The Pillars of Hercules

9 The Ferry Villa to Calabria

Instead of entering Messina on the way back, I stayed on the train, and the train and I were rolled onto the clanging deck of the ferry Villa—railway tracks were bolted to the deck. This shunting was done in jolting installments, sections of three or four coaches at a time, uncoupled, lined up side by side until the whole train was on board, sixteen coaches. The whole railway train, minus its engine, physically transferred to the vessel, was then floated across the Straits of Messina.

Standing in the darkness of the steel-hulled Villa among the greasy train wheels, I heard a man’s hoarse pleading voice.

“I lost my arm.”

It was too dark to see anyone, though I could hear the laborious pegging of a crutch or a cane knocking against the metal deck.

“Help me,” the voice said.

I stepped back, and the noise I made gave me away and directed him to me.

“Give me something,” he said. “I lost my arm.”

He then dimly emerged from the soupy darkness and I smelled him more clearly than I saw him. The smell was stale bread and decaying wool, spiked with a hum of vinegary wine.

“Please,” he said. And then, “No, I can’t take it!”

My coins were clinking because he bumped them with the stump in his ragged sleeve.

“No arm! Put them in my pocket!”

All this was in the stinking darkness of the ship’s hull, among the detached coaches of the train.

“Have a good trip,” he said, and pegged past me, rapping his crutch, and I heard other passengers giving him money — not out of mercy, but in exchange for his blessing, out of superstition.

On deck with the departing Sicilians and the returning Calabrese, all of them munching sandwiches, I saw that we were pulling out of Messina’s harbor. Sicily had clouds the shape and color of old laundry billowing over it, and the straits were windy too, but except for whitecaps and blown froth, it did not seem to be a bad sea. This could have been just an illusion. A whirlpool might make a low howling sound, but it is not usually visible until you are on top of it.

The Odyssey’s whirlpool Charybdis (“Three times / from dawn to dusk she spews … a whirling maelstrom …”) is not fanciful; it actually exists near Messina, on the Sicilian side, opposite the small village of Ganzirri. Scylla, the six-headed monster with twelve great tentacles, has not been sighted recently, but she is always heard. At just the spot where Scylla “yaps abominably” the sea-swells roll into the stone caverns on the Calabrian side, where they make a gulping sound, audible to anyone on the water — a familiar yapping to anyone who lives within earshot of cavernous seashore. This could easily be mistaken for the voice of the beast, Scylla, that Ulysses heard, “a newborn whelp’s cry, though she is huge and monstrous.”

Much of The Odyssey’s Mediterranean geography is either misleading or imaginary (I had passed the Islands of the Cyclops near Catania, but didn’t recognize them), yet occasionally, as in Bonifacio and here, the topographical description is so specific I got a thrill in matching it to the text. The art in Homer’s lines still precisely reflected nature. There was also a private satisfaction in savoring the ways that Ulysses managed to have a pretty bad time. Homer’s epic seldom celebrates the joys of seamanship or marvelous landfalls. It is about delays and obstructions and messy deaths. Ulysses’ crew is nearly always complaining or fearful, and the captain himself rather dislikes the gray sea and the fickle winds, the toil of shipboard life, the distances, the inconveniences, the dangers. Among many other things The Odyssey is a poem about the frustrations and miseries of travel, and the long voyage home; in a word, an epic of homesickness, greatly consoling to a traveler reading it.

The Calabrians had cracked a ghoulish joke by naming a village on the shore after the monster that had to eat six sailors at a time (“she takes, / from every ship, one man for every gullet”); in fact, Scylla was a little place nearby on the railway line to Naples and Rome, where this train was going. Above the shore here were great eroded slopes of steep hills, all settled and scraped bare, and like Sicily the landscape was mostly urbanized or settled. No hill existed in Italy without an antenna planted on it, or a fort, or a dome, or a crucifix. Italians fulfill themselves by building and reorganizing the landscape. It is as though nature has no interest for them until it has been improved by digging and urbanizing it. That is one thing Italians have in common with the Chinese. Another is a love of noodles. Yet another, an ancient belief in dragons.

