A stupendous erudite collection of impressions and reportage about the most neglected part of Italy from the early Twentieth Century. Douglas was a polymath who firmly held that life was there to be enjoyed. This book rather proves his point.

Fondamentale per arrivare alla fine, riuscire a capire dalle prime righe di ciascun capitolo cosa si può saltare e cosa si può provare a leggere alla ricerca di qualcosa di interessante. Douglas è un poligrafo erudito che discetta di qualunque cosa, salta di palo in frasca, apre parentesi infinite che possono chiudersi anche venti pagine dopo, sembra avere come interesse principale quello di produrre un tomo di un determinato spessore. Di tutti i libri letti sulla Calabria finora, sicuramente il più noioso. ( )

Before reading this, all I knew of Norman Douglas was a vague idea of him as one of the last of the great Edwardian reprobates, famous for his talent for hopping over a succession of frontiers just in time to avoid (sex) scandals, regarded in his later life as one of the cultural monuments of Capri (together with Gracie Fields and William Walton).

[Old Calabria], published in 1915, purports to be an account of one journey through Southern Italy, but it soon becomes clear that Douglas must have visited the area several times between about 1908 and 1912 (there are few mentions of external events, but he does talk about the Messina earthquake and the Albanian rebellion).

There is no attempt to cultivate the spontaneous “diary-style” later popularised by Robert Byron: it's the kind of travel book that wears its erudition with pride, and was obviously put together not merely in one library, but in a whole succession of them. Douglas refers to, and quotes from, not only the classical authors and recent travel writers you might expect, but also all manner of obscure 17th and 18th century local historians. Douglas clearly takes an especial pleasure in lives of local saints, the more implausible the better. There's a whole chapter devoted to an obscure flying Franciscan, and another to a saint who devoted much of his time to the useful art of resurrecting deceased eels.

But Douglas isn't just interested in history and religion: there are long discussions of problems like malaria, deforestation, crime and the failures of the Italian justice system. There's a chapter about a 17th century play that might have inspired [Paradise lost]. A discussion of Pythagoras leads to a long aside on the intellectual weakness resulting from too much indulgence in the kind of soft, anti-scientific thought that comes from Pythagoras and Plato (a weakness he specifically accuses the English of being prone to). So it's definitely not a journey for cissies. But you shouldn't let that put you off. Most of the names he drops are so obscure that he clearly doesn't expect his readers to be able to pick them up, and you can make sense of most things without having heard of them. The style is a bit Edwardian, but it's still extremely readable. Somewhere about halfway between Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, perhaps, if you can imagine that. Fiercely intelligent and erudite, but with a waspish delight in teasing the reader’s expectations.

On the more prosaic side, there's a lot of very perceptive observation of local people and habits. Some obvious prejudices, of course, but not as many as you might expect from someone of his class and period. He likes to complain about the discomforts of travelling, and is often very funny when he does, but he's also realistic about what to expect, and makes the best of what he can find. He knows he's in an area where there are no roads to speak of, few hotels and fewer travellers, and many places are so poor that there is simply no food that anyone can sell him. He has a lot of fun playing the game where he has to let the locals cheat him exactly enough to satisfy their own self-respect, but not so much that they despise him. By the sound of it, even more fun when the local doing the cheating is a saucy young man with Hellenic good looks... ( )

Waspish, erudite - makes you long to be there ( )