by David Yeadon
Moore also suggests, “The soul echoes ancient themes common to all human beings. It is always circling home.” But he emphasizes that excessive soul-searching can lead to “dangerous seriousness” and that “absence of humor signals a failure in basic humanity.” He senses that life is a divine comedy and that “heartfelt laughter” was very much a part of “the mystical land before our birth.”
In an attempt to combine the subtle, the serious, the sensuous, and the gloriously silly, I began to unravel all the years of travel memories, trying to discern larger constructs of comprehension and richer patterns of experience. And this somewhat unexpected and certainly intriguing introspection resulted in my sitting in my little DoDo on that bluff with all its magnificent vistas and celebrating the months of surprise, mystery, and delight that lay ahead.
My work, this book, was not to be a guide, so I had no need to gather meticulous, tedious data on hotels, inns, and restaurants (not that there were many in this part of Basilicata) or offer interminable recitations of oft-told histories or describe, with a pseudo-authoritative air, the trappings and iconic decorations of ecclesiastical highspots (I didn’t see many of those either). Nor was it to be a sketchy, superficial tale of a fast week’s wandering in “hidden Italy” for some touristy travel magazine. Instead, for once—for the first time actually—I had a whole book to write on a single small region and even primarily on one tiny village in that region. I was about to give myself, and Anne (when she was finally able to tear herself away from her teaching responsibilities in Japan), a chance to meld slowly into village life, to talk, drink, and eat with the residents, to share their mirth and mysteries, to celebrate their festivals and fun, and to offer our own little feasts and celebrations in return. And then ultimately to try to capture this whole kaleidoscopic montage in words and sketches in a book. This book.
SLOWLY THIS SUDDEN surge of introspection and expectation simmered down to a warm glow around my shoulders. From my high vantage point, the view was spectacular. A few of H. V. Morton’s words, from his delightful book, A Traveler in Southern Italy, capture its ambience:
Cloud shadows moved across the distant plains and a treeless countryside, golden with stubble in the valleys, golden with ripe winter wheat on the hills. A beautiful gradation of color from golden yellow to brown amber and burnt sienna;…There was no sign of life upon this wide landscape save where, far off, catching the sun upon the shoulders and crests of mountains, a gleam of white denoted towns and villages…The only movement was a flight of hawks, sometimes high above me, sometimes below in the valleys, gliding upon the air currents. This was the country described by Carlo Levi who wrote the best book of its kind on the south of Italy.
I looked at my watch, and realized that it was much later in the day than I’d thought. The sun was sinking, pearlescent, and dusk shadows were easing across the vast wheat fields all around me, filling the valleys with the purpling haze of evening.
My schedule-monitoring self began to fret about dinner and a bed for the night, while my gypsy self seemed utterly unconcerned, reminding me that I had a bag of snacks in the back of the car—slices of salami and proscuitto, half a plump round of focaccia, some delicious gorgonzola, a bar of creamy Italian chocolate, and a bottle of Barascolo wine. And what about sleeping? moaned my monitor. What’s wrong with the car, and right here? my gypsy responded happily. Just pull up a little higher up this rough track and wake in the morning with one of the finest views in Basilicata.
So that’s exactly what I did.
CHAPTER 3
Seeking a Home
A First Visit to Aliano
While I’m often humbled yet energized by the almost-tangible power of wild places, not all explorers of the Mezzogiorno shared my enthusiasm for this relatively undiscovered part of Italy. Shelley, Henry Swinburne, Edward Lear, and others all warned of the dangers there, particularly from rabid forest creatures, brigands, and widespread disease. Perhaps most adamant of all was Augustus Hare, who wrote in 1883:
The vastness and ugliness of the districts to be traversed, the bareness and filth of the inns, the roughness of the natives, the torment of zanzare (mosquitoes), the terror of earthquakes, the insecurities of the roads from robbers, and the far more serious risk of malaria or typhoid fever from bad water, are natural causes which have hitherto frightened strangers away from the south.
