Seasons in Basilicata (5 page)

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 South 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?”

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.

M
ARATEA

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.

 

“D
UE 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.

I paused for a restorative coffee—a post-lunch cappuccino, much to the confusion of the bartender—at a gas station on the main valley highway linking the Basilicatan coast near Policoro and Metaponto with the A3 Naples-to-Reggio freeway. For a few minutes I reentered the twenty-first century: Cars and huge tractor trailers whizzed past (whizzing is apparently the only mode of movement for Italian drivers); billboards rose high on huge pillars, displaying evocatively underdressed young ladies sucking with erotic delight on Coke bottles or sprawling invitingly across gleaming latest-model automobiles. Farmers were out in ultra-fertile and immense fields with huge machines very unlike the donkey and oxen contraptions and tiny, waddling Ape trucks I'd noticed in the
pocket-handkerchief patches of hardscrabble land way up in the mountains.

But soon it was northward again, hairpinning like a pinball, dizzied by heights and constant glimpses of vertical-sided canyons and gorges dropping off a few inches from my front wheel.

Infrequent white hill villages popped up, perched on distant puys, and then vanished almost magically into the swirl and tumble of the ranges. The lower foothills were often cloaked in deep, dark forests of oak, beech, and holly, while the higher peaks—Volturino, Caperino, and Montemurro—rose bold and bare, the great ancient bastions of Basilicata.

“No wonder Christ stopped at Eboli,” a wisecracker once suggested. “Our mountains keep out anyone coming from the North.”

“Well, they didn't stop all those invasions though, did they?” I wisecracked back, only to be told with fierce southern logic that “the invaders cheated and came by sea!”

I was tempted to remind the wisecracker that Christ could walk on water and obviously had the option therefore of entering Basilicata by the aquatic route. However, as would happen later in Basilicata, I found it best not to carry my “Italianish” repartee too far. A lot gets lost in the translation, and apologies for unintended slights are not always accepted gracefully.

Just outside Laurenzana, one of the larger hill towns of the region, and perched even more precariously than most on a sheer precipice of rock, an ancient castle tower rose like a warning finger…one I perhaps should have heeded because I was soon about to have my first little meeting with misfortune—and the “dark side” strangeness—in this desolate realm.

 

I
T ALL BEGAN PLEASANTLY
enough as I came upon a sign handpainted on a rough slab of wood. It read Castelmezzano and pointed down an enticing-looking backroad that sinewed its way across the top of a high forested ridge. My map showed no such road, but I'd been told that Italian maps, despite their elegantly nuanced colors and air of authorative accuracy, were often notoriously defi
cient in the finer points of what one might call definitive cartography. So, off I went down the road, dust clouds spuming behind me from the unpaved but relatively rutless surface.

It was a little late in the evening, and dusky shadows were rising up from the valleys far below as the sun began its final declining arc, spraying the higher hills with brilliant flares of gold and amber. According to my crow-flying estimates, Castelmezzano couldn't have been more than twenty miles or so to the north, so I reckoned I should reach the comforts of an evening coffee—or maybe even a real cocktail, a multicourse Italian dinner, and a cozy bed in some local
pensione
—in an hour, tops.

A few miles farther on, deeper and deeper into those silent, seemingly unpopulated ranges, my schedule became somewhat disjointed. As did my little Lancia DoDo. (I knew I shouldn't have trusted a car with such a dumb name.)

Maybe I'd become a little too cocky on this particular backroad, but its relatively rutless, uncorrugated surface encouraged speed and the pleasure of seeing half a mile of dust trailing behind me in true outback-explorer fashion was captivatingly hypnotic.

Then came the rut. Some massive gouge out of the road's surface possibly caused by erratic drainage following one of Basilicata's sudden and very fickle spring thunderstorms. Anyway, the rut came, and I didn't see it, and the little DoDo slammed into it at full speed. First there was an abrupt downward crunch, then a wheel-spinning surge upward, with the impact of an untamed bucking bronco, and then the car crashed back down onto the road, pebbles and rocks flying, dust everywhere, me choking and spitting…and the engine dead.

Dead, as you might appropriately say, as a DoDo—that huge, ungainly mega-turkey creature from Mauritius that has been extinct for centuries. It was one of the most trusting birds ever in existence, virtually inviting its own demise just by standing around haplessly waiting to be clubbed over the head by hungry sailors.

I sat for a moment to regain my equilibrium (maybe even contemplating my own hapless, DoDo-like demise), then turned the
ignition, listened to the whirrings of the flywheel, and waited for the sudden reassuring power-burst of valves and pistons…which never came.

I waited a few more minutes, humming some inane tune and trying to assure myself that all would be well and that I'd soon be in Castelmezzano enjoying its abundant comforts and coddlings.

But the engine still refused to revive itself. The road rut must have really done a number on something or other in the crammed mechanical complexities under the hood, of which, I admit, I know very little. I've never been much of a spark plug, carburetor, and alternator nut and I invariably stand in awe as friends of mine, immensely knowledgeable, tinker around with the oddest of instruments in the belly of their beasts and produce remarkable purring, jetlike sounds from their beloved machines. “Wow,” I'll normally say as they try to explain to me the subtleties of electronic ignitions and torque and traction and valve synchronization and Lord knows what else, and claim that “it's not quite right yet.” And I'll mumble inanities like “Well, it sounds great to me,” and they'll give me side-long glances and smile tolerantly like dads with blissfully ignorant offspring, and say things like “Right, Dave” or, worse, nothing at all.