Seasons in Basilicata Read online

  Viva’s Views on Almost Everything

  “You can call me Viva,” she said. “It’s Louisa Vita, really, but I like Viva better, don’t you?”

  I do, particularly after half an hour with this dynamic young lady of light and life, who spoke excellent English and happened to be the breakfast hostess at a little hotel I’d discovered right on the beachfront in Sapri. This funky-spirited, smart-dowdy, rich-poor, want-to-be-better-but-can’t-seem-to-make-it-happen seaside community just on the wrong side of the Basilicatan border had turned out to be a perfect place to pause for a day or so before continuing on into the increasingly dramatic mountainscapes of the South.

  MARATEA PORTO (NEAR SAPRI)

  Viva is one of those buoyant young women whose lives have suffered unseemly numbers of slings and arrows and yet who still seem to emerge more sprightly, and certainly wiser, than ever. She’d asked if I’d like coffee, and I nodded blearily. Then we began talking, and the only time during our long roller-coaster chat—and a most unmemorable “continental” breakfast at the hotel (“You’d like an omelet?” she said. “Well, so would I, so would everybody. But, in this place, no omelets. No cook!”)—that I ever saw her vivacity wane was when she mentioned her husband…her ex-husband.

  “I made mistake,” she said. But it wasn’t too clear if she was talking about her divorce or her decision to move to Sapri. “There’s nothing to do here. Nothing! I don’t know why I came. Escape maybe. To get far enough away, and hide. It’s happening so much in Italy now. After seven years of marriage: divorce, with one child. Did you know we have lowest birthrate in Europe? In Italy! The land of romance, love, and passion! Isn’t that crazy? But it’s the way things are. And the family gives everything for that one child. Especially if the child is a boy, and even if he’s thirty he’s still a child and often lives at home with Mamma. Or if not, the family follows him around to look after him. But it’s always work. Work, work, work. Men, women: everybody work all the time to buy things and make it good for family, and for that one child! Stupid! Here I work in this hotel from height (Viva had an endearing habit of adding h’s in the oddest places) to ten in the morning, and I get a thousand heuros a month, but my rent is five hundred, my babysitter is three hundred, my car and food and things, five hundred, so I don’t know what to do. Where are all the rich men, I ask! Maybe I could meet a nice doctor, but they are all married. They make lots of money and, just like all those lazy statali government workers, retire early and go and live in other fancy places. Never Sapri, of course. Never Sapri!”

  “Viva,” I said, stopping her strident flow and trying once again to keep her on track. “You were telling me about the divorce.”

  She paused in mid-breath. Her vibrant, vivacious face puckered for an instant. “Mistake. Aghh!” She shook her head. It was a sign to move on to other subjects.

  “Anyway, you were also telling me earlier about the problems in the Mezzogiorno.”

  “Ah, Mezzogiorno!” Life returns. Viva revived, in that press-button passionate way Italians have of dealing with their rousting, everything-out-in-the-open emotions. “Those politicians. Talk, talk, talk. Promise, promise, promise. You give me your vote and I’ll bring you lots of jobs and factories and better roads and new houses. And what happens? Nothing! Nothing, nothing, nothing! Have you seen the A3 road from Salerno to Reggio? The main highway from the North to the South. How many years have they been ‘improving’ that stupid road? And look at it! It’s rubbish! The most dangerous main road in the country! And all those villages on the tops of the mountains. All full of old people. All the young ones have gone to the cities. Just the very old ones left. And even if the young ones stay because the politicians say, ‘We will bring you jobs, molto lavoro,’ what do you get? Stupid jobs for a few weeks, building a road or a public toilet that nobody needs or uses, or a wall around the town hall, and then, no job! So, no pension. No—how you say?—security. And then they say, ‘Let’s bring tourists,’ and all the mayors say, ‘My town first! My town first!’ So they all try fancy ideas to bring tourists. And in Sapri, you know what the last idea was? You saw that huge, half-finished building as you come in from Maratea? Massive, isn’t it? Well, it was supposed to be a cement factory about thirty years ago, and they said, ‘No, cement is wrong. We need tourists.’ So they left the thing just standing there like it was a bombed building and they tried to get people from the North to come down and make it into a fancy resort and, oh dear, surprise, surprise! Nobody came.”

