Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  MINGALONE CANTINA

  Nothing needs to be added. Rosa, as usual, said it all.

  More Serendipity with Sebastiano

  Experiences like this (despite Giuliano’s little trick) made Anne and me appreciate even more the gracious hospitality and gustatory talents of our friends, particularly Sebastiano and Rocchina, whose generosity knew no bounds. And once again we had been invited over to their Stigliano home for “a little Sunday lunch,” which of course is an utter oxymoron in the Villani household. But on this particular Sunday there were even more surprises in store for us…

  “YOU TWO—you’re just like a couple of little boys together!”

  I’d forgotten who’d actually said that. It might have been Rocchina, but I think it was his postpubescent, nineteen-year-old daughter, Antonella (I do like the way Italians often create male and female versions of the same Christian name), who gave one of her cute, sultry half-smiles and, between frantic bouts of gum-chewing, often made quite revelatory and perceptive statements. As teenagers everywhere are apt to do, I guess.

  I certainly remember watching Sebastiano’s face when the remark was first made. It scrolled through a range of possible responses, each reflecting a different persona and each of declining severity. First was the stern Italian father, head of the household, wondering if such levity of a personal nature was appropriate in his family. Particularly with guests present. Then came the director of education/headmaster disciplinarian always seeking to balance “appropriate behavior” with what he insisted he wanted most of all for his students—“Freedom to learn, think, and express themselves.” And then came the man himself, almost thirty years older than his daughter, wondering if some kind of watershed in understanding and communication were being crossed and whether he might have to start treating Antonella as a young woman rather than just a girl with sometimes erratic and beguilingly bizarre outbursts of rhetoric and behavior.

  And then came his smile. Then the wide grin. And then the belly laugh, which made his brown eyes shine brightly and his thick moustache wobble in that endearing Groucho Marx manner.

  “Yes, yes. I suppose it’s true! What do you think, David?”

  I was laughing too, along with Anne, who nodded in enthusiastic agreement with Antonella’s remark. And it was definitely true that whenever Sebastiano and I got together, often for the most serious of purposes, zany things would just seem to happen serendipitously. Things we never expected and never sought to instigate or control. And we just kind of plunged in and watched to see what would occur next. Which was fine with me, because I’d spent a large part of my adult life giving myself precisely that kind of liberty. Indeed, seeking it on every possible occasion as a way, not only to spice up my existence (ever true to Jack London’s belief that “the function of man is to live, not to exist”) but also to provide grist for my writing and my way of learning about the wonderfully kaleidoscopic world in which we all live.

  But on occasion I was a little concerned for Sebastiano. After all, he was a pillar—and a very highly respected pillar—of Stigliano society and the community of villages all around, and I hesitated to be a catalyst of anything that might jeopardize such a respected position and hard-earned reputation. He, on the other hand, didn’t seem in the least concerned. “It is best that people see who you really are,” he told me after a couple of rather riotous bouts of free-wheeling behavior. “They always find out anyhow, so why pretend? After all, you yourself, David, have said many times that we all have many sides, many selves to our personalities and that we should allow them—how you say—that we should ‘let them out to play, eh’?”

  I obviously had to agree because that’s what I think and, doubtless, I’d expressed such musings on more than one occasion. “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.” And having affirmed the fact that we were, and intended to remain, rather like “little boys together,” I asked about our agenda for the rest of the day.

  “Well, first we let lunch settle a little,” Sebastiano replied with a sigh of gustatory relief as the two-and-a-half-hour-long Sunday midday meal slowly rolled to a climax in the form of an enormous cake, layered and iced with chocolate, stuffed with hazelnuts, and rich in sweet liqueur-flavored intensity.

  The lunch, once again, was supposed to have been “a snack.” At least that’s how Sebastiano had presented it when he called earlier in the week to ask us if we could join his family and a couple of friends that weekend.

  “We’re not much good with large lunches, Sebastiano,” I had replied hesitantly, remembering past occasions when we’d been overwhelmed by Rocchina’s prowess in the kitchen. “They usually wipe us out for the rest of the day.”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” he’d insisted. “Just a few things to nibble while we plan some other activities. Oh, and a surprise—I have a little surprise for both of you.”

  Surprises always piqued our interest. So, we agreed and presented ourselves at one o’clock in the afternoon on a blustery Sunday at his apartment building, perched on top of one of Stigliano’s arduously high hills. Chilly mists, brought in by a north wind—“from Russia,” insisted Sebastiano—whorled around the streets and blocked out all the usually fabulous views of the mountains and valleys to the south. Seven flights of stairs later we arrived at his door, breathless and thirsty. And, I regret to say, hungry, too.

  “Ah, David, Anne!” Sebastiano said as he greeted us with one of his “from the heart” smiles. “Welcome, welcome, come in, come in.”

