A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey Read Free Book Online Page A

passing chariots. Yet, much of the day, they are jammed by honking cars and smoking buses, or are torn up for resurfacing. Roads remain under construction for months, even years, with utility lines exposed and few walkways provided for pedestrians, who regularly navigate rubble, loose cobblestones, open pits, piles of dirt, and cars parked on sidewalks.
    Much of the street work during my visit in early 1998 was along the busy Via Toledo—or, depending on one’s politics, Via Roma—the major artery designed and built under the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo in 1536.
    I walked past one spot on the Via Toledo/Via Roma where drainpipes from under a building were dripping evil-looking liquid into a hole dug near the edge of the torn-up street. A disconnected sewer line waiting to be reconnected? How long it had been like this, uncovered, uncapped, I had no idea. There were no workers in sight. Perhaps it would be untended for days, weeks.
    It was a strange contrast: many people wearing stylish coats, furs and leathers, pushing past me on the narrow, temporary sidewalk, a few feet from an open sewer line, in front of stores hawking the latest fashions. Mysteriously, in a city rampant with poverty, the stylish stores seem to survive, and the people generally appear healthy and well fed.
    Here, across busy streets, pedestrians do not have the right of way. They must pick their openings, looking left and right, arms tucked in, holding possessions close like a footballer heading for a score. Traffic lights and Walk lights, only colorful window dressing in this troubled and crowded city, are ignored.
    My distress over jammed streets, open sewers, and what appeared to my American sensibilities to be abject poverty all contrasted sharply with Englishman Gissing’s now ludicrous 1897 lament that organ-grinders had disappeared. His consternation had even carried over to Paola, my destination the following day. There, he bemoaned in the late 1890s that rural Italians were not wearing their traditional garb—their colorful costumes that painted such an idyllic, stereotypic picture in his mind.
    Eventually, I guess, we are all doomed to watch our stereotypes and preconceptions crumble. The movement away from traditional peasant dress, Gissing believed, was the result of “this destroying age” of nineteenth-century modernization. Strong words, but, in view of his Victorian, pre-automobile sensibility, he believed they were appropriate.
    Those words are appropriately strong today, if not more so. If only Gissing had lived to see the impact of the automobile on Italian cities! From my standpoint in the 1990s, “this destroying age” is best represented by the vehicles that pack narrow Italian streets from north to south. Another British novelist writing one hundred years after Gissing, Ian McEwan, uses in his book Amsterdam the most appropriate phrase: “tyranny of traffic.”

    Professor Baldassare Conticello, one of Italy’s preeminent archaeologists and an expert in early Greek colonization in southern Italy, checks a reference from one of the hundreds of books in his Rome apartment library.     Photo by John Keahey
    I certainly can accept that it is not the job of modern Italians to walk around in “peasant dress” to satisfy the Gissings of the tourist world. Change, after all, is inevitable and proper. But I do regret the loss of serenity that I imagine used to hang over once quiet town squares that today have become giant parking lots. I grieve at my inability to walk down a narrow street lined with magnificent medieval buildings crafted out of stones pillaged from ancient Greek and Roman monuments without being narrowly missed by small, darting cars or by careening teenagers on high-pitched, whining motor scooters.
    Of course, while lost in such idyllic thoughts I choose to ignore why southern Italians, late last century and early this century, fled what today’s