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Old Calabria
Though steeped in a rich and ancient past, Calabria had been lost from view when Norman Douglas visited in the early 1900s. Within Douglas’s vibrant account of his adventures is woven the rich history—from Greek settlers and Roman conquerors to the powerful Ndrangheta organized crime family—that has shaped the land, language, culture, and people of a place that Douglas grew to adore. Witty, erudite, and elegant, Old Calabria is a literary classic, acclaimed as much for its sparkling prose as for its exquisite portrait of Italy’s most unpredictable and colorful province.
368 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 1914
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About the author
Norman Douglas
106 books58 followersGeorge Norman Douglas was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 28, 2021
You might mistake him in a photograph for a country vicar or dahlia fancier but he was no such creature. See him instead as a well-groomed satyr or an uncle of ill repute whose conduct shames the family but whose occasional letters, posted from exotic locales, you secretly cherish for the black glamor of their prose.
Norman Douglas first distinguished himself by being dismissed from the British diplomatic service in 1896 after a St Petersburg intrigue that may or may not have left a relation of the Russian imperial family with child. Next year he married his cousin, swiftly begot two more children, and then divorced his wife for her (it’s said) infidelity. Scandal after scandal followed. Most infamously, he was charged with forcing advances on a lad of sixteen. He described himself as “Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, [but] formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid prosecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling.” He lived most of his life in exile.
In the midst of his unsavory gambols Douglas wrote a fair number of books, occasionally using pseudonyms like Normyx or Pilaff Bey. South Wind (1917), his most famous novel, was set in a lightly fictionalized Capri and peopled with characters sketched from friends and acquaintances who didn’t all care for their portraits. In addition to novels he also published travelogues, a study of children’s street games, a book on Italian geography, another on food, another on aphrodisiacs, a study of animals mentioned in the Greek Anthology, and a collection of pornographic limericks.
Does anyone read Norman Douglas these days? I recently finished Old Calabria, the 1915 record of his travels across the unwashed toe of Italy. The style is conversational – but it’s the conversation of a jaundiced, prejudiced, overeducated Faust. He drops names and learned allusions like dandruff. He expects you’ll be as well read in classical and medieval history as he is. He quotes, unapologetically and without translation, not only from French but also from Italian, Latin, Greek, and (get ready for it) Albanian. He’s a scoffer, a cynic, a dissipated aesthete. And yet, Old Calabria is a wonderful book.
It’s wonderful, I say, but not always nice. For all its fine scenery and a history reaching back to the Greeks, Calabria was a shocking backwater at the time of Douglas’s visit – the people impoverished and mostly illiterate, the countryside half-depopulated since the young men had all decamped for instant riches in America. Douglas very much liked the place but never softened a judgment in the interest of encouraging tourism:
“Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of somber, tortuous, and fetid alleys, where black pigs wallow amid heaps of miscellaneous and malodorous filth – in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everyone being free to throw their own private refuse into the public street and leave it there, from generation to generation.”
And then Douglas can never pass up a chance to describe an outrage. He must have kept a lovingly compiled index of the unspeakable practices and unnatural acts he encountered:
“These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake that was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and then a plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the uncooked fat of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week afterwards); another one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks, claws, and feathers. Such deeds are sternly rebrobated as savagery; still, they occur, and nearly always as the result of wagers…
“I have also met persons who claimed to have been cured of rachitic troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from those foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are taken as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the discomfort caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a certain kind of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them in loco infantis. These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally destroyed after performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for curing the scrofulous tendencies of other children.”
Appalled half the time, he is enchanted the other half. Douglas hunts down obscure ruins mentioned in doubly obscure Renaissance manuscripts. He speculates on the origins of the dragon myth, the legacy of Pythagoreanism, and impressively plausible Calabrian inspirations for Milton’s Paradise Lost. He tramps up a mountainside to participate in a peasant festival, the first outsider in living memory. He gobbles up bandit lore, and interviews the banditti in person whenever possible. He compares his own impressions against those of Brits who’d toured Calabria before him: Sir Thomas Hoby in the 1540s, George Berkeley the philosopher in the 1710s, and Edward Lear (of Nonsense fame) in the 1840s.
