Seasons in Basilicata Page 3

  Douglas found his fascination for such aspects of Mezzogiorno life constantly rejected by local mayors, minor officials, and powerbrokers. And when he delved deeper, he found that: “a foreigner is at an unfortunate disadvantage; if he ask questions, he will only get answers dictated by suspicion or a deliberate desire to mislead.” So, never one to be at a loose end for research, he set off exploring some of the legends surrounding the multitudinous local saints and discovered an intriguing retinue of flying monks, raisers of the dead, and other assorted miracle-and marvel-makers, many with distinct pagani attributes.

  But Douglas also discovered larger and more enduring characters in the Mezzogiorno. In the ancient and mysterious mores of the south “there arises…a new perspective of human affairs; a suggestion of well-being wherein the futile complexities and disharmonies of our age shall have no place, and which claim kinship with some elemental and robust archetype….”

  Finally, ever a non-admirer of the more modern confusions and complexities of Christianity, which he called “that scarecrow of a theory which would have us neglect what is earthly, tangible,” he found in Calabria and Basilicata that “a landscape so luminous, so resolutely scornful of accessories…brings us to the ground, where we belong…. What is life well lived but a blithe discarding of primordial husks, of those comfortable intangibilities that lurk about us, waiting for our weak moments.”

  And in the inhabitants—despite their living conditions, which often shocked Douglas into despair—who were so obviously outcasts from “life’s feast” and whose depths he was never able to plumb fully, he invariably sensed that “the sage, that perfect savage, will be the last to withdraw himself from the influence of these radiant realities.”

  THUS WE WERE LURED into the land of Levi, and his pursuit of his “magic key” unlocking the “radiant realities” of a wilderness so loved by Douglas. And we began, like Gissing, to be “moved by the voices and spirits” of the people we met and befriended there. Times for us were not always easy, and our adventures didn’t always turn out quite the way we might have liked, but we never once stopped celebrating our good fortune at being able to share our lives with our newfound friends in Aliano and the surrounding hill villages. Like Levi, we came to “understand this land and love it,” and like Douglas, we caught glimpses of Italy as a bizarre “cauldron of demonology,” while admiring the region’s “elemental and robust archetype” character. And we found, just as Pico Iyer, that renowned travel writer–philosopher, suggests, that “All the great travel books are love stories, and all great journeys are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.” (We were never at a loss for either of those.)

  Best of all, we revived and expanded our own lives together through our experiences, and gleaned intriguing and powerful insights there in that beautiful and beautifully strange Basilicata.

  The Adventure Begins

  Browmmmmm…browmmmmm…swiiiiish…browmmmmm…swiiiiish…

  Well, that, I thought, as I was abruptly awakened in utter darkness, is certainly a sound you don’t hear every day.

  If it is indeed daytime here.

  Wherever “here” is.

  Then came that whirling panic of utter disconnectedness, a smothering blankness of confusion, made even more terrifying by those strange sounds coming from somewhere very close by and getting louder and stronger…booming, swishing, booming…

  Thankfully, the mental curtain rises suddenly, and I know I’m not in the United States in our New York home with Anne snuggled beside me or in our other cozy little tatami-matted retreat in Japan.

  I’m in Rome. Rome, Italy. And I’m alone. Anne is still teaching at her university at Kyushu.

  After long and tediously cramped flights, from Japan via the U.S.A. and England, I’m finally here. But not in the Rome of the glossy brochures—the Rome of soaring Corinthian columns and rubble-strewn ruins and tiny piazzas with trellised trattorias and the whine of motorini (mopeds) and the hosts of tottering, weary tourists and the cacophony of honking traffic, always jammed and always oblivious to stoplights (in Italy they are regarded merely as suggestions), pedestrians, and even other traffic.

