Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  SO, NOW IT’S the following week, Sunday, and the weather’s perfect. The stage is still standing as it has been for the last seven days, creating a dangerous traffic hazard (one bowled-over donkey and two minor fender benders), and everyone is convinced that finally the procession of the Madonna of the Rosary will really take place.

  And it does, following Don Pierino’s schedule precisely. Two afternoon masses and then at four-thirty the doors of the church are flung open and out comes the life-size statue of the Madonna, bedecked in blue and cream-colored robes and wearing an elegant crown. She is being carried a little precariously by six village stalwarts. Don Pierino is out front in an ornate cassock with green and gold trim and carrying a battery-powered microphone. He starts to walk and chant rather mournful litanies with the straggling crowd of a hundred or so villagers following behind him in a rather raggedy processione made up almost entirely of women. The women are supposed to echo equally mournful responses, but either they don’t know the words or the weather’s just too beautiful for somber chants and the like, so they remain silent, with the exception of six “black widows,” right behind the rocking Madonna, linked arm in arm and singing out the responses with dirge-delight. It’s all a little disharmonic. The good don has a limited vocal range—a wavering voice much amplified by the microphone—and a remarkable ability to switch key in mid-chant, which leaves the widows with a considerable range of notes to choose from. So, in true democratic fashion, they each choose a different one. Some falter rapidly due to a lack of lung capacity, while others keep going far too long in felinelike crescendos.

  But no one seems to mind. At least they’ve got their procession at last. It wobbles down Via Roma, past the bars where, to give them credit, the octos stand and tip their hats as the Madonna (whom many still regard in their pagani hearts as a thinly disguised manifestation of Demeter, the ancient goddess of the earth) moves by, and then promptly sit down again to resume their raucous card games.

  The aim of the procession seems to be to meander slowly through the nooks and crannies of the village, bringing the festivities and blessings of the church to most parts except the old section far below (too steep downhill) and the new section (too steep uphill). Anne and I follow them, behind a rather excellent local brass band with four enormous euphonia, three French horns, some superbly in-tune trumpeters, and a dozen or so younger members with flutes and clarinets. They give the whole affair some rousing inspiration, and the crowd increases. By the time we all return to Piazza Roma, we’re around two hundred strong, and Don Pierino gives the band permission to “let it rip” as the elegant Madonna is returned to her prominent position near the altar inside the church.

  The band needs no encouragement. Enough of those sonorous, plodding hymns! And in a bizarre mix of the sacred with the profane, they’re off, with whirlwind renditions of popular tunes, well-known Basilicatan folk songs, some catchy Germanic lederhosen-band oompah-pah, oompah-pah clapping songs, and even a few racy renditions of bar tunes, with some of the band members singing the ribald chorus lines. The crowd loves these, and joins in on the naughty bits. At least, we think they’re naughty by the expression on the singers’ faces and their lusty emphasis on certain key lines.

  At seven o’clock the band is still blasting out its extensive repertoire. Then, as the crowd continues to grow, two vans suddenly roll up packed with boxes of electronic equipment, scaffolding, klieg lights, man-size speakers, guitars and other instruments, a huge drum kit, mikes, and miles of thick electric cable. Anne and I are back on our terrace now, watching the frantic scene below in amazement as four young men, proficient as robots, erect their complicated stage set and test out their forty huge lights. Then, as the street band rounds off its own splendid show with a very popular and spirited tune from Titanic, and is rewarded with thunderous, stomping applause, the stage hands set about doing their sound checks and drum tests and voice balances, and all those other complicated pre-event preparations. These seem to take forever due to the fussy perfectionism of a young man with a long ponytail and dark glasses, who sits at an enormous control box with more switches and levers and slide knobs than a Cape Canaveral launchpad and howls out instructions in a series of catlike wails.

  There’s a brief interlude, when an odd tape compilation of Sade, the Rolling Stones, U-2, and some anonymous, mind-numbing, techno-pop, hip-hop syncopations blasts out into the piazza. A clarion call for the concert. And it works. An even larger crowd gathers and then, at nine o’clock on the dot, we’re off.

