North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  This was the part of the town most affected by the earthquake, the houses being old and in poor condition. Consequently this is where the bulk of the rebuilding has happened. The argument rages still about the rebuilding. Our neighbouring town, San Donato, managed to restore its old buildings leaving the old stonework façades intact. In Gallinaro the exteriors have had steel mesh riveted to them and have been covered in a cement render. It’s effective and cheap, but some of the more beautiful old stonework is now under an inch of sand and cement.

  Despite my misgivings about the effect of the rebuilding on the village as a whole, at a personal level I have been fortunate. Like most old houses in Gallinaro, mine was fitted with chains after the 1921 earthquake. A house in an earthquake opens out like an artichoke, from the top. To counteract this, the upper levels were threaded with chains which bound opposite walls to one another. Although this work stopped the house from collapsing, it was damaged extensively and was one of the first to benefit from the rebuilding. Without filling in any forms, without making applications to government offices, the local administration simply rebuilt it. The work done was extensive: a new tiled roof; a reinforced concrete cordon around the top of the walls; the interior of the upper storey lined with steel mesh and rendered; the supporting walls and arches in the cantina buttressed and strengthened. As it stands now, the house should withstand all but the worst geological violence.

  I was frankly amazed at the extent of the work and its quality. I found Alberto, the then mayor, and thanked him.

  He looked at me quizzically. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course. It’s a good job.’

  ‘Well, you’re the first person in the village to have no complaints. Everyone else has been moaning about the mess the builders left.’

  This was in 1987. The previous year my house in Ireland had been under a metre of water as a result of Hurricane Charlie. There was no help available from government, council or insurance. Returning to Italy to find my house restored by the administration made comparisons inevitable, and whatever mess had been left by the builders seemed a small inconvenience to me. There is a lot to be said for living in a country with a large base of taxpayers.

  The area around the main church is a maze of narrow alleys. Most of the houses here date from the twelfth century. One of the peculiarities of ownership has caused immense problems for the rebuilding. Almost nowhere in Gallinaro is a house owned by one family. What the Gallinarese refer to as a casa, a house, in fact means a place to live. Especially in the centro storico, flying freehold is the norm. One apartment runs in a long strip along four houses. The apartments can be large, on several floors, but they rarely mirror the divisions in the external façade. This is the result of centuries of dividing houses between offspring, and of people’s willingness to sell single rooms to abutting houses. Last year I was offered the top room of the house adjoining mine. The owners have a problem: the house has been abandoned for years, but now that it has been rebuilt by the earthquake fund, the two brothers and one sister cannot agree on how to sell it. There are four rooms, one above the other. It is clearly impossible for each of them to have a separate entrance to their respective floors, so one alternative is to sell it, room by room, to the neighbours.

  Beyond the main church the road descends gently towards San Donato, a few scattered contratti, or hamlets, along the way. The campo santo, the town cemetery, is on the left. It has high walls and a large, iron double gate. Inside are my ancestors, their names and dates carefully recorded on the graves. This is where my father lies buried and where an empty space awaits me. The custom here is not to inter the dead, but to place the coffins on large shelves stacked four-high which surround the cemetery wall on the inside. Marble face-plates close in the coffin and record the name and dates of the body within. Most graves carry a photograph as well, as a memento for the living. There is a matter-of-factness about the system which reflects the closeness to the birth and death cycle that all country-dwellers have. When the next death in the family comes, the shelf that has been occupied the longest is opened; the remains are placed in an urn and the urn joins the others on the top shelf, the name being added to that face-plate while a new one marks the details of the recent arrival. With this system a family vault of five places – four stacked high and one below ground at the base – can serve for many generations whilst saving precious space. The habit of entombing above ground is a function of the difficulty of interring in rocky land. I have a vivid memory of a visit to Brancaleone in Calabria many years ago. The old town was abandoned on a hill-top while the new bustled at the sea shore. Earthquakes had shaken the graves and many of the cover plates were cracked and broken, exposing the occupants. Inside several of them were skeletons with rotting clothing, but with perfect leather boots.

