Seasons in Basilicata Read online

  The Rabatana was still regarded with some trepidation by people in the lower parts of the village. One elderly man I met at a coffee bar in the old center, adjoining the Church of San Giacomo and a cluster of bold, elegant stone palazzos, half whispered that he still didn’t trust the remnant Saracen population living “up there.”

  “But they came centuries ago,” I suggested. “Surely by now…”

  His response was a slow wink and an index finger drawn from under his left eye slowly down the side of his nose and ending with a quick slash across his throat. Then another slow wink and finally a sideways shrug of his head, with his mouth contorted in a cynical grimace.

  I must start to get the hang of these eloquent, say-everything expressions, I thought, and tried to invent my own responsive gesture, combining a wink, an empathetic nod, a smile, and a circled thumb and index finger. He smiled in acknowledgment, so I guess it worked.

  I went on to explain to the old man in appalling “Italianish” that I was thinking of making a brief journey across the mountains to Aliano. I had been anxious to begin linking my random Basilicatan experiences with Levi’s remote village.

  He nodded and told me (I think) that Aliano was a rather strange place and that, as this was my first visit to the province, maybe I should first extend my looping familiarization expedition to include Matera—“a very, very ancient city of caves, the Sassi.” Maybe then, after that, he suggested, I might begin to understand the unusual things, the “strangenesses,” I would later see and learn about in Aliano. As a final comment, he advised me, with another flurry of descriptive gestures, to avoid all the Albanian villages, such as San Constantino and San Paulo. “Very strange peoples. They still have vendettas—every family has a Kanun, a “Book of the Blood,” to keep record of killings. Stay away.”

  I looked at my map and estimated that Matera was an easy three-hour drive at the most from Pietrapertosa. I thanked the elderly man for his advice and told him I’d leave immediately, and that I’d also avoid the Albanian villages (for the moment at least).

  He smiled and appeared relieved at my decision.

  I was tempted to ask more about the “strangeness” of Aliano but decided that I’d prefer to explore the place on my first visit without a bagload of biases, preconceptions, and myths. A friend of mine in the U.S.A., who also had a home in Italy, had warned me just before I left about “crazy village vendettas” in Basilicata, fueled by ancient prejudices, half-remembered slights, and rivalries, and the endemic ethic that “anyone who’s not from our village is either a cheat, a liar, a philanderer, or a werewolf in disguise.”

  I’ll try to retain my innocence and neophyte bliss as long as I possibly can, I told myself as I left Pietrapertosa and curlicued my way down dozens of curves and ridiculous hairpins to the wide, straight main highway along the Basento Valley.

  AT FIRST MATERA was a real letdown. Sprawling endlessly across a high ridgetop, the city appeared to consist primarily of ugly, new tower blocks, traffic-clogged streets, and architecturally neutered neighborhoods whose arbitrary layout and tangled intersections only served to leave me disoriented and disappointed.

  There were plenty of signs pointing the way to the Sassi, but every time I thought I’d arrived, there’d be another sign sending me off in another direction totally contrary to the first. Finally, when I was convinced that I was somewhere near the old historic core of Matera (streets suddenly blocked to traffic with Pedestrian Area notices were a useful hint), I parked the car and decided to walk until I found what I was looking for.

  And what I was looking for was pretty amazing: spectacularly deep gravine (calcarenite-limestone gorges) pockmarked with ancient Neolithic earthworks and caves dating back to 500 B.C.; medieval hermitages; more than a thousand cave chapels (chiese rupestri) rich in Byzantine frescoes, some dating back to the eighth century; and profusions of cave houses dug into the soft, golden bedrock in the two cliffside Sassi “amphitheaters” (Barisano and Caveoso). Despite constant invasions by the Greeks, Byzantines, Lombards, Saracens, and Normans, the bizarre Sassi communities continued to expand and flourish. The city, one of the world’s most ancient settlements, became such a prosperous trading center that in 1663 it was declared the capital of Basilicata, and remained so until the Napoleonic era, when, in 1806, Potenza, way to the north, was selected instead.

