In Lucania, beyond Paestum: ancient and nature on the trail of Nèstore and Epèo

Abstract

In the earliest modern-age descriptions of Lucania emerge feelings close to an ante litteram Burkian delightful horror where out-of-reach mountains, impervious woods and gloomy marshes make up the recurring descriptive programme of lands «as toilsome and unpleasant as a basilisk. And perhaps they received their name from their ruggedness and crookedness», as Leandro Alberti noted in 1550. His reference to the mythologic figure of the reptile, capable of killing people just by looking at them, brews in the impressions of Nineteenth-century travellers who go beyond the picturesque and the antique and translate the seducing horror of such places of wretchedness and death into an inner experience of the landscape, ‘an analytic insight into the Sublime’ where Nature prevails over man and his every action. In this Kantian line converge the travel notes of all Nineteenth-century travellers and artists, unanimously creating an invisible academy of the Sublime accrued by the tremendous magnificence of the landscape.