#cinematic thinkers when they have to do descriptive writing: | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

franciscretarola · 5 years

Text

Matera, the Brigantaggio, Southern Italy’s Mostly Unknown History

There was a lull during our tour of Matera's sassi, the former cave homes of workers, farmers and shepherds carved into the gorge beneath the city's elegant "Civiltà" and "Piano" neighborhoods. Sasso literally means "stone" in Italian. The homes had been excavated from the calcareous tufo stone and fronted over the centuries by what are often elegant facades. The rest of our tour group, a family from Seattle, was still inside a small sasso that had been turned into a museum. My wife Cathy and Kateri, a professional photographer and staffer at our Philadelphia Abruzzo-dedicated restaurant, stared out over the densely packed and compelling warren of the Sasso Caveoso, one of two sassi quarters in the city, apparently reflecting on what we'd just seen. The cave home was just slightly larger than my South Philly row house living room but until the 1950s had been shelter for thirteen people, a donkey, pig and chickens. All the family's possessions - mostly equipment used for farming and raising animals - were stowed on the walls. There was one table with a large wooden serving board and two chairs. The home had just one bed which stood high above the floor to separate the sleeping family from their animals and afford the chickens a place beneath to roost. It was both a sobering look at the desperate circumstances once faced by the common people of Matera and an impressive display of ingenuity: each sasso had an intricate system for water collection - rain is scarce in this part of Basilicata - that was connected to a common cistern shared by its immediate neighbors. When the family's cistern was filled, runoff was channeled to the common container; nothing was wasted.

Our guide, Luigi - a trim, dry-witted and instantly likeable guy with thick, professorial glasses and dressed casually in jeans with a flat cap - leaned back against the stone facade of a sasso and stared pensively at the ground. Before the tour had started we'd talked a bit about the town and local history - this was not my first time in Matera - and I felt we'd had an instant rapport. So, I screwed up my nerve and asked him what I'd been dying - for years, actually - to ask someone from Basilicata. We spoke in Italian to keep our conversation private.

"So...what do you think of Carlo Levi and Christ Stopped at Eboli?" Luigi's face first registered a mixture of surprise and fear but resolved into a knowing smile. "How much time do you have?"

First published in 1945, Levi's book has come to define much of Italy's south, especially Basilicata. For most people, it's all they'll ever know of Basilicata, called "Lucania" in antiquity and during the Fascist period (Mussolini was trying to evoke ancient Rome and inspire a renewed imperial spirit), unless they've heard of or been to Matera, whose sassi are now a UNESCO World Heritage site and were used by Mel Gibson to stand in for Palestine in his film "The Passion of the Christ." Levi was a vocal critic of fascism. He was arrested and then, like many other left-leaning intellectuals and opponents of fascism, sent into "exile" in the remote south, specifically in his case to the towns of Grassano and Aliano (which he renames Gagliano in the book). His account of the appalling living conditions, poverty and malevolent neglect (centuries old, by every form of government and of every conceivable kind, from a lack of educational resources and infrastructure to access to medicine) suffered by Aliano's townsfolk and other lucani (citizens of Basilicata) moved postwar Italy to (briefly) countenance the "Southern Question" and seek remedy. It has deeply affected readers all over the world, including me.

Levi's description of the poverty in the sassi (delivered in Eboli by his sister, who'd had to stop in the town to receive official permission to visit him in "Gagliano") is particulary grim:

"...Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags. I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty... I saw children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and the eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids, but the children stayed quite still, without raising a hand to brush them away. They had trachoma. I knew it existed in the South, but to see it against this background of poverty and dirt was something else again. I saw other children with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous dilated stomachs and faces yellow and worn with malaria."

At one point during her exploration of the sassi, Levi's sister was followed by bands of children begging not for coin, but for quinine.

Eboli stirs the emotions and Levi's heart was certainly in the right place (his actions as well: his atrophied skills as a trained physician were much needed in malaria-plagued Aliano) and much of what he writes about Italy's neglect of the south was - and is - certainly true, but after much reading and travel I began to believe that, however well-intentioned, the book’s tone is condescending, its view of history distorted by a northern perspective and, to create the desired effect, its depictions of the rural population exaggerated. Luigi agreed.

"For years we've been living with Levi's book on our shoulders. People come here looking for his lucani, his Matera and his Basilicata. I think they see what they want to see." Levi's lucani peasants are superstitious creatures (that much was true, and to some extent is still, and not just in Basilicata), immune to or unknowing of logical process, cause and effect. They seem almost another species, existing beyond the boundaries of time and untouched by the influences of the region's many conquerors, from Greeks and Romans to the Piemontese army of Vittorio Emanuele. Their physical appearance reminds Levi of depictions of ancient Italic peoples and to him shows no evidence of later ethnic incursions. Their stoicism and desolate world view, bereft of any hope, are born of millenia of futility and neglect. To hammer home the desperate situation he found, Levi - knowingly or not - created mythical beings beyond our understanding or experience. This device was effective but Basilicata (and much of southern rural Italy) still suffers the stigma that his book and descriptions, and other less well-intentioned depictions, created.

"Farmers and villagers then might've been simple, often ignorant, but they are not now and never were stupid. They certainly understood most of the reasons they suffered, as well as who might carry some of the blame. Their beliefs weren't all based on emotions and mysticism."