  A group of four gorgeous, long-haired ladies leap onto the stage—a Spice Girl–type quartet but without the gaudy costumes—and launches into a series of upbeat Latin-style songs backed by trombone, sax, trumpet, a manic drummer, a guitarist, and a superb keyboard artist. There seems to be no end to the range of sound effects that the keyboardist can generate from his dual keyboards, which is a relief because, from what I can tell, the guitar player is making a real mess of his solos and rhythm riffs.

  The band keeps up a rip-roaring, samba-tango–bossa nova pace going for a long set, with the girls—in their identical elegant dark suits with definitely daring décolleté and seventies-style bell-bottom trousers (obviously fashionable once again to judge by the outfits of Aliano’s teenagers) dancing, arm-waving, and singing in harmonious synchronization. The crowd loves them. The youth of the village are hip-hopping up a storm. The males are on one side of the piazza, prancing around with shifty-eyed, gum-chewing machismo, and the girls are on the opposite side, finger-fluttery and bathed in the glow of ripening femininity, lost in their own whirlings and complicated MTV-inspired sequences of arm gesticulations.

  We decide it’s time to go down and join the festivities, but as we do, the band comes to the end of its act, and then it all starts to fall apart. I have no idea who decided on the sequence of the show’s attractions that night, but as soon as the girls leave, with their sexy little waves and wiggles, up leaps a comedian dressed like a clown, except for the fact that he’s wearing the traditional blue and red smock of an elementary-school boy and one of those enormous multicolored backpacks that are currently all the rage with European kids. But he’s lost the crowd before he even begins his endless patter. I can see them pulling back down the street, some vanishing into the bars, others huddling in the shadows hoping the four girls will return soon.

  The comedian’s only real audience is a bunch of very young children—who obviously love his depiction of them and who react to his every clownish antic with screams of delight—and a few bemused parents, who stand around enjoying their children’s laughter. I feel sorry for the comedian. He knows that the crowd wants the lanky, long-haired ladies back, with their erotic stage presence and fast-beat, pop-song renditions.

  But rather than bring them back, quickly, the show’s director sends up a middle-aged, over-the-top, Mario Lanza–style crooner, presumably a real torch-song charmer in a nightclub setting, but definitely a nonentity tonight for Aliano audiences. He dies, too, just like the clown, and his pleading “Grazie, mille grazie” echoes around the half-empty piazza and generates only a scintilla of sympathetic applause.

  A young girl with a beautiful solo voice follows, but she is backed by a recorded, rather than a real, band, so she stands alone and a little forlorn as the chill night breezes begin to blow. Even more people drift away. Put the four girls back on, you twit, I want to shout at the show’s director, but I don’t. Instead Anne and I wander together down to the Bar Capriccio for a cappuccino. We realize that the whole thing is dying, becoming yet another nonevent, so we decide to call it a night.

  IN THE MORNING, when I peer over my terrace railing, it’s all gone: the elaborate scaffolding, the lights, the speakers, the mikes, even the stage itself. Piazza Roma is back to its normal, pleasant vacuity, edged by coteries of those chatting octos, of course—sometimes I wonder if they ever actually go to bed—and the cheerful, bleary-faced street sweepers out with their brooms, trying to remove the last bits of evid
ence that anything of any import happened the previous night.

  Which, I guess, it didn’t really…except for those samba-prancing ladies with their long, dark hair swirling and bell-bottoms twirling. They were good, and maybe they’d brought a little something real and classy of the outside world into this remote community. And maybe the community appreciated all the effort that had gone into the show…maybe…

  Dinner at Margherita’s

  A week or so later, we were guests at another event that, from the very start, never flagged for an instant.

  “AROUND SIX THOUSAND olive trees, I think,” Margherita said with a mischievous grin on her lean, light-filled face. “Approximately.” That grin, I later realized, was a key to her irrepressible humor and her hands-on, straight-talking approach to life—a life that, for one of Sebastiano’s prized teachers and co-owner with her husband, Tori, of a huge olive orchard outside Stigliano, seemed unusually full and active.

