I left Salerno with two priests bound for Cosenza on business, and in twenty-two hours we rattled through one hundred and forty-two miles of rough road and lazy villages.
The next day I hired a small carriage for Martorano.
As the wheels jolted along, I kept my gaze on the Ausonian Sea, that famous gulf of Magna Graecia where Pythagoras had once walked and taught his lessons. Now I looked out on the real country.
The hills rolled down in vast green folds, vines twisted over ruined walls, fig trees bent under their own fruit.
The earth looked heavy with generosity. Yet wherever I turned my eyes, I saw hunger.
A lone hut sagging into the soil. A child in rags staring at our carriage as if at a miracle. A man sitting idle on a broken wall, his hands empty, his face empty too.
No carts, no markets, no hum of trade, only scattered people dropped here and there on a land that could have fed three times their number.
I had to confess to myself that these were my kinsmen, sons of the same Italy, and the thought made me blush.
This, they told me, was Terra di Lavoro, the Land of Work, where no one seemed inclined to work at all.
Everything cost little, because no one had money to buy anything.
A peasant thought himself lucky when he found a gentleman willing to take charge of the fruit that fell almost of its own will from the trees.
The land gave too much, the people gave nothing.
The Romans, with their rough honesty, had not called them Bruttians instead of Byutians for nothing.
As for my two reverend companions, they amused themselves at my expense.
At the least tuft of grass I suspected a tarantula, at every heap of stones I saw a crasydra ready to spring.
Having known one poisonous malady in too intimate a fashion, I had no wish to make acquaintance with another that, according to the tales, forced the victim to dance himself half dead to the sound of fiddles.
The priests laughed heartily.
They swore that all those stories were tavern fables, not worth the ink Virgil had wasted on them in the Georgics. 1
Whenever I quoted a line to justify my caution, they met it with a joke and a shrug, and pointed to their own legs, unbitten after a lifetime in the country.
Between their laughter in the carriage and the misery outside the windows, Magna Graecia lost a little of its ancient halo, and began to look very much like the rest of the world.
I found Bishop Bernard de Bernardis sitting on a hard chair, bent over a worn table, his pen scratching slowly across the page.
I dropped to my knees out of habit before a prelate.
Instead of lifting his hand in blessing, he pushed back his chair, came to me, and pulled me up into a tight embrace.
His arms were thin, but his welcome was warm.
His face clouded when I told him I had wandered through Naples without finding a single instruction from him.
It cleared at once when I added that I owed no money to anyone and that I was in good health.
"That is something at least," he said, with a tired smile. He made me sit, drew a long breath that came out as a sigh, and began to talk of his poverty.
Then he called his servant and told him to lay the table for three.
That servant, a solemn housekeeper who looked as if she prayed with every movement, and a silent priest were his whole household.
The priest muttered a few clumsy sentences during the meal, enough to show me how little he knew.
The house itself was large in outline, yet badly put together and worse maintained. The walls sweated damp, the doors did not close, and the furniture looked as if it had been collected from the refuse of several parishes.
To make a bed for me in the room beside his own, the poor bishop had to strip one of his two mattresses from his bed and send it to mine.
When dinner appeared, it almost frightened me.
It was a fast day, and he followed the rule of his order without a slip. No meat, a few miserable dishes, and oil so harsh it stung the throat.
He ate it as if he had long since made peace with such fare.
Yet under that shabby cassock there was an intelligent man, and, better still, an honest one.
While we ate, he told me calmly that his see, though not contemptible in name, brought him only five hundred ducats a year, and that he already owed six hundred.
He added, with another sigh, that at least he had escaped the monks, who had hunted him for fifteen years and turned his life into a sort of purgatory on earth.
Every word he spoke cut into my hopes. I saw at once that this was no land where mitres fell ready made into open hands.
I was not arriving in a house of plenty, but at the door of a man who could barely feed himself.
I felt ashamed that my presence would weigh on him, and I saw in his eyes that he, too, was grieved at the sorry present his patronage seemed likely to prove.
I asked him if he had a good library, if there were any men of letters in the town, any circle where a man could pass a few hours without feeling his mind grow rusty.
He smiled, a tired, indulgent smile.
"In all my diocese," he said, "there is not one man who can write a tolerable page, still less one who loves letters. There is not a single bookseller. No one even cares for the gazettes. But I have ordered some books from Naples. When they arrive, we shall read together."
It didn't sound promising to me. A young man of eighteen shut up in a town without books, without company, without rivals, without talk that could sharpen a phrase or an idea.
