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Updated: June 5, 2025
While waiting for supper and the train to Cotrone, I strolled along the beach, and soon found myself sitting beside the bleached anatomy of some stranded leviathan, and gazing at the mountains of Squillace that glowed in the soft lights of sunset.
The wind has died down, the storm is over and Cotrone thirsts, as ever, for rain that never comes. Yet they have a Madonna-picture here a celebrated black Madonna, painted by Saint Luke who "always procures rain, when prayed to." Once indeed the tail of a shower must have passed overhead, for there fell a few sad drops.
Old authors praise the beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.
After that, it is advisable to absorb an ice or two they are excellent, at Cotrone and a glass of Strega liqueur, to ward off the effects of over-work.
Thence onward a pathway skirts the sea at the foot of the clay-hills; passes the sunken wells; climbs up and down steepish gradients and so attains the plateau at whose extremity stands the lighthouse, the column, and a few white bungalows summer-residences of Cotrone citizens. A day of shimmering heat. . . . The ground is parched.
Like the old town of Taranto, Cotrone occupies the site of the ancient acropolis, a little headland jutting into the sea; above, and in front of the town itself, stands the castle built by Charles V., with immense battlements looking over the harbour.
Altogether, it is a poor and thinly peopled stretch of land between Cotrone and Capo Rizzuto. No wonder the wolves are famished. Nine days ago one of them actually ventured upon the road near the cemetery, in daylight. Yet there is some plant-life, and I was pleased to see, emerging from the bleak sand-dunes, the tufts of the well-known and conspicuous sea lily in full flower.
These are mines of that dusky sulphur which I had observed being drawn in carts through the streets of Cotrone. There are some eight or ten of them, they tell me, discovered about thirty years ago this is all wrong: they are mentioned in 1571 and employing several hundred workmen. It had been my intention to visit these excavations.
If so, I had reason for my suspicion that poor fever-stricken Cotrone regarded with a sort of jealousy the breezy health of Catanzaro, which at the same time is a much more prosperous place. Later, I found that there did exist some acerbity of mutual criticism between the two towns, reminding one of civic rivalry among the Greeks. Catanzaro spoke with contempt of Cotrone.
Why should Taranto not follow suit in the matter of culture? Heraclea, Sybaris and all the Greek settlements along this coast have vanished from earth; only Taranto and Cotrone have survived to carry on, if they can, the old traditions. They have survived, thanks to peculiar physical conditions that have safeguarded them from invaders. . . .
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