Old Calabria

Norman Douglas's Old Calabria turns southern Italy into a landscape where beauty, history, and decay are inseparable. In Lucera, he finds a hill town of quiet dignity: clean streets, a modest garden, a cypress cemetery, and above all the Suabian castle, whose walls, relics, and legends preserve the memory of Frederick II, Manfred, and the town's remarkable Saracen past. Douglas's amused satire targets civic vanity, manufactured saints, and local monument-making, even as he lingers over festivals, crowds, and the town's stubborn vitality. From there the book widens into moonlit meditations on Hohenstaufen tragedy, the fall of dynasties, and the eerie survival of buried histories. The journey continues through Apulia and beyond, where heat, sirocco, marsh fever, ruined harbors, exile islands, and neglected seafronts expose the harshness of the southern world. Douglas also reflects on the region's changing climate, lost forests, and the dry wit of its people. In a later literary excursion, he argues that Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained drew deeply on Italian models such as Tasso, Ariosto, Marino, and Salandra, defending Milton's borrowings as part of his epic power. Throughout, the book blends travel, history, satire, and criticism into a vivid portrait of Calabria and the Mediterranean imagination. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.