Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were
looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder
mountains of Albania.
Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of
those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new
feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look
out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the
western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped
themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the
Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to
being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to
the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the
boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on
the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch
glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on
the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of
cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which
decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must
go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time
we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive
range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass
from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of
south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series
of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but
their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages,
not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days
when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of
Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those
eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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