  The Gallinaro cemetery is disturbing for me since I once walked around it calculating the age of Tullio males: very few survived longer than sixty years. Perhaps it was no more than their tough, back-breaking life taking its toll.

  The comune of Gallinaro extends almost the same distance from each side of the road and accounts for roughly half of the official population. The town centre, once the commercial nub and on Sundays the social nub, is going through a transformation. Today all the inhabitants have a car, they shop in the big supermarkets either on the superstrada or in large towns. Sunday mass is not the draw it was, and anyway the main church has been closed since the earthquake. The patterns of behaviour that created a vibrant town centre are changing. People are dispersed, they work in Sora or Cassino, they have friends in other towns, they have transport. The little villages of the Comino Valley worked when their economy was peasant. You walked in the morning to your patch of earth, worked it, and walked home at dusk. Until recently there were many who had never travelled beyond the valley. It was a self-sufficient society, almost apart from the rest of Italy. D. H. Lawrence described the valley as ‘a world within a world, a valley of many hills and townlets and streams shut in beyond access’. The ancient patterns of life have been eradicated in the last forty years and with it the very reasons for the structure and shape of the villages. Already the majority of the houses in Gallinaro are empty for eleven months of the year, owned by emigrants who come in August, or by Gallinarese who work in Rome or Milan, who return to see old friends and rediscover their roots.

  Quite where this trend will lead I’m not sure. Long-forgotten owners of abandoned houses which have been rebuilt from central coffers have surfaced, and many of the houses are now for sale. Who will buy them? Already we have a family of Romans who have no prior connections with the village – they came because it is beautiful, because the air is clean, and to get out of Rome in the summer. I would guess that more and more urban Italians will buy holiday homes in small villages like ours to escape their own form of rat-race and to rediscover in a small rural community some of the old pleasures and values that they have missed.

  Two years ago we stopped for the night on our way to Ireland in Castle Combe, in Wiltshire. This village is absurdly pretty, and looks in danger to me of becoming a theme park. Everyone we met seemed to have moved from London. The pubs and the Castle itself are owned by anonymous and amorphous conglomerates. It seems to be a rural backdrop, a theatrical set against which temporary visitors strut and fret their hour and then are seen no more. Gallinaro may be a long way from this, but the thought remains. One of the main topics of conversation amongst the emigrants is the relationship that their children have with the town. Many of these emigrants have elderly relatives still living in the village, so it is partly to visit them that they return. Their children, especially the teenagers, would for the most part much prefer to be in Torremolinos, or anywhere rather than rural Italy. For the bucolic there is much on offer, but Euro-teenagers want more than this village can provide.

  For the moment the glue that holds the centre together is provided by Sinella. Cesidio Franciosa, known universally as Sinella, owns the bar of the
same name. It is home to the disgruntled voters of the old town, the opposition parties, and all the holiday-makers who know nothing of the political undercurrents.

  I have never seen Sinella with anything other than a cheery smile. During the summer he works insanely long hours, serving until two or three in the morning, and re-opening at seven in the morning. In the winter he keeps it open and warm all day long while the old men sit, smoke and play cards, ordering a coffee every five hours or so. There is a definite touch of the classical in the names of the regulars: Othello, Pompey, Attila, Dionysius, Augustus, Maximus, Achilles, Horace and Hercules all play cards here.

  It’s hard to believe how cold it gets in January and February, especially if your memories are only of summer. For eight consecutive years we spent the winter in Gallinaro. Had we been tied to the village with no transport, there would have been literally nothing to do to while away the hours outside our house other than sit in Sinella’s. As it was, we took to skiing, against the advice of everyone over fifty, who explained that the mountain air made you sick. Anyone under fifty thought that we were eccentric, so our activities were largely ignored. Still, it eventually caught on and the village now has a thriving ski club.

  During the summer Sinella comes into his own. He is one of those people whose enthusiasm for life is infectious. He organizes music and dancing in the little piazza outside his bar, despite the obstacles that the administration put in his way. I honestly believe he should be rewarded for performing a public service.

