Seasons in Basilicata Read online

  “A bear!” I was impressed.

  “Yes. We still have…” Massimo’s eyes twinkled. “Well, some people say so…”

  I was now less impressed. “Right,” I said sarcastically. Anne nudged me and gave me one of those “don’t be so rude” glances.

  “And Doctor Carlo Levi, the man who was imprisoned here in this village, just a little way down the street, during the war, he says—”

  ACCETTURA ALLEY

  “You know about Levi?” I interrupted.

  Massimo raised himself in his chair and looked at me indignantly. “Of course I know about him. He is very famous writer. He wrote many things about our places here.”

  “Yes, I know, in his book Christ Stopped at Eboli.”

  “Yes. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli—the same.”

  “But that’s one of the main reasons we first came here, Massimo. Ever since we read his book years ago we have wanted to explore Basilicata—or, as he called it, Lucania, its ancient name.”

  “Yes, Lucania, the name of our province in Greek times, long before all those other peoples invaded us—the Saracens, Byzantines, Normans, Angevins, Albanians! Can you believe that? Even the Albanians! And Carlo Levi is still very big man here. Next week, in Stigliano, just over the mountain, they are having a theatre of his book. Everybody is going. Is very important thing.”

  “But he painted such a dark and mysterious portrait of this part of Basilicata—all that poverty, all those tales of pagani [pagans], sorcerers, strange creatures, all the stuff about witches and werewolves and death curses….”

  “Yes, of course, we know. These things existed. Some still do. But they are our things. My grandfather, Nicolà, he will tell you stories. He knows about many strange things here. He says to me often about Basilicata, ‘Mare e munne non se trouet u funne.’ ‘You’ll never find the true bottom of the sea or the bottom of our world.’”

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “Of course. You will. And you will both see, you will understand, that Doctor Levi was not dreaming any of his stories. Everything is true.”

  “Still true?” I asked.

  Massimo laughed and then drank the last of his wine. His eyes had that tantalizing twinkle again. “Ah, well, that is something you must both decide for yourselves, isn’t it? Don’t forget another one of our local sayings, ‘Ogne tempe arrivete, ogne frutte ammaturete.’ ‘All seasons will come, all fruits will ripen.’ You will know when you know.”

  A wise young man, our Massimo.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Lure of Levi

  This is a closed world, shrouded in black veils, bloody and earthy—that other world where the peasants live and which no one can enter without a magic key…Here there is no definite boundary between the world of human beings and that of animals and even monsters. And there are many strange creatures here who have a dual nature…everything is bound up in natural magic…and a subterranean deity, black with shadows of the bowels of the earth…

  CARLO LEVI, Christ Stopped at Eboli

  Some say his coffin is full of rocks.

  It lies deep in the heavy clay soil at the edge of the cemetery in Aliano. The cemetery is at the highest point of the village, on a watershed ridge above the Sauro and Agri Valleys. The views from there across the eroded calanchi canyons, which seem to be melting like cake frosting into the scrubby and scraggly olive orchards far below, are the finest in the village. And Carlo Levi’s grave has the best view of all, west across the calanchi, the muscular outlines of the Pollino range and, on a clear spring day, the massive bulk of the Calabrian massif.

  The grave site has recently been rebuilt with a simple two-walled enclosure overlooking a deep gorge, but the headstone remains the same as before, bearing its simple inscription: Carlo Levi 12.11.1902–4.1.1975.

  Others say his actual remains are in Rome, jealously guarded by a lover. His nephew, Giovani Levi, who lives in Venice, is vague about the whole matter and prefers to discuss the impact of his uncle’s books and political career on the Mezzogiorno, “Land of the Midday Sun,” that wild region dismissed by refined, affluent northerners as “the South” (with the usual complacent smirk) or, more offensively, “the land of the terroni” (peasants). As with everything involving Carlo Levi, opinions are divided, sometimes dramatically, ferociously. But all that will be revealed later.

