The habits of domestic life in the South are said to be very primitive. ‘It is a common thing for a Calabrian woman, far advanced in pregnancy, to go up to the forest for fuel, and to be there surprised by the pains of childbirth, perhaps hastened by toil. She is nowise dismayed at the solitude around her, or the distance from home, but, as in some of the Caucasian tribes, delivers herself of her infant, which she folds up in her apron, and, after a little rest, carries back to her cottage.’
In his 1853 edition Murray informs whoever is about to do the three hundred Italian miles to Reggio that no postroad in Italy is ‘so little frequented or abounds in such magnificent scenery as this high road into Calabria’. Highway robbery rarely happened, except on the byroads which ‘are still so much infested with robbers that no one should attempt to explore them without the advice of the local authorities’. On entering the province of Basilicata, we are told: ‘It is much to be regretted that the absence of good roads, and the danger of travelling by unfrequented paths in a country so often infested with brigands, renders a large number of interesting and picturesque towns almost inaccessible to the traveller.’
Alighting from the lumbering coach we find Atella to be ‘a miserable place, half dilapidated by the earthquake of 1851, with a population of 1200 souls, scarcely less wretched than their inhabitants’. The largest town in Basilicata, Rionero, with a population of ten thousand, contains ‘nothing to arrest attention, except the terrible traces which at least one half of it presents of the earthquake which spread so much terror and destruction throughout the whole district round Monte Volture on the 14th August 1851’. Hare describes the area as still ‘earthquake-stricken’ sixty years later.
Lagonegro, where Murray’s romantic prose cranks into top gear, is ‘picturesquely situated in a cold and gloomy position at the extremity of a narrow glen … At its southern entrance the road crosses two branches of the Trecchina by bridges thrown across the deep and narrow ravines in which they flow, and proceeds thence through a bleak and gloomy defile characterised by the picturesque wilderness for which the ravines of this province are remarkable.’
A battle fought here in 1806 between the Neapolitans and the French army of Joseph Buonaparte was ‘one of the few instances in which native forces showed a gallant spirit of resistance. During the second invasion towns on this route occupied by the French were the scenes of the most terrible executions. Colletta the historian affirms that he himself saw a person impaled “con barbarie Ottomana,” by order of a French colonel who had been a prisoner in the Levant. Many others, according to the same authority, were stoned to death, or subjected to the most terrible tortures.’
Guidebooks later in the century tend to play down accounts of such atrocities, but Hare tells us that one band of brigands in 1865 ‘captured seven men and fourteen women, whom they took away to a place called Maccolata. News of this enormity reaching the authorities, they sent a force to encounter the brigands. The latter, finding themselves in a difficult pass, cut off two heads of their victims and sent them to the officer in command, threatening to send the rest if the pursuit were continued. While this was going on, some of the brigands were dancing and drinking, and others were playing the guitar … and the authorities retired.’ In 1876 another gang boiled a herdsman alive in the forest of Silla, ‘and compelled his subordinates to eat him’.
For all their barbarity the bandits were said to be god-fearing and superstitious, as was revealed in the trial of one Musolino in 1902: ‘If he wishes his affair on hand to go well, he sends to the curé of his village a few soldi to say a mass to the Madonna for him. If it turns out well, he will perhaps send a rich necklace to the image of the Virgin in the church. To the Madonna he owes all, and would on no account offend her by eating meat on the day sacred to her.’
One band pillaged the carrier’s waggon plying between the provinces and the capital, though it was strongly escorted. On one occasion they seized a waggon loaded ‘with all the paraphernalia of a newly established court of justice, and, dressing up in the judge’s wig and robes, amused themselves by holding a mock court of justice on an unfortunate traveller they had captured and sentencing him to immediate execution’.
Methods of repression were on a level with the ferocity of the brigands themselves. A bandit, in the early nineteenth century, whose pleasure it was to roast his prisoners alive was, says Augustus J. C. Hare, ‘taken by the French troops and roasted by them between fires, blaspheming to the last’. In the days of Murat, those ‘who did not die fighting usually died under torture or at the stake, or succeeded in fleeing to Sicily. Benincasa, a leader betrayed by some of his followers, was tied, like Samson, while he slept in a wood near Cassano, and taken into Cosenza. There General Manhes ordered his hands to be struck off, and him to be taken mutilated round the town of S. Giovanni, his native place. First, they cut off his right hand and tied up the stump, so as to keep him alive. He did not utter a sound, but with terrific cynicism held out the other hand to the board. The two hands were then hung by strings upon his chest. The same day he was escorted from Cosenza to San Giovanni, in Fiore. One of the soldiers gave him some food and drink. The next evening he slept, but in the morning he refused the ministrations of the priest sent to him, and ascended the ladder to his death with sang-froid.’
Eventually, our coach brings us, unscathed we hope, to a place called Maida, ‘a small town of 2800 souls, the name of which has been made familiar to the English traveller by the victory gained by the British army under Sir John Stuart over the French army in 1806’ — and which, incidentally, gave the name to a familiar district of London, Maida Vale.
The French army occupied a strong, defensive position, from which it would have been hard for the British to dislodge them. Holding the smaller British army in contempt, the French advanced to what they thought would be complete victory. Against the 7000 French the British had 4800 men, and Murray quotes the despatch of Sir John Stuart: the two enemies, ‘at a distance of about 100 yards, fired reciprocally a few rounds, when, as if by mutual agreement, the firing was suspended, and in close compact order and awful silence they advanced towards each other until their bayonets began to cross. At this momentous crisis the enemy became appalled. They broke, and endeavoured to fly, but it was too late; they were overtaken with the most dreadful slaughter.’ It was the last time British troops fought in Italy until the First World War.
At the furthest point of Italy’s big toe we reach the Rock of Scylla. The rock, ‘whose dangers have been made so familiar to every reader by the Greek and Latin poets, have long ceased to be formidable, and the timid Neapolitan or Sicilian navigator sails by it without any apprehension. But although deprived of its terrors, the classical traveller will examine with lively interest this celebrated spot, immortalized by the greatest poets of ancient and modern times.’