It was a one-hour crossing of the Straits of Messina, and then the train was slung out of the ferry in sections and reconnected at Villa San Giovanni, which was just a ferry port and a mass of chanting signs, Al Treno, To the Train, Au Train, Zum Zug.

At a certain hour of the day in Italy, one of the more demoralizing aspects of being in a forlorn little station like Villa San Giovanni was seeing a big comfortable express train that would be departing in ten minutes for Rome, arriving tomorrow, just as the shutters were being flung up in the bookstores and restaurants. The passengers on the Rome Express looked out at me, probably thinking, Poor sucker, because they knew that I was just another peasant waiting for the branch line train to Reggio, fifteen minutes down the line, on the toe of Italy’s boot.

Twenty-three Italian soldiers, wearing maroon nightcaps with dangling blue pompoms, stood with me, and soon after the Rome Express moved importantly north, our little choo-choo went clinkety-clank south, to Reggio, which was dark and cold and windy. It was Sunday night in this poor town — it had once been the capital of Calabria but it had fallen on hard times like most of the south. It too had been flattened by the 1908 earthquake that had destroyed Messina. Strangely, even after pacing up and down, the only hotel that I could find open in Reggio turned out to be the most expensive one of my trip, so far ($81), though hardly better than the rest of them.

Almost a hundred years ago the English writer George Gissing (born poor, wrote New Grub Street, married a prostitute) made a solitary and often melancholy trip around southern Italy, which he called By the Ionian Sea. He stopped in Reggio and saw “few signs of activity; the one long street, Corso Garibaldi, has little traffic; most of the shops close shortly after nightfall, and then there is no sound of wheels … the town is strangely quiet, considering its size and aspect.”

That was precisely what I reported to my diary, until around seven in the evening I heard a loud commotion, and howl of human voices, and I asked a man in the doorway of the hotel, “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” he said in the local dialect, not niente but ninte.

So accustomed was he to the sound, it meant nothing to him. But I should have known.

“You from around here?”

“Squillace,” he said, and it seemed a very grim name.

“And you?”

“United States.”

“Good. I got relatives there.” From his agitated hand gesture, and his pursed lips, I was to understand that there were very many of them.

It was Sunday night in Reggio and that meant the parade of locals, great and small, old and young, male and female, the ritual of the passeggiata—that was the sound I heard. It fascinated me, more there than in Siracusa, because the weather was colder. On this foul, windy night in the small town of Reggio, in the depths of winter dampness, the whole populace turned out to march, bundled up against the weather. It was a gentle mob scene, the loud scuffing of their shoes, their chattering voices, up and down Corso Garibaldi, or milling around the piazza, on street corners, talking, laughing, walking three or four abreast, about a quarter of a mile and then back again, commandeering the main street.

The most remarkable thing to me was the controlled fury of it, all the voices creating one loud, almost deafening drone, everyone talking at once; that and the motion of the people in the street, on which there were no cars — not that they were specifically excluded, but who in a little Fiat would risk facing all those tramping arm-swinging Calabrians? This was a cheery event. It started round about seven, and by ten everyone had gone home.

Obviously, George Gissing had not seen Reggio on a weekend (though he had seen it just before the earthquake brought it down). It was still true almost a century later that Reggio was a just a little lighted place with darkness all around it — not wilderness or woods but dry tiny villages set amid the strange and infertile landscape of rocks and ravines, in the dusty hills of Calabria. They were remote and forgotten places even now. People in the nearby village of Bova spoke a dialect that was nearer Greek than it was Italian, and it has been suggested that the people in this region had been yakking happily in Greek during the whole Roman era, speaking Latin to officials only when they had to. When Roman rule was supplanted by the Byzantines, Greek came back into vogue and was once again the language of commerce and the greater empire. Nonetheless, for all this classicism and all the civilizations that had come and gone, there were villages in Calabria that still had no electricity or running water.