Levi's bias and prejudice are clearest when he discusses the local peasants' obsession with and vibrant emotional connection to the Brigantaggio, the guerrilla war fought by southerners from 1861 into the 1870s in opposition to the unification of Italy under Piemontese rule, Italy's fabled and much-celebrated Risorgimento. He contrasts this persistent and vibrant link to the past with the peasants' apparent indifference to and distrust of Italy's more recent nationalistic adventures: in the First World War two decades before his exile and the expedition to "Abyssinia" then in progress. Unlike some of the town's bourgeois citizens, the very same element who had tended to favor unity over continued Bourbon rule in 1860, the farmers and workers show no nationalistic zeal. They seem to feel that any expedition designed to capture territory and displace others to allow for Italy's expansion, even if they themselves might profit from access to arable land, is doomed from the start and fundamentally wrong. Though many of them fought, suffered and died in the "Great War," they never discuss it. But they seem perpetually ready to discuss the briganti and their exploits; every locale seems to have some historic connection to the doomed resistance.

Levi places the brigantaggio in a context of previous uprisings - to invading Greeks, Romans, etc. and posits that the briganti reaction couldn't be rationally justified but could be understood as an emotional response. The peasants, he argues, reacted with an understandable but irrational and hopeless attempt to strike out at the fates and cultures that seemed to persecute them. Maybe Levi actually believed this. His upbringing in Piemonte occurred during a time when many of the dark and brutal facts about Italy's unification and its effects on the ancestors of these very same peasants had been suppressed, swept under the rug and willfully ignored. But there were still living briganti during Levi's exile. He even met one of them during his time in Grassano. The brigantaggio was not ancient history to the villagers. Modern study has focused welcome light on the Risorgimento, the Brigantaggio and the Savoiarda reaction. Eyewitness accounts from both sides and previously ignored scholarship have been revisited, reevaluated and resynthesized, and the resulting picture - of Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele, Cavour and the Savoy military - is not a particularly pleasant or flattering one. What emerges is less an image of a war of liberation than of a violent and abusive invasion, occupation and systematic exploitation. Southern Italy, the new scholarship argues, was conquered, occupied and turned into a colony of the North.

Prominent Italian journalists, politicians, thinkers and historians have been questioning the national narrative for decades. Novelist and screenwriter Carlo Alianello (one of the modern founders of revisionism and a cinematic collaborator with Visconti and Rossellini), economist and one-time Italian Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, historian and politician Giustino Fortunato (both from Basilicata) as well as Marxist thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci (a Sardinian) all believed northern development had been achieved, to some extent, at the South‘s expense. Much of the best known revisionist scholarship on the Risorgimento has been done by non-Italian academics (English historians Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan and Martin Clark have all, to varying degrees, questioned some official accounts and flattering portraits of the movement and its heroes). But the current spear point of reevaluation is probably Pugliese-born journalist Pino Aprile. During our stay in Matera, I happened to be reading his book "Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure that the Italians of the South Became 'Southerners.'" (Terroni is a pejorative for southerners still in use in the north which links them to the dirt and land, their "terra"; it insinuates ignorance, filthiness and dark skin). Aprile clearly has an axe to grind and sometimes has figurative hams for fists (and no dead horse fails to be beaten, repeatedly), but his work seems well researched (his layman's tome does not always provide source attributions, however) and his arguments well supported. They've gained a lot of traction and currency recently, and I've found few coherent retorts. Many Italians, including some southerners, would rather not know, but Aprile seems to have dedicated his life to speaking what he feels is the truth, or at least one side of it: the side that has gone mostly unheard.

The economic story he weaves (mostly using others' scholarship, especially that of researchers Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima) contradicts almost all prevailing conceptions about the Bourbon realm, its wealth and sophistication and the condition of its subjects, particularly in relationship to northern and central Italy, at the time of unification. He points out the comparative wealth of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the vast monies in its coffers and in circulation and the hale condition of its currency (the Kingdom used gold coins while the Savoy realm had converted to paper money). The Kingdom of Sardegna (as the Piemontese realm was known) had exhausted its funds in a series of wars, including adventures in the Crimea, and was heavily in debt. "War or bankruptcy," one of Cavour's deputies wrote in 1859. Taxes were low in the South and, contrary to the popular image, the Kingdom had a relatively developed industrial base: it was named the most industrialized state in Italy after the 1855 Paris World's Fair, and third in the world. Under King Ferdinand II, it began liberal reforms and pioneered antituberculosis campaigns in Italy, as well as public housing and assistance programs (though the kingdom was hardly liberal and Ferdinand’s reactionary nature and narrow-mindedness undermined these efforts and alienated much of the kingdom‘s intelligentsia). Aprile also notes that, preunification, southern emigration was minimal and significantly less than the diaspora from the North, which stands preconception on its head. And indeed, I'd been surprised to read years ago in Richard Juliani's "Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians Before Mass Migration," that the founders of the city's Italian quarter in the years before Italian unification had been northerners, especially from Liguria. The United States’ first dedicated Italian Catholic parish, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi in the city's Bella Vista neighborhood, was founded by these northerners in 1852, eight years before the war. The destruction and economic disruptions caused by the invasion were exacerbated by the newly unified Kingdom's seemingly punitive measures against the South: disproportionate taxes were imposed, ironically to pay for the "liberation"; many southern industrial plants were dismantled and sent north, as was the gold of the Bourbon treasury. Other plants were closed. Once vibrant cities, most notably the port of Gaeta, were left in ruins. The former Bourbon army, tens of thousands of men, was disbanded, leaving scores of (armed, politicized and militarily trained) men unemployed (they would eventually form the core of the brigantaggio). These actions and policies would persist for decades and, Aprile argues, built the North and created the modern South. But they are not nearly the darkest part of the story.

