"Where the little river Liris runs into the Gulf of Gaeta, seventy miles south of Rome, may be placed the natural boundary between central and southern Italy."
Thus begins "Greek Cities in Italy and Sicily," a book written by David Randall-MacIver and published in 1931. This was pretty much square in the middle of the period written about by Paul Fussell in "Abroad," his study of English literary travelogues written between the world wars; and the minor key of "Greek Cities is indeed the travelogue.
But the major key of Greek Cities is a description of Greek architectural sites in southern Italy and Sicily in the late 1920's, with narratives about the cities where the sites are found including the cities' mythologies and most famous citizens, visitors, and political figures. The book's history, then, spans the period from about the eighth century BC to about the third century BC, when Rome displaced Carthage permanently from Sicily in the Punic Wars, and usurped the Greeks' dominance on the island.
So, I skimmed the book's first eighty pages about the Greek cities in southern Italy and started with Chapter VIII - "From Paola to Syracuse" - which begins in the book's minor key and then modulates effortlessly into its major key; and I paraphrase from Chapter VIII's first paragraphs:
"The majority of my readers in all probability will start for Sicily from Naples.
"And if I may advise them I would say do not go by sea, which is perfectly uninteresting. Once out of sight of land, one piece of sea is exactly like another, and if the crossing is made at night even the sea is invisible. But the railway journey down the west coast of Calabria and the east coast of Sicily is the experience of a lifetime. There is scarcely a journey in Europe which is so beautiful and so full of historic interest at every moment....If it chance to be in the middle of February, it seems as though snow-clad trees were reflecting the rising sun (in Calabria). These are the almond trees in blossom....At Villa San Giovanni the train is ferried across the straits on a steamer (to Messina), a picturesque proceeding, and more practical than the method by which Herakles once crossed these waters, swimming beside the oxen stolen from Geryones with his arm resting on one horn of the leader. It would seem a very difficult undertaking to swim the straits against the currents even if we ignored Charybdis. And yet it is on record that when Himilkon stormed Messina in 397 B.C., 200 of the city's defenders threw themselves into the waters and no less than fifty succeeded in reaching the Italian shore...."
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