No wonder so many Italians said good-bye here. Near the port of Messina, in the poorest region of Italy, Reggio was the last landscape tens of thousands of emigrants saw, before they boarded ships for America; Reggio was less a town than a jumping-off place.

The ones in the passeggiata were the ones who had stayed behind. Eating pasta, drinking wine, I watched them from the window of a restaurant, while I scribbled. The idea that most of them had relatives in the United States made them seem resolute, if not defiant, to me, and it was as though they were celebrating the fact that they were still there, carrying on, after all these years, proudly rooted in the peculiarly stony soil of their native land.

Again, I seemed to be the only guest of the hotel. That suited me. The empty foyer, the shadowy corridors, my gloomy cubicle — this was an appropriate setting. I was reading the copy of Frankenstein I had bought in Siracusa, to put myself in the mood for the gothic darkness of Calabria. And that night I read how Dr. Frankenstein had been born in Naples, when his parents were passing through.

I was not heading for Naples. The next day I bought a ticket to Metaponto, half a day’s train ride in the other direction, in the arch of the Italian boot. Usually I just rattled to a new place and hoped for the best; but today I had a specific objective at Metaponto.

After Reggio there were a succession of straggling settlements by the sea, some dilapidated vineyards crowded by factories and junk heaps. It was a view of the Mediterranean that was new to me, mile upon mile of empty stony beaches, here and there some fishermen venturing out in small wooden dinghies. Inland on the sea-facing slopes there were hamlets of houses, some of them ancient-looking, and many of them had great cracks in their walls which could have been produced by the 1908 earthquake. There were newer houses, but they seemed as ruinous as the old ones. The soil looked infertile, much of it white chalky clay plowed into clods at Brancaleone, and sluiced into stony gullies at Bova.

The beaches were littered but there was no one on them, even at Locri, one of the bigger towns. Albichiara was one of those old yellow villages built high on a ridge, almost at the skyline (“against the barbarians”), and in the plains below it were fruit trees and olive groves. The station at Soverato was crowded with people clamoring to board this train — which was going to the distant provincial capital, Taranto, and terminating at the city of Bari on the Adriatic. But not all the people were boarding; many were there to say good-bye.

“Have a good trip!”

“Bye, Grandma!”

A priest joined me in my empty compartment. He had the evil eye, of course. So no one else came in, and those who passed in the corridor averted their eyes and hurried past.

Squillace was not as ugly as its name suggested. It was Virgil’s “shipwrecking Scylaceum” and in Gissing’s time was squalid: “Under no conditions could inhabited Squillace be other than an offense to eye or nostril.” But I saw only the settlement around the station. The village itself was five miles inland and was perhaps still offensive.

Spivs, little old women in black, nuns whose noses were longer than their bonnets, salesmen with crates, and fussing couples got on at Catanzaro, which was a good-sized town among ferocious-looking cliffs of dusty clay. After the desolate grandeur of the great sweeping fields and valleys, littered with stones, the hills near Cutro were so scored with erosion they seemed covered with heavy folded drapes of clay. The redeeming feature was the glittering sea; no waves, no swell, just placid water nudging and sloshing at this arid edge of Italy.

Crotone was a port with fields and factories around it, and a statue of the Virgin at the station. Cape Colonna just at the south side of town was also known as Capo di Nau, a corruption of the Greek word naos, meaning temple. The Greek Temple of Hera, made up of forty-eight marble columns, had stood on the headland for hundreds of years, but was torn down in a fit of militant piety in the sixteenth century by the Bishop of Crotone. The columns were then broken up and used to build the bishop’s palace. The earthquake of 1783, which had devastated this whole area and much of Sicily, knocked down the palace, and the remainder of the temple was used to strengthen Crotone’s harbor. Many of those marble slabs were still in place.