The Piemontese response to popular dissent and the brigantaggio was violent, at times sadistic. Critics of the new regime were jailed, tortured and sometimes killed. Martial law was imposed on the entire South and the populace forced to endure a brutal occupation that drove many of them, who might have been otherwise indifferent to the regime change, to support or join the briganti. It was illegal, for example, to be outside town boundaries with certain (vaguely defined) quantities of food or supplies as authorities suspected these were intended to sustain the briganti, who indeed relied on local populations for support (which was offered gladly or obtained by threat and violence). For a time it was illegal even to have stores in the larder, as this was deemed suspicious. And the penalties were harsh, including jail sentences, corporal punishment and summary execution. Whole villages were razed to the ground, their populations (including women and children) murdered, displaced or forced into concentration camps. Aprile's rage appears most in the chapter discussing the Savoy army's well-documented atrocities in the towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni, in Campania, whose alleged support for the briganti, he maintains, prompted the worst acts of reprisal ever committed on Italian soil (which would include Nazi war crimes during World War II). Individual acts of rape, torture and murder are relayed in excruciating detail, including the names of the victims. Many unarmed and nonresisting villagers were bayoneted, hanged and burned alive in their houses, slaughtered even in the churches where they took refuge. The diary of one of the northern soldiers present at Pontelandolfo, Carlo Margolfo from Sondrio in Lombardia, is matter-of-fact: "We entered the town; immediately we began to shoot priests, men, however many as it happened, then sacked (the town) and finally we set the town aflame." He adds, "...it was impossible to stay inside (the town) because of the great heat, and such noise was made by the poor devils whose fate was to die toasted under the ruins of the houses. We, instead, had everything during the fire...bread, wine, capons, nothing lacking." The general responsible for the slaughter, Enrico Cialdini, enjoyed a long and profitable political career in the service of the newly united Italy. A piazza in Venezia bore his name until January of 2014, when the controversy surrounding Casalduni and Pontelandolfo forced the town council to make a change.

Of course atrocities are common in wars, especially guerrilla wars, and the briganti were not innocent or blameless. But the scale and systematic nature of the northern repression and reprisal leaves no room for comparison. Tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of southerners were killed, and many more traumatized, injured, displaced, imprisoned and impoverished during the war and brigantaggio, which in some places persisted into the 1870s, more than a decade after the South's fall. And there are components to the repression and treatment of the "terroni" that stink of racism and a lack of the respect one human being affords another. The severed heads of executed briganti were routinely displayed on pikes in southern towns to dissuade locals from supporting the resistance. Photos of dead and mutilated briganti were hot commodities in northern cities during the period. Many of these images are easily found on the internet (though one recurrent photo supposedly of severed briganti heads turns out to be from the Boxer Rebellion). Images of both living and dead guerrillas were used by northern social scientist Cesare Lombroso to form his ominous theories about physiology and criminal behavior. Indeed, the Nazis later enthusiastically (and ironically: Lombroso was Jewish) parroted many of Lombroso's theories on the connections between race, ethnicity, handicap and criminality. The museum of his collection - which is still in operation at the University of Torino in Piemonte - includes the skulls of hundreds of "criminals," including several briganti. He believed he'd identified a "southern" racial type which was, of course, inferior and more prone to criminality than the "northern" example. Over 150 years after the brigantaggio, the relatives of the briganti displayed in this "museum" are still fighting for the return of the remains for proper interment.

A female brigante, or brigantessa, has come for many to symbolize the fate of the South. Michelina Di Cesare was born in 1841 in the small village of Caspoli, a satellite town of Mignano Monte Lungo, in what today is part of Campania’s Caserta Province. Photos of her alive - posed in traditional village costume, holding a shotgun and pistol and with what looks like a sheathed bayonet in her belt - create the romantic impressions of a beautiful, fire-eyed, mountain warrior. She and her husband Francesco Guerra, an ex-Bourbon soldier who’d resisted the draft under the new regime, were part of a band of briganti that operated around Mignano from 1862 until their deaths in 1868. Michelina was not the only brigantessa. Many southern women, after seeing their communities suffer and their brothers, husbands and sons punished, jailed or executed as briganti or Bourbon and briganti sympathizers, supported the resistance, even as armed participants. This created quite a stir in mid-19th century Italy. Northern authorities strove to rob them of their femininity and dignity, and some period reports refer to them as “drude,” or druids, a derogatory term meant to degrade and dehumanize them. Some sources diminished their role and dismissed them as mere companions to the male insurgents. But by all accounts, Michelina was a competent and courageous guerilla and her band a feared cell. In 1868, she and her compatriots were betrayed by local collaborators, trapped and killed by Northern soldiers and Carabinieri under the command of Emilio Pavellicini, who’d used no small amount of coercion to get some locals to turn on the band. Most authoritative accounts have Michelina dying in a gun battle, falling next to the body of her husband (though some maintain she was taken wounded but alive and then tortured and raped before her execution). The last photo of Michelina is posthumous; she is nude from the waist up, her face and body a study in torment and already showing the effects of decomposition. Di Cesare’s corpse was displayed nude, under armed guard, in Mignano’s town center, as a lesson and deterrent to the local population. It’s said to have had the opposite effect, and the local brigantaggio intensified and persisted for several more years.

