Travel
[From time to time we notice in this page travel books and pub- lications sent to tar by travel agencies and shipping companies which ive think may be of interest to readers.—ED. Spectator.] " Cita Morta " ITALY can never be quite the same to you after having seen Paestum. In that place of broken stones you are in the presence of Old Things. Their isolation, their desolation, cuts you off from the little fretful noises of the everyday world. Almost you are aware of the dim shapes of the Ancient Gods ; you hear in the wind an immense and divine music.
I was fortunate in my companion : a man who loved the sweet earth and the lovely labour of peasants. The day was perfect for our long drive. We had spent the night at Signor Caruso's hotel at Ravello—surely one of the pleasantest hostelries in Italy. A place of gentleness and comfort, of fragrant wood fires, ambrosial food and ancient wine. Down the hill to Amalfi, through the terraced lemon groves. Just now they are all covered with branches, spread on chestnut poles, against the cold of winter. From Amalfi southwards is a winding, smoothly tarmaced coast road.
I think it is finer than any part of the Corniche. There are no tramlines nor railway between road and sea ; no stiff rows of imported palms, but the beautiful unspoilt vegetation of the coast, and everywhere a glowing, vital peasant life. At Minori, macaroni was spread on sacks drying in the sun. Girls with linen-coiffed heads, bright blouses and dark skirts carried water in graceful terracotta jars, or wine in narrow Roman barrels. Carts piled with brushwood passed us, their wheels painted with scarlet patterns, and drawn by three horses abreast. The central horse had a collar surmounted by a tall mitre-shaped ornament of white metal. This usually bore the image of a saint, and was hung with bells, elaborately worked and chased.
We drove through Vietri, where they make majolica, and into Salerno, once Robert Guiscard's capital, now a thriving market town. After Salerno the mountains go back from the sea, and you come out to a great windy level.
Many men have sung the delights of hills and the sea ; but few the high romance of great plains. Not all are romantic ; the Plain of Lombardy is a glaring brazen place, with little to make you love it ; but Sedgemoor, the great plain of Hungary, and now the Battipaglia level—these touch the heart with their mystery and their magic, after familiar undulations.
Near Salerno the plain is a great market garden, and every inch is cultivated. We saw men ploughing with a pair of oxen and a wooden plough, much as the autocthonic inhabi- tants must have ploughed, centuries before the Greek and Roman came. Outside wheelwrights' shops were great cartwheels, newly painted with gay and careful designs ; in a little village piazza a piper was playing a strange sweet tune to the Immaculate Virgin—his remote forefathers probably played the same tune to Demeter. As the plain widens agriculture gives place to the tending of flocks and herds. Here are sparse houses and grass lands, and the unfamiliar sight of animals grazing in the open— unfamiliar, that is, to one accustomed to the stalled beasts of the terrace country. The sheep had already dropped their lambs. We passed one magnificent herd of goats, and began to see the shaggy buffaloes that were brought here by the Arabs from Africa. In one large village were men in boots and breeches, riding small but well-conditioned horses ; flying high was a falcon ; outside a butcher's shop the carcass of a wild boar. Nine hundred years ago, perhaps, Norman knights rode out here from Salerno, and loosed their hawks against the herons.
Those peasants on the plain seemed to me symbolical figures. They achieved a unity with the earth ; their lives were rhythmical, even inevitable. They were immensely significant, terribly aware always of eternal things--eating and drinking and working, being born,* having children and dying. Yet utterly unaware of the fret and fume of the mechanical, restless, worrying world of the cities. One won- dered what their leisure was like, whether they dreamed and yearned for unattainable delights, or whether they were content with those simple primitive things, and the practice of a traditional religion.
And then, gaunt and golden, we saw the temples of the dead city bf Paestum. The wind blew chill, rustling the grass and the stiff leaves of the asphodels, those flowers of death that always seem to grow round shrines deserted by the Gods. There was not much colour in the landscape, except for the deep blue of the distant sea, and the lighter blue of the wild chicory. Of those three temples the temple of Poseidon must, of course, take first place. It is the best proportioned, and far the best preserved. Its Doric columns of weatherworn travertine have an indescribable glow of rosy gold. . We were fortunate in being alone. There was no cackle of voices to break the desolation; -In -the- December sunshine, the
Samnian mountains loomed jagged and terrible. At our feet, a lizard flickered over a broken fluted column ; far away was the thin melancholy magic of a pipe. It is a strange awe that comes to you in a Greek temple ; quite different from what you feel in the shadowed grandeur of a cathedral. Something wild and windblown, gray-eyed, desolate and forlorn.
Close to the temple of Poseidon is the so-called Basilica, an obvious miscalling of what may have been a temple to Demeter and Persephone. It is paler, and its proportions less fine ; losing its pediments, too, has taken from its majesty. Strewn between these two temples and the temple of Ceres are the ruins of altars and houses, streets and porticoes, and the semicircle of a theatre. Once there was gracious Greek life here, feasting and song and dancing, sacrifice to the Sea God, and to Mother Earth ; now, nothing remains but the broken stones, rank grass, and shaggy, grazing buffaloes. Seaward, they are excavating the wall and the harbour of the city. The wall is of huge unmortared blocks, you can see the paved road down to where once was the water, the inner and the outer harbours. We tried in vain to beg an ancient coin from the workmen, and looked longingly at graceful amphorae that they had found.
The sun was veiled, the wind blew chill across the salt marshes as we turned homewards from that other-worldly place. Ahead of us, at dreaming Ravello, was a friendly, homely world of a bath, food and drink, red flames that roared up the chimney. Our eyes were tired yet glad at the fine things we had seen.
Paestum can be reached by rail from Naples, but it is a long slow journey, entailing a change and a long wait. Far the pleasantest way is to take a car to Amalfi or Ravello, and stay the night at either of those places. The car from Naples costs 250 lire—about £2 14s. At Amalfi is the famous Hotel dei Cappucini, where a room and a day's meals costs 50 lire and upwards. At Ravello, at the Hotel Belvedere Caruso, the price is from 40 lire. From either of these places, a car to Paestum and back costs 250 lire.
GEOFFREY HOLDSWOETII.
[The authorities in Italy have lately been doing everything possible to encourage tourists. There have been reductions in railway fares and hotel charges, improvements to roads, tipping has been abolished, and so on. Full information can be obtained from the Italian State Railways Official Agency, 16 Waterloo Place, London, S.W. 1, who also supply a booklet, Winter in Italy (2s.), to assist the intending visitor. —TRAVEL En. Spectator.]
Previous page