  Viva paused for breath, and I tried to change the subject again but I wasn’t quite fast enough (not even fast enough to remind her about my coffee).

  “Mezzogiorno! All stupid!” she continued in her charmingly railroading fashion. “And everything so corrupt. Dio cristo! You can’t trust anybody. Everybody expecting their little bustarelle [“gift envelopes,” aka bribes]. And they talk so much about the stupid ‘plans for the South.’ The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno—that was one of them. And what happened to that? They tried to stop malaria, which had always been so bad in this area. Everybody sick all the time. They built a few roads, some places for industries that never come, some public housing where the earthquakes in 1980 had collapsed some of the villages, you know, like the one recently not so far away, in Puglia—you know about that?”

  “Yes, it was in all the international newspapers. The school that collapsed and killed more than twenty children.”

  “Yes, that is right. And it was not a very old school either. Now they say there was corruption, stealing, and the people who built it did a very bad job because they put so much money in their pockets. Ma! Is that a surprise? No, I don’t think so, thank you very much. It happens all the time everywhere. And down here, particularly in Calabria, where they have a ‘second government’—Oh, you don’t know about that? Well, maybe it’s better you don’t. Not so long ago peoples was very frightened to travel to Calabria and Reggio. There were many robbers—briganti—in the mountains and you could be attacked or kidnapped, even killed.”

  “Is that so today?”

  Viva gave one of her endearingly sly, ironic smiles, and I was thinking what a great guest she would make on one of those TV talking-head shows, of which there were many in Italy. Her face, her mind were so animated and volatile. Of course, that’s not unlike most Italians, who seem to possess an inbred natural ability to express all their emotions instantaneously, using numerous body parts, from their eyes and mouths to extravagant shrugs to whirling arms and even legs. (Watch one of those talk shows and see how far apart they have to seat people to prevent serious physiological damage from the guests’ emotive outbursts.) In Viva’s case, she used mainly her face, but with the skill and dexterity of a contortionist.

  “Well, today they are clever. The brigands are now the ’Ndrangheta,’ the Calabrian Mafia.”

  “And they’re the ‘second government’?”

  She laughed and raised her eyes heavenward. “Some say they’re actually the first! That all the elected peoples and the police and all the others get their little bustarelle and sit around not doing very much while the ’Ndrangheta organizes everything.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  But she was on a roll now, and although I was beginning to lose hope of ever being served my morning coffee, I had no intention of restricting the flow of her eloquent tirade.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think we should tell Rome to keep all its stupid plans, and the European Union too. They say Basilicata is a ‘priority development area,’ but I think they just want our oil. Yes! Didn’t you know? We’ve just found oil, a lot of oil, in Basilicata here. I think we should forget the euro too—going up, up, up. This is no good for us. Our main market in Italy is export, but a strong euro makes everything too expensive to sell. So, this is what I think. The neo-fascists keep saying we should go back to having autonomous republics like it was before 1860, when Garibaldi came to unite Italy as one country. The Northern League wants to forget the Sou
th completely. They say the government has spent over three hundred fifty billion euros on the South over the last twenty years. But they say we wasted the money, or stole it, and then peoples from the South all go north for work…and steal jobs! So, why don’t we just say Mezzogiorno is a new country, separate from everybody, and we put ’Ndrangheta in charge? Let them work it all out. That’s what they do anyway. All those different southern Mafia organizations—the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita and La Rosa in Apulia, and of course the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. And I think they’re richer than the government. They have so many businesses with good profits. So, why not let them run the Mezzogiorno like a good business? They know all about this. Andreotti [the ex-prime minister recently under indictment for collaboration with the Mafia] knew the truth. He was real in his thinking. So maybe we have to be real also. We have to recognize the power of our Mafia. We have to—how you say?—involve, no integrate, them to improve our economy for everyone here. The government hasn’t, cannot do this. And there are many who think like this too.”

