the boast of the Silanese that their country is as safe as the streets of Naples. Qualified praise, this!

The last genuine bandit of the Sila was Gaetano Ricca. On account of some trivial misunderstanding with the authorities, this excellent man was compelled to take to the woods in the early eighties, where he lived a wild life for some three years. A price was set on his head, but his daring and knowledge of the country intimidated everyone. I should be sorry to believe in the number of carabinieri he is supposed to have killed; no doubt the truth came out during his subsequent trial. On one occasion he was surrounded, and while the officer in command of his pursuers, who had taken refuge behind a tree, ordered him to yield, Ricca waited patiently till the point of his enemy's foot became visible, when he pierced his ankle-bone with his last bullet and escaped. He afterwards surrendered and was imprisoned for twenty years or so; at present he is once more on the Sila, enjoying a green old age in his home near Parenti. If I had been aware of this fact at the time, I would have called on him to pay my respects, as I must have walked within a few yards of his house. His memoirs might be no less interesting than those of the Sardinian brigand Tolu which have been printed. It may be long before another outlaw of this kind appears on the Sila. Musolino infested the neighbouring Aspromonte up to a few years ago, and would no doubt be free to this day if he had not left the district, inasmuch as the officer who was sent to catch him was paid a fixed sum for every day he spent in the chase, and naturally found it in his interests never to discover his whereabouts. He is now languishing in solitary confinement on Elba, having been accidentally captured by two policemen who were searching for another man, and who nearly fainted when he pronounced his name. But this name of Musolino will long survive as that of a martyr and national hero; even at civilised Cosenza, I saw a play of which he was the leading figure, in which this rascal was depicted as a pale, long-suffering gentleman of the misunderstood' type, friend of the helpless, champion of widows and orphans, and rectifier of all wrongs.

San Giovanni in Fiore is the central village or town of the Sila; but it is central only in a geographical sense-the region immediately surrounding it is nowise representative. It lies on a rocky slope, facing southward, and the prospect towards the Ionian Sea is intercepted by hills. The neighbouring summits, which, with proper administration, could produce firewood in abundance, are

bare for miles around, and to gather a handful of fuel entails a scramble of two or three hours.

The only thing worth seeing in San Giovanni are the women. Their natural charms are enhanced by elaborate and tasteful golden ornaments, and by an attractive costume and mode of dressing the hair, two curls of which are worn hanging down before the ears with a mischievously seductive air. Many Calabrian towns and villages still possess their peculiar female costume; that of Tiriolo, I remember, is very gay in colour--I did not visit Cimigliano, which is celebrated in this respect-but in point of mere personal appearance I think it would be difficult to find anywhere an equal number of really handsome women in such a restricted space. Their eyes are black or of a deep gentian blue; their complexion pale; their movements and poses impressed with a stamp of great distinction. It is nothing short of a miracle how they manage to keep their good looks and the appearance of scrupulous cleanliness among their sordid surroundings; they must use soap, although I was assured that there was not one piece of that article in the whole Sila, and certainly saw no traces of it myself.

For San Giovanni is as dirty as can well be; it has all the accumulated filth of an Eastern town without any of its glowing tints and harmonious outlines. We are disposed to associate squalor with certain artistic effects, but it may be said of nearly all Calabrian villages that they have solved the problem how to be ineffably squalid without becoming in the least picturesque. Much of this grimy appearance is due to the smoke which issues out of all the windows and blackens the house-walls inside and out-the native persisting in a prehistoric fashion of cooking on the floor. The buildings themselves look crude and gaunt from their lack of plaster and eyeless windows; black pigs wallowing at every doorstep contribute to this slovenly ensemble. The City Fathers here have turned their backs upon civilisation; I daresay the magnitude of the task before them has paralysed their initiative. Nothing is done in the way of public hygiene, and I saw women washing linen in water which was neither more nor less than an open drain. There is no street lighting whatever; a proposal on the part of a North Italian society to draw electric power from the waters of the Neto, which foams below the town, was scornfully rejected; one single tawdry lamp, which was bought some years ago as a sample in a moment of municipal recklessness, has been lighted three times in as many years, and on the very day of the year when it was

least necessary, namely, midsummer (San Giovanni). It now hangs at a dangerous angle, and I doubt whether it will survive till its services are requisitioned next June. This in a town of 18,000 inhabitants, and in Italy, where the evening life of the populace plays such an important role! No wonder North Italians, judging by such external indications, regard all Calabrians as savages.

This place must be very unhealthy. Upon my arrival, the pangs of hunger induced me to ask for some eggs, but I was informed that none were procurable, because the invalids eat them all. I then suggested a chicken, but the girl frankly told me 'You will never be able to pay for it.' Milk is worth sixty centimes a litre, and, of course, the invalids get all there is of it. I never saw a drop, and eggs only on one occasion, when an inspector of some kind put in an appearance and devoured two of them, the rest of us looking on enviously. No doubt they had been ordered weeks beforehand in anticipation of his visit, or perhaps, to make sure, he had brought them with him.

