Seasons in Basilicata (11 page)

I particularly agreed with the writings of Thomas Moore, who suggested:

Moore also suggests, “The soul echoes ancient themes common to all human beings. It is always circling home.” But he emphasizes that excessive soul-searching can lead to “dangerous seriousness” and that “absence of humor signals a failure in basic humanity.” He senses that life is a divine comedy and that “heartfelt laughter” was very much a part of “the mystical land before our birth.”

In an attempt to combine the subtle, the serious, the sensuous, and the gloriously silly, I began to unravel all the years of travel memories, trying to discern larger constructs of comprehension and richer patterns of experience. And this somewhat unexpected and certainly intriguing introspection resulted in my sitting in my little DoDo on that bluff with all its magnificent vistas and celebrating the months of surprise, mystery, and delight that lay ahead.

My work, this book, was not to be a guide, so I had no need to gather meticulous, tedious data on hotels, inns, and restaurants (not that there were many in this part of Basilicata) or offer interminable recitations of oft-told histories or describe, with a pseudo-authoritative air, the trappings and iconic decorations of ecclesiastical highspots (I didn't see many of those either). Nor was it to be a sketchy, superficial tale of a fast week's wandering in “hidden Italy” for some touristy travel magazine. Instead, for once—for the first time actually—I had a whole book to write on a single small region and even primarily on one tiny village in that region. I was about to give myself, and Anne (when she was finally able to tear herself away from her teaching responsibilities in Japan), a chance to meld slowly into village life, to talk, drink, and eat with the residents, to share their mirth and mysteries, to celebrate their festivals and fun, and to offer our own little feasts and celebrations in return. And then ultimately to try to capture this whole kaleidoscopic montage in words and sketches in a book. This book.

 

S
LOWLY THIS SUDDEN
surge of introspection and expectation simmered down to a warm glow around my shoulders. From my high vantage point, the view was spectacular. A few of H. V. Morton's words, from his delightful book,
A Traveler in Southern Italy,
capture its ambience:

I looked at my watch, and realized that it was much later in the day than I'd thought. The sun was sinking, pearlescent, and dusk shadows were easing across the vast wheat fields all around me, filling the valleys with the purpling haze of evening.

My schedule-monitoring self began to fret about dinner and a bed for the night, while my gypsy self seemed utterly unconcerned, reminding me that I had a bag of snacks in the back of the car—slices of salami and proscuitto, half a plump round of focaccia, some delicious gorgonzola, a bar of creamy Italian chocolate, and a bottle of Barascolo wine. And what about sleeping? moaned my monitor. What's wrong with the car, and right here? my gypsy responded happily. Just pull up a little higher up this rough track and wake in the morning with one of the finest views in Basilicata.

So that's exactly what I did.

A First Visit to Aliano

While I'm often humbled yet energized by the almost-tangible power of wild places, not all explorers of the Mezzogiorno shared my enthusiasm for this relatively undiscovered part of Italy. Shelley, Henry Swinburne, Edward Lear, and others all warned of the dangers there, particularly from rabid forest creatures, brigands, and widespread disease. Perhaps most adamant of all was Augustus Hare, who wrote in 1883:

Like Levi's classic works, Anne Cornelisen's powerful books on the region,
Women of the Shadows
and
Torregreca,
had impressed both Anne and I long before we decided to live there. We found
Cornelisen's description of the region a little alarming, but also enticing:

As I left my high aerie in the early morning, watching the valley mists move like ancient oceans against the bare hills and ridges, I felt no such trepidation. Just pure elation. From the wide, fertile valley of the (dry) Sauro River, a ridge rose abruptly, dotted with strangely eroded buttes and green-clay gorges that looked recently torn out of the soft, oozy earth. Straggly olive orchards clung to tiny patches of land between the eroded clefts. And way, way up—over one thousand five hundred feet up from the valley road—perched little Aliano, like a craggy half-completed fortress. Upon closer inspection, the fortress turned out to be the high walls of public housing recently built to rehouse residents whose homes had collapsed or were destined to collapse in the next earthquake or land-slide—apparently a familiar feature of life in those parts and one that certainly reflected the mood of Cornelisen's description.

