towers whereon reposes an old cannon amid a wind-sown garden of shrubs and weeds. Here the jackdaws congregate at nightfall, flying swiftly and noiselessly to their resting-place. Odd, how

e work, but the chief architectural beauty of the town is the decayed Benedictine ab

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ttached to it is a Norman chapel containing the bones of Alberada, mother of Boemund, and others of her race. Little of the original structure of this church is left, though its walls are still adorned, in patches, with frescoes of genuine angels--attractive creat

inds have been deposited here since those days. The ruin is strewn with columns and capitals of fantastic devices; the inevitable lions, too, repose upon its grassy floor, as well as a pagan altar-stone that once adorned the neighbouring amphitheatre. One thinks of the labour expended in ra

ries. The catacombs of Venosa were discovered in 1853. Their entrance lies under a hill-side not far from the modern railway station, and Professor Mueller, a lover of Venosa, has been engaged for the last twenty-five years in writing a ponderous tome on the subject. Unfortunately (so they say) there is not m

rinità: E

enos

essitating a further revision. The Profe

phistophelian spirit of modern indifference. Of cynical insouciance; for although this is a "national monument," nothing whatever is done in the way of repairs. Never a month passes without some richly carven block of stonework toppling down into the weeds,* and were it not for the zeal of a private citizen, the interior of the building would long ago have become an impassable chaos of stones and shrubbery. The Trinità cannot be restored without enormous outlay; nobody dreams of such a thing. A yearly expenditure of ten pounds, h

and the buffoonery which subsequently tainted the Catholicism of the youth. On its gable sits a strange emblem: a large stone dog, gazing amiabl

ructed, says Lupoli, on the foundations of a temple to Hymenaeus. It may be so; but one distrusts Lup

the east front with that taken to illustrate Giuseppe de Lorenz

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uttered: "tutti santi--tutti santi!" at each osculation. Next, they prostrated themselves on the floor and licked the cold stones, and after wallowing there awhile, rose up and began to kiss a small fissure in the masonry of the wall, the old woman whispering, "Santissimo!" A familiar

femi

e bodies of females who press themselves between it and the wall, in order to become mothers.

with a contrary effect would be

says that perambulating it hand in hand with another

inently a "Vic

Alta

BANDUS

d insufficient. This improper dieting is responsible for much mischief; it induces a state of chronic exacerbation. Nobody would believe how

undergone at his native place, he would quickly have remembered some urgent business to be transacted in the capital--Caesar Augustus, me-thinks, would have desired his company. And even so, I have suddenly woke up to the fact that Taranto, my next resting-place, besides possessing an ag

anes and a luxuriant growth of mares' tails and creepers; their banks are shaded by elms and poplars--Horatian trees; the thickets are loud wi

engaged in burrowing furiously into the bowels of Mother Earth. They told me th

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nd finance. Among other things, there are 213 kilometres of subterranean tunnellings to be built; eleven thousand workmen are employed; the cost is estimated at 125 million francs. The Italian government is erecting to its glory a monument more durable than brass. This is their heritage from the

comfortable moods. Virgil's lachrymae rerum hints at mystic and extra-human yearnings; to the troubadours nature was conventionally stereotyped--a scenic decoration to set off sentiments more or less sincere; the roman-ticists wallow in her rugged aspects. Horace never allowed phantasy to outrun intelligence; he kept his feet on earth; man was the mea

f fear and mystery diluted, our sympathies have broadened; the Goth, in particular, has learnt the kn

rivers, yet only when subsidiary to man's personal convenience; to appreciate a fair landscape--with a s

next c

apital a

dusian

become very intelligible to me during the last few days. I

aking--a morning's trip. The village of San Gervasio is the next stati

Venosa." Church and fountain have now disappeared; but the site of the former, they say, is known, and close to it there once issued a copious spring called "Fontana Grande." This is probably the Horatian one; an

vanished church stood. I rather think it occupied the site of t

copious, and both lie near the foot of the hill on which the village now stands. Capmartin de Chaupy has reason

mouths, and near at hand is a plantation of young sycamores. The basin of this fount was also rebuilt about ten years ago at no little expense, and has now a thoroughly modern and businesslike aspect. But I was told that a complicated network of

ditions postulated in the last verse of Horace's ode may be s

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nd cite, in confirmation thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and water, even the Thames

h grounds and seek its present lower level. To begin with, the hill on which the village stands is honeycombed by hives of caves which the inhabitants have carved out of the loose conglomerate (which, by the

land, now a stretch of rolling grassy downs, was decently wooded up to a short time ago. I observed that the roof of the oldest of the three churches

choking up their old channels. My acquaintance with the habits of Apulian earthquakes, with the science of hydrodynamics and the geological formation of San Gervasio is not sufficiently ex

dusian

past days is responsible fo

hat the water used to issue at a higher level. Firstly, there is that significant name "Fontana rotta"--"the brok

a hundred yards below the Church of Saint Anthony, an old well standing in a field of corn and shaded by three walnuts and an oak. This well is still

ever, unless they existed as ornamental statuary: statuary such as frequently gives names to streets in Italy, witness the "Street of the Faun" in Ouida's novel, or that of the "Giant" in Naples (which has now been re-christened). It strikes me as a humble but quite scholarly speculation to inf

elli's church "at the Bandusian Fount" stood on this eminence--well, I shall be glad to corroborate, for once in the way, old Ughelli, whose book contains a deal of dire nonsense. And if the Abbe Chaupy's suggestion that the village lay at the foot

Cala

han did he and Virgil. And yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his imagination--the very word Bandusia may have been coined by him. Who can tell? Then there is the Digentia hypothesis. I kno

rs; to the herd of squabbling laundresses and those other incongruities that spoil the antique scene. Why not? The timid alone are scared by microscopic discords of time and place. The sage can invest this prosaic water-trough with all its pristine dignity and romance by an unfailing expedient. He closes