The title says what it is. An English classicist visits Calabria (and a bit of Puglia) in the late 19th century, searching for the past. He notes both the past and the present, but also perhaps inadvertently finds the future?

I'd heard of this book many years ago as a possible source of the word "paparazzo", which Fellini used as the name of a photographer in "La Dolce Vita" (we all know what became of the word later). But I'm highly skeptical. The word appears once as the last name of a hotel owner who was upset that his guests would not eat in his establishment. Why would Fellini (if he even read the book) just randomly pick that name?

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. What's interesting is an Englishman's view of southern Italy in the late 19th century. He travels by train and horse-drawn coach, visiting ancient sites that mostly no longer exist. But he wants to step where ancient poets, monks and generals stepped. He wants to see what they might have seen, despite the many changes. He wants to breathe in the same air. He writes not only of what he knows of the past, but also of what he sees in the present, of the people, of their ways of life, the food, the wine, and how it's different from England.

I made several notes that would require an entire blog-post or essay to comment on, so I'll leave you with one. This is a thought I've thought myself many times (comparing Italy to the US) and it has to do with beauty:

"Pottery for commonest use among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far beyond anything native to our most pretentious china-shops... There must be a great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils...with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it really so certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness?" (pg 21) ( )