His humor sometimes falls flat (“These sovereigns were murdered in so many castles that one wonders how they ever found time to be alive at all”), but then it often hits the mark (of the lax Tarentines, he says: “Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical tone of a people”). Even his verbal excesses are at least droll: Douglas describes a bout of seasonal allergies as “not your ordinary hay-fever, oh, no! but such as a mammoth might conceivably catch, if thrust back from his germless, frozen tundras into the damply blossoming Miocene.”
Douglas befriends the locals with surprising ease. The first place he stops in any village is the barbershop, for conversation and gossip. He generally avoids hotels, sleeping now in an elderly widow’s spare bed, now in a farmer’s barn. Quite unconsumed with anything resembling zeal for his native Presbyterianism, he is a reflexive anti-Catholic and keen spotter of pagan survivals in ritual practice, like his compatriot George James Frazer. And yet he sincerely enjoys the company of priests, especially those of a scholarly bent or who keep a good wine cellar.
Travel inspires Douglas, as it does so many others, with reflections on the essential character of one nation versus another, but with interesting results:
“And what, I sometimes ask myself – what is now the distinguishing feature between these southern men and ourselves? Briefly this, I think. In mundane matters, where the personal equation dominates, their judgment is apt to be turbid and perverse; but as one rises into questions of pure intelligence, it becomes serenely impartial. We, on the other hand, who are pre-eminently clearsighted in worldly concerns of law and government and in all subsidiary branches of mentality, cannot bring ourselves to reason dispassionately on non-practical subjects.”
He doesn’t, however, overestimate the value of such insights and understands that, in respect to essential character, we differ as much from our own ancestors as we do from contemporaries of other tribes:
“What has the Englishman of today in common with that rather lovable fop, drunkard, and bully who would faint with ecstasy over Byron’s Parisina after pistolling his best friend in a duel about a wench or a lap-dog? Such differences as exist between races of men, exist only at a given moment.”
Douglas travelled alone in Calabria, and perhaps it’s no wonder. He must have been a difficult friend on the road: careless of comfort, opinionated, whimsical, prickly, given to weird enthusiasms and unpredictable repulsions. The book is adapted from a journal, which may have been for him the only welcome companion. Even then a curtain is drawn. He never talks about himself, his life history or feelings. In our confessional age this strikes us as offish and impersonal, but I suspect that travel for Douglas was less about self-discovery than self-forgetfulness, and we profit from his guidance without the expense of his company.
Born in 1868, Norman Douglas died on Capri in 1952. An unregenerate pagan to the end, his last words were said to have been, “Get those f***ing nuns away from me.”
Norman Douglas first distinguished himself by being dismissed from the British diplomatic service in 1896 after a St Petersburg intrigue that may or may not have left a relation of the Russian imperial family with child. Next year he married his cousin, swiftly begot two more children, and then divorced his wife for her (it’s said) infidelity. Scandal after scandal followed. Most infamously, he was charged with forcing advances on a lad of sixteen. He described himself as “Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, [but] formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid prosecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling.” He lived most of his life in exile.
In the midst of his unsavory gambols Douglas wrote a fair number of books, occasionally using pseudonyms like Normyx or Pilaff Bey. South Wind (1917), his most famous novel, was set in a lightly fictionalized Capri and peopled with characters sketched from friends and acquaintances who didn’t all care for their portraits. In addition to novels he also published travelogues, a study of children’s street games, a book on Italian geography, another on food, another on aphrodisiacs, a study of animals mentioned in the Greek Anthology, and a collection of pornographic limericks.
Does anyone read Norman Douglas these days? I recently finished Old Calabria, the 1915 record of his travels across the unwashed toe of Italy. The style is conversational – but it’s the conversation of a jaundiced, prejudiced, overeducated Faust. He drops names and learned allusions like dandruff. He expects you’ll be as well read in classical and medieval history as he is. He quotes, unapologetically and without translation, not only from French but also from Italian, Latin, Greek, and (get ready for it) Albanian. He’s a scoffer, a cynic, a dissipated aesthete. And yet, Old Calabria is a wonderful book.
