A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey

was and how I was renovating it. She said, matter-of-factly, that her home just outside of Siena’s walls dated back to the twelfth century C.E. It had been renovated dozens of times in the intervening seven hundred years. And there was another teacher who, leading me up the steps to her Sienese office eighteen months later, casually mentioned that the three-foot-high vase in the entryway, with flowers tumbling from the top, was, probably, several hundred years old. “It has always been here,” she said, shrugging off questions about its origins.
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    Now, far away from Siena, I watch this historical stretch across the Apennine range between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas reveal itself through the window of my train compartment. In addition to the Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples who walked here, this area also was used heavily by early Greek colonists-turned-traders.
    About 720 B.C.E. , one group of Greeks built the city of Sybaris between the rivers Coscile (called the Sybaris River in ancient times) and Crati, at a point near where both flowed just hundreds of yards apart into the Ionian Sea. This city became famous in ancient times for its wealth and the hedonistic, gluttonous lifestyle of its citizens. It is this city’s ancient name that gives us the English word sybarite, used to describe someone who is a voluptuary or a sensualist.
    Today’s Coscile has lost its Ionian mouth and now flows into the Crati some thirteen miles west of the ancient city of Sybaris’s recently discovered location. The archaeological dig is just southeast of modern Síbari along the main road, S106, that connects Taranto to the north and Reggio to the south.
    Ancient writers say the tract westward from Sybaris to the Tyrrhenian Sea could be traveled with pack animals in just three days, allowing Sybarite traders to connect with Etruscan traders, who sailed south along the west coast from the region of modern Tuscany north of Rome. This trade took place in a series of colonies—Poseidonia, Skidros, and Laos. Poseidonia, now well preserved and known by its later Roman name Paestum, is part of a complex of ruins sixty miles south of Naples.
    The pathway between Sybaris and its west-coast subcolonies crosses ground near where Spartacus fought and died in 71 B.C.E. Hollywood, in the Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus, had the gladiator, believed to be a former Roman army officer, dying instead on a cross near Rome. But his death, historians tell us, was likely on the battlefield near the Crati and in the midst of a plain traversed for thousands of years before his birth.
    Spartacus’s followers were taken to Capua—the site of the gladiatorial school north of Naples where he had been trained—and were crucified by the thousands, one after another, along the Via Appia between there and the southern gates of then Republican Rome.
    Today at the former Greek subcolony of Poseidonia, now called Paestum, it is hard to imagine that these magnificent ruins were virtually unknown until the eighteenth century C.E. Margaret Guido, writing in Southern Italy: An Archaeological Guide, tells us that these “splendid Greek temples” for hundreds of years had been “hidden among trees and malarial swamps, which in the course of centuries developed around them. They may even have been partly standing in water.”
    Today, we see the remains of a nearly complete Greek town, generally “unencumbered by modern building, though modified and added to in Roman times.”
    Guido offers a clue as to why the Greeks flourished for so many centuries in a land that eventually became swampy and beset with malaria, driving its occupants elsewhere.
    Since early ancient times, she notes, the trees that blanketed the region had been cut down. Rivers, such as the Sele, that flow near Poseidonia/Paestum became silted up with a sediment of rocks and mud brought down from the denuded hills, “and