  “Fascinating idea, Viva. They say that southern people are tough. They’ve been going their own way for centuries.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s true. We are tough. Just think of our history: all those peoples invading us—Greeks, Arabs, Normans—and wars all the time. And the people living in a medieval—how you say?—feudal system, full of superstitions and witches and things. And that terrible time—the Kingdom of The Two Sicilies. And earthquakes and landslides—always earthquakes and landslides—and malaria that killed so many. And even Spartacus—you remember?—that great rebellion of the Roman slaves in 73 B.C. He destroyed so much of Basilicata. And other diseases and plagues, too. And the Catholic Church saying to all the poor people, ‘Just be good and peaceful and obey the big bosses—the baroni and the padroni and all the others—and you’ll be happy one day.’ Not here, of course. Not now. Not on this earth. But certainly in that beautiful heaven with all the angels singing and…” She paused in mid-flow and gave a Edith Piaf–like ‘pouf!’ and hunched her shoulders in a huge shrug.

  And then she began again, a little quieter this time. “But you know something? In spite of all this, we have a good life. We are not rich, but we know, we have learned, how to live well in our poverty. The North don’t know how to do this. To grow and make what you need for yourself—olives, sheep, pigs, vegetables, wines, tomato sauces, fruit, wheat for your own pasta and bread. They don’t know up north these things like we do, and even when they are rich, they are not so happy. We are so different here. Like I say, we are a separate people, a separate country!”

  There was a long pause, a satisfied pause, in Viva’s case. She’d made her points, exhaustively.

  “Viva?”

  “Oh yes, what please?”

  “Any chance of that coffee now?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Entering “The Land of the Magic Key”

  Sapri is a beguiling little place despite, or maybe because of, its not-quite-successful attempts to become another Amalfi or Sorrento. Those two world-renowned hotspots on the Punta Campanella peninsula south of Naples, along with the nearby Isle of Capri, offer a scintillating summer scene of Eurotrash jet-setters, gorgeous gigolos, fashion-fad fanatics, infotech multimillionaires, dazzling stars of stage and screen, and myriad ogling, wannabe watchers and adulators.

  Sapri does not.

  Despite an idyllic location on a broad, curving bay with a mountain backdrop of almost alpine majesty, the little town is still celebrated primarily by its own residents. The nightly passeggiata, snaking past the coffee bars, pubs, and restaurants on the seafront, is still the high point of slow languid summer days. Fishermen still make a decent living here and can afford to own their own homes, untouched by the mega-inflation that has made property unaffordable for most locals in the hip commercial coastal communities farther to the north.

  The town beckoned and invited me to stay. “What are a few more lazy days of indolence and indulgence when you have all the time in the world to do whatever you wish?” I heard the little town say. So, without too much resistance on my part—particularly since I was enjoying a virtually free hotel and a bedroom terrace overlooking the beach, bay, and mountains—I did indeed stay longer than intended. Pizzas, pastas, ridiculously inexpensive bottles of local wine with every meal, and seafood squiggly fresh from the adjoining sea, helped pass the time easily and effortlessly.

  MARATEA

  But eventually, as I knew he would, my wanderer-self emerged, restless again for the open road.

  “But it’s so beautiful and relaxing here,” I tried to explain.

  He would have none of it.

  “GO SOUTH,” he demanded once again, just as he had a few days earlier at Fiumicino, outside Rome. And so, the following morning, after another long diatribe from Viva and another almost-coffeeless breakfast, I left little Sapri, vowing to return with Anne when she arrived in a couple of weeks.

  And thus I finally entered Basilicata, beginning a year-long love affair with “The Land of the Magic Key.”

  Basilicata actually began just a few miles south along the coast. A hair-raisingly dramatic swirl of corniche-like tornanti (hairpin bends) led me along a narrow road, perched on eroded precipices hundreds of feet above an azure blue ocean, across the border with Campania and into the town of Maratea.

