Customer Reviews

Old Calabria Hb (Picador Travel Classics)

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If you enjoy books by literary travellers, you will love this one. In it a humane sensibility reveals itself in clean, meticulous prose. This is not a book about Calabria but a book about Norman Douglas in Calabria, a much more interesting topic. Read Paul Fussell's excellent essay on Douglas, "Norman Douglas's Temporary Attachments" and you will understand. In Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars

This book is a masterpiece of English literature on Italy. However the book description on Amazon is misleading. It is not about Calabria but "Old Calabria." To the ancients the area between northern Apulia (Puglia) and Calabria, and of course Calabria itself, was Calabria. The first half of the book is mostly about the area which is called Tavoliere di Puglia, which is in current-day Puglia, and parts of Basilicata (the old Lucania). Only the second half deals with current-day Calabria.

Norman Douglas's knowledge and grasp of Southern Italy is unsurpassed. I also highly recommend "Siren Land." Add to these Goethe's "Italian Journey" and you will have gained the kind of insight that no contemporary, olive-tree hugging, marketing-conscious author can ever provide.

This was a brilliant book and thoroughly enjoyable. At first I got it to look into the nature of the Calabrian people but soon realized it was the story of one man's interpretation of his own travels through Southern Italy in areas that may at one time have been part of Calabria. Interestingly San Giuseppe di Cupertino was mentioned in the book but he is from Le Marche, far north of Calabria if old. Still a witty and sarcastic endeavor that was fun to read.

'Old Calabria' is a travelogue reporting a British aristocrat's journey to Southern Italy and Calabria at the turn of the 20th century. For readers interested in Calabria, its real value lies in its depiction of how Southern Italy must have appeared to a foreigner's eyes at the time. Aside from the literary ability of the author, the book's subsequent success has depended more from the paucity of other accounts on Calabria in English than for any other intrinsic merit. Indeed, the book is much more interesting as an account of how Calabria has been represented by foreigners. There are a number of other accounts by English speakers on Calabria that are more nuanced and therefore more interesting. 'Old Calabria' reveals more about the common prejudices held by educated English speakers on Calabria than the region itself. In this book Norman Douglas perpetuates a number of mythologies regarding the South of Italy that are still current today as exoticising motifs, both in the negative and the positive: the "wildness" and "impenetrability" of Calabria, its deployment as a borderland between the great constructs called "Orient" and the "West" and so forth. For those people of Calabrian origins who have read the book in search of a sense of identity and feelings of self worth, this book may have loomed the larger, the greater their actual alienation from their origins. Rather than bringing them closer to an understanding of their identities, I would argue that the book has distanced them even further. It is through the very discourses that books such as these have perpetuated and legitimated in the English speaking world, that diasporic Calabrians have been alienated from themselves.

The book was not as I expected and rather dated in content, so it was no help to me in my current search for information on Calabria. I returned the book according to the credit guidelines from Amazon but did not receive a credit.

Ann Garland