  Overcrowding and negligence in the two unique Sassi districts eventually led to appalling living conditions, with peasants sharing their cave homes with livestock, suffering from the rampant spread of disease, and finally finding a voice of protest in individuals like Carlo Levi. His impassioned writings and speeches led to a special law requiring the forced abandonment of the Sassi and the relocation of more than twenty thousand inhabitants.

  Levi offers a formidable picture of life in Matera in the 1930s, through the eyes and words of his sister, Luisa, also a physician and social activist. She captures a truly Dantesque vision of squalor and poverty:

  The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors. Some of them had no entrance but a trapdoor and ladder. In the dark holes with walls cut out of the earth, I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds and some ragged clothes, hanging up to dry. On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in, and there they all sleep together; men, women, children and animals. This is how 20,000 people live…. the children have the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons…most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs, and faces yellow and worn with malaria.

  Only the intervention of UNESCO in 1993 saved the complete destruction of these unique places. Today, so I’d read, massive efforts were under way to restore and rehabilitate the cave dwellings. So successful apparently had such initiatives been that Sassi houses were becoming de rigueur among the young and wealthy, and the canyon dwellings were coming back to life as affluent, fully functioning communities, complete, in many instances, with air-conditioning and all the modern conveniences of the twenty-first century.

  I wandered around a little aimlessly at first, following misleading signs, and then suddenly everything fell into place. Actually dropped would be the more appropriate word because as I followed the slow downhill curve of Via XX Settembre, I landed abruptly and unexpectedly in the vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the great passeggiata meeting place of Matera. Bound by elegant and richly adorned churches, a stately library and government center, palazzos, and numerous restaurants, coffee bars, and kiosks, this almost-circular space is the heart of the old city, focal point of all its great festivals and processions, and a prime viewing point (at last) of the great canyonlike bowl containing Sasso Barisano.

  From a shaded belvedere I could peer hundreds of feet down into this amazing bronze-and-cream-colored intensity of ancient urbanity. Clusters of cave houses, their façades often adorned with baroque and classic motifs, tumbled in seeming chaos down the face of the canyon and into the great bowl below. Sinews of alleys and endless staircases and tunneled streets suggested some order and logic to all the confusion. However, as I left the bustle and chatter of the piazza and began an arduous descent down into the Sassi, I quickly realized that such order could really be appreciated only from the belvedere high above.

  I became disoriented. But it didn’t matter. The place possessed such a hobbit-land appeal that I wandered, as I had done in Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa earlier that morning, as if in some kind of surrealist dream. I peered in at the powerful frescoes of the Byzantine chapels, followed serpentine alleys where the façades of the leaning houses almost touched one another, explored dark underground passageways that suddenly emerged into tiny, bright, flower-bedecked piazzas, and gazed up at the golden glories and delicate slender tower of the duomo, Matera’s great cathedral dating back to 1270 and dedicated to the Madonna della Bruna, a patron saint of the city. I was particularly moved by the Church of Santa Maria di
Idris. Carved deep into an enormous, craggy pyramid of golden rock known as Monte Errone, the church had a richly decorated, cool, cryptlike interior adorned with twelfth-century frescoes, whose soft colors glowed almost magically in the half-darkness.

  Somehow I edged and nudged my way into the southern Sassi bowl, Caveoso, and slowly began to climb up through more echoing tunnels and sinewy staircases to the Via Ridola and the great austere seventeenth-century façade of the Domenico Ridola National Archaeological Museum.

  Returning slowly to Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and passing the baroque extravagance of the Church of Purgatory, dripping with grimacing skulls, crossbones, and other all-too-obvious reminders of the fate that awaits us all, I celebrated the fact that I had come full Sassi-circle without any mishap. I must admit that all of those endless steps leading out of the bowl had set the old ticker tocking along a little faster than I’d have liked. But I was still alive, breathing (panting actually), and ready for a big, frothy cappuccino and an enormous slab of one of those sumptuous, cream-laden Italian confections I’d seen displayed almost erotically in store windows and coffee bars around the piazza.