“This squalid little town of today has nothing left from antiquity.” What George Gissing said of Crotone could have been said of hundreds of places in Sicily and Calabria.

The priest got off at Crotone; a quarreling couple and an old woman took his place in my compartment. As soon as we drew out of Crotone a nun ambushed us, passing out holy cards: the Virgin on one side, a calendar of holy days on the reverse. I accidentally dropped my card and before I could retrieve it the old woman pounced and snatched it up, then brought it to her mouth and kissed it, in a kind of greedy veneration. She looked up at me and handed it over — reproachfully, I thought. I kept the card as a bookmark in Frankenstein and for weeks afterward, whenever I came across it, I thought of that old woman rescuing it from the indignity of a train floor and planting a kiss on it as a way of propitiating the Madonna. I saw stranger manifestations of religion in this trip but I remembered that gesture for its passion.

The starkness, the emptiness, the yellow-gray slopes, and stones, the stucco houses, the bare hills matching them, the exhausted-looking soil: except for the vineyards places like Strongoli and Torre Melissa looked like places I had seen in rural China, in the poverty-stricken regions of Gansu and Ningxia, just as poor and as hard to till.

The sea was almost irrelevant here, and it was as though Mediterranean culture did not penetrate beyond the narrow beach. The towns were a little inland or else on hills, with fortifications. There were no fishing boats for miles here, no boats at all. No marina, no docks, nothing that hinted at recreation. It was too cold for swimming but even so no one walked along the beach. So the blue coast was more like a barrier, a use I saw it serve in other places on my trip: the Mediterranean as a moat.

Great snow-covered peaks rose behind Sibari — wholly unexpected, like the first glimpse I had gotten of the snowy crater of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mountains seemed so unlikely, and the snow was an added bonus. I looked at my map and guessed it to be Monte Pollino, seventy-four hundred feet high.

And Sibari itself, this insignificant railway station in a wide dusty valley in Calabria, deserted by peasants (who had fled to Naples or Brooklyn), where no one got on or off the train, on the Gulf of Taranto, where all I remember was the glimpse of a snowy peak — this place that passed in the blink of an eye, was once the rich Greek town of Sybaris, whose inhabitants were so hoggishly self-indulgent, living in such luxury, that their lifestyle had given a new word to the language, sybaritic.

I alighted at Metaponto, and even accustomed as I was to small and squalid places, I was surprised by the smallness of Metaponto.

My intention was to leave here as soon as possible. I had another book in mind, that I had read years ago, that filled me with a sense of mission. Metaponto was the nearest coastal town to Aliano, which was the scene of Carlo Levi’s brilliant memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title of the book is slightly confusing. Levi was quoting a local maxim in Aliano: the point was that Christ stopped at Eboli, fifty miles away (near Salerno), and never got as far as Aliano, in the benighted province of Basilicata, where the people regarded themselves as heathens and savages, living on a crumbling hill.

Carlo Levi, a Florentine Jew and a medical doctor, was banished to Aliano in 1935 because of his antifascist views (the Abyssinian War had just begun: Italian machine guns against African spears), and in this obscure and distant village (Aliano is called Gagliano in the book) he stayed for an entire year. He languished under a casual form of house arrest, confino. There was no chance of escape: Aliano was the Italian equivalent of Siberia. Levi kept a diary, he painted pictures, he attended to medical problems of the people in the village, and after he left he wrote his book, which is a masterful evocation of life in a remote place. He got to know everyone in the village. The book is unclassifiable in the best sense; it is travel, anthropology, philosophy; most of all, it is close and compassionate observation.

I had been avoiding inland places, but Aliano was near enough to the Mediterranean shoreline to be on my route. I wanted to go there, just to see it. In The Inner Sea, Robert Fox wrote of a trip he took to Aliano in 1983, and of the mayor, Signora Santomassimo, saying that Donna Caterina “is still alive, over ninety — you can hear her shrieking at the moon on some nights, mad as a hatter.”

