The animal population was not without its importance.  Turn where I would I encountered lean, black pigs, snorting, frisking, scampering, and squealing as if the bad weather were a delight to them.  Gaunt, low-spirited dogs prowled about in search of food, and always ran away at my approach.  In one precipitous by-way, where the air was insupportably foul, I came upon an odd little scene:  a pig and a cat, quite alone, were playing together, and enjoying themselves with remarkable spirit.  The pig lay down in the running mud, and pussy, having leapt on to him, began to scratch his back, bite his ears, stroke his sides.  Suddenly, porker was uppermost and the cat, pretending to struggle for life, under his forefeet.  It was the only amusing incident I met with at Squillace, and the sole instance of anything like cheerful vitality.

Above the habitations stand those prominent ruins which had held my eye during our long ascent.  These are the rugged walls and windows of a monastery, not old enough to possess much interest, and, on the crowning height, the heavy remnants of a Norman castle, with one fine doorway still intact.  Bitterly I deplored the gloomy sky which spoiled what would else have been a magnificent view from this point of vantage—­a view wide-spreading in all directions, with Sila northwards, Aspromonte to the south, and between them a long horizon of the sea.  Looking down upon Squillace, one sees its houses niched among huge masses of granite, which protrude from the scanty soil, or clinging to the rocky surface like limpet shells.  Was this the site of Scylaceum, or is it, as some hold, merely a mediaeval refuge which took the name of the old city nearer to the coast?  The Scylaceum of the sixth century is described by Cassiodorus—­a picture glowing with admiration and tenderness.  It lay, he says, upon the side of a hill; nay, it hung there “like a cluster of grapes,” in such glorious light and warmth that, to his mind, it deserved to be called the native region of the sun.  The fertility of the Country around was unexampled; nowhere did earth yield to mortals a more luxurious life.  Quoting this description, Lenormant holds that, with due regard to time’s changes, it exactly fits the site of Squillace.  Yet Cassiodorus says that the hill by which you approached the town was not high enough to weary a traveller, a consideration making for the later view that Scylaceum stood very near to the Marina of Catanzaro, at a spot called Roccella, where not only is the nature of the ground suitable, but there exist considerable traces of ancient building, such as are not discoverable here on the mountain top.  Lenormant thought that Roccella was merely the sea-port of the inland town.  I wish he were right.  No archaeologist, whose work I have studied, affects me with such a personal charm, with such a sense of intellectual sympathy, as Francois Lenormant—­dead, alas, before he could complete his delightful book.  But one fears that, in this instance, he judged too hastily.