  “Six thousand!” I gasped in awe. Most of our other small-farmer friends seemed to get by with a few dozen at most. This was obviously an estate of some magnitude for a town like Stigliano. I hadn’t realized that when Anne and I arrived, with Sebastiano, Rocchina, and young son, Gianluca. It was dark, so other than an impressive avenue of olive trees, there was nothing to suggest the scale of this little kingdom.

  “It was my father’s,” Margherita explained. “But he is eighty now, so he gave it to us. Well, to my husband really. Tori.” Still grinning, she stroked Tori’s broad shoulders spread beneath a face that was plump and constantly bemused, as if he were sharing jokes with himself and no one else. He and his wife stood together by a huge, baronial fireplace in the large, whitewashed living room and kitchen, once the barn of the substantial stone farm a couple of miles down the steep hill from Stigliano.

  We could see the lights of the town twinkling high above us along the ridge as we pulled into the estate and drove along a bumpy track down that avenue of young olive trees. Apparently Margherita and Tori used the farm for entertaining when their home in town was not large enough to hold parties. A lot of parties.

  “We have many good friends, so we like to get together and talk and eat good food,” Margherita told me with that wily smile, almost identical to that of her husband’s. “And lots of homemade wine!”

  “And what’s on the menu for tonight?” I asked as I stood beside them near the roaring fire with olive logs crackling cheerfully.

  “Some real simple home cooking, nostrano, with lots of porcini and funghi,” she said.

  “Ah, mushrooms. Lovely!”

  “Oh, yes.” Margherita smiled.

  “And…?”

  “And more mushrooms!” She laughed, indicating a huge wicker basket filled to overflowing with at least six different kinds of mushrooms, most of which she’d gathered herself in the nearby oak forests of Montepiano and which included rarer local species such as boletri (smooth, round, and white like hardboiled eggs), quaitelle (with vibrant red caps), and biette (smaller, but with equally bright caps).

  “A whole dinner entirely of mushrooms?” I asked, amazed by her gastronomic daring.

  “Of course,” she replied, with that playful grin. Tori grinned along with her. They seemed to be a couple custom-made for each other, for whom nudging, winking, and sudden mutual outbursts of ribald laughter were all an endearing part of their nonverbal dialogue.

  And that’s exactly what happened. A multicourse meal for fourteen friends, with Anne and me as “honored stranieri,” conceived primarily out of mushrooms and with the following sequence of delights:

  First, a hand-around dish of black olives, their own, baked black and then marinated in olive oil and garlic served with home-baked focaccia.

  Slices of hot, fire-toasted bread (crostini) carved from a two-foot-diameter, bronze-crusted loaf from a nearby bakery and dribbled with olive oil bruschetta style and sprinkled with finely ground sea salt or with a slather of Margherita’s magnificent bagna calda hot dip of blended cream, anchovies, garlic, and olive oil—a nostrano delight! The cutting of the bread was an odd and seemingly precarious procedure. First you sliced the whole ungainly loaf into two halves and then, holding one of the halves against your chest with your left hand and arm, you sliced from the far end with your right hand directly toward your body, and then veered the loaf and knife away at the last second before doing irreparable damage to very sensitive upper parts of your anatomy. To see large-bosomed women do this as they suckle the half-loaf between their ample protrusions and flailed away with a large and very sharp knife, getting closer and closer to their salient bits, was a rather unnerving sight. However, they claimed that accidents were rare.

  A simple but very aromatic bowl of homemade orecchiette pasta tossed in a rich sauce of fresh porcini, butter, cream, black pepper, and parsley and then topped with just-grated hard pecorino cheese (their own, of course). Actually, they’d called it stagionato, a special name for aged pecorino, which is regarded as a pungent delicacy in these parts.

  Fat, spicy, six-inch-long sausages with a pepperoni kick and chunky pork-meat filling grilled in the fireplace. These were served, as is very common in the countryside, with no garnish except some of those blindingly hot Basilicatan peperoncini chopped and marinated, along with garlic in olive oil.

