“A dollar a mile?” I protested.
“That’s so.”
“You be damned.”
“Same to you, mister.” And he drove off.
Such bold defiance of fate never goes unrewarded. A two-wheeled cart conveying some timber overtook me shortly afterwards on my way from the inhospitable Taverna. For a small consideration I was enabled to pass the burning hours of the afternoon in an improvised couch among its load of boards, admiring the scenery and the engineering feats that have carried a road through such difficult country, and thinking out some further polite remarks to be addressed to my twenty-dollar friend, in the event of our meeting at Catanzaro. . . .
One must have traversed the Sila in order to appreciate the manifold charms of the mountain town—I have revelled in them since my arrival. But it has one irremediable drawback: the sea lies at an inconvenient distance. It takes forty-five minutes to reach the shore by means of two railways in whose carriages the citizens descend after wild scrambles for places, packed tight as sardines in the sweltering heat. Only a genuine enthusiast will undertake the trip more than once. For the Marina itself—at this season, at least—is an unappetizing spot; a sordid agglomeration of houses, a few dirty fruit-stalls, ankle-deep dust, swarms of flies. I prefer to sleep through the warm hours of the day, and then take the air in that delightful public garden which, by the way, has already become too small for the increasing population.
At its entrance stands the civic museum, entrusted, just now, to the care of a quite remarkably ignorant and slatternly woman. It contains two rooms, whose exhibits are smothered in dust and cobwebs; as neglected, in short, as her own brats that sprawl about its floor. I enquired whether she possessed no catalogue to show where the objects, bearing no labels, had been found. A catalogue was unnecessary, she said; she knew everything—everything!
And everything, apparently, hailed from “Stromboli.” The Tiriolo helmet, the Greek vases, all the rest of the real and sham treasures of this establishment: they were all discovered at Stromboli.
“Those coins—whence?”
“Stromboli!”