entry
Mar 16, 2016
Norman Douglas, Old Calabria
& the Policoro Wood
George Norman Douglas (1868 – 1952) was
a British writer, now best known for his travel writings
about southern Italy. He was a long-time resident of the
island of Capri, an honorary citizen of the island, and
he died and is buried there. He's in the company of a
very long list of late "Grand Tour" northern enthusiasts
of the bay of Naples and the south of Italy, among whom
we may count Graham Greene,
Oscar Wilde, Jacque Fersen, D.H. Lawrence, Alfred Krupp and countless
others. Old Calabria, published in 1915, from
which the excerpts (below) are taken, is among Douglas'
better-known works. Others include Siren Land
(1911) (about this area) and a
novel, South Wind (1917), about an island
(obviously Capri) and its inhabitants.
Much of Old Calabria gives
the impression that for many of those smitten with the
bay of Naples, there existed only the immediate
bay, and that the rest of southern Italy was a dark and
mysterious land called Calabria. (Well, there was
Sicily, too, of course, also foreboding, all by itself.)
Indeed, much of the book is not really about Calabria,
but Puglia (Apulia, the long southwestern region along
the Adriatic coast). Old Calabria thus contains
exquisite chapters about the Saracens
of Lucera (Frederick II's loyal Arab army in
Apulia), about Frederick's son Manfred
and the town of Manfredonia, and about cities of Bari
and Taranto (in Apulia); even the chapter cited below is
about a place not in Calabria, but rather the province
of Matera, in the region of Basilicata, once upon a time
called Lucania.
Douglas does eventually get into Calabria on his
clockwise trip around the southern peninsula, but for
now I choose the area called the Policoro Wood, now a
rather confined area directly on the Ionian sea on the
sole of the "boot" of Italy (5km/3 mi from the town of
Policoro) because I came across a passage that said
"this should all be written in the past tense because
the Wood has largely disappeared". The Policoro Wood has
shrunk by two-thirds from its 1500 hectares (3700
acres/5.7 sq. miles) when Douglas wrote about it; it has
simply been run over by urbanization and perhaps is
still barely salvageable by good-hearted environmental
groups. In the chapter entitled "Into the Jungle" of Old
Calabria, Norman Douglas writes:
Twilight reigns in this maze of tall
deciduous trees. There is thick undergrowth, too;
and I measured an old lentiscus —a shrub, in Italy—
which was three metres in circumference. But the
exotic feature of the grove is its wealth of
creeping vines that clamber up the trunks, swinging
from one tree-top to another, and allowing the
merest threads of sunlight to filter through their
matted canopy. Policoro has the tangled beauty of a
tropical swamp. Rank odours arise from the decaying
leaves and moist earth; and once within that verdant
labyrinth, you might well fancy yourself in some
primeval region of the globe, where the foot of man
has never penetrated...Yet long ago it resounded
with the din of battle and the trumpeting of
elephants —in that furious first battle between
Pyrrhus and the Romans. And here, under the very
soil on which you stand, lies buried, they say, the
ancient city of Siris.
Yet, Douglas, even in 1915, sees what
is coming:
The parcelling out of many of these
big properties has been followed by a destruction of
woodland and complete disappearance of game. It is
hailed as the beginning of a new era of prosperity;
and so it well may be, from a commercial point of
view. But the traveller and lover of nature will be
glad to leave some of these wild districts in the
hands of their rich owners, who have no great
interests in cultivating every inch of ground,
levelling rocky spaces, draining the land and hewing
down every tree that fails to bear fruit. Split into
peasant proprietorships, this forest would soon
become a scientifically irrigated campagna for the
cultivation of tomatoes or what not, like the
"Colonia Elena," near the Pontine Marshes. The
national exchequer would profit, without a doubt.
But I question whether we should all take the
economical point of view —whether
it would be wise for humanity to do so. There is a
prosperity other than material. Some solitary artist
or poet, drawing inspiration from scenes like this,
might have contributed more to the happiness of
mankind than a legion of narrow-minded, grimy and
litigious tomato-planters.
Among
the "good-hearted environmental groups" trying to
save the area are the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF) with its Herakleia-Policoro
Oasis within the Nature Reserve of the Pantano di
Policoro Woods. There you can get environmental
guided tours about and among the incredible
variety of flora and fauna that still abound in
what has been called the last patch of
Mediterranean coastal forest in Italy, this bit of
"prosperity other than material." As well, you
have access to recreational activities such as
horseback riding along the beach.
photos
- top: Wikipedia; middle: WWF; bottom, JirkaN
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