Like Levi’s classic works, Anne Cornelisen’s powerful books on the region, Women of the Shadows and Torregreca, had impressed both Anne and I long before we decided to live there. We found Cornelisen’s description of the region a little alarming, but also enticing:
The south has always moved me. They suit one another, this bleak land and dour people who see no joy in life, but only an eternal struggle which they cannot win…. It is a bare, sepia world. A cruel world of jagged, parched hills, dry river beds, and distant villages where clumps of low houses cling together on the edge of precipices…The south is not for the easily discouraged. It is for those who can imagine living in another time…in a mirage-world created by light so piercing that it sears the eye.
As I left my high aerie in the early morning, watching the valley mists move like ancient oceans against the bare hills and ridges, I felt no such trepidation. Just pure elation. From the wide, fertile valley of the (dry) Sauro River, a ridge rose abruptly, dotted with strangely eroded buttes and green-clay gorges that looked recently torn out of the soft, oozy earth. Straggly olive orchards clung to tiny patches of land between the eroded clefts. And way, way up—over one thousand five hundred feet up from the valley road—perched little Aliano, like a craggy half-completed fortress. Upon closer inspection, the fortress turned out to be the high walls of public housing recently built to rehouse residents whose homes had collapsed or were destined to collapse in the next earthquake or land-slide—apparently a familiar feature of life in those parts and one that certainly reflected the mood of Cornelisen’s description.
I counted twenty-two one-hundred-eighty-degree hairpin bends and a dozen or so additional tight curves on the painfully slow ascent to the village. I’m sure the ever-increasing breadth of views across the rolling green wheat fields and the high, craggy hills beyond must have been spectacular. But I wouldn’t know. I was too aware of the fact that most of the twists and turns were densely crowded in by ancient olive groves full of fractured and contorted branches and even more contorted root systems that curled and looped around one another like orgies of serpents. Anything coming down the narrow road from the village could not be spotted until mid-bend. Ditto anything coming up. Like me.
My little DoDo sputtered and choked in first gear, narrowly missing traumatic interfaces with two donkeys, both bearing on their sides enormous straw pannier baskets crammed with olive-branch prunings (veritable forests themselves); a huge blue corriera (bus, the local public transport); one of those rackety three-wheeler Ape trucklets, with a maximum uphill speed of around five m.p.h.; and an old woman on foot who was bearing a voluminous bundle of kindling twigs on her scarved head. The woman was half hidden by a tumult of weeds and brush that overhung the road, and I had to swerve quite dramatically to miss her. The look from her enraged eyes seared through my car window like a laser, and as I continued upward, I wondered if her irate gesticulations were an omen of things to come.
Welcome to Aliano, I whispered to myself. Don’t forget all Levi’s warnings about the pagani strangeness here and the life-and-death power of village witches. As the Professor had told me, despite its Roman name—Praedium Allianum, bestowed on the village in the sixth century A.D. in honor of its owner, Allianus—this was a far more ancient and mysterious place. Possibly more than nine thousand years old, according to the findings at a necropolis near Aliano’s sister village, Alianello. Tread lightly.
Having gone to all that trouble of climbing up to the village, the road curled across the top of a narrow ridge offering brief but spectacular mountain vistas in almost every direction and then immediately began a precipito
us tumble past forlorn-looking clumps of apartments and shadowy, stepped alleys. Older buildings, some with ancient stone façades, began to close in tightly as the road continued its steep descent. And then, with no warning and in that wonderful way that Italians articulate urban spaces and the “accidental aesthetics” of architecture-without-architects and town-scape-without-city-planners, the road flared out at the bottom of the hill into a piazza boasting an elegant circular paving pattern of cobbles and smooth black stones. Across the piazza a church rose up with whitewashed walls and a sturdy stone tower. Small streets wriggled away in various directions around a couple of prominent palazzos, but the main street, set at a right angle to my descent, was broad, neatly paved, tree lined, and dotted with small stores and coffee bars.