(Michelina de Cesare) So, if Aprile and the revisionists' studies have any merit, Levi’s notion that the passion and nostalgia Grassano and Aliano’s common folk felt for the brigantaggio was irrational or logically unjustifiable doesn’t hold water. But he was a product of the schooling and propaganda of his time, especially as a well-educated son of privilege raised in early 20th-century Piemonte. The history Levi (and most educated Italians, then and until the present day) had been exposed to had been scrubbed and rewritten. “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians,” remarked nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio (who also famously said that "uniting with the Napolitani was like uniting with lepers") after the war. A narrative was created to justify the invasion and elevate its purpose. And, in fairness, there were many, north and south, with purer intentions who had long dreamed of a united Italy, Garibaldi included. There had also been many actively against it and millions more indifferent to the question of unity (many liberals, including the blond “liberator,” were later disillusioned by post-war governance and policy; Garibaldi eventually resigned from Parliament, disgusted with the use of martial law in Sicily). Statues of the Risorgimento's heroes were erected throughout the new country and streets and squares named after them, often despite local opposition. If you find yourself in any major southern town, you’re sure to see places named after Garibaldi, Cavour, Nino Bixio or Vittorio Emanuele. The southern kingdom and southern Italians were portrayed as backward, uncivilized and in need of the North’s intervention. And as decades of Savoy economic policy and political repression had their effect, this portrayal was seen to be true, even among some southerners. It was not until decades after unification, Aprile argues, that metrics showed southern farmers and workers to be appreciably worse off than their northern counterparts. The great southern diasporas that followed further reduced and depopulated the South.

Italy’s conscience has, from time to time, been awakened and attempts made to redress the inequalities. In the 1950s La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno sought to build the region’s infrastructure, stimulate economic growth and fill medical and educational gaps in its poorest areas, but these initiatives were mostly short lived, poorly administrated and informed by the idea that southerners were responsible for their condition. This tendency to judge the South undermined efforts and engendered a prejudice which has, more recently, laid the groundwork for separatist groups like the Lega Nord, whose founder Umberto Bossi was for a time Minister of Federal Reform under Silvio Berlusconi. Aprile goes to great lengths to compare the relatively few monies sent southward as part of the Cassa with the vast haul pilfered from Bourbon coffers and raised through punitive taxation of the South during the decades after unification. And he tries to connect the racism of men like Lombroso with the politics and words of Bossi and his allies.

This racism or, if you prefer, virulent ethnocentrism, is real and permeates daily Italian life, and I‘ve had my own small experiences with it. During my first trip to Italy, I stayed with a wealthy family in the town of Vincenza, in the Veneto. My Italian then was limited, but I vividly remember a car ride with five or six local twenty-somethings to what turned out to be a fairly decadent and enjoyable pool party. They were blasting Bob Marley in the Alfa Romeo and the overloaded car attracted the attention of the local Carabinieri who stopped us and interrogated the driver. After a brief but tense exchange, we were sent on our way. The car erupted in laughter and animated conversation. My host, who spoke perfect English, explained that Carabinieri were invariably stupid guys with few options and from ignorant southern regions. I think she’d forgotten that my grandfather was from Abruzzo. Years later, while studying Italian in Firenze, a regular at the bar my new Canadian drinking buddy and I frequented asked us why we were studying the language. My Canadian friend was studying Florentine history, which pleased our interlocutor, whose name was Alessandro. When I mentioned my Abruzzese heritage as part of my reason, he was less impressed. Alessandro described himself as the scion of a noble Florentine family, though I’ve no idea if it was true. He pointedly explained to my friend that the Abruzzesi were just “cafoni,” poor peasants without much going for them. “Cafone” is a term that implies ignorance, lack of couth and culture, and can be a synonym for terrone. I asked him if he’d like to discuss the issue privately, around the corner, but he declined. He took off instead to buy cigarettes, and things de-escalated. The owner of the bar - a fat, loveable and improbably promiscuous Napolitano named Massimo - explained that Alessandro was a bit of a tool and his ornery attitude might be attributed to his wife’s flagrant cheating, which had made him the butt of jokes at the bar (which was in the Oltrarno and strangely named Camelot). Minor stuff, but illustrative.

In 2005, while revisiting what was the last Bourbon fortress to surrender to the Piemontesi, Civitella del Tronto in Abruzzo’s Teramo province, I mentioned to my guide Bruno (the fort’s curator) the stickers I’d been seeing on house windows and cars around the town and other places in the region that read “Zona Degaribaldizata” (“De-Garibaldized Zone“). He said they where part of a recent movement, which was only half joking, calling for the return of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He then gave me an edition of the movement’s magazine, “Due Sicilie.” Its cover was a photo of the door of an apartment building in Torino. There was a handwritten sign advertising vacancies but beneath the notice, in smaller script, it read: “Non si acettano meridionali,” southerners not accepted. It was from the 1970s.

