THE TRAINS ALSO BROUGHT Gissing and Douglas, more than a hundred years ago. Having eaten miserably, in the restaurant below the Concordia, I returned to my room, went online and downloaded Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea. He had eaten miserably, too, he said. And he, too, had found the river by the station an ‘all but stagnant and wholly pestilential stream’. I downloaded Douglas’s Old Calabria and found the same observation on the river, though Douglas felt the food had much improved since Gissing’s visit ten years before. Both authors spent most of their time in Crotone considering how a place that was once the capital of Magna Grecia and famed for its healthy climate, a city boasting twelve square miles of walled habitations and a huge temple to the goddess Hera, had become little more than a squalid fishing village. Gissing rails against a certain Archbishop Antonio Lucifero, yes, he who had given his name to the library I had noticed, who apparently had started dismantling Hera’s temple in the fifteenth century to use its stones to build his ecclesiastical palazzo. Douglas ironises, thanking Lucifero for leaving two of the forty-eight columns of the temple when he could have taken all of them.
Here and there both authors had intriguing train anecdotes.
This is Gissing’s comment on departing from Taranto for Metaponto, the same journey I would be taking in the opposite direction soon enough:
Official time-bills of the month marked a train for Metaponto at 4.56 a.m., and this I decided to take, as it seemed probable that I might find a stay of some hours sufficient, and so be able to resume my journey before night. I asked the waiter to call me at a quarter to four. In the middle of the night (as it seemed to me) I was aroused by a knocking, and the waiter’s voice called to me that, if I wished to leave early for Metaponto, I had better get up at once, as the departure of the train had been changed to 4.15 – it was now half-past three. There ensued an argument, sustained, on my side, rather by the desire to stay in bed this cold morning than by any faith in the reasonableness of the railway company. There must be a mistake! The orario for the month gave 4.56, and how could the time of a train be changed without public notice? Changed it was, insisted the waiter; it had happened a few days ago, and they had only heard of it at the hotel this very morning. Angry and uncomfortable, I got my clothes on, and drove to the station, where I found that a sudden change in the time-table, without any regard for persons relying upon the official guide, was taken as a matter of course.
Here is Douglas similarly irritated by early rather than late trains, returning to Taranto after a day trip to Grottaglie:
A characteristic episode. I had carefully timed myself to catch the returning train to Taranto. Great was my surprise when, halfway to the station, I perceived the train swiftly approaching. I raced it, and managed to jump into a carriage just as it drew out of the station. The guard straightway demanded my ticket and a fine for entering the train without one (return tickets, for weighty reasons of ‘internal administration’, are not sold). I looked at my watch, which showed that we had left six minutes before the scheduled hour. He produced his; it coincided with my own. ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘I am not responsible for the eccentricities of the driver, who probably had some urgent private affairs to settle at Taranto. The fine must be paid.’ A fellow-passenger took a more charitable view of the case. He suggested that an inspector of the line had been travelling along with us, and that the driver, knowing this, was naturally ambitious to show how fast he could go.
With so much that is familiar here, the one surprise is that the inspector’s watch ‘coincided’ with Douglas’s.
But the anecdote that had me laughing myself to sleep, a train story I know I shall never be able to match, was this gem that Gissing found in a religious pamphlet distributed by an itinerant preacher in Taranto:
A few days ago – thus, after a pious exordium, the relation began – in that part of Italy called Marca, there came into a railway station a Capuchin friar of grave, thoughtful, melancholy aspect, who besought the station-master to allow him to go without ticket by the train just starting, as he greatly desired to reach the Sanctuary of Loreto that day, and had no money to pay his fare. The official gave a contemptuous refusal, and paid no heed to the entreaties of the friar, who urged all manner of religious