  No, definitely not that Rome. I’d been there before and, quite frankly, after landing at Leonardo da Vinci airport (more commonly known as “Fiumicino”) the previous afternoon, after a soul-stirring flight over the pristine peaks of the Swiss Alps, I hadn’t been in the mood for the tumult and tensions and crackle and din and the utter sensory overload of the historic core of that flamboyant and heavily testosteroned urban chaos. Neither was I ready to leap into my rented car and drive immediately to the South for a first glimpse of a region that, after all my readings and weeks of anxious preparation, had begun to take on a character of almost mythic proportions.

  What I needed the day of my arrival was precisely what I found: a fishing village with a vast beach of smooth blond sand, a quaint boat-filled harbor, a choice of inexpensive hotels and good restaurants, and all within a few minutes’ driving distance west of the airport (so close in fact that one wonders why planes don’t occasionally splash down in its harbor).

  Almost as in a dream, where things wished for can become tangibly real, I arrived in the little seashore town of Fiumicino. And all these delights were presented in such a quiet, off-season, sedate kind of way that I had to blink furiously to assure myself that this was indeed not a dream…especially when my car literally drove itself into a small, vine arbor–shaded car park beside a charming pensione complete with a flower-bedecked restaurant. And at the restaurant, with its meticulously laid tables of shining crystal glasses, three charming, elderly-lady proprietors welcomed me like a long-lost relative, with a grace and tenderness befitting a Jane Austen novel. The oldest one appeared to be a permanent fixture in her antique chair by the cash register. Under her meticulously plaited silver hair glowed two azure blue eyes, and her smiling lips were the epitome of welcome.

  So that’s where I am, I thought, as yesterday’s memories flooded in. And those sounds are, I assume, the sounds of fishing boats firing up their engines and swishing their way down the long, narrow inlet of the harbor and out into the open sea.

  I groped my way out of bed, shuffled across the cool tile floor to the window, and flung open the shutters. And there they were: a dozen or more large trawler-tough boats gliding past as the sun yolked up above the rooftops of houses and nautical workshops on the far side of the harbor and the screech of gulls and the briny-fishy aroma of morning rolled into my room. And I smiled. A big, happy, yawny kind of smile.

  And I thought, so this is where our adventure begins.

  A WHILE LATER, after a long hot shower and a leisurely search of my suitcase for something not too creased to wear (if I’d allowed Anne to pack for me, as she’d suggested, nothing would have been creased), I ambled down from my room to an adjoining coffee bar by the harbor to start my first day with a frothy-topped cappuccino dusted with powdered chocolate, and a very large and very flaky cornetto. And then, as I watched the huddle of locals around the bar from my chair on the sidewalk, I realized I was missing one of the key ingredients, a traditional morning corretto—that small glass of something strong and revitalizing to kickstart the body and mind. So, as a salute to the “when in Rome” (literally) spirit, a second cappuccino with a small anise chaser was ordered and I returned to my chair and grinned at the sun as the pungent alcohol raced through my still semi-dormant system and made all my appendages, including my nose and ears for some odd reason, tingle in a most beguiling manner.

  What now, I wondered? Stay here by the harbor for another day and sort of ease into the mood and pace of things? Or maybe play tourist and plunge into the tumult of the city for a quick scramble up the dome of St. Peter’s and a stroll through the ancient monoliths of the forum and amphitheater? Or…

  “GO SOUTH,” a voice insisted. “TODAY. NOW!”

  This was my favorite inner voice—the impulsive, occasi
onally intrepid, explorer voice, and the one I invariably follow. He always seems to know intuitively what I really want to do, no matter how much I might try to propose or rationalize other perfectly reasonable options.

  “Rome will wait. And you can come back to this little pensione, too. But today, now, GO SOUTH!”

  So, south it was to be.

  “But go leisurely,” the victorious voice suggested. “There’s no rush. Meander a little and get a feel for the place. Time is all yours for as long as you need, or wish.”

  And with that tantalizing thought, I gathered up my belongings from the room and bid farewell to the three matronly ladies (emphasizing that I would indeed be back). Even before the Roman rush hour had begun, I was off, following the big green freeway signs south toward Naples, singing silly, mindless tunes to myself, and inviting serendipity to set the course and pace of my long journey down into the depths and mysteries of Basilicata.

