The Lamezian Plain as Recounted by Foreign Travelers in the 1700s and 1800s

The enormous open-air museum that constituted the Lamezian territory was an attraction for so many foreign travelers who visited Calabria in the second half of the 1700s and in the following century, above all the English, Germans and French . A few years before the disastrous earthquake of 1783, there came to Calabria Johann Hermann von Riesdel (1767), Johann Jacob Ferber (1773), Swinburne (1777), Saint-Non (1780), and Fortisi (1800). After the earthquake, traveling over Calabria were Friedrich Munster (1786), Heinrich Bartels (1785), Karl Ulysses von Salis Marschlins (1788), Ramage and B. Hill (1791), F. Leopold Stolberg (1792), G. Arnold Jacobi (1792), and K. Joseph Stegman (1798). Certain French officers like Duret De Tavel and Augustine De Rivarol have left extremely interesting accounts of Calabria during the French occupation of the Kingdom of Naples (1806-1814). During the same period, Paul Courier, a French writer and officer, gave descriptions in his letters, that were somewhere between fantasy and reality, of the towns that he passed through when following Napoleonic troops.

View of Nicastro
(from G.B. Pacichelli, Il Regno di Napoli In Prospettiva Divisa in Dodeci Provincie,
Stamperia di D.A. Parrino, Naples, 1703)

 

In the XIXth century, those who became interested in the Lamezian plain were Lenormant, Ramage, Alexander Dumas, Orazio Rilliet, Maxime Du Camp, and the Fouchier brothers. The interest of these travelers was purely learning for the sake of learning. “Let us stop to admire so that we may draw,” wrote E. Lear. For this reason their eyes turned primarily to the landscape, indulging themselves in its more picturesque aspects. From this point of view, the plain of Lamaze Termed has particularly attracted the attention of travelers deeply impelled by purely cultural interests or, as we would say today, the attention of tourists. From the great number of travel accounts, we can extract and synthesize a bit from a list of the more significant ones.