by David Yeadon
Roberto accepted my accolades with professional modesty. “I didn’t make all these wonderful things. I just help local farmers keep doing it the way they always have. We learn from them, and in our education courses we pass on their knowledge and techniques along with new research and enhanced processes.”
“What makes this caciocavallo cheese so special?” I asked.
“Oh, so many things. The free-grazing Podolico cows and their unpasteurized milk, the maturing of the curds in a whey mix in wooden vats, which keep in the special bacteria—that’s the kind of thing that makes the EU very nervous! And then the pasta filata method of kneading and stretching the curds as they become elastic in heated water. It makes a very unique cheese—someone called it the institute’s ‘calling card.’ It’s what makes people realize that keeping old cheese-making processes alive is totally possible. We have proved it. And we teach this and many other things to over a thousand people a year—farmers, students, hobbyists. Many types of peoples.”
“Where do you teach them? Not here surely!”
“No, no, this is just our farm and upland grazing area. The kind of pastures that used to exist on the common land all over Basilicata, when they practiced transhumance—moving the flocks in summer to upland grazing areas. Some still do, but it’s a tradition that’s fading. We hope to revive it but…No, our trainers are in the town of Bella, you will see. We go there now, okay?”
On our way he explained that his great love for traditional cheese-making methods came from his having grown up near Battipaglia, the world-renowned center of true mozzarella di bufala cheese-making south of Naples.
“I realized that if you were true and honest to traditions and made the best possible product you could, the world would…how you say…”
“Beat a path to your door?”
“Yes. That’s right. So, when I became director over twenty years ago, I knew we had so many things to offer the world—better cheeses, better aging processes, better animals, better grazing on lands full of wild herbs that give unique flavors to the cheeses. And better work for Basilicatans. The government said we were marginale, so they kept sending money and factories down here. But these people are not factory workers, they are people of the land. So I wanted to find a way, a profitable way, for them to stay in their farms and on their pasturelands and produce some of the finest cheeses in Italy.”
“And it’s working?”
By way of reply, Roberto swung off the highway on the outskirts of the village of Bella. Suddenly, there before us, stood a huge, meticulously renovated Lombardy-style palazzo.
“No, no, not palazzo. Stables,” Roberto said. “Built after World War One for the Ministry of Agriculture. The minister was from the North, so he chose this unusual style. We have full teaching and conference facilities here and twenty bedrooms. And over there…” He pointed over to the left of the broad lawn campus. “We have pens for the animals—mainly goats, but some Merino sheep, too, and a small herd of buffalo.” And there they all were—scores of farm animals frisking, sleeping, and pursuing amorous activities in the warm afternoon sun.
“And we have a dairy, cheese-making plant, an aging ‘cave,’ and many offices and research facilities. We do a lot of research on animal breeds, but mainly on cheese composition—studying flavor and aroma terpenes to see how to create the best tastes, aging methods, different types of rennet, and improved cheese-making with such other traditional cheeses like cacioricotta, made from mixing goat’s and ewe’s milk. Also we have revived pecorino di filiano, an aged hard, sheep cheese; we hope to get a DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta) certificate for that. Oh, and of course we have our big success in Moliterno, a lovely hill village to the south of Potenza. They once used to age pecorino there in perfect cellar caves. It was very famous in New York and France a hundred years ago, but it faded away. But now we have been able to open up the cellars again, and our trainers are supervising the aging, for years, and hope to make it famous again!”
All in all his institute was a most impressive establishment, particularly the aging cave dug into the campus hillside and packed with dozens of different kinds of goat cheeses. (The distinctive “ammonia” aroma remained on my clothes for days.)
But one room made me lose my journalistic cool—not that I have much of that left these days. It was the Cheese Analysis Examination Room, which consisted of two lines of enclosed booths facing a narrow central passage. Each booth had a little trap door, which could be raised in order to pass through samples of cheeses to be analyzed by students in terms of their appearance, texture, aroma, flavor, strength, and consistency. I tried to imagine twenty or so students—some of whom would be burly hill farmers who rarely left their fields—nervously waiting behind their little trap doors at exam time to be fed those morsels of subtly different cheeses. A sort of Pink Floyd’s The Wall meets Pavlov’s dogs.