  “No One Travels to the South”

  Smiling, I watched the morning traffic jams intensify—I smiled because the jams applied only to traffic bound for the chaotic heart of Rome. I, on the other hand, was just leaving Rome and had most of the freeway to myself. As I drove happily southward, my mind was kind of freewheeling through the arrival antics of the day before, and one small incident—shards of overheard conversation—stood out.

  I couldn’t believe I’d actually heard and understood them (thanks to the interpretive abilities of a fellow passenger). And in such an auspicious place as the airport, as I was finalizing the laborious long-term rental arrangements for my little toy Lancia DoDo. In hindsight, it would have been far more expedient and far less expensive to have purchased a car of my own on day one. Or at the very least I should have avoided renting any car named after an extremely dumb and therefore extinct overgrown turkey.

  A well-dressed woman—actually, a superbly attired and manicured lady, as only Italian ladies can be—was also reaching the end of signing her seemingly endless forms for the release of her car, a black Mercedes turbo, which she referred to loudly and proudly on at least three separate occasions during the red-tape rituals.

  “And where are you planning to visit?” the young girl behind the counter asked the woman pleasantly, her dimpled apple cheeks glowing. “The South, maybe?”

  The lady, who was undoubtedly northern Italian born and bred—tall, svelte, and queenlike in attitude and disposition, making a true bella figura—paused in mid-pen-flourish and stared at the girl in utter surprise.

  When she had regained her composure, she said in a stiletto-sharp voice with a strident, clipped Milanese accent. “The South!? O Dio, no! No one travels to the South surely! Solo i fessi stanno laggiù! [‘Only fools stay down there.’]—Rome is quite far enough.”

  The girl behind the counter smiled brightly, probably assuming that this was just one of those little comedies of colliding cultures and Mezzogiorno jibes that northerners liked to make every once in a while to remind anyone who had the patience to listen that, of course, the North was Italy and the South was, well, the South. Another country. An undesirable, uncultivated appendage to the “true” Italy, full of muddled remnants of Saracens, Albanians, and suchlike “uncivilized peoples.” The land of the terroni (“the little peasants”). More African and Arabic than European. And certainly not a place to be driven through in a black Mercedes turbo, thank you very much. And, no, she was not joking. She spoke in the superior manner of the supremely confident, complacently full of old-money, high-culture snobismo. The counter girl understood this quite clearly, I think, and with a rapidly rising blush that suggested a possible southern heritage, she looked away and pretended to be searching for more interminable papers for the lady from the North to sign.

  THIS ENDURING DICHOTOMY between North and South is not altogether unfamiliar in other countries—particularly Great Britain and the U.S.A.—but in Italy it seems far more potent. Whether it is due to the fact that, until 1861, Italy was essentially a batch of loosely related nation-states, or to the striking economic disparities between the two halves of the nation—the rich, industrialized, fertile, sophisticated, architecturely resplendent North, and the far more agrarian and underdeveloped South, with its rugged and ragged history of invasion and conquests—who can tell? Certainly the North African Arab invasions of portions of Europe from the seventh to the tenth centuries, most notably in southern Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily, reinforced the prejudices of northerners that these regions had become tainted, “foreign,” and strange. Such a sentiment is reinforced today by clear radio reception in the South of wailing, quarter-tone music, obviously Arabic, from nearby countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, the last only ninety miles or so south across the Mediterranean from Sicily.

  The fact is the dichotomy truly exists, and discussions about “solving the dilemma of the South” invariably and quickly lead to entrenched positions and virulent verbal skirmishes. One charmingly outspoken woman later told me in all seriousness that the South should declare itself a separate nation and “let the Mafia run it. They’re much better at running things down here than any elected government!”

