Death has made hideous gaps in the short interval. The kindly Vice-Consul at Catanzaro is no more; the mayor of Cotrone, whose permit enabled Gissing to visit that orchard by the riverside, has likewise joined the majority; the housemaid of the “Concordia,” the domestic serf with dark and fiercely flashing eyes—dead! And dead is mine hostess, “the stout, slatternly, sleepy woman, who seemed surprised at my demand for food, but at length complied with it.”
But the little waiter is alive and now married; and Doctor Sculco still resides in his aristocratic palazzo up that winding way in the old town, with the escutcheon of a scorpion—portentous emblem for a doctor—over its entrance. He is a little greyer, no doubt; but the same genial and alert personage as in those days.
I called on this gentleman, hoping to obtain from him some reminiscences of Gissing, whom he attended during a serious illness.
“Yes,” he replied, to my enquiries, “I remember him quite well; the young English poet who was ill here. I prescribed for him. Yes—yes! He wore his hair long.”
And that was all I could draw from him. I have noticed more than once that Italian physicians have a stern conception of the Hippocratic oath: the affairs of their patients, dead or alive, are a sacred trust in perpetuity.
The town, furthermore, has undergone manifold improvements in those few years. Trees are being planted by the roadsides; electric light is everywhere and, best of all, an excellent water-supply has been led down from the cool heights of the Sila, bringing cleanliness, health and prosperity in its train. And a stately cement-bridge is being built over the Esaro, that “all but stagnant and wholly pestilential stream.” The Esaro glides pleasantly, says the chronicler Nola Molisi. Perhaps it really glided, in his day.
One might do worse than spend a quiet month or two at Cotrone in the spring, for the place grows upon one: it is so reposeful and orderly. But not in winter. Gissing committed the common error of visiting south Italy at that season when, even if the weather will pass, the country and its inhabitants are not true to themselves. You must not come to these parts in winter time.
Nor yet in the autumn, for the surrounding district is highly malarious. Thucydides already speaks of these coastlands as depopulated (relatively speaking, I suppose), and under the Romans they recovered but little; they have only begun to revive quite lately.[[1]] Yet this town must have looked well enough in the twelfth century, since it is described by Edrisius as “a very old city, primitive and beautiful, prosperous and populated, in a smiling position, with walls of defence and an ample port for anchorage.” I suspect that the history of Cotrone will be found to bear out Professor Celli’s theory of the periodical recrudescences and abatements of malaria. However that may be, the place used to be in a deplorable state. Riedesel (1771) calls it “la ville la plus affreuse de l’Italie, et peut-être du monde entier”; twenty years later, it is described as “sehr ungesund ... so ärmlich als möglich”; in 1808 it was “réduite à une population de trois mille habitants rongés par la misère, et les maladies qu’occasionne la stagnation des eaux qui autrefois fertilisaient ces belles campagnes.” In 1828, says Vespoli, it contained only 3932 souls.
[1] Between 1815—1843, and in this single province of Catanzaro, there was an actual decline in the population of thirty-six towns and villages. Malaria!
I rejoice to cite such figures. They show how vastly Cotrone, together with the rest of Calabria, has improved since the Bourbons were ousted. The sack of the town by their hero Cardinal Ruffo, described by Pepe and others, must have left long traces. “Horrible was the carnage perpetrated by these ferocious bands. Neither age nor sex nor condition was spared. . . . After two days of pillage accompanied by a multitude of excesses and cruelties, they erected, on the third day, a magnificent altar in the middle of a large square” —and here the Cardinal, clothed in his sacred purple, praised the good deeds of the past two days and then, raising his arms, displayed a crucifix, absolving his crew from the faults committed during the ardour of the sack, and blessed them.