La storia - I viaggiatori

Henry Swinburne (1743 –1803), an unsuccessful ecclesiastic who was born in Bristol, inherited his family's fortune, after which he carried out a trip on horseback through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from February 8 to February 22, 1778, accompanied by a servant. Upon arriving on the Lamezian coast, he was stricken by the malarial countryside, populated by hogs that were guarded by longhaired tousled boys who played reed bagpipes. Arriving in Nicastro, he lodged with the Dominican Fathers. To him, the countryside around the city seemed luxuriant, covered as it was with “areas that are always green.” What most caught his fantasy was the castle (“a romantic ruin”), which dominated the city from on high, the wooded valley, and the underlying “delightful countryside” of Sambiase, and he describes in his diary the quality and the healthful virtues of the thermal waters of Caronte.

View of Nicastro (from Jean Claude Richard de Saint-Non,
Voyage Pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes
de Naples et de Sicilie, Paris 1781-1786

In the same year, 1778, from the beginning of summer to the end of autumn, the abbot Richard de Saint-Non undertook his voyage in Calabria along with three artists (the architects Desprez and Renard, and the painter Chatelet), who were charged with drawing views on panels of the most evocative places they encountered. His baptismal name was Giovanni Claudio Richard, born in Paris in 1727. After having traveled along the whole the Ionian coast of Calabria from north to south, this French traveler came back by sea from Messina to Tropea and overland from there to Nicastro. Of Nicastro what struck him above all was the position of the city “resting on a base of mountains covered with woods” which “from a distance presented a most singular and picturesque scene.” The climate that he found was so mild that “on the 7th of December we found trees with leaves as green as we have in France in the months of August and September.” Also evocative is his description of the market-square full of people, and a monsignor who was traveling on a litter with his whole entourage and some noble ladies “with high hair styles as in the time of Louis XIV,” followed by other women who functioned as lackeys.