Now, twelve years later, the old woman was almost certainly dead, but that compelling description roused me. What about the rest of them? What of the village itself which is such a strong presence in Carlo Levi’s book? There were other details that I wondered about, too. For example, there was a fascinating description in the book of a church at the nearby village of Sant’Arcangelo which contained the actual horns of a dragon. People went to look at the horns. The dragon had terrorized the whole region: “it devoured the peasants, it carried off their daughters, filled the land with its pestiferous breath, and destroyed the crops.” The strongest lord of the region, Prince Colonna of Stigliano, had the encouragement of the Virgin Mary (“Take heart, Prince Colonna!” the Virgin said). He slew the dragon, and cut off its head and built the church to enshrine the dragon’s horns.

From Metaponto I could easily reach Sant’Arcangelo and see the dragon’s horns. It was only about fifteen miles to Aliano. And I was lucky to have chosen to get off at Metaponto, because in the summer it welcomed tourists, and although the summer was far off, there were facilities here that did not exist in the places I had come through.

By the time I had found a car to rent, the day was almost gone.

“You can see the ruins,” Mr. Gravino said.

“I want to drive to Aliano.”

“It’s a very small place,” he said. “You might be disappointed.”

“If it is very small I will be very happy,” I said.

I spent the night in Metaponto and early the next morning drove up the flat valley to Pisticci and Stigliano (where the dragon-slayer had lived) and beyond. It was a sunny day, and there were green fields beside the shrunken river, and yet the sense of remoteness here was powerful, not merely because the region was so rural and empty, but more because of the condition of the houses, which looked very poor and neglected. A branch line train had once run through here but it was gone and the stations were ruined. Many houses were in a state of disrepair, many had been abandoned. It was that look of old Ireland you see in book plates that show the effects of the potato famine — collapsed roofs, dead animals, weedy fields. This was also a region that many people had migrated from and no one else had moved in to reoccupy. It was both the prettiest and certainly the poorest area I had seen so far in the Mediterranean.

It was also a land almost without signposts, and the signs that existed were unhelpful, directing me to the road for the distant cities of Potenza and Salerno.

I saw three men on an embankment and when I slowed down I saw that they carried long worn poles. They were goatherds, two old men and a young man in his twenties. Their goats were grazing in the meadow just below the road.

“I am looking for Aliano.”

“Up there.”

They indicated a cluster of old buildings on a crest of a steep dry hill.

Then I asked them about their goats — was there enough grazing here? — just small talk, because I wanted to hear their voices, I wanted to study their faces. They were as Levi described the peasants hereabouts — short, dark, with round heads, large eyes, thin lips. “Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most Italic types.” He goes on: “They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.”

Aliano exactly crowned the hill. I had not expected it to be so high up, but of course the height of a village here did not indicate its importance. The poorer and weaker peasants put their villages in these almost inaccessible places. All around it was dry light-brown soil, and some olive trees with grayish leaves and gnarled trunks, and tussocky grass.

A narrow winding road led to the summit and, climbing it, I could see that the village was not at the top of the hill, but rather spread on the ridge between two steep ravines.

Ahead, an old woman laden with two pails, a shovel, and a bag of freshly picked spinach was laboring up the road. She wore a kerchief on her head, and a black skirt, and an apron — the uniform of the peasant in the deep south of rural Italy. I slowed down and saw that she was perspiring, gasping from the effort of carrying all that paraphernalia.

“Please, I am looking for the house of Dr. Levi.”

“It is on the other side of the village.”

“Far?”

“Yes. Very far.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“No,” she said, not out of pride or obstinacy, I guessed, but because of the impropriety of it. She was a poor old woman carrying more than she could manage, but still it was wrong for her to ride with a strange man. Levi had something to say about that too. As a young unmarried man he had to be careful not to cause a scandal by appearing to compromise the virtue of an Aliano woman. That meant he could never be alone with any woman.