It’s wonderful, I say, but not always nice. For all its fine scenery and a history reaching back to the Greeks, Calabria was a shocking backwater at the time of Douglas’s visit – the people impoverished and mostly illiterate, the countryside half-depopulated since the young men had all decamped for instant riches in America. Douglas very much liked the place but never softened a judgment in the interest of encouraging tourism:
“Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of somber, tortuous, and fetid alleys, where black pigs wallow amid heaps of miscellaneous and malodorous filth – in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everyone being free to throw their own private refuse into the public street and leave it there, from generation to generation.”
And then Douglas can never pass up a chance to describe an outrage. He must have kept a lovingly compiled index of the unspeakable practices and unnatural acts he encountered:
“These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake that was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and then a plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the uncooked fat of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week afterwards); another one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks, claws, and feathers. Such deeds are sternly rebrobated as savagery; still, they occur, and nearly always as the result of wagers…
“I have also met persons who claimed to have been cured of rachitic troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from those foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are taken as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the discomfort caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a certain kind of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them in loco infantis. These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally destroyed after performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for curing the scrofulous tendencies of other children.”
Appalled half the time, he is enchanted the other half. Douglas hunts down obscure ruins mentioned in doubly obscure Renaissance manuscripts. He speculates on the origins of the dragon myth, the legacy of Pythagoreanism, and impressively plausible Calabrian inspirations for Milton’s Paradise Lost. He tramps up a mountainside to participate in a peasant festival, the first outsider in living memory. He gobbles up bandit lore, and interviews the banditti in person whenever possible. He compares his own impressions against those of Brits who’d toured Calabria before him: Sir Thomas Hoby in the 1540s, George Berkeley the philosopher in the 1710s, and Edward Lear (of Nonsense fame) in the 1840s.
His humor sometimes falls flat (“These sovereigns were murdered in so many castles that one wonders how they ever found time to be alive at all”), but then it often hits the mark (of the lax Tarentines, he says: “Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical tone of a people”). Even his verbal excesses are at least droll: Douglas describes a bout of seasonal allergies as “not your ordinary hay-fever, oh, no! but such as a mammoth might conceivably catch, if thrust back from his germless, frozen tundras into the damply blossoming Miocene.”
Douglas befriends the locals with surprising ease. The first place he stops in any village is the barbershop, for conversation and gossip. He generally avoids hotels, sleeping now in an elderly widow’s spare bed, now in a farmer’s barn. Quite unconsumed with anything resembling zeal for his native Presbyterianism, he is a reflexive anti-Catholic and keen spotter of pagan survivals in ritual practice, like his compatriot George James Frazer. And yet he sincerely enjoys the company of priests, especially those of a scholarly bent or who keep a good wine cellar.
Travel inspires Douglas, as it does so many others, with reflections on the essential character of one nation versus another, but with interesting results:
“And what, I sometimes ask myself – what is now the distinguishing feature between these southern men and ourselves? Briefly this, I think. In mundane matters, where the personal equation dominates, their judgment is apt to be turbid and perverse; but as one rises into questions of pure intelligence, it becomes serenely impartial. We, on the other hand, who are pre-eminently clearsighted in worldly concerns of law and government and in all subsidiary branches of mentality, cannot bring ourselves to reason dispassionately on non-practical subjects.”
He doesn’t, however, overestimate the value of such insights and understands that, in respect to essential character, we differ as much from our own ancestors as we do from contemporaries of other tribes:
“What has the Englishman of today in common with that rather lovable fop, drunkard, and bully who would faint with ecstasy over Byron’s Parisina after pistolling his best friend in a duel about a wench or a lap-dog? Such differences as exist between races of men, exist only at a given moment.”