  At one end of the piazza, just outside the bar, are a flight of steps made of local marble which lead up towards the church. These steps serve as a dais for the musicians when Sinella organizes an evening’s entertainment. Like most Italians south of Rome he loves Neapolitan songs and music, so that is what we tend to get. One of the regulars in the bar is Franco la Sip. Because he used to work for the phone company, SIP, that has become his name. He is a Neapolitan who has now settled in Gallinaro the better to play cards, and, because of his connections, he finds us good Neapolitan musicians to play. Both Franco and Sinella have fine tenor voices and both of them sing when there is a PA system available.

  The little piazza is like an outdoor salon in the summer; it is sheltered from the wind and the full sun, and there are benches under the oleanders that line its sides. When the construction companies that did the rebuilding finished in this section, as a gift to the village they re-paved the piazza in a sort of red, patterned cobble. This, combined with fact that here is one of the few places in the village where nothing offends the eye, makes outside Sinella’s a good place to sit.

  On 12 August 1991 Sinella and Franco between them organized supper for the whole village. Trestle tables ran the length of the piazza, ready to accommodate 200 diners. Opposite the bar Franco had set up his outdoor kitchen, where he cooked the pasta and meat. We were all to arrive at eight with our own crockery, cutlery and wine; the food was Franco’s job.

  One of the joys of living in Italy is the fact that it is possible to organize an outdoor event in advance and know that rain will not stop play. We walked across the road from our house to the little piazza clutching one bottle of Nicola’s rosé and one of Gerardo’s white. A gibbous moon hung high overhead and a warm breeze rustled the oleanders. A group of friends had laid siege to a centre table and had kept us a place. As we tasted each other’s wine we waited to see what was in store. I found the whole idea of a meal for a village just wonderful and tried to photograph it. Unfortunately the shutter jammed, so I have no photographs of that night.

  Franco came by, shouting, barracking, fencing with hecklers. Before each of us he dropped a plastic plate with home-made bread and prosciutto. ‘Nine courses to come!’ he yelled over his shoulder.

  We had paid 10,000 lire each for this, about £5. Even assuming this to be a non-profit-making venture, already no easy assumption where Franco is involved, it seemed absurdly cheap for ten courses. OK, in the end the courses were not huge, and coffee counted as one too, but it was one of the most memorable nights that I have spent in the piazza.

  After the coffee the band began to set up and a space was cleared for dancing. For me it was not the first time and hopefully it will not be the last, but there is something magical about balmy evenings, sitting outside and listening to the saccharine schmaltz of Neapolitan love songs. I love it unashamedly. Sinella started the dancing, a lambada I think, with an attractive lady from Rome. His movements fascinated me, the kind of sinuous twisting that an overdose of Dopamine produces, all curvy limbs but somehow taut. I was mesmerized, never having seen the like, but my wife found it a little unattractive. Anyway, it had the desired effect, for soon we were all dancing.

  Once Sinella had sung O sole mio, the microphone became fair game for anyone who could get hold of it. The man on keyboards began to assume the haunted look of a musician who, try as he might, is unable to find the key in which to accompany the singer. By two o’clock, having tried all the keys they knew, the musicians went back to Naples. In what I thought was a miracle of organizing a crowd of happy Italians, Sinella got the piazza cleared, the trestles put away, the rubbish in sacks and the whole place back in order in less than ten minutes. Franco says he’ll do it again but next time he’s going to charge properly, whatever that might mean.

  That Sinella is still running his bar is thanks to the Baby Jesus. As the Chapel of the Baby Jesus began to attract increasing numbers of pilgrims, Sinella opened a small shack from which he sold coffee and beer. Now it has grown hugely, one of several watering-holes provided by the village to extract cash from pilgrims. It is undoubtedly his main source of revenue and it has allowed him to keep the bar in the village going, giving us a focal point. For the sake of the village I hope he prospers.

