VIA VIA APPIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 227, 29 October 1943, Page 8

VIA VIA APPIA

Along the Road to Rome

(Written for "The Listener" by

A.M.

R.

though the Eighth and Fifth Armies are getting thither despite the alleged ones that squeeze along between the ranges that rib Italy’s waist, their gear will follow by an_ easier route, A roads lead to Rome. But, "Soldiers!" cried Napoleon, at the Battle of the Pyramids, "The centuries look down on you!" "Drivers!" Montgomery and Clark might radio by analogy (only we know they won't), "you are hurrying over history!" For the Appian Way, constructed from Rome to Italy's far-eastern heel, is Europe’s most historic highway. The original section, that built by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 B.C. as far as Capua, I have traversed foot by foot — though only up the hills on foot. This is an attempt, in a less pedestrian way, to help you to move along it in imagination with our advancing armies. ak x Bg HE northern rim of the dish-shaped Volturno plain consists of soft green, winding, olive-sprinkled downs, on the far side of which a little riverbasin lies locked between mountains and sea. Villages are frequent, | surrounded by orange groves; for this sheltered nook is the last pocket of citrus country as you move north. And Formia aiong the bay, which is to-day a ladder of fishermen’s cottages leaning against a steep slope that overhangs a beach, used once to be to Rome what Bournemouth is to London. While from the, little plain rose the clank, the curses and the groans of manacled slaves planting or scything to numbers, and while Via Appia below the holiday villas swam with wealth ever pouring into Rome from the whole conquered world, the

mistresses of the world’s masters lolled through the summer heats in Formia in a modernity of plucked eyebrows, rouged lips, and padded consciences. Above Formia is the Pass of Itri, a steep, boulder-strewn mountain ridge, which would make a great line for a retreating army to hold. Fortunately, it is the far side that is really precipitous. The only thing that kept me climbing up its heat-breathing rocks one late summer evening-rocks bare but for stunted bushes peering out of great cracks and clefts-was competition with a donkey-cart top-heavy with firewood and a family, zig-zagging up the track behind. Whether or not the fat driver’s constant sympathetic belching at his beast really encouraged it, he certainly

kept me anxious to hold my lead ahead. No Welcome at Itri Itri itself, a sun-blackened, fivestory town under a castle cliff, was the only place in Italy from which I ever fled in haste and fear. Its lowering *inhabitants, 5000 without visible means of support in that slab-sided gorge, breathed sour garlic and fanaticism and scowled implacable vendetta. And where I ran was the only farmlet in the peninsula where -hospitality was refused, implacably refused. I had, however, to stay, standing helpless in the circle of the kerosene lamp swung over the outdoor dining table, since one could not sleep on boulders or continue in utter blackness down that flood-eroded high-way-yes, the Appian Way in its then local state. And when the policeman was sent for, arrived, and shook his head at my trial of French on him-‘"Moi, je parle Francais" cried that adamant old peasant enefgetically; and insisted thereafter on narrating how he had preserved his estate by 30 years’ labouring in France, and insisted, too, on incarcerating me in his bare, furnace-like, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) hermetically-sealed, best bedroom for the night ..... I am wondering how the Germans have managed among those dark, dour, un-Italian, pre-Italian Itri people. If the Fifth Army forces this pass as it did the far higher but less defended mountains at Salerno, there is as strong a natural barrier right behind it. For efter. the queer, land-locked, lagoonfilled; sea-level plainiet of Fondi the Volscian range rises, bleak as the moon. It is no height here at its end, but it runs right into the sea-or did until the Romans by sheer wedge-and-chisel-slogging, cut a deep horizontal U along its seacliff face. Fifty Miles from Rome But thereafter Rome is only 50 miles distant as the crow flies, and the Appian Way flies nearly as direct. The highway shoots up at a brake-burning gradient whenever a spur of the inland ranges sticks out its neck into the plain. And as one donkey-cart kept me sweating up to Itri, so another took me up Alba Longa-psychologically speaking. For one other fool was travelling in that pitiless, windless, small hour siesta heat. He sat in the roasting-chamber of the gaudy canvas hood of a little brightly- painted cart-fast asleep. With every sway his head swivelled round, his jaw snapped shut and open. Thankfully I fell in behind, pushing my iron steed. But from the summit what a view! The houses of the township, grappled in straggling line along the underside of the road, hide all the lower slopes. One is floating in a heavenly coolness of fresh mountain air and cypress shade, like Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, gazing out over some altogether other, distant, hot, tortured planet far below. Southward, the inland mountains and the seawards straight-edge of white-fringed blue mark out the Pontine Plain, split down the centre by the avenue of the Appian Way and its accompanying canal, and ending in an Ultima Thule of many-hued haze, amid which floats Monte Circeo (or Circello)-the promontory island of Circe the Enchantress. Inland along the ridge stretches Castel Gandolfo-the Papal State’s one foreign possession. Beyond is Nemi, a lake on a mountain, among whose groves glided that "priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain," and who inspired Frazer to write the 12 tomes of The Golden Bough. Along the scalloped bays of the hillside lies Velletri, Imperial Rome’s mourfain holiday resort. And northward-Rome itself, distantly visible among its uncertain number of malarious hollows conventionally called Seven Hills. So shall our soldiers catch their first glimpse of the Eternal City. ‘Fascism’s One Permanent Conquest However, the Pontine Plain itself is not only the longest section of the Appian Way, but the most interesting of all. In history’s dawnlight it supported flourishing cities. Yet by the time The Road was necessary, it had sunk ifto waterlogged marsh. Appius dug a canal straight through from Terracina to Velletri and built his causeway on its bank. Then Martinus-a person otherwise unknown-drained the whole swamp, and cities again flourished. In the dark days of Rome’s downfall, mosquitoes and the Rio Martino-now swollen’ by neglect from a drain into a riverdrove out the colonists once more. Even the Appian Way was completely lost until Pope Pius VI. excavated his "Holy

Line" (Linea Pia canal), and so laid bare the. pavement down which the legions had thundered to the conquest of the East, and up which that little hook-nosed political prisoner Paul, had limped "in bonds" to capture Rome itself. Our supply lorries trundling along the 34-mile tree-lined bitumen straight

will see the last scene of all this strange eventful history in the blue-walled, redtiled cottages of the new colonists from the over-crowded north who settled on fields recently reclaimed again. For the Pontine Plain ("Marshes"-no longer), is Fascism’s one permanent territorial conquest, sole incontestable title to glory. And so, via Via Appia, to Rome.