I like the look of this, I thought. I’d expected something a lot tougher and surlier from Levi’s descriptions.
But as I drove slowly down the main street in my DoDo, the pavement suddenly appeared to vanish and tumble into a dramatically eroded gorge hundreds of feet deep—the Fossa del Bersagliere, according to a small, lopsided sign (which also mentioned that the gorge had been named after an unfortunate soldier who had been thrown to his death here by brigands). The road made a sudden turn to the left by another coffee bar, but the shock of that abrupt precipice remained and increased as I continued my exploration of the town.
The main street had indeed been something of an illusion. Beyond the tightly clustered dwellings I caught glimpses of Aliano’s panorama calanchistico, vistas of startling precipices studded with ancient cave dwellings. Much of the rest of the village seemed in dire need of repair, although some restoration work was in progress. I noticed a mini piazza (piazzetta) with rebuilt stone houses around it and a small new gallery featuring the artwork Levi completed in the village during his 1935–1936 confino. Nearby was a small ampitheatre set on the edge of another precipice with dramatic views across more canyons to the south. Farther down, the large house where Levi had endured his confino was being restored as a museum, but to judge by the absence of machinery or workers, it seemed to be suffering from the same kind of in-progress lethargy as the Carlo Levi Center in Matera.
Elsewhere, blank windows stared out of cracked and broken walls, buildings leaned drunkenly, and in a lower section of the village two tightly clustered clumps of seemingly abandoned houses—the perfect setting for some werewolf or vampire horror movie—perched precariously on even more vertical precipices. A sudden shudder of strata would send the walls, the lot, tumbling and shattering into the ghost-colored gorges far below.
The Mezzogiorno is renowned for its natural disasters, most notably the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, near Naples, in A.D. 79, following the ashy eruptions of Vesuvius, and much more recently, the horrendous Messina earthquake in 1908, which killed more than eighty-four thousand people and decimated the cities of Reggio di Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s toe, and Messina on Sicily. Aliano suffered its own more modest earthquake in 1980, which explained the battered appearance of many houses, some of which dated from the fourteenth century.
The village bridge had already gone. One night in June 1998, this vital link to the outside world at Sant’Arcangelo in the next valley, the Agri, had collapsed with a great roar. All that was left now was a pathetic attempt at rebuilding—which had apparently been abandoned due to “sliding earth” problems—and a sinewy, footpath-wide track that somehow managed to carry small vehicles at ridiculous grades down to a minor canyon floor and up the other side.
I was beginning to rethink my initial optimism as I backtracked to the main piazza, parked the car, and sat outside one of the coffee bars ruminating over a late morning caffe latte. Old, diminutive men with bowed backs stood or sat around the other side of the street watching me warily, and I sensed in the eerie silence Levi’s “age old stillness of the peasant world.” I opened my notebook and flipped through to find a composite quotation of his descriptions of Aliano:
Archaic traditions aimed at driving back the evil eye revealed themselves in the architecture of the façades of the humble buildings here. Small windows like malicious eyes underlined by frowned eyebrows, consisting of warped moth-eaten chestnut wood lintels, were set on either side of immense arches that create a devilish sneer expression. Staircases grind their teeth formed of broken steps and bestow a grotesque and horrible expression, and are the only true guarantee for chasing away the evil eye and evil spirits…. This is a truly animistic architecture with attentive eyes, threatening grim looks; everywhere one feels observed, spied upon and warned.
