Departures and Arrivals by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Newby, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007404179
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1999-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Northern England, vol. Ill, 1970.

† Thomas Sharp in the Shell Guide to Northumberland, 1969.

‡ Pevsner says they were built during the reign of Mary Tudor in 1555.

In Calabria

One morning in the early 1990s we arrived in Gioia Tauro in Calabria, a part of Italy we had always wanted to see after looking at Edward Lear’s splendid lithograph drawings reproduced in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples, published in 1852.

The modern parts of Gioia Tauro were places of nightmare, overflowing with motor car repair shops and vendors of spare parts. On one side of a street there was a hecatomb of dead vehicles with piles of millstones on top of them, presumably to prevent them blowing away. Here, we breakfasted on coffee and slightly dusty occhi di bue, delicious pastries with a blob of red jam in the middle, hence the name, bull’s eyes.

We left Gioia Tauro by way of immense olive groves. There were splendid views over Scilla, partner of Charybdis, on the Sicilian side of the Strait of Messina – almost exactly, except that now the sea was rough, as Lear depicted it when he was there in the autumn of 1847. Now white chestnuts were in flower and there was orange blossom everywhere. Here, in Calabria, the wild flowers have a life-span in spring of about three weeks.

We failed to make the turning off the autostrada on to route 106 and had to go back some miles in order to do so. Here, every available ridge facing seawards was clothed in houses, most of them no more than grey, concrete shells, unfinished because their owners either lacked planning permission, or the means to bribe the local authorities.

The first part of the 106 was built up as far as Pellaro, and the railway line runs along the coast between the main road and the sea, all the way to Taranto, making access to the beaches difficult. These were mostly gravel and rather squalid. Palms and prickly pears flourished, making the wearing of nothing but a bathing costume hazardous. At Fornace Lazzaro Saline Ioniche, as a signpost had it – could this be one place? – there was a huge chemical plant with tall, striped chimneys, condemned and out of action. There were piles of wind-blown plastic everywhere and dry river beds full of assorted muck. We had long since begun to wish that we hadn’t come. At San Melito di Porto Salvo, the southernmost point of Italy, you can’t even see the sea. But the smell of orange blossom was everywhere and there were great displays of geraniums on the balconies of the houses on every hand.

We drove to Pentedattilo, an inland village. Immediately you leave the coast you are in another, better-for-the-traveller world, because no one can afford to live so far from everywhere unless he or she is an old-age pensioner. Here, in this lonely valley of the San Elia there were uncountable numbers of yellow

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