  Maratea turned out to be a confusing collection of communities: the small but elegant porto clustered like a mini-Amalfi around its tiny harbor; the elegant and lush Marina di Maratea resort (strict controls on rabid development here reflect a local policy of “non-aggressive tourism”); remnants of Maratea Superiore, a “settlement of uncertain origin,” but likely an eighth-century B.C. Greek colony; a thirteenth-century “lower town,” and finally the tightly clustered medieval glories of Maratea Inferiore, itself set on a steep mountainside beneath a seventy-foot-high gleaming white Statua del Redentore (statue of Christ the Redeemer), arms outstretched beneath a placid Buddha-like face.

  If this were a guidebook, pages could be devoted to the architectural charms and ecclesiastical glories of this little town. Suffice to say, I was entranced by its tiny coffee bar–studded piazzas; its wriggling, stepped, and tunneled alleys; and the rich, interlocking complexities of houses, stores, churches, richly stuccoed palazzi, fountains, and statues, all jumbled together in typical Italian hill-town intensity.

  I sat for a bit, trying to capture all this in a sketch while happily sipping my cappuccino and grappa—a little Italian habit I’d picked up and had found most conducive as a mid-morning pick-me-up. But only morning, mind you: The locals tend to have very rigid rules about coffee-drinking; after midday, the only drink is one of those malicious caffeine-jolt espressos the size of a thimble, and which are tippled in one gulp like a neat bourbon. Stranieri (foreigners) ordering post-lunch cappuccinos are regarded as bizarre curiosities, ignorant of traditional mores. My problem was that I still had not accepted the idea of paying eighty cents for an ounce or so of pungent molasses-thick brew and ingesting it with barely a scintilla of a palate appreciation when, for almost the same price, I could sit for quarter of an hour with a frothy cappuccino and enjoy every leisurely sip.

  Doubtless my initiation and acceptance would come. But not yet. At that point I was still happy to be seen as a straniero and to do whatever I felt like doing.

  “Very nice picture, Signore,” a voice whispered in my right ear.

  I looked up from my sketch quickly, maybe too quickly, and alarmed an elderly, wrinkled, and extremely bent gentleman wearing a lopsided trilby hat and carrying a knobby olive-branch cane.

  “Ah, scusi, scusi!” he said, and backed away nervously.

  “No, no, thank you. I’m glad you like.”

  The man smiled and inched back. I invited him to join me at my table. (Another oddity I discovered in these parts is that if you sit down at a table to enjoy your coffee, it can cost you double the price of the stand-at-the-counter, quick-tipple-and-out practice
of most locals.)

  The man accepted, and we began what was rapidly to become my regular mode of conversation with the locals—lots of gesticulating; elaborate hand, eye, wink, and nod communication; and wide smiles and laughter—as my Italian-English (“Italianish”) and his raw dialect, only truly understood in Basilicata and its environs, intertwined in hilariously confusing attempts at coherent dialogue.

  But something useful did emerge on this occasion, something along the lines of “If you think this place is special, wait until you get farther north, through the mountains and into the Lucanian Dolomites, and there you’ll find two villages like no others in Italy.”

  From the chaotic convolutions of that chat over coffee emerged the names Pietrapertosa and Castelmezzano. I looked at my map. The towns were indeed a long way to the north, far from Aliano, but as it was my plan to loop and spiral my way through the heart of Basilicata before focusing on Levi’s confino village, I decided to take the old man’s advice and head due north, directly across the mountains.

  “DUE NORTH” is an utter oxymoron, particularly in this wild, soaring, broken, twisted topography. But despite endless hairpin turns and the most dangerously narrow, tortuous roads I’d faced just about anywhere in all my wordly wanderings, the position of the sun informed me, throughout that long, laborious day, that I was indeed edging northward through the ranges.

  And what ranges they were! They buckled and twisted like snakes with broken spines around six-thousand-three-hundred-foot-high Monte Sirino and the Riserva Naturale Foce Sele-Tanagro. A brief moment of respite was offered as I descended past the hilltop aerie of Moliterno and the Roman ruins of Grumentum—abandoned around the year 1000 A.D., following repeated attacks by Saracen invaders—and eased out into the wide Agri Valley.