Douglas’s advice to his friend, Elizabeth David, set her path to becoming a food writer while walking and picnicking in the hills above Antibes in 1940.
Known as a great exaggerator, Douglas describes a mountain festival as a picnic. In his travelogue in Old Calabria, he claims that very few foreigners (than) ever get high in the hills surrounded by dense forests. The festival is a part picnic, part bacchanal, and part adoration of the Virgin Mary.
Douglas festival picnic has been held on the first Saturday and Sunday of July, every year since the Fifteenth Century (and still is). “Two thousand persons are encamped about the chapel,” he recounts, “amid a formidable army of donkeys and mules whose braying mingles with the pastoral music of reeds and bagpipes–bagpipes of two kinds, the common Calabrian variety and that of Basilicata, much larger and with a resounding base key, which will soon cease to exist. A heaving ebb and flow of humanity fills the eye; fires are flickering before extempore shelters, and an ungodly amount of food is being consumed, as traditionally prescribed for such occasions—si mangia per divozione.”
*Douglas was friends with D.H. Lawrence until Lawrence portrayed him as a bitchy homosexual drunkard in Aaron’s Rod (1922).
See Norman Douglas. Old Calabria. 1915.