GISSING AND DOUGLAS, and everyone before them, searched for the fabled city of Sibari, or Sybaris. They asked villagers, shepherds, and local historians, everyone they could, but they all left disappointed, convinced the city was just a myth.Sybarites lived in such opulence that they were the envy of Magna Graecia. (Even today the word “sybarite” defines a person who is a sensualist, someone who lives a life of opulence and indulgence.) In 510 B.C., as legend has it, the people of Crotone invaded Sibari, plundered its great wealth, and burned it to the ground. The Sybarites fled to the mountain village that is now Corigliano Calabro, some historians say; those who didn’t escape were taken into slavery. To vanquish Sibari forever, the Crotonese diverted the flow of the huge Crati River and submerged the city. Eventually Sibari became a name in legend only.
Today citrus fields occupy the land between the sea and the mountains, a narrow five miles, following the riverbed of the Crati, now a mere trickle. With so few flat, fertile areas in Calabria, farmers use every possible patch of soil within the groves of trees, so it’s
not uncommon to see smaller almond and fig trees planted in between the larger, leafier mandarin and clementine trees.
The mandarin trees are shorter and bushier than the clementines, and are more closely pruned. Clementines ripen as early as September, a full three months before the mandarins. Every fifteen years the trees are pulled up, and new ones are planted.
Giuseppe and I entered the tourist office of the Sibari archaeological site. Two men who had been smoking and talking stopped and looked up at us. We paid the admission and walked toward the grounds, whereupon one of the men rose and lugged himself toward us.
“You can only see the grounds with a guide,” he said, neither lazily nor enthusiastically. He put on a jacket that marked him as an official park guide.
Within minutes Giuseppe had engaged him in conversation, and within minutes they learned that they had friends in common. Giuseppe seemed to know someone no matter how far off the well-traveled path he was. And if he was in a place that was truly foreign to him, he would strike up a conversation with a stranger anyway.
Now that Giuseppe was no longer just a curious tourist, the guide—his name was Angelo—gave us a special tour of the site, spicing his narrative with local history and lore. He brought us beyond the yellow ropes marking areas off-limits and steered us down the damp main road that at one time had led from the sea to what archaeologists believe had been a college. Water hoses snaked throughout the excavations, and he explained that the workers were still pumping out what had become marshland after the river receded.
The breeze from the sea carried with it the scent of orange blossoms. The excavations had actually uncovered the ruins of three cities built one on top of another. We walked along the main cobblestone road, which still showed the ruts from ancient carriage wheels. The road at one time extended out to the sea, and at the center of the gridded city, the cross street ran north to south. Now nearly three thousand years after it had been founded—and almost a
hundred years after Douglas had given up his search—I stood at the site of a jewel in the crown that was Magna Graecia.
About forty years after the Crotonese destroyed Sibari, the villagers returned from their hideouts to try to rebuild their city, but the Crotonese fought them back to the hills and the sea. After another failed attempt, they returned in 444 B.C. and commenced to rebuild the city, calling it Thourioi. About a hundred years later the city fell once again, this time to the native tribes called the Bruttians (from Calabria) and the Lucanians (from Basilicata).
Not until about 190 B.C., with the help of the Romans, was the city, now called Copia, rebuilt successfully. Copia lasted until the sixth century A.D., when a malaria epidemic wiped out the population.
Now fig and olive trees surround the ruins of Copia’s Roman amphitheater; you can walk along the floor of a Roman house and peer into a large bath lined with red tile. Grand column bases line the main street of Thourioi. And virtually all that has been uncovered of Sibari is the original layout and various pieces of gold.
The excavation of Sibari is one of Calabria’s postwar success stories. Under the direction of archaeologist Umberto Zanotti-Bianco, who under Mussolini was imprisoned (much like Carlo Levi) in 1932, the serious research to find Sibari began. The first stone of Sibari wasn’t uncovered until shortly after the war ended, and even then archaeologists weren’t convinced that they had unearthed the mythical city.
The hum of pumps extracting water from the longtime riverbed throbbed and disappeared into the nearby marshland. My eyes followed the empty cobblestone road that led to the horizon when Giuseppe pointed to a mountain with two peaks, separated by a crescent slope. It looked menacing in the distance. Dark thunderclouds flanked the mountain. There was something primitive about it.
