A Traveller’s Intent in Metapontum ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

Before I see the ocean, I smell it, vaporous coils of salt and tide unfurl against the windshield, tangle in my hair. Suddenly the Ionian Sea sprawls beyond the sands of Metapontum, an ancient city on the Basilicata coast of Southern Italy, filling the horizon, deep blue against impending dusk. This is Homer’s sea. Virgil’s landscape. Where gods breathed tempests from calm and beckoned heroes to gaze beyond their simple pastures. This is Metapontum.

I drive slowly through this city, what is now a beach town of Camel cigarette sponsored campsites and water-wing stores, looking for a warm bed and a hot shower. An olive-skinned woman with long legs and short shorts sits splayed on a folding chair next to a rack of humidity-warped postcards. She frowns at a man next to her, bushy eyebrows meeting in the crease. Her black ponytail drags over a breast as she turns to watch me pass, her gaze conjuring onyx frontal-eyes and snail-shell curls painted on urns.

Once a Greek colony, Metapontum remains the site of the Tempio extraurbano di Hera, the City Temple of Hera, queen of Mount Olympus and bride to Zeus. The Greeks erected temples in Italy thousands of years before the Romans adopted their structures and mythology, before Virgil read Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and before he scripted his own epic, The Aeneid. And in these places, if you look and listen for it, if you try to sniff it out between ebbing tides and porous columns, time seems only a concoction, a membrane waiting to be pierced with a traveller’s intent.

The sun is receding and I’m tired and hungry. I drive in circles around sandy parking lots looking for a place to stay, but the toppled trash cans, hollow housing developments and compacted beachfront properties force me back onto the highway, away from Metapontum heading East toward Taranto. Dusk is falling and Hera’s temple will have to wait until morning.

Back on the SS106, I remember how surprised I was that Greek temples still stand in Italy. Over 1,500 Grecian colonies once settled along the Mediterranean and Black Seas from Spain to the Crimea. Land shortages in Greece, an increasing demand for raw materials and the establishment of more expansive trade routes all fuelled the process of this Magna Graecia colonization.

Metapontum dates back to the early 8^th century BC with a prosperous age from the 6^th to 4^th centuries. Primarily agricultural, the Greeks enjoyed the lush farmland and the five rivers, including the winding Fiume Bradano and Fiume Basento that pour into the sea. Amber, gold, copper and bronze have been found among the ruins in over 700 of these colonial properties. Prosperity nurtures thinkers and Metapontum bore her own. Hippasus, a Pythagorean philosopher and mathematician, discovered that not all numbers are rational. Thousands of years ago, he stood on this shore grappling with the conundrum of pi.

Empires rise and fall and by the 3^rd century BC, the expansion of Rome enveloped the Greek colonies in Italy, and cities like Metapontum changed masters. But much, like the temple to Hera, remains.

And the temple is why I’m here, why I drove all day through 90 degree heat without an air conditioner. Why I sped over mountains in June in a tiny rented Fiat Punto, surviving on granite de limone, unsweetened lemon ice. Cheap, wet and loaded with vitamin C, they are a traveller’s ally, but like one’s initial taste of liquor, sputtering and shock precedes appreciation. And appreciation precedes hankering.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to sit in a Greek temple. When I read the story of the horse tamer Bellerophon falling asleep in Athena’s temple and waking with a golden bridle in his hand, I wanted to dawdle between like columns. The bridle allowed Bellerophon to ride the winged Pegasus and kill the Chimaera, the countryside-ravaging beast with fire-breathing heads of a goat, a lion and a fuming, lashing serpent for a tail. With the advantages of agility and height, Bellerophon rammed a pike tipped with a lump of lead down the brute’s flaming gullet. The flames melted the lead, killing the Chimaera. From an elevated perspective, Bellerophon was able to end the scourge of an otherwise unapproachable monster; from a perspective given to him by the gods.

I check into the Hotel Jonico in Castellanta Marina, propped up right on the highway. The hotel, brand new against a marred, construction-torn landscape, looks made of silver cellophane and injected with neon pink, green and blue snakes. Ionian Sea meets disco.

In my room, I lift the aluminum slats of the window blinds with a clatter. The last ripples of sunset streak across a barren field. Leaning out my window, I watch a man dump hotel trash into a dumpster. When he leaves, a stray dog appears. Up on her hind legs, she buries her head in a split garbage bag and emerges with a slice of pizza in her mouth. She carries it to the field and eats it in the dirt. I watch her, hungry myself, waiting for the restaurant to open at 8pm.

