Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> To the traveller heading eastwards from Foggia to the sea the gaunt grey shadow of Monte Gargano looms over the plain like a thunder- cloud. It is a curious excrescence this dark limestone mass rising so- unexpectedly from the fields of Apulia and heedless of the gentle sweep of the coastline jutting forty miles or so into the Adriatic- curious and somehow awesome. For centuries it has been known as the ‘spur’ of Italy-not a very good name even from the pictorial point of view since it is much too far up the boot and seems to have been fixed on backwards. It is more like a hard callus accidental unlooked-for and basically unwelcome. Even the land- scape with its thick beech-forests more Germanic than Italian; even the climate raw and torn by winds; even the population sombre black-swathed and old (in contradistinction to anywhere else in Apulia where the average age of the urban population to all appearances exclusively male seems to be about seven) bespeak a strange foreignness. Monte Gargano to visitors and natives alike is different. It does not really belong. This feeling has always existed among the Apulians and they have always reacted to it in the same way. Since the days of remotest antiquity an aura of holiness has hung over the mountain. Already in classical times it possessed at least two important shrines one to Podaleirius an ancient warrior-hero of small achievement and less (SP)