A Sweet and Glorious Land (15 page)

Only once did I see a dog on a leash. It was a giant German shepherd, pulling its slight owner this way and that. The man was being led by the dog, the animal obviously in charge, despite his tether. He was the only dog I saw over a three-week period that appeared to be tended by any human.

I passed the Greek column, its color now like burnished gold in the glow of a sun just beginning to disappear beyond the sweep of the gulf, and passed the once Roman, now medieval, fort before crossing the drawbridge over the canal. As I walked the block or so into the crest of the newer city, I skirted the perimeter of a park—Piazza Garibaldi—full of murmuring groups of teenagers. Just before I reached the side street by my hotel, I looked ahead and down Via T. D'Aquino, a wide boulevard barricaded against motor traffic by giant flower planters. Instead of the usual polluting cars that clog Italian city streets, people were everywhere. It was
passeggiata,
that time in the early evening when all over Italy people wander out into the public squares of their towns and villages to see and to be seen, and to catch up on the day's gossip with their neighbors.

*   *   *

I remembered my first
passeggiata
—or at least the first one I recall with any kind of awareness. I was in Città di Castello, a small Umbrian hill town, with my new wife and her two teenage children. We had agreed to meet in the town square at six o'clock. I was an hour early and sat on the stoop of the post office in the late afternoon sun. I must have dozed against that stone pillar because I only gradually became aware of a low murmuring, getting louder and louder. I had closed my eyes to a near-empty square. I opened them to a square filled with people, standing in small groups, talking, gesturing, patting and poking babies, laughing and linking arms with their companions.

Through this hubbub of sound, I noticed my wife walking through the square between her son and daughter, their arms linked, laughing and all speaking at once. In the midst of a cluster of Italians following a time-honored tradition—a
passeggiata,
or walkabout—of keeping solid their connections to one another, I realized I was beginning to firm up my new connections.

Another trip and several
passeggiate
later, some friends and I drove into Pistoia between the Tuscan towns of Lucca and Florence. We had been traveling all day, sight-seeing and visiting hill town after hill town. I was tired and wanted to head back to my
pensione,
but they insisted on one more stop. Amidst my grumbling, we parked in Pistoia's modern outskirts and walked a few blocks into the old town center. We rounded a corner and I heard that familiar rumble of voices and saw the streets alive with people, young and old, standing and talking. The evening was cold and threatening rain. It didn't matter. It was
passeggiata.
With friends, I forgot my fatigue and joined the masses, soaking in Italy once again.

A drawbridge connects Taranto's old town on the left to the new town. A medieval fort sits near the spot where a Roman garrison held off the Carthaginian general Hannibal for two years. The canal was dug in the Middle Ages, making the point of the peninsula first occupied by the Greeks in the late eighth century B.C.E. into an island.    
Photo by Paul Paolicelli

Taranto, hundreds of miles to the south at the other end of Italy and, as far as northerners are concerned, another world away, was no different. I turned away from the direction of my hotel and plunged into the crowd along Via T. D'Aquino. It was less than two weeks before Easter. Jovial Tarantans sold, from sidewalk stands, giant, elaborately decorated chocolate eggs, a traditional
dolce,
or sweet, found all over Italy during the Easter season.

A church tucked in along a tiny square was so full of people that the crowd was overflowing down the steps and into the street. I wedged my way in and saw a procession of young Catholic boys who appeared to be about fourteen years old, garbed head to foot in white fabric, complete with hoods and tiny holes for the eyes. Barefoot, they were making their agonizingly slow way down the church aisle, two by two, moving ahead only inches at a time, arms locked, and swaying side to side, as one.

Finally, each twosome reached the altar, where an older colleague stood with a large, body-sized crucifix. Each pair knelt before the crucified wooden figure of Christ and kissed the carved feet. Then the boys removed their masks, revealing themselves to the congregation and their proud parents, friends, and relatives: an ancient rite of passage marking the coming of age. The procession must have gone on for hours. The lineup of boys awaiting their turns at the back of the church disappeared into a side room. In the thirty minutes or so I was there, I watched only three pairs of young men make their way along the aisle.

I left to resume my personal
passeggiata
along via T. D'Aquino and stopped for a
gelato
—my evening ration of a remarkable ice cream–like Italian confection unmatched just about anywhere outside of Italy. A pretty teenaged girl, a
ragazza,
behind the counter took my order, which I offered in halting Italian. She responded in very proper English: “Where are you from in America?” I told her, in Italian. “Is it beautiful there?” she asked. I said it was. She said, “You speak excellent Italian! Your pronunciation is perfect.”

“And you speak excellent English,” I said, laboriously searching for the proper Italian words, knowing that her command of English was far superior to my efforts at her language.

I was in Taranto four nights. Each night I went into that shop and each time the young woman and I conversed in each other's language, together experiencing a short lesson mixed with geography.

Once she said, “I know about California. Have you been there?” I told her I had, that my grandparents had lived in a tiny beach community north of Los Angeles and, a long time ago, I would go there with my parents to visit during summer vacations.

“It seems it would be so warm and pleasant there,” she said, looking, and sounding, wistful.

“But isn't it warm and pleasant here?” I asked. “People travel from all over the world to come here, and you have it all the time.”

“Yes,” she said, “the summers are hot, the winters, as you see, are mild. “But
California!
It is better, yes?”

“Not better, not worse. Just different,” I responded.