The thought of it pressed on my chest like a weight.
The bishop saw my face darken, saw the silence into which I fell, and he tried to cheer me with assurances that he would do all that lay in his power to make me happy.
The next day he officiated in full pontifical dress, and I had my first view of my future flock.
The cathedral was packed with priests and people, men and women together. I studied them with rapt attention.
The sight decided everything.
I saw coarse faces, heavy jaws, dull eyes.
The men stared at me with a sort of stupid hostility, as if my youth and my black hair were an offense against their rough ugliness.
The women, God forgive me, seemed even worse. Their eyes were either vacant or suspicious.
My very presence, my clean clothes and decent bearing, felt like a scandal dropped among cattle.
When I went back to the episcopal house I did not dissemble.
"Monseigneur," I said, "I have no vocation to die a martyr of boredom in this place. Give me your blessing and let me go; or, rather, come with me. I promise you that we shall make a fortune somewhere else." 2
The idea amused him so much that he laughed over it several times during the day.
If he had taken it seriously, he might not have died two years later, in the prime of manhood, in that wretched town.
He understood, however, that my repugnance was natural. He asked me to forgive him for having summoned me.
Since he believed me to be penniless and had no money of his own, he told me he would give me a letter to a worthy citizen in Naples who would lend me sixty ducats to get me back to Venice.
I accepted with sincere gratitude.
In my room I opened my trunk and took out the case of razors the Greek had given me at the Tour du Grec, fine blades with silver handles.
I carried it to the bishop and begged him to accept it as a keepsake.
He resisted, almost offended, for the set was worth the sixty ducats he was trying to procure for me.
To overcome his scruples I had to threaten, with a smile, to stay in Martorano if he refused my present. That argument decided him.
He wrote for me a most flattering letter of recommendation to the Archbishop of Cosenza, asking him to forward me to Naples at no expense of my own.
It was thus I left Martorano sixty hours after my arrival, pitying the bishop whom I was leaving behind, and who wept as he was pouring heartfelt blessings upon me.
The Archbishop of Cosenza, rich, sharp eyed and curious about everything, received me with ease. He gave me a room in his palace and a place at his table.
During dinner my heart overflowed for the poor Bishop of Martorano, and I praised him with all the warmth I felt.
Once his virtues were safely enthroned, I turned my wit against his diocese and against all Calabria.
I drew its ugliness in hard, clean lines, so vividly that the archbishop and his guests burst out laughing.
Two ladies of his family presided over the table. The younger, pretty and quick, took my jests as a personal insult to her birthplace and, with flashing eyes, declared war on me.
I asked for peace on the spot.
"Calabria would be a paradise," I told her, "if only a quarter of its people resembled you."
The compliment landed. Hostilities ceased, at least outwardly.
Perhaps to prove that I had judged his country in haste, the archbishop gave a magnificent supper the next day, drawing together the best company Cosenza could offer.
It was not a barren town. A gentleman could live there pleasantly enough.
The nobles had money, the women had beauty, the men had some polish, since most had studied in Naples or Rome.
After three days, armed with a letter from the archbishop to the famed Genovesi, I set out for Naples.
I shared the road with five fellows whose faces suggested either the sea or the mountains and nothing honest from either. Their eyes were restless, their hands never far from their belts.
I decided that my purse must remain a secret between my pocket and myself.
Every night I lay down in my clothes, boots and all, ready to be awake at the first suspicious movement. In that country such precautions are a necessity.
On 16 September 1743 I entered Naples.
I went straight to deliver the letter from the Bishop of Martorano. It was addressed to a certain Gennaro Polo in the parish of Sant'Anna.
Polo's duty was simple. He was to count out sixty ducats and send me on my way.
Instead, after reading the bishop's letter, he opened his arms and his house at once.
The good prelate had spoken of my verses as if Apollo himself had dictated them, and Polo wanted me to know his son, who, he assured me, was a poet like myself.
After the usual courtesies, I accepted.
My trunk was fetched, my quarters were prepared, and before nightfall I was no longer a stranger in Naples, but a guest under the roof of Signor Gennaro Polo.
Author Note:
1- There is one aspect that strikes the reader of these memoirs is how much more connected the people of that era to the cultures of the ancients. It appears to me that this is not the case today. People used to recite by heart Homer, Horace, Vigil and Dantes … but modernity seems to have acted as a violent shock that separated the ancient from the present almost completely. In my opinion, the loss is immeasurable
2- Cute daring Casanova