I counted twenty-two one-hundred-eighty-degree hairpin bends and a dozen or so additional tight curves on the painfully slow ascent to the village. I'm sure the ever-increasing breadth of views across the rolling green wheat fields and the high, craggy hills beyond must have been spectacular. But I wouldn't know. I was too aware of the fact that most of the twists and turns were densely crowded in by ancient olive groves full of fractured and contorted branches and even more contorted root systems that curled and looped around one another like orgies of serpents. Anything coming
down the narrow road from the village could not be spotted until mid-bend. Ditto anything coming up. Like me.

My little DoDo sputtered and choked in first gear, narrowly missing traumatic interfaces with two donkeys, both bearing on their sides enormous straw pannier baskets crammed with olive-branch prunings (veritable forests themselves); a huge blue
corriera
(bus, the local public transport); one of those rackety three-wheeler Ape trucklets, with a maximum uphill speed of around five m.p.h.; and an old woman on foot who was bearing a voluminous bundle of kindling twigs on her scarved head. The woman was half hidden by a tumult of weeds and brush that overhung the road, and I had to swerve quite dramatically to miss her. The look from her enraged eyes seared through my car window like a laser, and as I continued upward, I wondered if her irate gesticulations were an omen of things to come.

Welcome to Aliano, I whispered to myself. Don't forget all Levi's warnings about the
pagani
strangeness here and the life-and-death power of village witches. As the Professor had told me, despite its Roman name—Praedium Allianum, bestowed on the village in the sixth century
A.D
. in honor of its owner, Allianus—this was a far more ancient and mysterious place. Possibly more than nine thousand years old, according to the findings at a necropolis near Aliano's sister village, Alianello. Tread lightly.

Having gone to all that trouble of climbing up to the village, the road curled across the top of a narrow ridge offering brief but spectacular mountain vistas in almost every direction and then immediately began a precipitous tumble past forlorn-looking clumps of apartments and shadowy, stepped alleys. Older buildings, some with ancient stone façades, began to close in tightly as the road continued its steep descent. And then, with no warning and in that wonderful way that Italians articulate urban spaces and the “accidental aesthetics” of architecture-without-architects and town-scape-without-city-planners, the road flared out at the bottom of the hill into a piazza boasting an elegant circular paving pattern of cobbles and smooth black stones. Across the piazza a church rose up
with whitewashed walls and a sturdy stone tower. Small streets wriggled away in various directions around a couple of prominent palazzos, but the main street, set at a right angle to my descent, was broad, neatly paved, tree lined, and dotted with small stores and coffee bars.

I like the look of this, I thought. I'd expected something a lot tougher and surlier from Levi's descriptions.

But as I drove slowly down the main street in my DoDo, the pavement suddenly appeared to vanish and tumble into a dramatically eroded gorge hundreds of feet deep—the
Fossa del Bersagliere,
according to a small, lopsided sign (which also mentioned that the gorge had been named after an unfortunate soldier who had been thrown to his death here by brigands). The road made a sudden turn to the left by another coffee bar, but the shock of that abrupt precipice remained and increased as I continued my exploration of the town.

The main street had indeed been something of an illusion. Beyond the tightly clustered dwellings I caught glimpses of Aliano's
panorama calanchistico,
vistas of startling precipices studded with ancient cave dwellings. Much of the rest of the village seemed in dire need of repair, although some restoration work was in progress. I noticed a mini piazza
(piazzetta)
with rebuilt stone houses around it and a small new gallery featuring the artwork Levi completed in the village during his 1935–1936
confino.
Nearby was a small ampitheatre set on the edge of another precipice with dramatic views across more canyons to the south. Farther down, the large house where Levi had endured his
confino
was being restored as a museum, but to judge by the absence of machinery or workers, it seemed to be suffering from the same kind of in-progress lethargy as the Carlo Levi Center in Matera.