  More porcini mushrooms, this time baked to tongue-tantalizing tenderness with a mix of chopped herbs, garlic, peppers, and cheese and served with a dark funghi stew laced with chilies and slathered over more fire-toasted bruschetta.

  There was supposed to be a salad, but we all agreed that perhaps it was unnecessary, as we could smell the next dish: a kind of finger food savory of crisp, deep-fried, sliced mushrooms (what else?) encased in a very highly seasoned batter of eggs and flour. These exploded with trapped juices à la Chicken Kiev as soon as they hit the palate, and the contrast between the crunchy batter and the rich, moist interior was so enticing that Margherita’s overworked brother (who, poor man, was not overly fond of mushrooms, despite the fact that he and a friend had done all the preparation and cooking) had to return to the stove in order to deliver two more bowls of these enticing delights.

  And then just when we thought that it was all over, out came the castagne (chestnuts), a true autumn delight, to be roasted in the fireplace and served with sliced pecorino, more crostini, and rich, creamy, unsalted homemade (of course) butter.

  And then, there was the wine. Endless bottles of unlabeled, home-produced red and white vintages from Margherita’s farm and the homes of her friends, each of whom had insisted on making his or her own vintage either from a small family vineyard or with grapes bought from local and “very reliable” vineyard owners. But what was intriguing, and seemingly a custom in these parts, was that in the long period between the arrival of the guests and the start of the dinner, not a single glass of alcohol of any kind had been served. Bottled water was the drink of choice (from Margherita’s own spring, of course). Any suggestion on my part—which of course, my being a very go-along kind of guest, was never made—that maybe a little aperitivo would be a pleasant way to get the evening started, would have been regarded as highly uncivilized. “Alcohol before food reduces the ability of your tongue to taste,” Margherita explained a couple of days later. “So we are like, how do you say, religious teetotalers until the food comes—but then with the arrival of the crostini, just watch those bottles of wine vanish.”

  And indeed they did. I lost count after the twelfth bottle. And that was around half-past midnight, long before we even started on the vin santo and the grappa.

  So, all in all, a remarkable experience in culinary simplicity and creativity right from the very first buon appetito and greeted throughout by all the guests with murmurs and exclamations of pleasure—Mangereccio! Mangiabile! Although, I should admit that before we’d arrived at Margherita’s, at around eight-thirty in the evening (dinner was served late in those parts), Anne and I had already consumed quite a range of gastronomic delights.

&nb
sp; First, Sebastiano and Rocchina had invited us for coffee and biscotti at their large, modern apartment in Stigliano and then for “just another coffee” at Rocchina’s parents’ house, deep in the wriggling alleys of the old town.

  They were a most hospitable couple, he a tiny ball of restless octogenarian energy with shining, smiling eyes peering out from under his trilby hat—apparently a permanent fixture, even in the house—and she a talker and a large-featured woman who greeted us all with kisses and hugs and coffee and the traditional demand (never an option) that “you will all have a little something to eat.”

  And so we had a kind of predinner dinner around a large kitchen table in a toasty-warm kitchen with a platter of bruschetta spread with tomato sauce (homemade of course), fat slices of pecorino (ditto), and beautiful red peppers stuffed with a mix of minced crumbled bread, anchovies, garlic, cheese, and egg and roasted in the oven with homemade olive oil. All of this was accompanied by glass after glass of the family’s very dark and intense-flavored red wine. Then, as we were just about to leave for Margherita’s, in walked a large segment of the rest of the family—burly husbands, demure wives, teenagers, a cousin, someone who’d just driven in from Naples. And the whole wining and dining thing started all over again, with grandpa puffing wickedly strong little Italian cigarettes in the corner and calling out raucous comments, his trilby hat wobbling as he laughed, and grandma at the stove, happily stirring and frying, and acting as though this familial scene of bodies everywhere and everyone eating and talking all at once and babies bawling and us trying to leave and never quite getting to the door was a regular part of her everyday life. Which, apparently, it was.

  MARGHERITA AND TORI’S ESTATE