(Civitella del Tronto)

In Philly, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi’s northern parishioners resisted the waves of southerners when they came and newcomers were directed to a second Italian parish founded in 1898 for their use, according to Stefano Luconi’s “From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia.” Luconi writes that Antonio Isoleri, the Ligurian priest who was pastor at Mary Magdalen from 1870 until 1926, was particularly dedicated to preserving its northern character. This dynamic, Luconi notes, was common throughout North American Italian communities, from St. Louis‘s Hill neighborhood to immigrant settlements in Providence, RI. I’m not sure what kind of mindset all this history (both official and revisionist), discrimination, prejudice, regionalism and economic privation engenders in most southerners, the depth of anger or offense felt, the inferiority complexes and desperation that might exist or the desire for vindication, but I’ve plenty of friends from the South and I can guess. And the Italian-American community (which is less a community than an identity and far from monolithic), comprised overwhelmingly of the descendants of southern immigrants, bears some of the South’s stigma and suffers its own complexes. Most Italian-Americans travel to the same spots in Italy as other tourists: Roma, Toscana, Venezia, maybe a visit south to Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast. And places like Roma and Firenze certainly merit a visit. They are among the world’s most significant historical and cultural jewels and the first places I went in Italy. But most Italian-Americans will never explore the regions that produced their ancestors and if they do most will stick to the home town and things specifically connected to family. Some of this has to do with a loss of language: Southern Italy is less accommodating language-wise than the North to the English-speaking traveler and the loss, which amounts to a loss of one’s roots and a blow to personal identity, can be painful and embarrassing. But I don’t think that’s the heart of it. Many Italian-Americans can be almost as dismissive and ignorant of the broader southern culture as any northerner or common tourist, maybe more so (many open-minded northern Italians will admit that life in the South is more rooted in traditions, that it has more soul). Perhaps there is an embarrassment that attends emigration and engenders a desire to justify your decision by denigrating the place you left (though many early Italian immigrants made multiple trips back and forth and lived a kind of double life, one in America and one Italy). When I first began traveling extensively in Abruzzo, many of my South Philly neighbors, including those whose families had roots in the region, were baffled. “Fran, what’s in Abruzzi?” one of them asked. “My nonno said there was nothing back there. He said all they had were dirt floors.” There was a kind of shame expressed, though none of them would have ever used that word. Compared to the splendor of Roma, the art of Firenze and romance of Venezia, what could the apparently forsaken places our parents and grandparents had fled - and always seemingly with nothing - offer us? Who wanted to be reminded of such deprivation, squalor and sadness? But those of us who do go are incredibly rewarded. And the ignorance of and prejudice we see everywhere directed at the South becomes difficult to bear, even in polite conversation. We walk around with chips on our shoulders not completely unlike those born by our meridionali friends. And if one loves Italy - as millions worldwide claim to - one hopes for the resolution of the “Southern Question.” Ironically for many who’ve posed the question before, no solution seems possible until the entire country, particularly the North, comes to terms with its history.

At the end of the tour I asked Luigi how he felt about current developments in the sassi, the luxury homes and boutique hotels created from the former homes of the poor, the restaurants and craft shops, the influx of wealthy tourists, including many northern Italians. We ourselves were staying at one of the new hotels and had mixed feelings about it. Luigi thought our ambivalence was misguided. Obviously, he owed his job to these changes. “The economy moves here when it isn’t doing so well in a lot of other places in Italy, especially the rest of the south.” This was true; the week before we’d been in Abruzzo which - though gifted with inspiring, evocative and unspoiled cultures and some of Italy’s most dramatic natural landscapes - has been perennially challenged economically and was now still traumatized from the enduring effects of the economic crisis and the 2009 earthquake. The vitality we saw in Matera was nowhere in evidence in Abruzzo. “Our job is to make sure that people know the history of this place, that they understand and respect the people who built it and made their lives here. But it would be a mistake to keep it as a lifeless museum.” Luigi explained that he’d left his job as an economist, which must be a pretty depressing job in early 21st-century Italy, and followed his passion. Telling people about the area’s history and patrimony gave him a sense of purpose. And he was making a living.

But mostly, Luigi thought our perspective on the sassi and their legacy was too influenced by Levi and based on ignorance. "The conditions in the sassi were not always as Levi described. For much of their history, the sassi were considered marvels and celebrated in period accounts and literature. This, I think, is one of the unintended consequences of Christ Stopped at Eboli: the idea that the sassi were always as overcrowded, poor and unsanitary as they were in Levi's time."

He thought I should read up on the subject and suggested two books: Giardini di Pietra (Gardens of Stone) by Pietro Laureano and Matera: Storia di Una Città (Matera: History of a City) by Lorenzo Rota. We shook hands and parted with plans to meet again later to explore some of the caves in the gorge across from the sassi. Kateri (naturally, for a twenty-something) vectored away from Cathy and me, and I, gently but sufficiently chastened by Luigi for my lack of historic understanding, dragged Cathy to the nearest bookstore to buy the books he had recommended.

When you stare out - let's say from your privileged terrace in a cave hotel constructed from a deconsecrated medieval church, a glass of Aglianico del Vulture in hand - across the densely packed, intricate "plan" of the sassi, one predictable effect is to feel yourself taken back to another, ancient time. The uniform and warm color of the so-called "tufo" stone, the complexity and apparent randomness of the settlement make the sassi seem almost natural formations, part of the gorge's topography. The views of the gorge across from the city, steep rocky walls pocked with unadorned natural and manmade caves where shepherds and monks once sheltered, heighten this impression. Inside the town, the simple sassi and the facades of the small shelters built in front of some caves are all fashioned from the same stone. The view, for me at least, creates a profoundly peaceful feeling. That and awe. That is, until I imagine poor children in rags lingering in front of every entrance, the stench from human and animal waste, the suffering and disease. But ancient Matera was not like this.