Elsewhere, blank windows stared out of cracked and broken walls, buildings leaned drunkenly, and in a lower section of the village two tightly clustered clumps of seemingly abandoned houses—the perfect setting for some werewolf or vampire horror movie—perched precariously on even more vertical precipices. A
sudden shudder of strata would send the walls, the lot, tumbling and shattering into the ghost-colored gorges far below.

The Mezzogiorno is renowned for its natural disasters, most notably the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, near Naples, in
A.D
. 79, following the ashy eruptions of Vesuvius, and much more recently, the horrendous Messina earthquake in 1908, which killed more than eighty-four thousand people and decimated the cities of Reggio di Calabria, at the tip of Italy's toe, and Messina on Sicily. Aliano suffered its own more modest earthquake in 1980, which explained the battered appearance of many houses, some of which dated from the fourteenth century.

The village bridge had already gone. One night in June 1998, this vital link to the outside world at Sant'Arcangelo in the next valley, the Agri, had collapsed with a great roar. All that was left now was a pathetic attempt at rebuilding—which had apparently been abandoned due to “sliding earth” problems—and a sinewy, footpath-wide track that somehow managed to carry small vehicles at ridiculous grades down to a minor canyon floor and up the other side.

I was beginning to rethink my initial optimism as I backtracked to the main piazza, parked the car, and sat outside one of the coffee bars ruminating over a late morning
caffe latte.
Old, diminutive men with bowed backs stood or sat around the other side of the street watching me warily, and I sensed in the eerie silence Levi's “age old stillness of the peasant world.” I opened my notebook and flipped through to find a composite quotation of his descriptions of Aliano:

F
OSSA DEL
B
ERSAGLIERE
—A
LIANO

Levi captures the mood perfectly, and in many ways little seems to have changed today, except for odd clay tablets fixed to walls around the village bearing brief quotations from his book. I also
enjoyed another of his descriptions of these older parts of the village I found in a booklet on the Parco Carlo Levi, one of seventeen “literary” parks established throughout southern Italy to celebrate links with famous writers and also to stimulate local-related economic initiatives:

Powerful stuff. And yet, despite Levi's initial abhorrence of the plight and depths of degradation suffered by the peasants almost as a birthright, his own experience of life here ultimately brought joy and exuberance, as the Professor had described, both by enlightening him and by shaping his views and political activities for the rest of his life.

Yes, but I'm not here to shape political activitism strategies, I thought. I'm here to live happily with Anne, learning, and generally
have a spanking good time dining on all those gorgeous porky products and homemade olive oil and wines and wild game and pasta galore.

 

“M
AY
I
OFFER YOU
a
corretto
?” I heard someone say in very precise English.

I turned and faced a young, clean-shaven man dressed neatly in a dark blue suit and crisp white shirt. He was giving me a most welcoming smile.

“That's very kind of you,” I said. “I'll try one of the local grappas.”

And that's when things began to change, and my optimism returned. Ironically in my subsequent months there I never again saw this young Italian man, but his spontaneous kindness that day made me realize that despite the strange aura of this remote village, I might find the nurturing warmth of new friendships. After all, no one said the hill villages in Basilicata were cute, squeaky white-clean masterpieces of ethnic aesthetic like their affluent northern counterparts. They are what they are. Ancient bastions of an ancient way of life that has pounded, broken, and decimated homes, families, and communities. And yet they're still here. Bruised and battered but with enough belief in themselves to rebuild, plant trees, and provide benches all the way down main street for the elderly. And they are still lived in by people—a thousand or so in Aliano—who possess enough innate southern hospitality to offer a confused stranger a drink at a coffee bar on a warm morning while he watches the little hunched, black-shrouded widows scurrying about on seemingly ever-urgent missions, donkeys clopping by carrying those now-familiar dual wicker panniers crammed with farming tools, huddles of old, sullenly dignified men deep in animated debate, and old women, sturdy as little trolls, swaying past carrying laundry or bundled faggots of kindling on their heads Arab-fashion.