“Perhaps,” she said, showing wise insight, “it is the ‘difference' I want.”

Her dark eyes set in olive skin, framed by long, dark hair, and her enthusiasm for her job, life, language, and travel, reminded me of my daughter oceans away, anxious always to move on toward the different and the unexpected, no matter where she has landed.

“I leave tomorrow,” I told
la ragazza.

“See, you move on always, too.”

“Sì,”
I said.

Chapter 12

Line in the Sand

The next day sparkled under shocking blue skies. No clouds. The sea-level light was intense. The greening trees seemed greener. The washed blues of door frames seemed bluer. The air tasted delicious and I felt myself bounce with each step. I knew I was in a wonderful place.

The chill of the threatening weather of the day before was gone. I spent the morning at the archaeological digs at Metaponto south along the Gulf of Taranto shoreline. After lunch, with a clearer idea of distance and location, I set out to spend more time along the banks of the Galeso, unimpeded by a taxi's ticking meter.

I found a city bus that followed the general route my taxi driver had taken the day before. We left from the
stazione,
rumbled through Taranto's suburban streets along the north shore of the Little Sea, and sped onto the main highway cutting northeastward across Italy's heel. We crossed the bridge over the Galeso and, a mile or so farther along, the bus driver dropped me off, pointing to where I could catch a ride back.

“But hurry,” he said. “You have only two hours before the final bus.” En route, he had been intrigued about my desire to see the Galeso. “It is not much,” he said. “Very short.” I asked him if he knew about its reputation in antiquity, and he thought a moment, as if trying to remember a long-ago school lesson.
“Sì, sì.”
He laughed.
“I Greci!”

I left the bus and walked along a narrow roadway through a decrepit warehouse district. There was some kind of naval base there, also probably a target of British bombs more than a half century earlier.
I cani liberi
lined portions of the roadway that led to the rail line just ahead. I am terrified by dogs running free. My hand unconsciously went up to where I felt the small scar under my right eye, left by a neighbor's dog that caught me by surprise when I was eight. I moved past each group gingerly. Sometimes the dogs would sit up, look at me, and, as I went by, lie down again. They didn't bark; they just watched.

Relieved and repeatedly looking over my shoulder, I reached the rail line. Then, just before crossing under the rails so I could turn left and follow a rain-puddled road to the Galeso bridge, I saw an unusual stone monument. On it were listed names with a carving of the Star of David next to each one. What appeared to be birth dates by each name ranged from 1912 to 1924, and the monument had been dedicated, out here in the countryside several miles from the city, in the mid 1960s.

It was plain, simple, and surrounded by pots that once held bright, vibrant flowers. What could it denote? Was it a marker commemorating a family of Italian Jews lost in the war? Was it in memory of a family who may have lived at the tiny farm located just off the road? Were people lined up and shot at this spot, as they had been by the Nazis in so many places in Italy?

Italy is like that: full of monuments and small remembrances, in the form of crosses by a roadside with pictures of the deceased attached or a name painted on the horizontal arm of each cross. Someday, I thought, I would return and seek out the story of this monument, beautifully carved in stone and freshened periodically with flowers.

Just across the narrow dirt road, directly opposite the marker, were the ruins of a strikingly familiar structure. It looked like an ancient way station, the kind built by the Romans every few miles or so along the various roads they carved out of the then Italian wilderness. I knew the Via Appia came through this area, but ancient geographer Strabo said it entered Tarentum a few miles away, closer to the gulf. This dirt road skirted this shore of the Little Sea in the direction of the Adriatic port city now called Bríndisi. This route matched maps I had seen showing how the Appia kissed the edge of the
Mare Piccolo.
Perhaps the road Strabo described was only an ancient “off-ramp” into the city.

Could this dirt country road cover a portion of the stone highway built by the Romans more than two thousand years ago? Just a few miles inland of where I stood was the Italian highway S7 that follows much of the original Via Appia through the mountains of modern-day Basilicata, once the Roman, and later Italian Fascist, province of Lucania. My map was not detailed enough to tell me precisely whether this dirt road is in a direct line with S7, the old Via Appia.

So many mysteries and not enough time to discover the answers! Perhaps a search for the monument's origins and the Roman road could be an excuse for another trip.

*   *   *

I thought about Romans and their roads. At the empire's height, these
strade
ribbed the Mediterranean world, reaching far north into England and across North Africa, spanning the entire southern shore of the Mediterranean. In all, the Romans built about fifty-three thousand miles of hard-surfaced highways made from giant paving stones, laid so they became slightly convex, or rounded up, in the middle—the origin of “high” way?—to allow rain to run off.

They were built for military reasons—a fast, easy way to move large armies into the provinces. And they were generally straight. Men walking in formation did not need gradual curves as modern vehicles do to make it across a rolling countryside.

These ancient roads were often built of concrete the Romans made from volcanic ash and lime, in addition to the large flat stones. Authoritative sources report that the Romans learned much about road building from the peoples they conquered early in their drive for empire: the Etruscans, who used cement and paved streets throughout their cities and villages before the Romans became a regional power; the Greeks, who taught Romans masonry skills; Cretans and Carthaginians, who knew how to lay down paving stones; and Egyptians and Phoenicians, who perfected the art of surveying.

The magnificent roads were carried over marshes, lakes, ravines, and mountains. The depth of the road and its base varied from three to six feet; the Via Appia one of the earliest of these roads, was thirty-five feet wide.