Douglas travelled alone in Calabria, and perhaps it’s no wonder. He must have been a difficult friend on the road: careless of comfort, opinionated, whimsical, prickly, given to weird enthusiasms and unpredictable repulsions. The book is adapted from a journal, which may have been for him the only welcome companion. Even then a curtain is drawn. He never talks about himself, his life history or feelings. In our confessional age this strikes us as offish and impersonal, but I suspect that travel for Douglas was less about self-discovery than self-forgetfulness, and we profit from his guidance without the expense of his company.
Born in 1868, Norman Douglas died on Capri in 1952. An unregenerate pagan to the end, his last words were said to have been, “Get those f***ing nuns away from me.”
February 26, 2008
This is a narrative of a Presbyterian Scotsman's journey, on foot, from the heel to the tip of the toe of Italy around the turn of the last century. Douglas is one of the best writers in English, ever. But lest you think this is some banal travel book you should remember the Mr. Douglas was not the sort of person to overlook the fact that Catholism is a Pagan religion and its adherents one step away from tropical savages. Eucalyptus trees feel the savage wrath of Normal Douglas's pen. His wanderings take us through an alien and beautiful world and his erudition and education make the experience a joy. The author is not burdened by any Boaz-induced need to justify or mitigate his statements about foreign cultures and criticizes with a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon superiority that has disappeared in these sordid times. What has also disappeared is the level of education that allows the author to switch, without fanfare, into Latin, French or Greek so bring along your dictionaries.
December 25, 2025
This is one of those books that I didn't want to come to the end of. Who would have guessed that a book about travel in a poverty-stricken part of South Italy before the First World War would be so interesting? And yet, indubitably, Norman Douglas's Old Calabria is a masterpiece. As the author writes near the end:
Calabria is not a land to traverse alone. It is too wistful and stricken; too deficient in those externals that conduce to comfort. Its charms do not appeal to the eye of romance, and the man who would perambulate Magna Graecia as he does the Alps would soon regret his choice. One needs something of that “human element” which delighted the genteel photographer of Morano—comrades, in short; if only those sages, like old Nola Molisi, who have fallen under the spell of its ancient glories. The joys of Calabria are not to be bought, like those of Switzerland, for gold.As Douglas traversed the hills and valleys and shores of Calabria, he saw all the layers of this land of mixed cultures (Greek, Roman, Albanian, Spanish Bourbon), whether through the lens of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (which did not reach far south), and the present day.
February 18, 2013
Norman Douglas's "Old Calabria," has many of the qualities of the other Douglas books I've read ("Siren Land" and "Fountains in the Sand'), in that it was filled with scholarly digressions and asides, lengthy passages in foreign languages which are left untranslated, and often hilarious criticisms of the backwardness and ignorance of the locals. It discusses a part of Italy which even today few travelers visit, and it approaches the subject matter in a slow, meditative way. The text immerses you in Southern Italy and in the idea of travel at a sane, human pace.
April 21, 2016
My Modern Library edition of this book contains no background information, not even the date of publication (apparently it was 1915, but the book makes no mention of WWI), but Norman Douglas seems to be one of the old-school British pedants who, having fled to other lands so that they could be freer to indulge their vices, could make a good living scoffing at the habits and conditions of lesser peoples outside of the Home Counties. He is a good stylist, but, for the most part, he has nothing but disdain, disgust, and contempt for the Calabrians he meets on his walk around the end of the peninsula (not that he could ever be bothered to actually get to know any of them). At times he is comically provincial:
"[W]hat else can one offer to these Abruzzi mountain-folk? Their life is one of miserable, revolting destitution. They have not games or sports, no local racing, clubs, cattle-shows, fox-hunting, politics, rat-catching, or any of those other joys that diversify the lives of our peasantry. No touch of humanity reaches them, no kindly dames send them jellies or blankets, no cheery doctor enquires for their children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack even the mild excitements of church versus chapel, or the vicar's daughter's love-affair, or the squire's latest row with his lady - nothing! Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness."
Occasionally, he does offer some actual insight, as here, on latter-era saints: "Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously introspective." And here, on the fruits of Pythagorean teaching: "So rapidly did the virus act, that soon we find Plato declaring that all the useful arts are degrading; that "so long as a man tries to study any sensible object, he can never be said to be learning anything"; in other words, that the kind of person to whom one looks for common sense should be excluded from the management of his most refined republic."
