A Sweet and Glorious Land (2 page)

Introduction

Sometime during the early fall of 1997, I read a newspaper article about the death of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales. It mentioned paparazzi, the celebrity photographers who pursued her on the night of her death in a car crash in Paris. A short article, placed adjacent to the one I had been reading, caught my attention. It told of the origin of the word
paparazzi,
about how a celebrity photographer in Federico Fellini's great movie
La dolce vita
was named Paparazzo, and how the name, in its Italian plural with an
i
substituted for the singular ending
o
and with a lowercase
p,
was used to denote all such photographers during and after the celebrity-ridden 1960s.

Fellini and his scriptwriter, the article said, got the name from a travel narrative, first published in 1901, by the Victorian writer George Gissing:
By the Ionian Sea—Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy.
The book's Italian edition is titled
Sulle rive dello Ionio—Un vittoriano al Sud
(Along the Ionian Coast—A Victorian in the South).

I did not, and still do not, care about paparazzi, but being an Italophile, I wanted to locate a copy of
By the Ionian Sea,
read it, and add it to my collection of books on Italy. It was a passing thought. I was buying and reading everything I could find about Italy, especially nonfiction travel and expatriate accounts. I was going through a spate of books that seemed to hash over the same themes: They were about the better-known Italian North, or about the Mafia; or about Americans, Central Europeans, or Britons buying and restoring farmhouses in Tuscany, then writing books about their experiences and introducing readers to “a colorful cast of characters.” A handful—such as Eric Newby's
A Small Place in Italy
and his
Love and War in the Apennines,
along with Paolo Tullio's
North of Naples, South of Rome
and Harry Clifton's
On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abruzzi
—are superb, capturing realistic insights into the Italian people.

Some books extol the comfortable life that foreigners of means can have among Italians. Few, I noticed—except in books about the Mafia—were writing about the poorer, economically depressed South, beyond Naples.

I eventually came across an edition of Gissing's work—a well-used 1986 trade edition—at my favorite local bookseller's. I brought the thin paperback home and placed it at the bottom of the stack of books on my bed stand. It was late November 1997 by the time I worked my way down to
By the Ionian Sea
and discovered I was reading one of the most enchanting travel narratives I had come across in years of seeking out such books.

At one moment, halfway through my reading of this classic, I turned to my wife and said that I wanted to visit Italy and follow in the footsteps Gissing made in 1897 during his third and final trip to Italy: from Naples where he boarded the coastal steamer south to Paola; and from there, in a horse-drawn carriage, through the Calabrian mountains to Cosenza. From Cosenza, he went by train to Taranto and, using a combination of trains and carriages, made it all the way to Reggio di Calabria. It was a journey that covered much of the foot of Italy, principally along the coastal instep of the Ionian Sea.

I wanted to see, one hundred years after Gissing, how these ancient lands looked. They had been settled for millennia by native Italic peoples and then colonized by the Greeks long before the Romans arrived.

His book was not a diary and the chapters were not dated, but I had the sense the journey must have taken him several weeks, if not a few months. To be sure, I called my rare-book dealer, who found an out-of-print copy of
George Gissing—A Critical Biography,
by Jacob Korg.

This same dealer also found a first edition of
By the Ionian Sea,
published in 1901, and the book dazzled me. It is bound in pale-colored linen, its spine darkened from years of sitting on a bookshelf in a house that must have been heated by a coal furnace or a peat fire. Its creamy pages are deeply embossed with printing that could only have been done with an old letter-press. Periodically a page would be devoted to a full-color reproduction of a watercolor of an Italian scene, the plate covered, for its protection, by a translucent tissue. Gissing's simple drawings of peasant dress, water jugs, and the like punctuated the narrative.

I reread the book, using this first edition. Then I got on the Internet and found that according to the Library of Congress there have been eight or nine U.S. editions of the book over the years. The book has almost always been available in one edition or another since its turn-of-the-century debut.

I also found several Web sites dedicated to George Gissing. There is even a quarterly journal—
The Gissing Journal
—devoted to scholarly works about his life. In this journal I found not one, but two articles detailing Gissing's connection with paparazzi!

Despite my earlier guess that his trip took months, Gissing's biography said that he made the journey into southern Italy, his Magna Graecia, over what appears to be only a one-month period, from early November to early December 1897. His diary reports that Gissing spent his fortieth birthday, November 22, 1897, in the South, while visiting Taranto, a milestone he did not mention in his book. His birthday, just one year short of the age at which his father had died when young George was barely a teenager, came just before his visit to the town then known as Cotrone, and today as Crotone. There George became ill and, at least in his mind, lay near death in his shabby hotel bed, wreathed in sweat and suffering fevered hallucinations. He described his hallucinations immediately after his recovery, according to biographer Korg, in a diary entry dated November 29, 1897.

It was about this time—sometime during the last two weeks of November 1997 and one hundred years to the month of his journey—that I decided to act upon my first inclination and actually follow in Gissing's footsteps. I would go in March 1998, a little more than three months later. I had spent several springs and some falls traveling in Italy. Spending March in the south, I figured, would be delightful. A wonderful excuse for another trip!

The journal I kept of the trip, while nothing like Gissing's detailed diary, became the seed for this book. I conjured up the idea precisely one hundred years to the moment of his travels, and retraced his route one hundred years and three months later. My most-used modes of transportation were the same—trains and foot-power—with the exception of the few jaunts Gissing made by carriage and the overnight trip in a coastal steamer from Naples to Paola.

When I was not studying maps or guidebooks, I was reading Gissing's short stories and one of his last books,
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,
which many scholars believe is a slightly fictional autobiography. I hoped it would give me insight into the inner workings of this lonely, chronically depressed author who seemed to yearn for inner peace—or perhaps escape—as he walked over the ruins of what used to be glorious cities established so long ago in what was, and continues to be, the economically depressed South of Italy.

I understood that feeling. I recalled that in the mid-1980s, during a particularly painful period of my own life, I stood in a Paris street, in front of the first apartment of American writer Ernest Hemingway. As I stared at its facade, I longed to be transported magically to the early 1920s and see the cobblestones he walked on and the goatherd he saw clicking down those stones with his flock, delivering freshly pulled milk in a bucket on a rope to Hemingway's upstairs neighbor lady. I opened my eyes, as I now suspect Gissing did on such occasions, and found myself right where I had started, in the here and now.