Well, I thought it was amusing anyway.
Roberto was chuckling at his own little joke. “You know, I am thinking: These traditional cheeses we are making are so good, so rich, maybe we will have to put a warning sticker on them like cigarette packets—‘Danger! If you eat too much of these delicious products of great quality it may be destructive to your health.’”
“Y’know, your job could be pretty detrimental to your health, too. Look at all the battles you’re fighting with the big boys—all those researchers fiddling with DNA and creating new animal species; intensive feeding factories with herb-less fodder in ‘industrial dairies’; widespread hormone and antibiotic injections; the obligatory processes of pasteurization and ‘processing’; that depressing McDonald’s ‘One Taste Worldwide’ mentality; mass distribution systems not geared to local ‘specialized’ products; the homogenization tendency of the EU and all those other bureaucratic regulators….”
“Oh, yes, yes, I know,” Roberto said cheerfully, “and many more. But you know, every time I eat one of our cheeses or see one of our farmers start to make real money with his own traditional cheeses, I feel very happy. And I agree with Schlosser. Do you know his book about America, Fast Food Nation? He condemns the plague of the industrialized agricultural system and says we must all push for the ‘re-localization of food.’”
“Especially in ‘marginal areas’ like Basilicata?”
“David!” he said, laughing and giving me another one of his extravagant hand, arm, and upper torso gestures. “You must remember—there is no marginality in Basilicata!”
At Last—Carnevale!
A truly climactic “celebration of the old ways”—very old ways in this case—began a few days later in Aliano. And there was certainly nothing of Roberto’s marginale about these festivities. Weeks of gleeful anticipation and secretive preparation erupted into the great annual romp and communal “roastings” of the pre-Lent Carnevale. It came with a flurry of devilish masks; skeletal-white figures; rowdy bands of wandering musicians; sudden dousings of thrown water, flour, and foamy squirtings; all suffused with a feral spirit of surprise, shock, and colorful chaos.
For Anne and me at least (despite the dousings and the squirtings), it was a key event of the year, which wove together so many of the individual threads of our experiences and our gleaned understanding of life in our little village. It was a riotous melding of the “dark side” elements that had added a strange piquancy to our lives, with the villagers’ irrepressible spirit of mischief, fun, and pride in their own distinct folkloric and terroni heritage.
Other towns nearby celebrated the Carnevale in very different ways. Cirigliano offered to its proudly insular villagers a mysteriously intimate, alley-by-alley procession of musicians, oddly dressed characters reflecting village legends and folktales, frantic dancing to accordions, drums, and flutes, and feasting on time-treasured culinary oddities such as sheep’s head, pig trotters, and tripe (all of which tasted far better than they sounded).
Stigliano’s Carnevale was by far the most extrovertedly flamboyant, featuring processions of costumed danc
ers and musicians and half a dozen enormous and bizarre floats, including a Harry Potter extravaganza; a marvelously satirical Bush–Saddam Hussein creation by some of Sebastiano’s teachers, with moving caricatured heads the size of weather balloons; and a witchy peasant tableau inspired, so it seemed, by Levi’s vast Lucania ’61 artwork in Matera. Then came something that resembled a macabre graveyard scene, with skull and skeleton-like figures rising and falling and scaring the bejesus out of the children, who clung frantically to their parents in the enormous, laughing and drinking crowds filling the main piazza.
Accettura had a more modest float—just the one—but a highly charged, punkish rock band and frantic dancing kept things lively until the early hours. Giuliano said it was “lotsa fun—like we was all kids again!” Rosa displayed her usual caution but admitted that “it brought everyone together—although it were all a bit daft really.”