In general, however, the author is a terrible bore. Confronted with a Calabria that is desperately poor, Douglas can only respond with ridicule.
"[W]hat else can one offer to these Abruzzi mountain-folk? Their life is one of miserable, revolting destitution. They have not games or sports, no local racing, clubs, cattle-shows, fox-hunting, politics, rat-catching, or any of those other joys that diversify the lives of our peasantry. No touch of humanity reaches them, no kindly dames send them jellies or blankets, no cheery doctor enquires for their children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack even the mild excitements of church versus chapel, or the vicar's daughter's love-affair, or the squire's latest row with his lady - nothing! Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness."
Occasionally, he does offer some actual insight, as here, on latter-era saints: "Their independence fettered by the iron rules of the Vatican and of their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like the rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously introspective." And here, on the fruits of Pythagorean teaching: "So rapidly did the virus act, that soon we find Plato declaring that all the useful arts are degrading; that "so long as a man tries to study any sensible object, he can never be said to be learning anything"; in other words, that the kind of person to whom one looks for common sense should be excluded from the management of his most refined republic."
In general, however, the author is a terrible bore. Confronted with a Calabria that is desperately poor, Douglas can only respond with ridicule.
June 4, 2014
Douglas' language was for me the best thing about the book, as well as some interestign observations about saints and peasants. It seems Calabria was a 3rd world country back then. No menntion however of Bruzzano, where my great-grandfather came from.
May 15, 2014
This is not a particularly easy read. The book was published in 1915 and some of the language is not easy to follow. The author seems to enjoy obscure and unusual words. Some of them are perhaps of his own invention. Some of the chapters are a little tedious. He writes about trying to find a room , food and drink, or hiring a donkey and its owner. He seemed to take pleasure in beating down the locals when it comes to negotiating payment. He justifies this in saying that this is the way to get their respect. A common trait is placing passages in Italian, Latin, German and leaving them untranslated. This is a bit irritating when he tells us that the passage illustrates a point of some significance. I came to read the book because it was an early travel book which I had heard praised as an example of travel writing. We get description of his own experiences, walking from one village to another, looking at churches, his search for somewhere to sleep or to eat, history, philosophy and his views on religion. I found the book interesting in parts but rather hard work. It took me a long time to read.
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July 10, 2014One sees where Nabokov got his penchant for wryly comical indexes. For example:
Breakfast in Italy, dislocates moral stability, 18, 125; responsible for homicides, 127.
Charity, a form of self-indulgence, 311.
Devil, his perennial popularity, 25; his honesty, 266.
Emigrants to America, their wine-bibbing propensities and intelligence, 21-22.
Norman Douglas, a now forgotten author, was in his day famous for his novel South Wind and his travel books. This one, from 1915, follows the author's journey through the barren southern regions of Italy. It's fastidiously written, peppered with arcane facts from obscure literary sources, and charged through with the sort of droll wit that's impossible for most people nowadays to appreciate. I liked it very much, but think that for most readers it would be sheer agony.
Breakfast in Italy, dislocates moral stability, 18, 125; responsible for homicides, 127.
Charity, a form of self-indulgence, 311.
Devil, his perennial popularity, 25; his honesty, 266.
Emigrants to America, their wine-bibbing propensities and intelligence, 21-22.
Norman Douglas, a now forgotten author, was in his day famous for his novel South Wind and his travel books. This one, from 1915, follows the author's journey through the barren southern regions of Italy. It's fastidiously written, peppered with arcane facts from obscure literary sources, and charged through with the sort of droll wit that's impossible for most people nowadays to appreciate. I liked it very much, but think that for most readers it would be sheer agony.
Read
February 10, 2016I luoghi si assimilano sempre più l’uno all’altro. Cambia lo skyline delle città, ma negozi e centri commerciali, l’intreccio tentacolare di strade e tangenziali, neon e cartelloni pubblicitari sono identici. La globalizzazione livella il nostro gusto e il modo di stare al mondo, confusi in anonimi non luoghi dove spazio e tempo sono ridotti al loro grado zero.