(Matera)

Al Idrisi, an Arab geographer and one of history's most important cartographers, visited Matera while working for Roger II, the 12th-century Norman King of Sicily, on a study of the latter's realm. He found the city "magnificent and stupendous," and Al Idrisi had been around, from Islamic Spain to the Balkans. Writing in 1595, Eustacchio Verricelli gushed about Matera: "The air is so good that very few people get sick and the inhabitants live very long: many of them live ninety, one hundred years. The men are of average height and clever... The town is made by buildings in white stone and dug caves where rooms, cellars, mule sheds, cisterns, hollows for grain keeping and even hen houses can be seen... When it gets dark, after a trumpet sounds, all the inhabitants place a lamp out of the houses and buildings. Watching the Sasso Barisano from the Cathedral (located on the Cività above the sassi), it looks like a starry sky... the sky and the stars are under the feet and not above the head...". Other written and artistic depictions describe a harmonious, well-organized community integrated with the Cività. Today, it's possible to visit an enormous cistern located beneath the Piazza Vittorio Veneto (in the so-called Città del Piano quarter, also built above the sassi), with pilasters, fifteen meters tall in places, chiseled from stone (it was one of several such cisterns beneath the upper town). The water it collected fed terraced gardens throughout the sassi. Water descended through intricate channels to nourish walled gardens in front of the homes in the settlement's lower levels. These green plots often sat upon the roofs of the homes below. Two larger, constantly flowing channels called grabiglioni washed each sasso neighborhood of sewage and waste which in turn was collected, dried and turned into fertilizer and humus. Each home and cluster of homes also collected water. The sassi were self sufficient, self sustaining and verdant, a 21st-century environmentalist's green dream. Nestled in the gorge, carved into or fashioned from the stone, they sheltered their inhabitants from heat and wind. Middle-class townspeople as well as laborers and farmers made their homes in the Caveoso and Barisano neighborhoods, living side-by-side.

Things began to go downhill in the mid-17th century when the town became the regional capital. Development of the upper Cività and newer Piano neighborhoods followed and the population swelled, stressing and damaging the vernacular infrastructure. Still, according to Laureano and Rota, some equilibrium seems to have persisted until the 18th century when a decline in the local pastoral economy (due, in part, to the decline of the South's importance in the international wool trade) dealt the peasants a major blow. The beginning of the next century brought more unrest when Joseph Bonaparte, installed by brother Napoleon as the King of Naples, presided over a division of public lands. Joseph's reforms favored the landed gentry and new bourgeoisie over ecclesiastical claims but, in effect, broke the peasant economy which depended on working small plots of land (as well as work done for third parties and civic projects). Joseph also moved lucrative regional government offices to Potenza, north of Matera. The Bourbons eventually returned but the power of the new bourgeoisie grew. Development of the areas along the rim of the ravine - essential in the water collection and dispersement systems that sustained the settlements and already weakened by construction projects in the previous century - intensified with buildings oriented away from the sassi and toward the expanding Cività and Piano quarters and the trade roads leading from Matera. In the 18th and 19th centuries, to quote Laureano: "...the pits, granaries, cisterns, vicinati (clusters of houses centered around a well) and gardens on the upper plain, major nerve centers of the systems of the sassi, are buried and hidden beneath the streets and buildings of the new physiognomy of power." The sassi, gradually cut off from the upper city, their water systems compromised, became poor ghettos. The decline increased after the fall of the Bourbons in 1860, when ecclesiastical holdings were liquidated and the middle class, much of which had favored unification, gained control of vast tracts which had been previously worked as small plots by local farmers. The situation of local peasants and workers became dire and, as Rota notes, their options extreme: "il brigantaggio prima e l'emigrazione poi" ("the brigandage first and emigration after"). Those who stayed crowded into the only place available to them, the sassi, exploiting every undeveloped space, converting granaries, stalls and even wells into the single room homes where they lived in filth with their animals and that are now preserved as museums. The vestigial water systems were further degraded and unable to supply the numbers then living in the sassi. Disease, especially malaria, was rampant. The wonder that had been Matera was gone and its previous splendor faded from memory.

(Cistern beneath Matera)

By Levi's time the sassi had become the fetid, diseased hell described in Eboli. Fascism brought ineffective, poorly considered projects to improve the lives of their denizens. The two grabiglioni drainage channels were buried and paved over to create carriage roads to ease entry into and connection between Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. Many of the bottegas found today in the sassi exploit these relatively new corridors. But this was a mortal blow to what remained of the sassi infrastructure and left the inhabitants to rely on what insufficient modern systems existed. Conditions only got worse. Levi and other reformers' protests eventually spurred the government to act. In 1952, evacuation of the sassi began. New settlements were built on Matera's periphery to house the displaced. There, they'd have running water and toilets, modern gas and electric service. Luigi took Kateri and me on a drive through one of the new sections. Viewed from the car window they seemed like smart, moderately-sized homes. They were generally built on two levels and organized into compact units. There was plenty of green space and, in all honesty, they didn't seem entirely unpleasant. Luigi thought so as well, but told us that many former sassi inhabitants had been traumatized by the move. Some of them didn't understand how to use the modern amenities they found in the new apartments. Some resisted relocation and most agreed that essential aspects of their lives in the sassi - traditions, daily rhythms, a sense of community - were lost in the transition. But modern Italy, which had largely forgotten the remarkable past of the sassi, looked forward and not back, misinterpreted Matera's legacy and encouraged modernization. The postwar economy, writes Laureano, needed "new houses, new ways of living, new products... necessary to the consumer economy." The sassi were abandoned and each individual property sealed. Without maintenance, some began to crumble. The first collapses stirred conversation about the sassi, whether they could be saved and to what end. Enter, yet again, Carlo Levi (and a little irony). At the end of the sixties, he lent his voice to the cause of conservation: "The sassi are not of minor importance among the most celebrated and important things that exist in our country, Europe and the world... (the example of the sassi) is of a very great value and unique in the study of urban planning, architecture, agrarian culture and world culture." Film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who set his Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel of Matthew) in the sassi (starting a trend for biblical epics set in Matera), also called for intervention. An international debate began on the future of the sassi and in the 1980s national laws were passed to encourage restoration and investment. Things began to move. In 1993 Matera's sassi were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site; their unique history and contributions would be celebrated.

