I did not seek out the Teatro delle Varieta; I might easily have been in my seat (with thirty, more likely than three hundred, other spectators) by half-past twenty-one.  But the night was forbidding; a cold rain fell heavily.  Moreover, just as I had thought that it was perhaps worth while to run the risk of another illness—­one cannot see the Madness of Count Orlando every day—­ there came into the room a peddler laden with some fifty volumes of fiction and a fine assortment of combs and shirt-studs.  The books tempted me; I looked them through.  Most, of course, were translations from the vulgarest French feuilletonistes; the Italian reader of novels, whether in newspaper or volume, knows, as a rule, nothing but this imported rubbish.  However, a real Italian work was discoverable, and, together with the unfriendly sky, it kept me at home.  I am sorry now, as for many another omission on my wanderings, when lack of energy or a passing mood of dullness has caused me to miss what would be so pleasant in the retrospect.

I spent an hour one evening at the principal cafe, where a pianist of great pretensions and small achievement made rather painful music.  Watching and listening to the company (all men, of course, though the Oriental system regarding women is not so strict at Catanzaro as elsewhere in the south), I could not but fall into a comparison of this scene with any similar gathering of middle-class English folk.  The contrast was very greatly in favour of the Italians.  One has had the same thought a hundred times in the same circumstances, but it is worth dwelling upon.  Among these representative men, young and old, of Catanzaro, the tone of conversation was incomparably better than that which would rule in a cluster of English provincials met to enjoy their evening leisure.  They did, in fact, converse—­a word rarely applicable to English talk under such conditions; mere personal gossip was the exception; they exchanged genuine thoughts, reasoned lucidly on the surface of abstract subjects.  I say on the surface; no remark that I heard could be called original or striking; but the choice of topics and the mode of viewing them was distinctly intellectual.  Phrases often occurred such as have no equivalent on the lips of everyday people in our own country.  For instance, a young fellow in no way distinguished from his companions, fell to talking about a leading townsman, and praised him for his ingenio simpatico, his bella intelligenza, with exclamations of approval from those who listened.  No, it is not merely the difference between homely Anglo-Saxon and a language of classic origin; there is a radical distinction of thought.  These people have an innate respect for things of the mind, which is wholly lacking to a typical Englishman.  One need not dwell upon the point that their animation was supported by a tiny cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade; this is a matter of climate and racial constitution; but I noticed the entire absence of a certain kind of jocoseness which is so naturally associated with spirituous liquors; no talk could have been less offensive.  From many a bar-parlour in English country towns I have gone away heavy with tedium and disgust; the cafe at Catanzaro seemed, in comparison, a place of assembly for wits and philosophers.