The modern Aesarus
I shall be sorry to leave these regions for the north, as leave them I must, in shortest time. The bathing alone would tempt me to prolong my stay, were it possible. Whereas Taranto, despite its situation, possesses no convenient beach, there are here, on either side of the town, leagues of shimmering sand lapped by tepid and caressing waves; it is a sunlit solitude; the land is your own, the sea your own, as far as eye can reach. One may well become an amphibian, at Cotrone.
The inhabitants of this town are well-mannered and devoid of the “ineffable” air of the Tarentines. But they are not a handsome race. Gissing says, à propos of the products of a local photographer, that it was “a hideous exhibition; some of the visages attained an incredible degree of vulgar ugliness.” That is quite true. Old authors praise the beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal. Of the girls and boys one notices only those who possess a peculiar trait: the eyebrows pencilled in a dead straight line, which gives them an almost hieratic aspect. I cannot guess from what race is derived this marked feature which fades away with age as the brows wax thicker and irregular in contour. We may call it Hellenic on the old-fashioned principle that everything attractive comes from the Greeks, while its opposite is ascribed to those unfortunate “Arabs” who, as a matter of fact, are a sufficiently fine-looking breed.
And there must be very little Greek blood left here. The town—among many similar vicissitudes—was peopled largely by Bruttians, after Hannibal had established himself here. In the Viceregal period, again, there was a great infusion of Spanish elements. A number of Spanish surnames still linger on the spot.
And what of Gissing’s other friend, the amiable guardian of the cemetery? “His simple good nature and intelligence greatly won upon me. I like to think of him as still quietly happy amid his garden walls, tending flowers that grow over the dead at Cotrone.”
Dead, like those whose graves he tended; like Gissing himself. He expired in February 1901—the year of the publication of the “Ionian Sea,” and they showed me his tomb near the right side of the entrance; a poor little grave, with a wooden cross bearing a number, which will soon be removed to make room for another one.
This cemetery by the sea is a fair green spot, enclosed in a high wall and set with flowering plants and comely cypresses that look well against their background of barren clay-hills. Wandering here, I called to mind the decent cemetery of Lucera, and that of Manfredonia, built in a sleepy hollow at the back of the town which the monks in olden days had utilized as their kitchen garden (it is one of the few localities where deep soil can be found on that thirsty limestone plain); I remembered the Venosa burial-ground near the site of the Roman amphitheatre, among the tombs of which I had vainly endeavoured to find proofs that the name of Horace is as common here as that of Manfred in those other two towns; the Taranto cemetery, beyond the railway quarter, somewhat overloaded with pretentious ornaments; I thought of many cities of the dead, in places recently explored—that of Rossano, ill-kept within, but splendidly situated on a projecting spur that dominates the Ionian; of Caulonia, secluded among ravines at the back of the town. . . .
They are all full of character; a note in the landscape, with their cypresses darkly towering amid the pale and lowly olives; one would think the populace had thrown its whole poetic feeling into the choice of these sites and their embellishments. But this is not the case; they are chosen merely for convenience—not too far from habitations, and yet on ground that is comparatively cheap. Nor are they truly venerable, like ours. They date, for the most part, from the time when the Government abolished the old system of inhumation in churches—a system which, for the rest, still survives; there are over six hundred of these fosse carnarie in use at this moment, most of them in churches.