Wherever the train stopped, that
sea-music was in my ears--now seeming to echo a verse of Homer,
now the softer rhythm of Theocritus. Think of what one may in
day-time on this far southern shore, its nights are sacred to the
poets of Hellas. In rounding Cape Spartivento, I strained my eyes
through the moonlight--unhappily a waning moon, which had shone
with full orb the evening I ascended to Catanzaro--to see the
Sicilian mountains; at length they stood up darkly against the paler
night. There came back to my memory a voyage at glorious sunrise,
years ago, when I passed through the Straits of Messina, and all day
long gazed at Etna, until its cone, solitary upon the horizon, shone
faint and far in the glow of evening--the morrow to bring me a
first sight of Greece.
CHAPTER XVIII
REGGIO
By its natural situation Reggio is marked for an unquiet history. It
was a gateway of Magna Graecia; it lay straight in the track of
conquering Rome when she moved towards Sicily; it offered points of
strategic importance to every invader or defender of the peninsula
throughout the mediaeval wars.
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