The houses were built so close to the edge of the hill that the walls of some of them were flush with the sides of the cliffs. Between the upper part of the town and the lower part there was a small square and at its edge a precipice, still known as “the Fossa del Bersagliere, because in earlier days a captured bersagliere [infantryman] from Piedmont had been thrown into the ditch by brigands.”

The old woman had said “Very far,” but I knew it was nothing like that. I left my car at the edge of the upper village and walked down the narrow street. Passing cave entrances that had doors on them, I thought of China again, how I had seen people near Datong, in a landscape just like this, living in the hollowed-out sides of mountains. But these were wine cellars.

An old man in a cloth cap sitting on a wooden folding chair near the main square smiled at me and said hello. We talked awhile, and then I told him what I was looking for.

“Yes. Levi’s house is down there,” he said. “There is a sign on it. There is a museum near it.”

As we were talking, another man approached. He was small, wrinkled, smiling, welcoming. He was Giuseppe DeLorenzo. His friend was Francesco Grimaldi.

“Grimaldi is a good name,” I said. “Your family rules Monaco.”

“My family is all dead,” he said. But he liked the joke. “That is another family.”

They offered to show me where Carlo Levi’s house was, and so we walked to the lower village, on the other part of the saddle, on the ridge. I was aware of being very high, of being able to see the plain stretching south to Metaponto and the sea. We were on a steep pedestal of dry mud and brush and from the street that connected the two crumbling parts of Aliano you could look straight down the Fossa del Bersagliere, 150 feet to a ledge of olive trees, and then another drop.

“You call this a gorge?” I said, using the word gola.

“No. A burrone.” And he grinned at me. When I checked I saw that this word might have come from the Arabic burr, for land or wild slopes.

We walked down the hot cobbled street, the hot sun beating on our heads. Flowers all over the valley gave it color and perspective, especially the poppies, which glowed a brilliant crimson against the dust.

We were passing some squarish crumbling houses.

“You have to see this,” Francesco said. “This is the historic part of Aliano. It is very old.”

“The palazzo,” Giuseppe said.

Another crumbling house.

“The signorina’s palazzo.”

“Where is the signorina?” I took this to be the Donna Caterina, “mad as a hatter,” who was said to bay at the moon.

“Dead. The whole family is dead.”

“What was the family’s name?”

“The family Scardacione.”

We walked down the cobbled street, to Piazza Garibaldi, though “piazza” gives the wrong impression — this square was hardly bigger than the floor of a two-car garage — to DeLorenzo’s house. The house was ancient, a section of cracked stucco attached to a row of stucco boxes. His cat yowled at me and crawled into a strangely made clay contraption that looked like a large birdhouse fixed to the wall of the house.

“What’s that?”

“A chimney.”

He reached over and removed a large brick from under the shelf where the cat had taken cover.

“See? It’s an oven. For making bread.”

Now I saw that it was a small scorched fireplace. The cat was curled up on the shelf where the loaf was placed; the chimney flue was connected to the fire pit, where Giuseppe was replacing the brick. It was an artifact from another age, and brought to mind the hard, simple labor of bread-making that also involved someone toting faggots of wood to use as fuel. I had seen small blackened bread-ovens similar to this in Inca villages in the Andes.

“It’s very old,” I said.

Giuseppe made the Italian gesture of finger-flipping that meant “An incredible number of years — you have no idea.”

“When was the last time it was used for bread?”

“This morning,” Giuseppe said, and then barked an unintelligible word.

A wooden shutter flew open and banged against the wall of the house. A woman, obviously Signora DeLorenzo, stuck her head out of the window and groaned at her husband, who made another demand, unintelligible to me.

The woman was gone for a moment and then appeared and handed down from the window an iron key ten inches long.

I greeted the old woman. She jerked her head and clicked her teeth. Meaning: I acknowledge your presence but I am much too distracted to return your greeting.

“Follow me,” Giuseppe said.

We went down the sloping cobbled street to a narrow road that lay against the steep hillside. A little fence and a steel gate surrounded a weedy garden and a grape arbor. Francesco dragged the gate open.