Restituire il loro volto ai luoghi significa recuperarne l’identità e l’anima profonda, stratificazione di ere, storia, memorie che si dipanano concentricamente attorno a un nucleo germinativo. E la narrazione diventa strumento privilegiato per far riaffiorare gli intrecci di storie che nel tempo hanno sedimentato passioni, amori ed emozioni, fino a individuare la linea rossa unificatrice di un territorio o di un tessuto urbano.
Un aspetto che qualche secoli fà i colti e appassionati viaggiatori che percorrevano l’Italia in quel che veniva definito comunemente Grand Tour, iviaggio obbligato verso la scaturigine dell’antichità, avevano perfettamente colto. Restituendo un’immagine della Penisola che, pur provenendo da uno straniero, non è meno autentico ed efficace dello sguardo ‘interno’, riuscendo a volte anche a ricomporre i pezzi di un puzzle da sempre disseminati in mille rivoli.
Lo fanno attraverso le mille storie in cui si imbattono viaggiando nelle città come nei luoghi più sperduti, con la capacità di perdersi in una natura a volte aspra e selvaggia a volte dolce e ammaliante, nel labirinto dei centri urbani o tra scorci che passano inosservati a chi alla bellezza è abituato da sempre, ma non a chi vive tra le brughiere e i paesaggi del Nord Europa.
"Questa Calabria è una terra di molteplici ricordi e interessi. Una terra di grandi uomini. Nel 1737 l’erudito Aceti riuscì a citare più di duemila celebrità calabresi: atleti, generali, musicisti, centenari, inventori, martiri, dieci pontefici, dieci re, una sessantina di donne in vista. Una terra di pensatori. …E chi racconterà dettagliatamente le sue naturali attrattive?"
A raccontarla...
(http://www.annapuleo.com/norman-dougl...)
Restituire il loro volto ai luoghi significa recuperarne l’identità e l’anima profonda, stratificazione di ere, storia, memorie che si dipanano concentricamente attorno a un nucleo germinativo. E la narrazione diventa strumento privilegiato per far riaffiorare gli intrecci di storie che nel tempo hanno sedimentato passioni, amori ed emozioni, fino a individuare la linea rossa unificatrice di un territorio o di un tessuto urbano.
Un aspetto che qualche secoli fà i colti e appassionati viaggiatori che percorrevano l’Italia in quel che veniva definito comunemente Grand Tour, iviaggio obbligato verso la scaturigine dell’antichità, avevano perfettamente colto. Restituendo un’immagine della Penisola che, pur provenendo da uno straniero, non è meno autentico ed efficace dello sguardo ‘interno’, riuscendo a volte anche a ricomporre i pezzi di un puzzle da sempre disseminati in mille rivoli.
Lo fanno attraverso le mille storie in cui si imbattono viaggiando nelle città come nei luoghi più sperduti, con la capacità di perdersi in una natura a volte aspra e selvaggia a volte dolce e ammaliante, nel labirinto dei centri urbani o tra scorci che passano inosservati a chi alla bellezza è abituato da sempre, ma non a chi vive tra le brughiere e i paesaggi del Nord Europa.
"Questa Calabria è una terra di molteplici ricordi e interessi. Una terra di grandi uomini. Nel 1737 l’erudito Aceti riuscì a citare più di duemila celebrità calabresi: atleti, generali, musicisti, centenari, inventori, martiri, dieci pontefici, dieci re, una sessantina di donne in vista. Una terra di pensatori. …E chi racconterà dettagliatamente le sue naturali attrattive?"
A raccontarla...
(http://www.annapuleo.com/norman-dougl...)