But Aliano’s Carnevale, while certainly modest in comparison to Stigliano’s, possessed far deeper and darker elements that reflected the bedrock of ancient pagani traditions and attitudes there. Levi’s description of his own experiences during that unique festival seem as valid today as they were in 1935:
The carnival season just preceding Lent, came around quite unexpectedly in these strange surroundings.…I saw three-white-robed ghosts appear at the lower end of the village and dash up the main street. They were jumping and shouting like maddened beasts, drunk with their own hue and cry. These were peasant masqueraders. Their carnival fancy dress consisted of white robes, on their heads white knotted caps, or stockings with white feathers stuck in them, and whitened shoes. Their faces were covered with flour and they carried dried sheepskins in their hands, rolled up like sticks, which they brandished threateningly and brought down upon the head and shoulders of anyone who failed to get out of the way. They seemed like devils let loose, bursting with savage joy at this brief moment of folly and impunity so different from their usual humdrum and browbeaten existence…. They were trying to make up for hardship and enslavement with a parody of freedom, exaggerated, but reflecting their repressed ferocity.
While the degree of repression and “enslavement” had obviously been much modulated since the thirties, there certainly remained a spirit of “devils let loose” in our little community.
They were everywhere. Frighteningly bedecked in garish, devil-like masks, with enormous horns and swirling cappelloni (headdresses) of colored ribbons, hundreds of them to each mask, they tore around the piazza and Via Roma, chasing the villagers with sticks and whips, all the way down the corso and into Piazza Garibaldi. Shouting and screaming like the mad animals they were, they threatened everyone with fiendish clubs, ridiculed the village’s higher-echelon “Don Luigis” (a permissible activity apparently for this brief and bizarre rite), and encouraged youngsters to join them in their pernicious pranks, water-dousings, flour-throwings, and squirt-can antics.
The village was in chaos despite the laughter and exaggerated screams of the devils’ victims. Cars, doors, and windows became smothered in squirted goo; dogs and cats ran frantically for cover, cowering in shadows; shopkeepers closed early to protect their precious hordes of goodies; and the local police kept well out of the way behind the thick, wooden doors of the comune (town hall).
Even the good Don Pierino, usually prime instigator of and participant in village festivities, was nowhere to be seen. Giuseppina told us he’d “gone to Rome to see the Pope.” Vincenzo Uno whispered that “the poor Don hates all this pagani stuff and stays inside watching videos.” Aldo, at the Capriccio, insisted that “he’ll be keeping record of all peoples being pagani!”
Incanto, that dark witchy Alianese enchantment, floated thick through the streets and the shadowy alleys. Despite the tongue-in-cheek antics and attitudes of some of the villagers, Anne and I sensed that the Carnevale reached deep into their collective consciousness, releasing memories and myths of once-strident peasant rebellions against the stranglehold of the local padroni and “petty tyrants.” Levi called it a “parody of freedom,” and indeed in his day this was the one occasion in the year when the “repressed ferocity” of the terroni could be released in a tumult of cutting satire, overt disrespect, and even occasional physical confrontations. The local phrase “a Carnevale ogni scherzo vale” says it all: “Everything is permissible at the Carnival.”
But the borderline between satire and more severe actions is sometimes thin and tenuous. And even today, after all the land reformations and social-assistance systems for the poor and for the Mezzogiorno as a whole, we could sense the ongoing frustrations of the villagers. They knew about all the petty corruption that still nibbled away at village coffers; the disappearance of the youth to the fleshpots of the North and beyond; the dispirited emptying and slow decay of the houses, creating a potential città fantasma (ghost town) where there was once a thriving community; the increasing regularity of funerals for the aging villagers; the strutting popinjay pomposity of the “petty tyrants”; the cushy “early-retirement” scams of the statali; the entrenched power of the secretive gens; and the black farce of Italian authority from the most mundane village level to the peaks of national political power.
They knew all this and so much more. And they cheered as the devils attacked and parodied the rich and the powerful. And they laughed and shouted at the improvised village sarcastica theatrical production, the Frase, in the piazza, which ripped the scabs off festering wounds of economic inequality, corrupt justice, avaricious tax collectors, and the moral degradation of social institutions.
We watched that particular event from our terrace along with a gathering of friends we’d invited over for a thank-you dinner before our imminent departure. Although much of the dialogue was in the local Alianese dialect, we could tell just by watching the expressions on the faces of our friends—Sebastiano, the two Giuseppinas, Bruno, Margherita, Tori, Rosa, Giuliano, Massimo, Antonio, Graziella, and many others—that the scenes being played out on the rickety stage below us were tantamount to rebellion.