“A doctor came here,” Giuseppe said, slotting the key into a wooden door in the hillside. “He was like you. Just traveling. He told me a good thing. ‘Worlds can’t meet worlds, but people can meet people.’ ”

“That’s very nice.”

“Very wise,” Francesco said. “See, worlds are big. Worlds can’t meet worlds.”

“But people can meet people,” Giuseppe said, entering the cavernous room.

“So who was this wise doctor?”

“Just a traveler!” Giuseppe beckoned me into the dark room.

It was cool inside, with a musty earthen smell of stale wine and damp dust and decayed wood. As I asked what it was my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw some large wooden casks set on racks.

“It is a cantina,” he said, gesturing in the vinegary coolness. He was using the word in its precise sense, for cellar. “In the Aliano dialect we call this una grota”—a cave.

Apart from the six wine casks, there was also a wine press that had been taken apart, and a great deal of dusty paraphernalia — rubber tubes, glasses, bottles, pitchers, buckets.

“What do you call this?” I said, tapping a cask.

“In Italian it’s a botte, but we call it a carachia,” Giuseppe said, using a word that was not in any Italian dictionary. “Please be seated.”

Francesco drew off a pitcher of wine and with this he filled three glasses. We toasted. Francesco downed his in two gulps. Giuseppe and I took our time.

Sitting at a rough wooden table, in the semi-darkness of the little cave, the bright white day glaring in the doorway, I asked the men their ages. Francesco was seventy-two, DeLorenzo was seventy. They were little boys at the time Carlo Levi had lived as an exile in the village.

“You must have seen Carlo Levi,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Francesco said. “I remember him well. I was a small boy at school.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Yes, yes,” both of them said.

I had a strong feeling this was not true, yet as it was the book that had put Aliano on the map, they had a civic duty to say that they had read it, even if they had not.

“He was a doctor,” I said. “Did he ever take care of you or your parents?”

“Doctor? He was no doctor,” Francesco said, and poured more wine for us.

We toasted again, and I recalled how on his first day in the village, and almost the first page of the book, Levi was asked to cure a man stricken with malaria. Levi asked why the man was in such a bad way (he died soon after) and he was told that there was no doctor in the village. So, in addition to being an exile, he was Aliano’s doctor.

The men smiled at me.

“Carlo Levi was a writer,” Francesco said. “A very intelligent man. He was writing most of the time.”

“We saw him writing!” Giuseppe said.

According to the book, which Levi began (so he said) in 1943, some seven years after leaving Aliano, Levi sketched pictures, and went for walks, and tended the sick. Because of his status, an antifascist political prisoner in a village whose mayor boasted that he had been described as “the youngest and most Fascist mayor in the province of Matera,” Levi was hardly likely to be seen writing in public.

“We would see him walking up and down.” Francesco got up and walked a few steps, swinging his arms. “He would be writing the whole time.”

“What did the village people think of him?”

“We put up a statue of him!” Francesco said. “That’s what we thought of him!”

“Thanks very much,” Giuseppe said, as Francesco filled his glass again. “He’s buried in our cemetery! You can visit his grave!”

Francesco was urging me to finish my wine so that he could fill my glass again. It was red wine, strongly flavored with a dusty aftertaste, and drinking it in the cool shadows of the cantina, with the full glare of the doorway in my eyes, I quickly became dizzy. Nonetheless, I obliged, because I liked talking to these two hospitable men.

They were recognizable from the book. It was the first feeling I had had when I encountered the woman with the buckets toiling up the hill. She had looked at me as though at another species and had turned away. The men were small and compact, the old Italic round face and large eyes and thin lips. Their language was different and they were proud of that. But there was something more, a greater difference, the very thing that Levi wrote about. The sense in which the villagers felt they were regarded as not Christians, not even human; “we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better or worse, like angels or demons, in a world of their own, while we have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry its weight and to stand comparison with it.”

