Old Calabria | Page 4

prospect of the drowsy Midland counties--so green it is, so
golden-grey the sky. The sunlight peers down dispersedly through
windows in this firmament of clouded amber, alighting on some
mouldering tower, some patch of ripening corn or distant city--Troia,
lapped in Byzantine slumber, or San Severo famed in war. This in
spring. But what days of glistering summer heat, when the earth is
burnt to cinders under a heavenly dome that glows like a brazier of
molten copper! For this country is the Sahara of Italy.
One is glad, meanwhile, that the castle does not lie in the natal land of
the Hohenstaufen. The interior is quite deserted, to be sure; they have
built half the town of Lucera with its stones, even as Frederick quarried
them out of the early Roman citadel beneath; but it is at least a
harmonious desolation. There are no wire-fenced walks among the
ruins, no feeding-booths and cheap reconstructions of draw-bridges and
police-notices at every corner; no gaudy women scribbling to their
friends in the "Residenzstadt" post cards illustrative of the "Burgruine,"
while their husbands perspire over mastodontic beer-jugs. There is only
peace.
These are the delights of Lucera: to sit under those old walls and watch
the gracious cloud-shadows dappling the plain, oblivious of yonder

assemblage of barbers and politicians. As for those who can reconstruct
the vanished glories of such a place--happy they! I find the task
increasingly difficult. One outgrows the youthful age of hero-worship;
next, our really keen edges are so soon worn off by mundane trivialities
and vexations that one is glad to take refuge in simpler pleasures once
more--to return to primitive emotionalism. There are so many
Emperors of past days! And like the old custodian, I have not so much
as set eyes on them.
Yet this Frederick is no dim figure; he looms grandly through the
intervening haze. How well one understands that craving for the East,
nowadays; how modern they were, he and his son the "Sultan of
Lucera," and their friends and counsellors, who planted this garden of
exotic culture! Was it some afterglow of the luminous world that had
sunk below the horizon, or a pale streak of the coming dawn? And if
you now glance down into this enclosure that once echoed with the
song of minstrels and the soft laughter of women, with the discourse of
wits, artists and philosophers, and the clang of arms--if you look, you
will behold nothing but a green lake, a waving field of grass. No matter.
The ambitions of these men are fairly realized, and every one of us may
keep a body-guard of pagans, an't please him; and a harem likewise--to
judge by the newspapers.
For he took his Orientalism seriously; he had a harem, with eunuchs,
etc., all proper, and was pleased to give an Eastern colour to his
entertainments. Matthew Paris relates how Frederick's brother-in-law,
returning from the Holy Land, rested awhile at his Italian court, and
saw, among other diversions, "duas puellas Saracenicas formosas, quae
in pavimenti planitie binis globis insisterent, volutisque globis huo
illucque ferrentur canentes, cymbala manibus collidentes, corporaque
secundum modules motantes atque flectentes." I wish I had been
there. . . .
I walked to the castle yesterday evening on the chance of seeing an
eclipse of the moon which never came, having taken place at quite
another hour. A cloudless night, dripping with moisture, the electric
lights of distant Foggia gleaming in the plain. There are brick-kilns at

the foot of the incline, and from some pools in the neighbourhood
issued a loud croaking of frogs, while the pallid smoke of the furnaces,
pressed down by the evening dew, trailed earthward in a long twisted
wreath, like a dragon crawling sulkily to his den. But on the north side
one could hear the nightingales singing in the gardens below. The dark
mass of Mount Gargano rose up clearly in the moonlight, and I began
to sketch out some itinerary of my wanderings on that soil. There was
Sant' Angelo, the archangel's abode; and the forest region; and Lesina
with its lake; and Vieste the remote, the end of all things. . . .
Then my thoughts wandered to the Hohenstaufen and the conspiracy
whereby their fate was avenged. The romantic figures of Manfred and
Conradin; their relentless enemy Charles; Costanza, her brow crowned
with a poetic nimbus (that melted, towards the end, into an aureole of
bigotry); Frangipani, huge in villainy; the princess Beatrix, tottering
from the dungeon where she had been confined for nearly twenty years;
her deliverer Roger de Lauria, without whose resourcefulness and
audacity it might have gone ill with Aragon; Popes and
Palaso-logus--brilliant colour effects; the king of England and Saint
Louis of France; in the background, dimly discernible, the colossal
shades of Frederick and