  For the moment Anne and I are sitting in the shade of a line of pine trees by Levi’s grave, watching hawks float on the spirals in the heat of the “sacred time,” the afternoon siesta. We’re thinking about the life of this man who worked so arduously on behalf of his “beloved peasants,” attempting to eradicate the centuries-old inequities of a harsh feudal system and create conditions conducive to human dignity and new economic progress in the South.

  We’re remembering his most famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli—first published in English in 1947—and its impact on us both when we first read it years ago. One reviewer described it as “an unforgettable journey into the dark, ancient and richly human ethos of Southern Italy.” Others saw deeper, more holistic nuances. An eminent European sociologist even suggested that the primitive elements Levi discovered here reflected “the deepest, darkest parts of the Soul of our World”—elements also dramatically reflected in Francesco Rosi’s famous 1978 film of the book, featuring Italian heartthrob Gian Maria Volentè as Levi and Irene Pappas as his witch-housekeeper, Giulia Venere (Mango).

  Levi wrote his masterwork following his confino, his house arrest in the remote Basilicatan hill town of Aliano, where he was exiled before World War II by an irate Mussolini, il Duce, who was determined to quell Levi’s rampant, antifascist activities and writings. Almost sixty years later Levi’s book, translated into thirty-seven languages, continues to provide insights into this wild region, located in the instep of Italy’s “boot.” Still mysterious and elusively tied to a darker age and deeper pagani touchstones of knowledge and belief, the region is relatively unchanged by the country’s over-reaching Catholic influence.

  A true Renaissance man—physician, philosopher, artist, writer, inspired speaker, and later a senator in the Italian government—Levi was born in Turin on November 29, 1902, into an affluent, talented, and respected Jewish family. He graduated in medicine at the early age of twenty-two. That same year, he exhibited his artwork at the Biennale of Venice and began his vociferous antifascist activities, with the Giustizia e Libertà movement, which ultimately condemned him as a “threat to national security.” He was sentenced to five years confino in one of Italy’s wildest regions, a term that was reduced to seven months (from October 3, 1935, to May 20, 1936), following Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia.

  CARLO LEVI

  Those less impressed by Carlo Levi’s political values and writings often refer dismissively to Christ Stopped at Eboli as a “novel,” implying that much of the dark, bleak, primitive, sempre miseria (“always misery”) peasant world in Aliano he describes—a world “which no one can enter without a magic key”—is largely fictitious. To some, it is either a figment of a vehemently antifascist, prounderclass imagination or, according to other cynics, a masterful work of mystical fantasy.

  Prior to our time in Aliano and other places in a region that once harbored a host of strident socialist critics, the plight of Mezzogiorno peasants was regarded as beneath the dignity of national politicians to investigate and certainly never to acknowledge. One of the most outspoken “revolutionaries” was Rocco Scotellaro, a close friend of Levi’s, who appeared in redheaded rhetorical fury in many of Levi’s Aliano-period paintings. As a poet and ultimately the mayor (sindico) of Tricarico, Scotellaro used his verses and vision as powerful instruments for social and economic emancipation. Similarly, in the village of Tursi to the Southeast, Albino Pierro, a renowned poet who wrote in the local Arab-tinged dialect and was once a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, was also a reformist for the sperduti (“the forgotten people”).

  Levi saw himself primarily as a p
hysician and a painter, and certainly never claimed to be a poet. However, both his art and his eloquent prose paint an intriguing and almost poetical portrait of Aliano, his place of exile in 1935–1936, the most strident era of the Mussolini fascist dictatorship. And there is no doubt, based upon our own time there, that Levi’s descriptions of the setting and mood of the village of Aliano could not be bettered. Certainly not by me.

  Here’s a brief collage of Levi’s impressions from his world-famous book, which, as one critic suggested, became “the symbol of many other dire realities in our divided world today.” That thought was echoed by the famous Italian writer Italo Calvino, who called Levi “the ambassador of another world in our world.”