Altogether, San Giovanni has a bad prognosis. As regards situation, it cannot compare with Savelli or the neighbouring Casino, which have truly noble, soul-inspiring views over the whole Sila, and southward down its many folded undulations that descend in a grand procession of twenty miles towards the blue Ionian, where sparkles the gleaming horn of Cotrone. The water supply of San Giovanni is tainted, and as I crawled and skipped among its unsavoury tenements I could not help regretting that recent earthquakes had spared them. If I were tyrant of the place, I would certainly begin by a general bombardment. The only thing worth preserving is the portal of the church, a large and finely proportioned structure of black stone, which looked ill at ease among its ignoble environment. A priest, to whom I applied for information as to its history, told me that he had never thought about the matter-straightforward, at least, like most Calabrians!

It was impossible to convince these good folks that I did not visit their mountain for some commercial speculation or to spy out the nakedness of the land. On arriving one evening at one of the larger places, an amiable citizen at once took me aside and assured me that there was not a soldo of money to be made there, and that, fortunately for myself, I should find a diligence leaving early next morning. One old man, I remember, was particularly anxious to find out the real reason of my visit. My secret, he gave me to understand, would be inviolably kept by him; indeed, he had

friends, influential friends, in various parts of the district who might, upon occasion, be useful to me in my speculations. If I was not an engineer, why did I carry a field-glass? Was it electricity, or some new railway? There were minerals, too; salt mines at Caccuri; could it be gold? Travelling for pleasure? Who travels for pleasure on the Sila, when there are the mighty cities of Cotrone and Catanzaro so near at hand?

The men on the Sila are such poor creatures in comparison with their wives and daughters that I am sure the ancient Hellenic civilisation which spread along the shores of both surrounding seas never climbed up into this trackless gloom, for wherever Greek blood can be traced the reverse selection has taken place. Unlike the Greek women and unlike those in many mountainous districts of Western Europe, these Bruttian Italiotes have learned the secret of making their men do all the hard work; none but the poorest of them bear burdens or indulge in any form of manual labour; beyond a little weaving, they do absolutely nothing except chatter with each other or with the priests, and spend their husbands' money (the husbands are nearly all emigrants in America). Hence they remain stately and unwrinkled through life, and it would be interesting to know for how many generations this female selection has been going on. The males have no constant type of physiognomy, and whoever expects to find the poetic shepherds for which the Sila was renowned will be disappointed. These shepherds are either evil-featured boys, indescribably dirty, or shrewd fellows of middle age, keeping strict business accounts for their masters of every ounce of cheese and butter produced. Only once I saw anything approaching the ideal-two curly-haired radiant striplings, reclining sub tegmine fagi in the best Virgilian style, and whistling, in emulation, wondrous dances and melodies of their native shore. But they were not Sila born; they had come up from the lower flanks of the hills to tend their masters' flocks.

I asked them, as I asked many others, about the double tibia, that venerable instrument of music which is familiar in classic sculpture and literature, and still found, they say, among these hills. But the answer was everywhere the same; they knew it; so-and-so used to play it; certain maestri in certain villages still made it, or sometimes the boys cut it for themselves-they described it accurately enough, but could not produce a specimen. Single pipes, yes; and bagpipes galore; but the fischietto a pariglia, as they called it, was out of fashion' wherever I asked for it.

Nearly all the cattle on the Sila, like the land itself, belong to large proprietors. These great signori are for the most part invisible; they inhabit their town-houses, and the very name of the Sila sends a cold shudder through their bones; their revenues are collected from the shepherds by agents, who seem to do the work with the conscientiousness of the race. In one hut I observed a small fragment of the skin of a newly killed kid; the wolf had eaten it the night before, and the shepherd was keeping this corpus delicti in order to prove to the agent that he was innocent of the murder. There was something naïve in his honesty, as if a shepherd could not eat a kid as well as any wolf, and preserve a fragment of its skin! The agent, no doubt, would hand it on to his signore, by way of 'confirmation and verification.' For though the old wolves are shot and killed by spring guns and dynamite, while the young ones are caught alive in steel traps and other appliances, the numbers of this formidable beast are still large enough to preoccupy the shepherds. I was therefore surprised to see what a poor breed of dogs they keep; scraggy mongrels, for the most part, that run for their lives at the mere sight of a wolf who can, and does, bite them into two pieces with one snap of his jaws. Fortunately, human beings are seldom attacked in the Sila, a dog or a pig being generally forthcoming when the usual prey is not to be found. Yet only a few months before my arrival a sad affair had occurred: the wolf had carried off a small boy before the eyes of his parents, who pursued him, powerless to help; the head and arms had been already devoured before a shot from a neighbour killed the beast. Truly, un grande dispiacere di famiglia, as my informant styled it.

The postal-diligence service in these hills is no doubt good enough for its purpose, but it is naturally slow, as the distances are great, and the country, especially the approaches to the Sila, often torn into deep ravines which take long hours to negotiate. For a short trip, it would be better to engage a motor-car, which can cover the distance from Cosenza to San Giovanni in two hours, while a carriage takes fourteen; athletic persons will find a bicycle preferable to the usual mode of travelling. The chief connecting roads are well engineered, and their surface, being of primary rock, hardly ever becomes dusty. But whoever steps aside from the principal roads must needs be a good walker, for the paths are so rough that riding on a mule or donkey, especially on a Calabrian saddle, is almost as fatiguing as going on foot; he must also have the digestion of an ostrich.