But many (maybe most?) visitors still focus on the Lucani, Matera and sassi described in Eboli, the sassi and inhabitants preserved in modern accounts and photographs: the sassi as a former vergogna nazionale, a national shame. The accomplishments of the people who built and for centuries maintained the sassi, and the potential lessons the historical sassi might offer a resource-challenged 21st century seem largely obscured and unknown.

In truth, I'd known a little bit about the more positive past of the sassi before Luigi and Messrs. Laureano and Rota took me to school. I remember reading some of Verricelli when we'd been in Matera the first time ten years before, especially his description of the lights of the sassi as stars under his feet. During that visit we'd stayed in one of the first hotels to locate in the caves. An older gentleman, maybe the owner, saw me reading a history of Matera at breakfast on the hotel's terrace and invited me on a tour of the complex. He focused especially on the complicated system for collecting water, explained how it was connected to others in the surrounding caves. He was cheerful, effusive and proud of the ingenuity the network displayed. Despite his obvious familiarity with the sassi - he told me he'd been among those forced to relocate - he smiled broadly when discussing his former life in the caves. His face expressed wonderment. But I was also reading Eboli at that time, as well as other depictions - some written by former sassi inhabitants - that described overwhelming poverty, sadness and stoic perseverence. The idea of the caves as wonderous or even sometimes happy places wouldn't stick. They were undeniably beautiful to look at, exhilarating to walk through, but their legacy was a sad one: poverty, inequality, neglect.

That night, after our tour with Luigi, we navigated the alleys down through the Sasso Barisano to a trattoria recommended to us by him and located on the neighborhood's former grabiglione. The cucina was simple but elegant - whipped sheep's-milk ricotta with honey, local salumi, purèe of fava with olive oil and bitter cicoria greens, a rustic, coarse-ground pork sausage and a potent Aglianico del Vulture, all capped off with several shots of the local Amaro Lucano. Kateri left us after dinner to explore the nightlife on the Cività and Piano and Cathy and I returned to the hotel. I stepped from our spacious cave room out on to the terrace overlooking the sassi. A light rain was falling and I was a little drunk. The sassi reclined in the gorge below me, bathed in the warm glow of the street lights. The rain and wine gave the view a kind of Impressionist aspect. I rested my arms on the terrace wall and saw, really, for the first time, the stars beneath my feet.

The next morning we drove out of Matera on a day trip to see the ruins of Craco, an abandoned medieval village in Basilicata that had gained some fame as a kind of ghost town. The first glimpse of the place, towering above a narrow crag and silhouetted against a pewter sky, was truly spooky. There seemed to be no human presence. Olive groves were scattered in the valley beneath the road. Goats grazed silently among them, apparently unattended.

(Craco)

We drove to a spot just beneath the village, which was cordoned off with barb wire-topped chain link. On the other side of the road, across from the fence, another herd of goats grazed beneath a soft pine canopy. A light rain fell. Kateri got out to take some photos of the goats, and Cathy and I looked for some way to get behind the fence. A young shepherd appeared from below the pines, dressed in a toque and heavy jacket. He seemed a little bemused at the attention Kateri gave him. Just then a old man crested the hill on the road above us. Nearly toothless and apparently agitated, he asked- mostly in an impenetrable dialect - what we were doing there, what we wanted. I said we wanted to see the town. “Ma non c’è nessuno (But there’s nobody)!” he yelled, and then launched into a passionate but - for me - indecipherable rant from which I could only make out the refrain: “Non c’è nessuno.” The shepherd smiled at him and waved. We located a sign on the fence which explained that tours could be arranged at an office a short drive beyond the ruins.

A young man - short, stocky and dressed in the somber, worn but clean clothes I associate in Italy with farmers - sat behind the counter at the office. We’d have to fill out a waiver if we wanted to tour the ruins. “Where are you from?” he asked. When I said Philadelphia his eyes lit up. “Il paese di "Rocky" (The town of ‘Rocky‘).” I smiled and said yes and then told him that they’d filmed a lot of the most recent “Rocky” near our house. “’Rocky 6,’” he responded, without hesitation. His name was Vincenzo and he’d be our guide. He gave us all hairnets and hardhats and told us to drive to the gate beneath the ruins. He met us there after ten minutes.