ALIANO CARNEVALE
Afterward, when the play was over, the devils roared about the streets again and the musicians fluted, screeched, and fiddled, and the cupi-cupi droned. (This bizarre instrument is played by rubbing a stick through a hole pierced through the center of a hide skin wrapped tightly around the top of a flowerpot-like vessel. It gives off eerie, echoey sounds—something like a bass and drum combined.)
Other strange allegorical figures emerged, too, just as Levi described:
Ghosts beat without mercy anyone that came into their grasp, no matter who they might be…the barriers between gentry and peasants were down. They leaped diagonally from one side of the street to the other, shouting as if they were possessed by evil spirits…like savages run amuck or the performers of a sacred dance of terror.
Skeleton-like figures appeared with white painted skull masks, along with odd characters dressed completely in black with tall stovepipe hats. Youngsters in capes and ghoulish headdresses—embryonic shape-shifters—pursued virginal (or so it seemed) maidens dressed in traditional peasant costumes of flowing white blouses and long black skirts. Others flounced about in 1940s-style clothes (possibly a reference to Levi’s era) or parodied the ostentatious dress of padroni families and overuniformed officials. And every once in a while screaming, witchlike characters—streghe—would fly out of the shadows, scattering the crowds and scaring the children, and then vanish up the now night-black alleys.
Our friends on the terrace, despite their generations-long Basilicatan heritage and their familiarity with all its pagani associations, seemed confused, even a little alarmed, at the tumult and occasional moments of terror in the streets below.
“This is…powerful stuff,” Sebastiano muttered, always intrigued by local myths and traditions.
Rocchina nodded and looked dumbfounded by the cacophony in the piazza. “They have other things here—like the festival of Aliano’s patron saint, San Luigi Gonzaga—that bring many Alian
ese back home for a few days. And the Viaggi Sentimentali events all around the village celebrating Levi’s book. But this…this is the real stuff of their heritage from il tempo fuori del tempo, ‘the time before time.’”
“Wild, wild!” Margherita said and vanished downstairs to reenter the fray while Tori watched her with that constantly bemused expression of his.
“’Ave y’tried my wine yet?” Giuliano asked, always focusing on the hedonistic side of life. “S’one of m’best.”
Rosa ignored him and stood, rigid as a stone, watching the kaleidoscopic antics and saying nothing. I had the feeling she preferred to celebrate Carnevale in the more demure Accettura fashion.
Massimo was happily tipsy, smiling his cherubic smile and dancing across the terrace with whichever of our lady friends was willing to risk her dainty feet to his somewhat unsteady boots. Finally Graziella grabbed him and, despite the fragility of her delicate pointed-toe shoes, showed him that even an intoxicated buffoon could do the cha-cha if he allowed her to lead.
The two Giuseppinas were huddled in the corner by the woodpile, apparently ignoring the riotous ancics below and discussing matters of serious village gossip (many new “scandals” would emerge after the festivities were over). Bruno, like Giuliano, was seriously into the wine and dismissed all the frivolities below as “ridiculous…barbaric!”
As I expected, Antonio gave a more eloquent and considered summary of the whole strange spectacle. “It’s pure Dionysian! It has the spirit of our ancient Greek—Magna Graecia—festivals for the God of Wine, Dionysus—Bacchus. It’s a time for letting go, a devil-may-care spirit of getting drunk and being overtly sexual. Just look at the phallic shapes of the noses, chins, and horns of those masks. And their underpants! They wear old long johns, cauzenitt, and other whatnots on the outside of their costumes. But it’s also got some of our local shape-shifting elements—men being transformed into creatures, men turning into women, little girls becoming streghe, witches. And watch the people. See how they’re laughing? But you can tell some are frightened. These beliefs and fears are still around even though the teenagers treat them as a bit of a joke. But to many it’s not a joke at all. It reminds them of the old ‘dark ways’ and all the terrors of the unknown, and the night.”