  We were introduced to his two friends, both sociologists and advisors on human affairs to local companies and organizations. And yet again, I had one of those increasingly frequent flashes of face recognition. It must be a symptom of the aging process because, more and more, I seem to keep meeting people who immediately remind me of other people. In this case the lady was definitely Erica Jong, or maybe Carole King, I couldn’t quite decide. And he, with his portly bulk and wide, toothy grin, was Topol, or maybe Zero Mostel. (I always get the two of them mixed up.) But there was certainly an aura of Fiddler on the Roof in the man’s hearty, booming presence as he looked up from a frantic game of foosball with Sebastiano’s son Gianluca, and then quickly resumed his flailing of the rods dotted with plastic players, filling the living room with great bearlike roars every time he scored.

  ROCCHINA’S “SNACK” began with the usual antipasto delights of sliced salami, prosciutto, mozzarella, garden-ripe tomatoes, and chunks of golden-dough bread with that hard, bronze crust. These were followed by what we hoped would be the second and final course: huge bowls of ferricelle, pasta doused in a rich pork and beef ragu sauce and sprinkled with just-grated parmigiano reggiano and—here’s a new one, at least for me—fresh-grated horse-radish. A truly pungent kick start to the dish. But we should have known better. These were merely tidbit preludes to a huge casserole of baked turkey and pork, an unusual but succulent combination in a rich peperoncini sauce served with olive oil–rich heapings of oven-roasted potatoes laced with minced garlic and caramelized onions.

  I gave Sebastiano one of those “I thought you said this was going to be a light lunch” looks, and he shrugged with a kind of helpless “Sorry, but you know what Rocchina’s like when she’s let loose in the kitchen” gestures.

  We plowed through the casserole and then into a huge platter of Rocchina’s homemade sausages, rich in anise-flavored fennel seeds and grilled to succulent, scarlet gold sweetness and thwacked with sprinklings of those startlingly fiery Basilicatan red peppers.

  And then salad. Of course. And then some kind of cheesy-mousse dessert with slices of scamorza cheese. And fruit: gloriously juicy blood oranges from Topol’s (I’ll call him that because I’ve forgotten his real name) orchard near his home in Pisticci, a fascinating warrenlike hill town twenty miles to the southeast of Stigliano.

  Finally came that splendid chocolate cake, served with Rocchina’s own five-year-old homemade walnut liqueur made from “green walnuts with bay leaves and lemon” (aggressively strong but aromat
ically beguiling), followed by decadently rich and enormous Perugia chocolates, cappuccino, and biscotti. Oh, and the wine, of course. Six adults managed to consume four bottles even though none of us ever seemed to have more than half a glass in hand at any one time.

  “So, enough, I hope?” said Sebastiano with a sly smile.

  I tried to frown at being duped into devouring such an extravaganza of delights but I guess it came out as a wide grin followed by a distinct growl from an overloaded digestive tract. “Superb!” I think I may have murmured, before slipping into a near stupor. Anne just smiled a very broad and wine-happy smile of appreciation.

  “NOW,” SEBASTIANO SAID, after Antonella had given us a brief but charming postlunch serenade on her organetto (a sort of miniature, gypsy-style accordion) and I had completed a series of circumnavigations of the living room, trying to restore some life and sense of movement in myself. “My surprise for you two.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, wondering what else he could possibly have in mind after such a cornucopia.

  “I have a friend in town, Rocco, who has this little museum, and he would like you, all of us, to go and see it.”

  “How nice,” I said, not too enthusiastically. “Is it a long drive?”

  “Oh, no, no,” Sebastiano insisted. “Not a long drive at all. Because we will all walk there.”

  I started to remind him that it was cold, very cold, outside, that the town was smothered in fog, and that we’d just completed an extremely long and debilitating meal. But when Sebastiano gets an idea in his head, it’s very hard to talk him out of it. I guess that’s why he is who he is, a director of education, who always seems to know what he wants and usually gets it too.

  So, that’s how we all came to be half-skidding down the steep hills of the town, then wandering up sinewy alleys of steps, endless steps, and then down again, past the remnants of Stigliano’s eleventh-century castle, across huge cloud-swept piazzas where the only signs of life were those little black-clad widows, always scurrying about in what looked like life-or-death missions of utterly focused urgency.

  “Are we lost?” I seem to remember croaking out at one point after a particularly laborious stepped ascent, when Sebastiano paused at the corner of one particularly spacious hilltop piazza.

  “No, no. I just wanted to show you. This is our marketplace. Very good market here. Every Tuesday. Full of people.”

  “Really?” was all I could think to say. The place looked so deserted that even the normally ever-present pigeons seemed to avoid it.

  “And here it is,” he said after a tortuous, half-skidding climb down one of the steepest alleys of the town. Those marble paving stones are lethal if you’re wearing smooth, rubber-soled shoes—as I was. “Rocco de Rosa’s little museum.”

  An enormous, bowed-wall, ramshackle barn of a building loomed up in front of us. Its construction consisted primarily of huge square stones, but despite its massiveness, the whole place looked as if a quick kick in the right place or the merest nudge of an earth tremor—not even enough to cause a flicker on the Richter scale—would crumple the place in a nanosecond. Which would be a great shame, because Rocco’s museum—actually an extensive collection of ancient agricultural implements, olive presses, wine barrels, torchi (grape-pressing machines), and hundreds of other carefully assembled, rust-bound knickknacks—was a masterpiece of visionary compilation. One man’s vision, too: Rocco himself. A bright-eyed, smiling, lean-bodied man, perhaps in his early forties, who according to Sebastiano had spent most of his adult years assembling his collection “without seeking money from anybody. He did it all by himself,” said Sebastiano with great pride in his friend’s accomplishments.