Vincenzo explained that the first damage from slides had occurred in 1963. As Levi explains in Eboli, the earth in this part of Basilicata is comprised mainly of a slippery clay. Slides are commonplace. Part of Aliano, including most of its mother church, had simply fallen into a depression beneath the town, gone in an instant. Vincenzo pointed to an area of debris beneath the main ruins. This had once been the lower part of the town and contained a piazza, a cinema and pastry shop. A long street, lined with shops, would’ve wound down the hill to where we were standing. Now there were just piles of brick, wood and plaster. Vincenzo didn’t attribute the disaster solely to clay soil. Instead, he spoke of neglect. The retaining walls that had terraced the hill and provided support had not been maintained. The medieval tower that crowned the town and provided its most dramatic visual point had been hollowed out during Fascism and an enormous municipal water tank installed. But the system had degraded over time. Water was not contained and leeched into the hill. Vincenzo’s presentation was calm, authoritative and delivered in a matter-of-fact tone. Contrary to the information I’d found online, the village had not been completely evacuated after the first incident. Parts of the town remained occupied until the 70s and some individual paesani even held out into the 80s and 90s. The people of Craco had had to be pried from their homes. We continued up the hill to the beginning of the ruins. A solitary donkey stood next to a detached, ruined house beneath us, near where Vincenzo had begun his talk. Vincenzo explained that one of the last holdouts had remained in the home, defying authorities to demolish his house with him still in it. He opened another gate and we entered the ruins of Craco.

It’s difficult and probably unnecessary here to describe the feeling of walking through such a complex, strange and painfully beautiful dead place. There’s a presence to formerly vibrant abandoned places that defies explanation. The town, like many Italian villages, was a captivating collection of winding and descending alleys. The buildings were constructed with honey-colored bricks made from the clay soil. Grass and wildflowers tufted from wall cracks and on terracotta roof tiles. Frail wooden doors swung open to reveal spartan, furnitureless interiors. Vincenzo continued his narrative, stopping from place to place to show us a compelling vantage or point out a crumbling, treasured artifact, or where one had once been. The town had been evacuated without much care given to the security of its artistic and cultural patrimony. The bells, altars and pipe organ had been stolen from its mother church. The ceiling above the church’s main altar had caved in due to goats grazing on the roof. Vincenzo pointed out the space beneath where once had been an altar. It had once been decorated with frescoes. Local boys, he said, had used the frescoed niche as a soccer goal.

We reached the summit of the town, just beneath the main tower and entered a home whose windows afforded panoramic views of the surrounding countryside, misty hills of green and brown which rippled to the horizon. Vincenzo offered some stories of village life, of how his grandfather had resoled shoes in the town and also been the street cleaner, of annual festivals, especially the procession for San Vincenzo, his namesake and the town’s patron saint. He spoke of daily rhythms, town life, social etiquette and funeral customs and how, on at least one occasion involving the death of an unpopular woman known (for her colorful language, ornery demeanor and mistreatment of her husband) as “the devil’s mother-in-law,” those customs were ignored.

I sheepishly asked him about briganti and he enthusiastically launched into a series of local stories and myths. Vincenzo was in his twenties, but the connection to the brigantaggio Levi lamented is still strong. He said that Piemontesi authorities had liked to display the severed heads of briganti at the entrance to the local towns, and that Craco was no exception. Levi himself references this intimidation tactic. The most famous local brigante, Giuseppe Padovano (called Cappuccino and from Craco), was an ex-Bourbon soldier and sometimes fought under the command of the most feared of all brigante leaders, Carmine Crocco. From our window overlook, Vincenzo pointed to a place at the foot of the town where there’d been a skirmish between Cappuccino’s band and northern forces. A little over twenty briganti were taken prisoner. They were brought to a place beneath the town in front of the church honoring San Vincenzo and lined up for summary execution. Craco’s most prominent noble family, the Cammarota clan, who had supported the Risorgimento and opposed the brigantaggio, assembled to watch the execution, cheering on the northern soldiers. Town mythology holds that the briganti turned toward the Cammarota and damned the family to a barren, heirless future. And according the Vincenzo, this came to pass. The last of Craco’s Cammarota, an old woman, died poor and alone in the family palazzo. Though most said she’d been a kind and decent person, she’d been ostracized by the local community. The wounds and divisions were deep and her family’s sins never forgiven. Levi notes this divide between the working class and gentry in Eboli.

As we descended the hill and again moved into the rubble field, Vincenzo explained his hopes for the town. In 2010 Craco had been placed on the list of the World Monuments Fund, an international non-profit dedicated to preserving endangered architectural and cultural treasures. But the monies amounted to little more than a trickle. Vincenzo, who’d done his research on his own using the few books he could find, the internet and testimony of Craco’s older population, hoped to create a group of volunteers dedicated to the town’s preservation. They would work independently of the outside organizations and government agencies in which he had no faith. Craco’s population had numbered more than 2000 in the 60s but had declined since the evacuation to around 700 souls. Most of them were moved into a new settlement, Craco Peschiera, a forlorn cement development a few kilometers from the old town. The young people raised there, he lamented, had no idea of the town’s cultural and artistic treasures or traditions. They saw only pale shadows of these and grew up with little or no pride in or connection to the town. Most longed to escape.

Vincenzo pointed to where the pastry shop had once been. His face brightened as he told stories his father had told him about his life in Craco as a very young boy. He’d go to the shop and choose several treats and then run to find Vincenzo’s grandfather, who was usually sweeping up in the piazza. “Dad, I took three!” His grandfather would smile, reach in his pocket and pull out the money needed to pay. “And where we’re standing, this was the piazza where everyone assembled each night. The theater was just over there. There was music and fireworks on festival days...”.

We stood alone on crumbled brick, surrounded by silence.

#Matera Craco Basilicata Mezzogiorno Southern Italy Briganti Brigantessa Michelina de Cesare Italian Americans terroni Civitella

1 note · View note