FOSSA DEL BERSAGLIERE—ALIANO
Levi captures the mood perfectly, and in many ways little seems to have changed today, except for odd clay tablets fixed to walls around the village bearing brief quotations from his book. I also enjoyed another of his descriptions of these older parts of the village I found in a booklet on the Parco Carlo Levi, one of seventeen “literary” parks established throughout southern Italy to celebrate links with famous writers and also to stimulate local-related economic initiatives:
I discovered that closed world, shrouded in black veils, bloody and earthy, that other world where the peasants live…bound up in inherited passions…faces of primitive solemnity. One old man in touch with forces below the earth could call up spirits.…They called themselves “pagani” or heathens (all outsiders were regarded as “Christians”)…behind their veils the women were like wild beasts.…The peasants seemed prey to asort of madness…a subterranean deity, black with shadows of the bowels…their Madonna appeared to be a fierce, pitiless, mysterious, ancient earth goddess, the Saturnian mistress of this world…. Here there is no definite boundary line between the world of human beings and that of animals or even monsters. And there are many strange creatures at Aliano who have a duel nature…. In this region names have a meaning and a magic power…. The atmosphere is permeated by divinities…everything seems bound up in natural magic.…The peasants are not considered human beings (by the landowner-gentry)…they have only one color, the color of their sad, sorrowful eyes and their clothes, and it is not a color at all, but rather the darkness of earth and death….
Powerful stuff. And yet, despite Levi’s initial abhorrence of the plight and depths of degradation suffered by the peasants almost as a birthright, his own experience of life here ultimately brought joy and exuberance, as the Professor had described, both by enlightening him and by shaping his views and political activities for the rest of his life.
Yes, but I’m not here to shape political activitism strategies, I thought. I’m here to live happily with Anne, learning, and generally have a spanking good time dining on all those gorgeous porky products and homemade olive oil and wines and wild game and pasta galore.
“MAY I OFFER YOU a corretto?” I heard someone say in very precise English.
I turned and faced a young, clean-shaven man dressed neatly in a dark blue suit and crisp white shirt. He was giving me a most welcoming smile.
“That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I’ll try one of the local grappas.”
And that’s when things began to change, and my optimism returned. Ironically in my subsequent months there I never again saw this young Italian man, but his spontaneous kindness that day made me realize that despite the strange aura of this remote village, I might find the nurturing warmth of new friendships. After all, no one said the hill villages in Basilicata were cute, squeaky white-clean masterpieces of ethnic aesthetic like their affluent northern counterparts. They are what they are. Ancient bastions of an ancient way of life that has pounded, broken, and decimated homes, families, and communities. And yet they’re still here. Bruised and battered but with enough belief in themselves to rebuild, plant trees, and provide benches all the way down main street for the elderly. And they are still lived in by people—a thousand or so in Aliano—who possess enough innate southern hospitality to offer a confused stranger a drink at a coffee bar on a warm morning while he watches the little hunched, black-shro
uded widows scurrying about on seemingly ever-urgent missions, donkeys clopping by carrying those now-familiar dual wicker panniers crammed with farming tools, huddles of old, sullenly dignified men deep in animated debate, and old women, sturdy as little trolls, swaying past carrying laundry or bundled faggots of kindling on their heads Arab-fashion.
I was intrigued by the whole timelessness of the place, and the only real disappointment on that particular day was my inability to find anywhere to stay. The village didn’t seem to possess even a modest pensione, and there was no place for rent, according to my kind young friend at the coffee bar, who apologized and explained that “Housing here is very precious, and many people still live in very small spaces and they have nowhere for other people. This is not a place that knows many tourists people from away. We are not—how you say?—on the map. But I think it is very nice that you would like to stay. Maybe you could find a small hotel in a nearby town—Stigliano or Accettura—for a few days, and if you will call me at this number I will ask here in the village for you. Maybe something will happen. Maybe we will make something happen.”
He paused and ordered two more grappas for us. I tried to pay, but he waggled a long index finger topped with a perfectly manicured fingernail (very different from the stumpy, earth-ravaged hands of the old men here), adamant that he was the host and I was the guest. “We have a little saying in our Alianese dialect,” he continued. “‘Chi caminete licchete, chi no restate sicche.’ ‘He who looks always finds something to eat; he who stays at home shall never find a bite.’”
And indeed, that’s precisely what happened on my second visit to Aliano just before Anne joined me a couple of weeks later.
Accettura and the Mingalones