  As I sat watching the clusters of men and families gathering for their evening passeggiate and chats, the lights came on deep down in the Sassi, creating a truly fairy-tale tableau of illuminated architectural exuberance. I then decided that I should stay here a day or two and try to capture the tumult and fantasy of all this in my sketchpad. A definite “must do.”

  Sketching Matera

  The day before had been a frustrating day. My sketch of Matera’s ancient Sassi dwellings just would not take shape. I had an idea of what I thought I wanted to say with the illustration, but the pen and brush resisted, the line was uncertain, vague, and the mood of the sketch was essentially one of vapid blandness with a few gimmicky flourishes I added to make me feel better. But they fooled no one. Certainly not me.

  Today is entirely different, and I have no idea why. I’m sketching the same subject, the weather is the same—bright and fresh and cool—and my mood is essentially similar to that of yesterday, if maybe a trifle angst ridden.

  I don’t like it when sketches refuse to gel. It unnerves me and reminds me of the tenuousness of that vital link between eye, brain, and hand. I guess I suffer from that same deep-lurking dread felt by anyone who tries to create something out of nothing—to fill a blank sheet with words or drawn lines or brushstrokes that communicate something worth saying. That dread of numbness, that dread of the day when nothing comes because the eyes refuse to see, the brain refuses to think or feel, and the poor hand remains poised motionless above the increasingly threatening whiteness of the empty page.

  But this morning that specter of doom vanishes as soon as the pen begins moving across the page. Everything seems, as they say, to be “in sync,” “in the zone,” or even “in the Zen” (irritatingly glib phrases, but when you’re there, you certainly know it). And I’m so relieved that I try something I’ve never done before. I turn on my tiny voice-activated tape recorder and mumble and murmur away to myself, telling myself what I’m seeing, feeling, and trying to express, while my hand scurries across the paper as if it had a life entirely of its own. All I have to do is look and let the wonder of a hundred little observations work themselves into the page without any self-conscious concern for the niceties of style or composition or technique. All those elements seem to take care of themselves as I stream forth my scattered observations into the tape:

  Splendid sensations of vast space and aloneness here—these great sunlit stones under a cloudless, deep blue sky. Powerful, sculptural, and yet possessing something of the mysterious, hollowed-out solitude of a Hopper painting.

  The brutal, muscular surge of the tufa cliffs from the shadowed depths of the Gravina River gorge; they say it’s three hundred feet deep, but it feels more like three thousand. The brilliant, antipodean sun dapples, illuminating the cliffs with dark bronze hollows of hundreds of hand-hewn caves and the dazzling patches of peach ochre, where landslides have sliced away sections of strata and revealed its rich, creamy interior.

  The amazing variety of texture and light falling on flat planes of rock, the gradations of shadow and those enticing niches that appear totally in shade, but when you peer closer, you can see that golden glow of reflected light that seems almost to exude from inside the stone itself.

  And despite this exuberance and dominance of stone, small violently overgrown patches of grasses and bushes and cacti and even two solitary dwarf palms are all sinewing in snakelike intensity on perches along the bright white and deeply eroded contours of this magnificently gouged-out bedrock gorge.

  Gradually the cliffs and lower hollows and caves are merging—almost like osmosis—with the first Paleolithic dwellings and then into the eighth-to twelfth-century walls and houses and church façades carved directly into the rock. Then more cubist projections of houses combining traditional block by golden block of carved stones with ancient cave interiors. Then flowing higher into staircases and over-hangs and arches and tunnels and balustrades carved directly out of the bedrock. Soaring, soaring, higher and higher. Each level a little more sophisticated and finessed than the one below it—a sort of vertical history of form and of man from prehistoric times through early Byzantine cave churches, with their religious wall paintings still intact, and all culminating in that one gloriously slender and simple tower of the twelfth-century cathedral, built on the site of the sixth-century Church of Sant’ Eustachio.

