Last fall, I went to Calabria. Some months before my trip, I discovered that George Gissing (for whom I've had an affection since reading
The Odd Women several years back) had taken a trip there and written a book about it. I thought I might read it before I went, but despite downloading it to my phone (it's past copyright and available for
free), I never got around to it. Then, a month or so ago, I got a paperback copy. And after my recent accidental theme of reading books about travels in Italy, I decided to make it intentional.
Gissing made his trip in the fall of 1897, as far as I can tell. He was drawn to modern day Calabria (and, in fact, Puglia and Basilicata, though he describes the whole region as Calabria) because of his interest in the ancient history of Magna Græcia. After departing Naples by ship to Paola, Gissing traveled by carriage over the mountains to Cosenza, the first stop on his Calabrian journey, and the city where I spent 3 nights at the end of my visit to southern Italy. Gissing's interest in Cosenza related to the death there of the Visigothic king Alaric. He was reportedly buried near the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers. Gissing visited the spot and marveled that a king and his treasures may have been buried beneath his feet and in full view of the city nearby. He also remarked on the new and hideous railway bridge. Today, there is a small park on the riverbanks where the two rivers merge and there is
a statue of Alaric that was erected in 2018. You can see both the statue (on the bottom left) and the railway bridge in this photo I took during my stay in Cosenza.
Apart from visits to Cosenza, Gissing's and my paths diverge. He took the train from Cosenza on to Taranto, in modern-day Puglia, then made his way back west and south along the Ionian coast. I saw the Ionian sea only briefly on my travels, somewhere in the vicinity of Trebisacce while I was on my way to Aliano. I did note one other similarity between my experience and Gissing's: in every museum he visited, he was the lone visitor. This was my experience at both museums I visited in Cosenza, and even in Matera, which is comparatively full of tourists, I was one of very few visitors to the museums I stopped in.
While Gissing's observations on the people and culture of the south of Italy are rather paternalistic, they are also entertaining and his writing is beautiful. At the time of his visit to the south of Italy, the war of Italian unification was only a few decades past and Calabria was unfrequented by visitors from outside, or even elsewhere in Italy. He succeeds in capturing a place and a time and people who were largely left out of writing at the time.
