Free A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey Page A

orange from the far South, perhaps Sicily. I, like Gissing sitting at his window, was in heaven.
    Too soon, I was back at the train station, gathering my luggage and getting ready to board the locale for Cosenza. On this trip, the train entered the mountain immediately south of the town, bore through a black tunnel for twenty minutes, and erupted on the east side of the Apennines just north of Cosenza. Disappointing and certainly not a picturesque trip.
    Months later, in another journey to this village, I had a car. It made all the difference in following Gissing’s trail. The car would keep me out of that dark, uninviting train tunnel. It would allow me to find the old road Gissing followed in his rented carriage. That road, in good repair and still used by locals, appears on some of the more detailed road maps.

Chapter 6
    The Missing Madonna, and Concrete Bunkers with a View
    The day promised rain. I was looking for the old highway to Cosenza, and the weather was cold. The air had that chilly, wet bite to it that could mean rain might turn to snow. Rain would be no problem, but snow over the tops of the coastal mountains could make the old highway treacherous. With some searching, helpful directions from obliging residents, and a lot of backtracking, I found the road Gissing used, his small carriage drawn by “three little horses” and his driver accompanied by a “half-naked lad” who, apparently for the fun of it, would leap off the carriage, take “a short-cut up some rugged footway between the loops of the road,” and reappear a few minutes later.
    Gissing set off from in front of the Leone, where “a considerable number of loafers had assembled to see me off, and of these some half dozen were persevering mendicants [beggars.] It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume; all wore the common, colorless garb of our destroying age.… With whip-cracking and vociferation, amid good-natured farewells from the crowd, we started away. It was just ten o’clock.”
    The road his carriage driver followed up and over the mountains is the old S107, probably created by the Romans more than one thousand years ago. In recent years, it has been replaced by a new four-lane, freeway-style highway that quickly cuts through the mountains nineteen miles inland to Cosenza, like the train, through its own series of tunnels.
    The old road turns sharply off the new highway just a mile or so to the south of Paola. It heads immediately back north and leads a traveler up the incredibly steep mountain, the Catena Costiera, in a series of hairpin curves, climbing higher and higher until I felt almost like I was hanging over the Tyrrhenian coast. The road is paved but extremely narrow, barely wide enough for two cars passing in opposite directions. Some of the hairpin curves are even narrower, so that if two vehicles meet, one would have to stop and wait for the other to pass. And many of the curves are blind where they move around the nose of a promontory.
    On this trip over the mountain, I met perhaps four other vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Often, when I stopped to survey the view, I could hear car after car humming along the new highway farther south, their engine noise filtering through the oak, chestnut, beech, and pine trees that, thankfully, shielded them from my view. Except for that distant humming, once over the initial crest of the tall coastal range, I was lost in a deep, silent forest that fascinated me as much as it had the Englishman.
    On the steep mountainside, well before I got to the trees, cattle grazed, their bells clanking like deep, hollow-toned wind chimes as they moved through the short grass. The slope was so steep that I imagined those cows must have longer legs on their downhill side.

    The new S107 can be seen from the old S107 that carried Gissing in a small three-horse carriage across the coastal mountains from Paola to Cosenza. The lichen-covered dome of