Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of “incomparable beauty”; unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at unfavourable moments I was strongly reminded of the Essex coast—­ grey, scrubby fiats, crossed by small streams, spreading wearily seaward.  One had only to turn inland to correct this mood; the Calabrian mountains, even without sunshine, had their wonted grace.  Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent in the foreground, preserved the southern character of the scene.  The great plain between the hills and the sea grows very impressive; so silent it is, so mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of vanished glory.  I looked at the Crathis—­the Crati of Cosenza—­here beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned by their own vapours.

The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with eucalyptus.  Great bushes of flowering rosemary scented the air, and a fine cassia tree, from which I plucked blossoms, yielded a subtler perfume.  Our lunch was not luxurious; I remember only, as at all worthy of Sybaris, a palatable white wine called Muscato dei Saraceni.  Appropriate enough amid this vast silence to turn one’s thoughts to the Saracens, who are so largely answerable for the ages of desolation that have passed by the Ionian Sea.

Then on for Taranto, where we arrived in the afternoon.  Meaning to stay for a week or two I sought a pleasant room in a well-situated hotel, and I found one with a good view of town and harbour.  The Taranto of old days, when it was called Taras, or later Tarentum, stood on a long peninsula, which divides a little inland sea from the great sea without.  In the Middle Ages the town occupied only the point of this neck of land, which, by the cutting of an artificial channel, had been made into an island:  now again it is spreading over the whole of the ancient site; great buildings of yellowish-white stone, as ugly as modern architect can make them, and plainly far in excess of the actual demand for habitations, rise where Phoenicians and Greeks and Romans built after the nobler fashion of their times.  One of my windows looked towards the old town, with its long sea-wall where fishermen’s nets hung drying, the dome of its Cathedral, the high, squeezed houses, often with gardens on the roofs, and the swing-bridge which links it to the mainland; the other gave me a view across the Mare Piccolo, the Little Sea (it is some twelve miles round about), dotted in many parts with crossed stakes which mark the oyster-beds, and lined on this side with a variety of shipping moored at quays.  From some of these vessels, early next morning, sounded suddenly a furious cannonade, which threatened to shatter the windows of the hotel; I found it was in honour of the Queen of Italy, whose festa fell on that day.  This barbarous uproar must have sounded even to the Calabrian heights; it struck me as more meaningless in its deafening volley of noise than any note of joy or triumph that could ever have been heard in old Tarentum.