“The mountain is called Sellaro, named after its shape—a saddle. That’s where we’re headed.”
We left the city and drove out of ancient Calabria onto a road
barely two lanes wide. About a hundred feet along the road there was a flash of color and movement in the bushes. As we passed, I spotted two dark-haired women walking out of the brush onto a sandy tractor road that led into the mandarin groves. It was cold, and they wore heavy jackets and dresses.
“Prostitutes,” Giuseppe said. “Albanian girls waiting for truck drivers and businessmen. They get dropped off here in the afternoon and get picked up late at night.”
They weren’t showing leg, as I would have expected, and they weren’t calling out to us. They just stared. To judge from their wizened faces, they must have descended from the ancient Sybarite prostitutes themselves.
Twenty minutes later—twenty minutes that spanned twenty-five hundred years—we reached the resort village of Laghi di Sibari. There Sibari had been reincarnated as a West Palm Beach housing complex. Though its name translates as “Lake of Sibari,” there is really only one large lake, shaped to give the impression that each row of condos opened up onto its own private lake—it had been man-made, with a channel cut to connect it with the Ionian Sea.
Laghi di Sibari was built in 1996 by an English developer. Like all new buildings on the Ionian Sea, it is populated only in the summer, although British and German tourists trickle in during the off season to take advantage of cheaper rates and less congested beaches.
Of all the tourist complexes on the Ionian Sea, Laghi di Sibari is perhaps the most attractive. Each villa has its own gated front garden and a dock. The sparrows’ chirps carried across the lake. In the summer, streets are lined with oleander, which happens to be the name of the only hotel there, II Oleandro. As in U.S. suburbs, streets and villas are named after the birds and trees that they’ve displaced. One villa has the name Il Cormorano, the cormorant.
Perhaps it is insensitive to criticize the hasty, ugly character of most other Calabrese tourist villages. They have brought income into a region that has always struggled economically, enabling the Calabresi to catch up to the rest of Italy. These new developments
fill voids between places of historic interest, and in Calabria there are many voids to be filled.
“There is no crime here … now,” Giuseppe remarked, and I knew this was a teaser to a story.
“About five years ago there were several robberies and thefts. The caretaker received a call from someone and caught the thief hiding in the bushes. So he shot him.” He explained to me that all the contadini, the farmers, had guns to protect their crops and livestock. There is a Calabrese saying, Paura guarda la vigne, non la siepe—it is fear, not hedges or fences, that guards the vines—and while there’s less handgun violence in Italy than in the United States, this saying still is the rule in Calabria.
In the center of the hotel complex, there was a bar, a restaurant—its doors closed—a sitting room, a patio for the large pool, and a shop that sold souvenirs and newspapers.
We stood at the bar, and a tall, large-boned woman appeared behind the counter. She greeted us with a nod and served us each a caffè. Afterward we walked into the shop and perused the racks of postcards. The woman followed us and took on the role of shopkeeper, with the same sour face.
“Gentilissima,” Giuseppe began in his most formal tone, “may I show you a map?”
He pulled his map out of his briefcase and launched into his sales pitch, comparing her outdated postcards with his custom-made new ones.
I shuffled through the magazines and newspapers—most of them German—looking for news from the States. Italian papers covered little American news unless it had to do with fashion or music or sensational shootings.
The phone rang. The woman cut Giuseppe short to answer. While she talked, he whispered in my ear, “That’s the wife of the caretaker.”
When I didn’t make the connection, he formed his hand into a pistol.
I thought that Giuseppe was working hard and getting nowhere, but when the caretaker’s wife returned, they got down to business.
She commissioned a series of postcards. No, she didn’t need to see his slide show; no, she didn’t need to see anything else.
She spied me ardently turning pages of a week-old Time magazine. She smiled at me and said, “Don’t worry, it’s my gift to you. Come back when you next visit.” While Giuseppe plied his trade as a photographer, the caretaker’s wife worked hers, wanting to please the American traveler.
Here in this isolated resort that was all but shut down during the off season was where I found the only English-language periodical in all of Calabria.