  I left dear Grassano, a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, a sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert…and entered the desolate reaches of Lucania (Basilicata)…. This shadowy land is like being in a sea of chalk—a bare and dramatic austerity—the haunts of caves and brigands…I sense the bottomless sadness of this desolate countryside…Broom is practically the only flower that blooms in this desert. The wind comes up in cold spirals from the ravines…mountain tops stick out of a weary pallor of mist like islands in a shapeless ocean of vapidity. And there was Gagliano [as Levi calls Aliano in the book] perched on a sort of jagged saddle rising among ravines. It wound its way like a worm on either side of a single street which sloped abruptly down the narrow ridge between two ravines…steep slopes of white clay with houses hanging from them…the peasants’ houses were all alike consisting of only one room…At night the empty blackness of the sky hung over the darkened village. But eventually I came to understand the hidden virtues of this bare land and to love it.

  I remember Anne’s reaction after reading Levi’s book for the first time. She turned to me, fixed me with one of her “please listen, this is serious” looks, and said, “Y’ know, darling” (“darling” invariably indicates something serious to be discussed), “you’ve written so many books and articles on world travel. Off you go, sometimes with me in tow” (our work schedules do not always coincide), “and burrow deeply into places, but then, just when we’re beginning to learn and understand some of the deeper nuances and strangeness of life there, we’re off again, on to somewhere else.”

  I stared at her, not sure exactly how to interpret her summary of my travel-writing life. She took my silence, I guess, as an affirmation and continued: “So, why don’t we try something different? Let’s go and live in just one place for a year or so, through all the seasons, and become part of it. Let’s see what happens—a book, illustrations, articles, or just lots of new experiences. Whatever. We won’t force it. Let’s allow the place to show us how best to use what we learn.”

  “Like Levi,” I said.

  “Exactly. Like Levi.”

  “And where,” I said, already guessing the answer, “do you think we might go to enjoy our year or so of seasons?”

  Anne laughed. “I think you know where. You’re already thinking about it! Remember Rumi: ‘Your own story is calling you.’”

  Levi’s book on Basilicata was our first and most transforming inspiration. His descriptions were siren calls to us: “The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did 3,000 years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.” But other writers have also explored this wild, strange, and little-known region. In particular, its dark and ancient mysteries intrigued the ever-curious and remarkably intrepid Norman Douglas. His 1915 book, Old Calabria, remains one of the most in-depth explorations of southern Italy (his Calabria had broad boundaries), despite the challenges he faced in finding his way into the psyche of a remote peasant culture steeped in intractable stubbornness and a deep and ancient silence.

  Douglas, “a genial, charming, obtuse, dogmatic, arrogant and overbearing Scot, who stalked about the world with the assurance of some Highland laird” (according to one of his publishers), was never a man to mince words or actions, neither in his highly controversial personal life nor certainly as the author of such revelatory books as South Wind and Alone. He has been compared with some of literature’s “greatest scoffers and debunkers”—Dr. Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Orwell, and Graves—whose primary collective purpose seemed to be to “clear minds of cant!” Douglas effectively describes the “ghostly phantoms of the past” that permeate this region, once “a cauldron of demonology…infested with brigandage” and (still a major Italian problem) “an army of official loafers who infest the land, and would be far better employed themselves planting onions.” And while Douglas admired the malizia (craftiness) and interesse (self-interest) of the region’s “sturdy brood” of peasant farmers (“che bella gioventù!”) and the fact that “wise women and wizards abound,” he seemed constantly to face invisible barriers to true insight. Frustrated, he wandered the region—through the “sunless and cobwebby labyrinth, the old woman pensioners flitting round me like bats in the twilight”—seeking deeper knowledge of “the old tangled ways,” and pursuing tales of supernatural creatures.

