Free A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey

all, if it is rung up on the machine, a record for the tax collector is created. Only once—in a rest-stop coffee bar outside of Naples—have I seen an officer of the polizia di finanza watching transactions to ensure they were rung up and receipts dispensed.
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    The walk up the hill toward the rampart that likely was Gissing’s pathway follows modern streets lined with the usual collection of small shops found near the train stations of most Italian cities: a bar serving coffee, a tiny space jammed with hardware, a barbiere (barber), a souvenir shop. Pedestrians still use the rampart; cars follow a narrow road that heads straight up along the town’s south side.
    A pleasing park, with a gratifying view of the Tyrrhenian coast north and south of Paola, sits at the top, and a narrow cobblestone street leads a few hundred feet up to the weathered-stone gate at the entrance to the old town. My predecessor must have walked through this gate. I doubt if any part of the newer town that now lies before it existed one hundred years ago. The gate leads into the old main piazza, Piazza del Popolo, with a grand old fountain at a point where two streets, from the south and north, enter the square. Gissing was deposited at an inn called the Leone, the Lion.
    He writes: “The room into which they showed me had a delightful prospect. Deep beneath the window lay a wild, leafy garden, and lower on the hillside a lemon orchard shining with yellow fruit.… The beauty of this view, and the calm splendor of the early morning, put me into happiest mood.… I ate and drank by the window, exulting in what I saw and what I hoped to see.”
    In an hour’s worth of walking around the square, I saw no building identified as the Leone nor did I expect to. There was no evidence that an old inn existed in the old town, but I did see gardens where lemon and orange trees flourished in front of buildings facing the sea. This small, old center, with another fountain a few hundred feet down Corso Garibaldi to the north, was charming. The second fountain covered a larger space than the one at Piazza del Popolo. It had several spigots pouring steady streams into the trough-like basin. I could visualize the women Gissing saw drawing “fair water in jugs and jars of antique beauty.”
    The square was silent. The day was comfortably warm. Birds were in the trees in tiny gardens everywhere. The shocking blue sky had only a few wisps of clouds. The sound of cars—the plague of modern Italy—was distant and easily put out of mind. I could live here, I thought, glancing up at a two-story medieval stone house opposite the tiny square, its back opening from the second level onto a small garden with two orange trees, a lemon tree, and a variety of colorful bushes.
    I walked into a small alimentari, or grocery store, located just a few feet from this murmuring old fountain and picked out meats and cheeses for a picnic lunch. The two women there smiled at my attempts to identify the kinds of food I wanted. What do you call “picnic” in Italian? I asked. “Picnic,” the woman behind the meat counter said, a broad, warm smile crossing her smooth, unlined face. Months later, I discovered a more appropriate, traditional phrase would have been una merenda, an afternoon snack.

    The fountain in Páola’s Piazza del Popolo sits in the middle of the old town’s one street. This view looks to the south, down via Giuseppe Valitutti. Turn north toward a second, larger fountain with several individual spigots and the street becomes the Corso Garibaldi. The inn Gissing knew as the Leone was near this spot.     Photo by John Keahey
    I returned to the second fountain—my favorite—and devoured la mia merenda: crisp bread holding salami and cheese, a bottle of sparkling water, con gas (with bubbles), an orange with its peel streaked dark red—a “blood”