  Rocco entertained us for an hour or so with the tales and histories behind his collection, which he seemed to regard as a roomful of personal acquaintances. He affectionately stroked the huge granite mill wheels of the seventeenth-century olive press; rubbed the cobwebby, leathery rotundness of a harness that was once wrapped around the necks of mules used to turn the tree trunk–thick central wooden pivot post of the mill; caressed in an almost sensual fashion the bowed oak staves of ancient wine barrels still vaguely redolent of old vintages; rang the big bronze cowbells dangling from the walls; and invited us to feel the sharpness of the spiked collars once worn by sheep dogs as defense against wolf attacks.

  Rocco’s love for his own personal creation was infectious, and as we went on to explore his upper “romantic” rooms above the presses, we found ourselves in an attic dreamworld. Here was where he kept his cheek-by-jowl piles of “emerging collections” of artifacts. They were in such wonderful heaped confusions—enormous boxes piled with old books and manuscripts; an ancient fireplace adorned with hundreds of rusty keys, some the size of kitchen ladles; dust-coated religious icons and paintings; a mini-mountain of ancient sewing machines—that you wondered how he would ever reach some of the remoter piles. To some, I suppose, it would have been just a hopeless, haphazard repository of miscellaneous junk. But in Rocco’s eyes it was more, and I could tell that, one day, he would sort it all out and display it as effectively and enticingly as all the other items in the rooms below.

  We all left, inspired by the man’s single-minded determination, and I wondered why he had so far refused to seek funding for his pet project.

  “Ah!” Sebastiano explained with a frustrated shrug. “Paperwork. So much stupid paperwork to get even a small grant in this town, in this region. And he is a very proud man and not very patient! He has, like so many Basilicatans, an inbred contempt for laws and regulations and statali bureaucrats!”

  “But surely this is a contribution to Stigliano,” I suggested. “There’s no other museum here. Nothing really for visitors to see if and when they ever come here.”

  Sebastiano chuckled cynically. “You know, last night I went to a meeting of the Regional Planning Council. They said they wanted to make plans for the future of this part of Basilicata and they invited the people in the town and from the villages to come to present their ideas.”

  “And?”

  “And what!? Nothing! There were less than twenty people. And no young people at all, and they are the future of this area.”

  “No ideas either?”

  “Oh, of course. The same old stuff. Bring new factories, new enterprises. Get rid of all the red tape. That kind of thing. And you know, in that small area in the valley between Stigliano and Aliano where they built a few roads and tried to get new businesses to come…”

  “Yes, I know the place. It has three buildings on it.”

  “Correct. Two are empty, and the other has been there for two years and they still don’t have a telephone yet! Can you believe?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said sadly but truthfully, “I can. But what other ideas came out of the meeting?”

  “Oh, ‘let’s make more tourism’ was the big one! In this area, with almost no hotels, no fancy restaurants, not even a properly funded museum like Rocco’s to show people our history and how we lived. Tourists need these things. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, it’s very beautiful and dramatic down here so please come and stay with us and spend lots of money.’ You know, it’s all so stupid. When I think…when I remember that my grandparents lived in one room here with farm animals and chickens everywhere…”

  Rocchina was walking with us and she could see that Sebastiano was about to launch into one of his familiar and always spirited tirades about the stupidity of politicians and bureaucrats and anything else that smacked of pathetic attempts at “planning” and half-baked visions of “our great new future.” So, she gave him a loving but tough nudge, and he stopped in mid-sentence, blinked, and then exploded with one of his warm, throaty laughs. “I’m off again, eh?” he said to Rocchina, and she smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “you’re right. What we need now is a glass of wine.”

  It just so happened that, as we were retracing our steps back to the Villanis’ apartment, up one of the steep, still-misty streets, I spott
ed a brightly lit wine shop with barrels and demijohns and bottles and someone pouring wine into liter flagons from a huge container finely carved with an heraldic crest and baroque flourishes. I signaled to Sebastiano that I’d found a timely source for his wine and pushed open the door into the warm, aromatic store. “Buona sera,” I said to a half dozen or so men standing or sitting around a wooden table filled with platters of sliced salami and mortadella and thick slabs of bread. And I was thinking, what a great little place, a sort of shop-cum-bar with free snacks to boot and a dozen or so different wines to choose from.

  “Ah,…David…” I heard Sebastiano whisper behind me. But I was intent on getting him a glass of wine. In fact six glasses—one for each of us.

  “Sei vini, per favore,” I said, smiling at the man pouring the wine from the elegantly carved barrel.

  There was what might be called a pregnant pause—actually more like an ominous silence.

  “David, David!” It was Sebastiano again.