  The whole ancient Sassi town seems to be moving, undulating, breathing like a living creature. It combines the immensity and strength of form and outline of Henry Moore with the fluid exuberance of van Gogh. Similar colors to Cézanne’s paintings, too, with those more subtle, flickery, restless forms of El Greco, and sudden Fauvist flashes of violent color when a line of washing radiates against the cream beige and golden unity of the Sassi. Even the pantile roofs possess a harmony of colors, darker, fire-burned versions of that golden bedrock clay from which they were formed. And as the sun, glittering now like hammered silver, surges brighter and hotter, the whole place begins to vibrate and radiate, and lines swirl and buckle, and the shimmer starts as the cold air from the canyon below rises up to be simmered in the day’s new heat.

  It gets to the point where it’s not real anymore. I don’t know yet how this sketch will work. I’m trying to give the place form, unity, and structure, and yet it seems to want to disintegrate like a Bacon painting, or even one of those furious Kandinsky “women” works.

  Now I can feel my hand rejoicing in its freedom, and I hardly dare look at the lines because it may all be an utter mess. But it feels so right and powerful, and I sense the town is looking right at me, talking to me, urging me to celebrate its utter uniqueness, its gloriously chaotic nature, and its wildness of spirit and form. Thing is—can I do it?

  I’m finished, at least for the moment. And I’m exhausted in that pleasantly reassuring way when you know that, whatever the outcome, you’ve had a true experience, a real communion with your subject.

  Time for a glass of wine in the piazza.

  Thank you, amazing Matera. Your organic forms will always be in my head when anyone speaks of the “growth of a city.” And I’ll think of—I’ll know—one place in the world that actually looks as though it’s grown out of the ground like a living thing—from gorge, to carved cliffs, to caves, to houses and churches, up and up to the very pinnacle of that beautiful cathedral tower.

  I smiled to myself. The art is always where the heart is. Today was a good sketching day.

  Pietro in the Piazza

  I decided to celebrate this period of successful image-capturing with a glass of prosecco (sparkling wine)—a popular lunchtime aperitif among urbane cityfolk—in the piazza on Via XX Settembre. And that’s when I met Pietro. We literally bumped into each other at a coffee bar. The bar was so dark and he so gaunt that I failed to notice him and almost dumped my wine on his long, black overcoat. Fortunate
ly the incident was resolved by laughter, and we strolled together across the piazza to the arcaded belvedere overlooking the Sassi.

  As we walked, Pietro handed me “a typical piece of Italian propaganda,” as he called it. But it didn’t look like your normal slipshod political tract. In fact, it was a fine tabloid-size, folded brochure for a “Miro in Matera” exhibition that had just ended. The brochure was filled with reproductions of some of the world-famous artist’s most fluid and childlike sketches, a couple of them so off-the-wall loony and light that they seemed to whirligig above the page. I smiled at the infectiousness of Miro’s art. This seemed to irritate Pietro.

  “No, go to back of this…brochure, where the town gives you its propaganda!” he said.

  MATERA

  I turned the brochure over and found an enchanting piece of Italianish self-promotion that read exactly as follows:

  Culture and Matera: An inseparable combination. This pittoresque town of southern Italy, the origins of which have lost in the mists of time, can justly boast supremacy that derives from uniqueness of its ancient Sassi. This is example of how human settlement can be done inhabited, without interruption, for at least five thousand years. Houses overlook the cobblestones of the same courtyard, incouraging a mutual exchange which is today irretrievably lost in the progressive dehumanization of the modern city. Carlo Levi was inspired to renounce the inhuman conditions in which peasants lived in the south, in his book Christ Stopped at Eboli. Today Levi’s prose belongs to far-off times. After the declaration of Sassi as world heritage by UNESCO the restoration experience of these old carved cave houses is become a methodological indication of the historical centers of the Mediterranean area. Matera is part of a world that is still in tact, untouched by the follies of contemporary life. But at the same time it is looking towards future.