  BASILICATAN PANORAMA

  He heard a few of the more “enlightened” village mayors and community leaders claim “the days of such fabulous monsters are over” and that fifteenth-century Spanish invasions of the South “withered up the pagan myth-making faculty.” But he didn’t believe it. Like others who have ventured there, Douglas continued to sense the dark and enduring underpinnings of the region’s strange and often unsettling heritage. “No wonder North Italians…regard all Calabrians as savages,” he wrote, both in admiration and exasperation. The unique southern region is “not a land to traverse alone,” he warned at the end of Old Calabria. And yet he obviously learned to love this bizarre region: “Such torrid splendour, drenching a land of austerest simplicity, decomposes the mind into corresponding states of primal contentment and resilience.”

  Douglas also apparently had a great affection for George Gissing’s book By the Ionian Sea, which describes Gissing’s 1897 journey along the southern Italian coast. However, I must admit to a certain personal frustration with this scholarly gentleman’s constant moaning and groaning about his ill health, the atrocious food, the climate, the poor state of historic preservation, the constantly irritating scirocco “African” wind (although, this complaint I can endorse wholeheartedly), and the invariable closing of museums for “renovation” (this too). But there is one moving passage in the Gissing book that made me realize that he had the capacity, as Douglas had, to empathize with the plight of Italy’s southerners and to understand the poundings of history that these stoic people have had to endure for century after century:

  One remembers all they have suffered, all they have achieved in spite of wrong. Brute races have flung themselves, one after another, upon this sweet and glorious land; conquest and slavery, from age to age, have been the people’s lot. Tread where one will, the soil has been drenched with blood. An immemorial woe sounds even through the lilting notes of Italian gaiety. It is a country wearied and regretful, looking ever backward to the things of old; trivial in its latter life, and unable to hope sincerely for the future.

  Gissing failed to mention the more recent plagues of nineteenth-century mountain brigands, renowned for their kidnap-and-ransom antics (primarily on the local populace, not tourists), and the insidious power of the Calabrian Mafia or ’Ndrangheta, which still has tentacles there today. But then he adds, in a rare moment of emotional uplift: “Listen to a…peasant singing as he follows his oxen along the furrow, or as he shakes the branches of his olive tree. That wailing voice amid the ancient silence, that long lament solacing ill-rewarded toil, comes from the heart of Italy herself, and wakes the memory of mankind.” And then he admits, in an unexpected apologia from such a finicky, disgruntled traveler: “In the first pause of the music I reproach myself bitterly for narrowness and ingratitude. All the faults of the Italian people are whelmed in forgiveness as soon as their music sounds under the Italian sk
y…. Moved by these voices…I asked pardon for all my foolish irritation, my impertinent fault-finding.”

  How can one not forgive Gissing when he exhibits such insight, graciousness, and genuine humility?

  But back to Norman Douglas. In addition to the music, which he loved as much as did Gissing, there was also something about the region’s cheerful pagan quality—he called it the “tigerish flavour” of the Mezzogiorno—that greatly appealed to this driven wanderer. And scholar too—a fine scholar of layered history who advised that “the magic of south Italy deserves to be well studied, for the country is a cauldron of demonology wherein Oriental beliefs—imported direct from Egypt, the classic home of witchcraft—commingled with those of the West.” He was particularly intrigued by the depths of such “demonology”: “priests are…mere decorative survivals, that look well enough in the landscape, but are not taken seriously save in their match-making and money-lending capacities.” Further on, Douglas writes “The records show that the common people never took their saints to heart in the northern fashion—as moral exemplars; from beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for fun and festivals, a means of brightening the cata-combic, the essentially sunless, character of Christianity.”

  At one point he describes the night he saw a werewolf—a lupomannaro (“not popular as a subject of conversation” in the South)—in a remote mountain community, and a villager explained that he was one of “the more old-fashioned werewolves”…“and in that case only the pigs…are dowered with the faculty of distinguishing them in daytime, when they look like any other ‘Christian.’” Even in the midday heat as well as the night-gloom, Douglas sensed deeper forces and presences: “This noontide is the ‘heavy’ hour…controra they now call it—the ominous hour. Man and beast are fettered in sleep, while spirits walk abroad, as at midnight. The midday demon—that southern Haunter of calm blue spaces.”