  Carlo Levi’s position on the subject is interesting, and indeed his antifascist ideas, which obviously ran counter to those of Mussolini and his cohorts, got him quickly arrested and placed in confino in Basilicata. Levi saw a very different future for the region, one far more radical than today’s ambiguous and ambitionless policies and plans, most of which fade and fail through a potent combination of bureaucratic lethargy and incompetence, fiscal corruption, impractical visions, ineffective implementation, chaotic political continuity (fifty-nine Italian prime ministers since the end of World War II!), and more corruption—right up to the present day. Even Italy’s media-mogul, billionaire prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been implicated. In power during our stay in Basilicata, he was desperately fighting a cartload of corruption indictments that threatened to decimate his political career.

  Levi had no qualms about declaring that “many” have claimed to have mediated upon the “problem of the South” and to have formulated plans for its solution. “But just as their schemes and the very language in which they were couched would have been incomprehensible to the peasants (still a majority of the population in the south), so were the life and needs of the peasants a closed book to them, and one which they did not even bother to open.” He concluded that: “The state cannot solve the problem of the south because the problem is none other than the state itself…Plans laid by a central government still leave two hostile Italy’s on either side of the abyss!” In the South he cited particularly the problems of “big landlord estates and their owners” and “middle class village tyrants…who cut the peasants off from any hope of freedom and a decent existence.” Levi’s solution was dramatic in its visionary simplicity: “All of Italy…must be renewed from top to bottom. We must rebuild the foundations…with the concept of the individual. The name of this way out is autonomy…self-governing rural communities.” This, Levi stated vehemently “is what I learned from a year of life underground.”

  Good heavens, I thought, as I signed the papers for my rental car and watched the northern lady stride off to claim her Mercedes, just what kind of place am I going to?

  THE DRIVE SOUTH became increasingly dramatic. As I left the great bowl of Rome behind, the mountains began to surge in on both sides of the freeway. To the east the snowcapped peaks of the Monti Simbruini, part of the Abruzzese Appennine chain, rose like cloaked wraiths above rugged foothills sprinkled with white hilltop towns. There they were, perched like clustered fairy-tale villages on the edge of impossible precipices, some so high above the Sacco River Valley that they seemed disconnected, inaccessible, and dreamily surreal. Rugged remnants of eleventh-century Norman castles, peering down from high-vantage-point aeries, added to the aura of romantic fantasy.

  The mountains to the west rose abruptly, aggressively, from the valley floor and huddled, huge and ogre-like, striated
with eroded, skeletal-white strata, their summits bare and wild. Freeway signs to Naples, “Capital of the South,” beckoned, but I decided to save that intense and intrigue-laced city for a future visit and instead soared on southwards around cloud-cocooned Vesuvius and down into the mammoth ranges of the Alburni, Maddalena and Cilento Mountains. Here, I sensed, was the true topographic barrier between North and South, the place where the strangeness begins, a gateway to the great bastion of Basilicata itself.

  At Lagonegro, perched high in a mountain cleft, I paused at one of those remarkable freeway service centers, gaudy with restaurants, motels, and mini-supermarkets crammed with elegant and tantalizing displays of regional delights—huge, golden wheels of bread; aged, mold-encrusted cheeses; wrinkled salamis; prosciutto; odd-shaped pastas; oils; olives; wine; and endless bizarre liqueurs. This was my first real encounter with Italian gastronomic overabundance, and my basket seemed to fill itself, abundantly. I obviously bought far too much but convinced myself that, if I got into the impromptu Italian picnic mode, nothing would be wasted. My enthusiasm was doused somewhat as I handed over a king’s ransom in brand-new euro bills to the cashier, but her empathetic nods and her obviously impressed smile at my gourmand’s selection and capacity made me feel I was already adopting the appropriate dolce vita attitude toward gustatory excess.

  On the way out, manhandling two enormous shopping bags, I noticed a photograph on a promotional display showing the nearby and very appealing little coastal town of Sapri, sprinkled around an idyllic bay against a backdrop of soaring ranges. My impulsive explorer–self immediately resurfaced, informing me that this was obviously an ideal place for a brief sortie. “Time is all yours,” he reminded me, “for as long as you need or wish.” And that little encouraging mantra kept repeating itself as I hairpinned down two thousand feet of riotous mountainscape to the Caribbean blue Tyrrhenian Sea.