  11

  Sex and Fashion

  Italians enjoy public life. They are at their happiest in the centre of the crowd. This simple truth explains much of the shape of daily life. Architecturally, it ensures that all towns and villages have a piazza where their inhabitants can meet and chat. It explains why Italian houses have balconies that look out on to the road, why cafés have tables on the pavement and why Italians are content in high-density housing. It explains why Italians take so much care over their appearance, why style and fashion are so important, why fine art is so much a part of urban heritage.

  At an individual level Italians define themselves in terms of their public persona; it is very much a case of ‘what you see is what you get’. With strangers they are at ease, comfortable and confident. Tortured angst and self-doubt, although not unknown, are not easily discerned in the daily mêlée of Italian life. Anguished soul-searching appears to be a condition better suited to the longer, cooler winters of the North.

  The ancient Romans, whose influence still pervades modern Italian life, had a name for their republic: the res publica, the public thing. It was not individual rights that were enshrined in early Roman law, but rather a codification of proper public behaviour. The emphasis was on social interaction rather than personal ethics and morality. Despite the appearance of chaos and disorder, the res publica has its own rigid codes of behaviour which are observed for the most part willingly by Italians. People who know Rome, Milan or any large Italian city will no doubt disagree with this, but this code of behaviour still applies in the provinces, and it does exist, although somewhat less apparently, in the big cities. Making sense of the seeming anarchy of daily life depends on understanding the systems that underpin the interactions.

  Appearances are paramount. Even the most casual observer will notice that cars are almost always clean, shiny and unmarked. A battered and tatty jalopy will draw attention to itself, not just from onlookers but also from the police. No matter how mechanically sound it may be, it will be perceived as unroadworthy. This attitude to outward appearance applies equally to people. Until very recently there was a widespread perception that people with long hair or beards were somehow suspect, anarchic or at odds with society. In effe
ct it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, since only those individuals who wanted to make a public statement about their political or social views grew a beard or long hair.

  What this points to is that public appearance is inextricably linked in the Italian mind with the content or the form; books are judged by their covers. Mussolini understood this, and ensured that all public building under his regime was classical, noble, monumental, with an immediate impression of eternal solidity. In the minds of rural Italians the architecture of the Fascist town hall or public convenience was an outward manifestation of those same qualities possessed by their government.

  Apart from making trains run on time, for which Mussolini is endlessly credited, he is famed in Italy for draining the Pontine marshes. They lay to the south of Rome, running along the coast as far south as the promontory of Circeo, the fabled home of Circe, who bewitched Odysseus. It was a wide stretch of coastal plain which represented to land-hungry Italians an opportunity for new land to cultivate. Since Roman times attempts to drain the marshes had failed, workers falling prey to the endemic malaria that was carried by the large and predatory mosquitoes. In the twentieth century DDT killed the mosquitoes and the marshes were drained with mechanical diggers. When the land was sufficiently firm for building, Sabaudia, a large town, was built in less than a year as a monument to Fascist endeavour. The whole area became part of the new province of Latina.

  No one these days would be so naïve as to equate architecture with propriety in government, but the tendency to equate appearance and content is strong. This is what makes Italians so fashion-conscious.

  Take Italian bathrooms. Filled with the most technologically advanced taps and fittings, they leave the visitor with an impression of twentieth-century wizardry. The fact that all these gleaming designer taps are connected to fifteenth-century underground piping is concealed. Only the owner knows how often his loo backs up and overflows on to the pretty ceramic tiles. As ever, what matters is not the efficient functioning of boring old unseen plumbing, it is the visual display of thoroughly modern convenience. Apart from their extraordinary variety of taps and fittings – you need about five minutes of familiarization to find out how everything works – Italian bathrooms are an electrician’s nightmare. I have seen power points placed underneath shower roses and wiring earthed to pipes – if the system is earthed at all. Once again, the latest in fashion for electrical accessories is on display, all connected to a potentially lethal electricity supply. If Italians have money to spend, it’s more likely to be spent on a new car parked conspicuously in front of the house rather than on rewiring the house.