August 9, 2020
Norman Douglas was a despicable guy in all too many ways. The appeal to this English reprobate of the Mediterranean world was partly that he could practice his passion for little boys without too much concern for the law. I didn't know this when I first read him -- and of course not a hint appears in "Old Calabria," which is a beautiful, mesmerizing evocation of a world that has largely ceased to exist. Before World War I (maybe I should write, "II"), the far south of Italy was isolated and little visited. Roads were poor, transportation unreliable. Its appeal -- if we set aside Douglas's abhorrent tastes -- came from a combination of sparkling sea, sun, and the notion that somehow preserved here were still traces of the old Greek world known as Magna Graecia, "Great Greece." Colonists had settled cities there with names like Tarentum and Sybaris, the latter famous (or infamous) for its lifestyle. In the Middle Ages the region fell under the control of the Byzantine Empire (after reconquest by the emperor Justinian) and so had a flavor of Greek decadence added on. It was even said that in isolated towns way up in the hills people still spoke Greek in the nineteenth century. But Douglas was just as interested, if not more so, in the reality in front of his eyes, which he evokes in a sonorous prose and with keen observation. Despite what I now know, this book continues to be a favorite, resonating with me many years after first read.
August 4, 2008
I liked this book. It had interesting information about southern Italy. Also some funny stories.
I enjoyed the writing style, although it's certainly not the type of book that made me dive into every day. I had to be in a slightly more serious mind-set.
There were chapters which I skipped over, such as his analysis of "Paradise Lost"...honestly, I just didn't care to try to be interested.
I would recommend it to people who can handle a more serious read with slightly more complex sentence structure and vocabulary.
I enjoyed the writing style, although it's certainly not the type of book that made me dive into every day. I had to be in a slightly more serious mind-set.
There were chapters which I skipped over, such as his analysis of "Paradise Lost"...honestly, I just didn't care to try to be interested.
I would recommend it to people who can handle a more serious read with slightly more complex sentence structure and vocabulary.
March 24, 2012
The text was on the small side.
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August 8, 2023A ruminative travelogue of a largely forgotten piece of post-unification Southern Italy. Douglas seems mostly famous these days as a pederast (which is quite an accomplishment, given the competition from other 20th century English writers) but this is fun all the same, interesting if not always coherent takes on the Italian history and culture.
February 16, 2022
A lot of this worked amazingly well. Others went on way too long.
July 17, 2022
No eucalipti
November 24, 2023
norman douglas's old calabria continues to go well. there is a map so you can trace his journeyings round the south of italy. he examines the succession of hermits by monks - the replacement of caves by monasteries.
he certainly knows his calabrian historians. here we find, that successor to barrius, the historian, humanist and priest girolamo marafioti. unfortunately the critic soria (at least according to norman douglas) is not impressed by his referencing (or at least not for the right reasons).
'to make his shop appear more rich in foreign merchandise, he did not scruple to adorn it with books and authors apocryphal, imaginary, and unknown to the whole human race.'
'a single eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape' opines douglas. many agree. the eucalyptus burns at a high temperature, it is an oily wood and spits out burning gouts of oil when on fire. it is a major wildfire hazard. horsemouth heard a story that it was general franco who imported it en masse to spain.
'one cannot have everything inasmuch as one thing sometimes excludes another' (quote re-punctuated) remarks one of the helpful italians douglas meets.
from his wikipedia entry douglas was a terrible human being so it is difficult to warm to his engaging travel guide act and yet it is a good read.
he certainly knows his calabrian historians. here we find, that successor to barrius, the historian, humanist and priest girolamo marafioti. unfortunately the critic soria (at least according to norman douglas) is not impressed by his referencing (or at least not for the right reasons).
'to make his shop appear more rich in foreign merchandise, he did not scruple to adorn it with books and authors apocryphal, imaginary, and unknown to the whole human race.'
'a single eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape' opines douglas. many agree. the eucalyptus burns at a high temperature, it is an oily wood and spits out burning gouts of oil when on fire. it is a major wildfire hazard. horsemouth heard a story that it was general franco who imported it en masse to spain.
'one cannot have everything inasmuch as one thing sometimes excludes another' (quote re-punctuated) remarks one of the helpful italians douglas meets.
from his wikipedia entry douglas was a terrible human being so it is difficult to warm to his engaging travel guide act and yet it is a good read.
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