I’m the first person in the dining room, as most Italians dine later than I can stand. For starters, I mop up bright green olive oil, lightly salted, with a chunk of bread, sliding it around in circles on my plate. The bread is soft, full of holes, the crust a quarter inch thick and begs to be torn not cut. When the house red arrives, I sip it with my bread. My tongue tingles and springs from the crisp berry tang. The ensalata consists of orange and green spotted tomatoes. They can’t be ripe. They are. These pomodoro fall over the tongue with a snappy, cool skin, and sweet, juicy flesh. They taste like summer.

After dinner I return to my room and sleep through the night without moving and by 9am, the Fiat’s on the road again. Back to Metapontum. I consult the oracle, the map, that is, and find a small, one-room museum with a sign for Tempio extraurbano di Hera. Tires crackle on the gravel driveway. The temple isn’t visible as I enter the museum.

The curator stands when I place a few thousand lire in the box beside him. He doesn’t speak English and I can’t make a word of his hard-edged dialect. With a wide smile, flickering dark blue eyes and a furrowed forehead, he seems to be asking me questions. I put my hands up in surrender and smile, No copisco, I say, I don’t understand. He shrugs and runs a hand through his graying, black hair. I’m the only one there so he’s going to give me the run-down.

The curator speaks in excited whorls as he leads me around the room. He hands me a glossy pamphlet, Metaponto, Museo e Parco Archeologico, all in Italian. A marble head of a woman stares from the cover, eyes white but lined in faded black, Testa femminile in marmo, expression stern like Hera’s. I wish I could understand him, smiling, gesturing, wide-eyed, a voice that echoes. He points toward the large wall-mounted photos of the Metapontum ruins but the property foundations just look like barely unearthed, geometric shapes to me. I nod at a shot of a cracked urn. I look around politely but it’s the temple I’m aching to see. Suddenly he stops and searches my face. He softens, smiles and points to a side door. There’s a path, lined with oleander bushes. Potted shrubs. The temple. Grazie, I shake his hand tightly. Grazie, signore. He doesn’t say another word, just tips his head.

I’m nervous. Excited. Walking up the stone path, I slip out of a sandal and stumble. I lose the other sandal and carry them, my feet padding along the mosaic of stones. Bushes line the path, white and pink globes of flowers lolling among dark green, spiky leaves.

There. The Temple of Hera. It is massive. A place of worship and sacrifice. Roofless and beaming white, awash in morning sunlight. Pillars stand like the ribs of some long extinct beast whose skeleton is as glorious as the beast itself in its determination to withstand time and elements. It is empty, I am alone.

Long licks of shadows intervene with the pillars of bright white and yellow stone. Intermittent exchanges of light and dark sprawl across stone. Great trunks of space construct this place. I am consumed by this immense, morning-painted dialogue of space that reflects my silence. It seems to double in size once I step onto the foundation between the chords of shadow and stone. I feel a death of self, an absence of thought, a melting sensation that allows me to be here with nothing.

Time is felt here, ebbing and flowing though the spaces of the pillars, time tidal, washing unseen, moving like breath. Shadows curl around pillars, marking them with the visible movement of time, cast by the path of a slowly arching sun.

I run my hand along the concave flutes of a column, the roughness ripples my skin. The stone is porous from the pelting of acid rain, bitten and chewed by damage sustained like a pox on the marble. My fingers slip into and out of holes and slide along the column; the roughness merges with the melody of smoothness, of up and down, of rise and fall, and of this embodiment of meter and time. I strain my neck, follow the motion with my eyes, trace it with my hands, step back and sit. Tiny blue morning glories, about the size of a thumbnail, grow wildly about the stones, their vines unfurled over the ground like green thread.

It is still clear after 2,500 years what this place is for, but I wonder what makes a place feel sacred. I stare up a pillar. Size helps. From pyramids to cathedrals to temples where even the smallest chunk of pillar can kill a person, sheer massiveness communicates contact with The Other, with That Which Is Greater. But it’s not just in the size, nor in the timeless ability to withstand. It’s not simply in the devoted, ornate carvings, nor is it contained in each human life spent, cast into the construction as sacrifices of one kind or another. There is something else. The promise of another perspective. A height, a depth, a few stone steps away from the rudderless spinning and forgetfulness of life. A perspective which reveals the path to slaying the beast, a perspective which disperses the haze of mystery and illuminates the way through this mortal coil.

There is a tiny spill of gravel. A green and yellow striped lizard darts in front of me, freezes. It cocks its head and looks at me, that little wrinkle under its eye. The lizard squints then disappears behind a rock. Time to go. My hands are empty but my heart is full. And the stillness is about to be broken. A tour group is coming.

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Published in The Portable Muse, September 2003