Levi had written a great deal about the language. Their word crai, for tomorrow, was a version of the Latin cras, but it also meant forever and never. Yes, Giuseppe laughed, that is our word and he was delighted that I used it.

“This is a lovely village, not a prison,” I said, my happiness fueled with wine.

“Who said it was a prison?” Francesco said.

“For Carlo Levi it was a prison,” I said. “He was sent here by the police.”

“Because we are so isolated,” Francesco said. “There was no road, nothing at all, just a path. We had no water, no electricity.”

“I remember when the electricity came,” Giuseppe said. “And the water for drinking.”

“Oh, sure,” Francesco said. “Before that it was just candles, and getting water from a well. That meant a long walk down the hill.”

“I didn’t mean to say that Aliano was a prison.”

“Not a prison at all. Just far!”

“And full of Fascists,” I said.

“Yes, it was all Fascists,” Francesco said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. The police liked Levi a lot.”

This was not true, according to the book, but if it allowed the men to take pride in the village and not be ashamed, that was all right with me. In fact, the police had from time to time made life difficult for Levi, who was prohibited from leaving the village. This was enforced. The limit of his world was the boundary of Aliano. “The surrounding lands were forbidden territory, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

Meanwhile we were still at the table, in the little wine cave, drinking and talking. Levi himself had spoken of the hospitality of the people, how they would share whatever they had, how attentive they could be in the presence of strangers.

“Was he tall or short?” I asked. “What was his face like? Very kind, I imagine.”

Giuseppe considered this. He said, “A strange face, of course.”

“Why strange?”

“Well, he wasn’t Italian.”

“Yes. He came from Florence.”

“No. He came from another country — far away.”

People in Aliano looked upon strangers from the north as though they came from another world, Levi had written, “almost as if they were foreign gods.”

“I’m sure it was Florence,” I said.

“He was a Brega,” Francesco said. “He had a foreign face.”

What was this “Brega”? I tried to think of a country that it might apply to, but I drew a blank. I asked each man to repeat the word. Still it sounded incomprehensible to me.

“If he was a Brega,” I said, using the word, “then where did he come from?”

“From far away.”

“Not Italy?”

“No. Maybe Russia,” Giuseppe said.

This seemed pretty odd. His Italianness was the whole point of Christ Stopped at Eboli: an Italian from Florence was exiled to a village in the south of Italy, and living with such a strange breed of Italians, he felt as though he was “a stone that had dropped from the sky.”

“This word Brega, is that his nationality?”

“Yes,” Francesco said, and he could not imagine why I did not understand him.

Then the light dawned. I said, “Are you saying Ebraica?”

“Yes.”

Two syllables, four syllables, what was the difference, the word meant Jew, like our word Hebraic. He was no Italian — he was a Hebrew!

And so sixty years and twenty-three printings of the book in English, and twice that in Italian, and fame, and literary prizes, and a world war and the fall of Fascism — none of these had made much difference. The man who had suffered exile and made Aliano famous in this wonderful book was not an Italian, after all, but just a Jew.

These two men were not anti-Semites. They were villagers. Everyone who visited was measured by the standards of the village, and when it came to nationality the standards had strict limits.

By this time all of us were full of wine. I stood up and staggered and said, “I have to go. I want to see Levi’s house. And then I want to go to Sant’Arcangelo.”

“A lovely place.”

“There are said to be the horns of a dragon in the church.”

“That’s true. A lovely church.”

Francesco stacked the tumblers that we had used for the wine, and outside he used his enormous key to lock the door to the cavern.

“I imagine this historic part of town is old,” I said.

“Very old,” Giuseppe said.

“Probably fourteenth or fifteenth century,” I said.

Francesco laughed so hard I could see his molars and his tooth stumps and his tongue empurpled with his own wine.

“No! Before Christ!” he said. “Some of this was built in the ancient times.”

And walking back up the narrow road to the piazza and the edge of the ravine, they went on encouraging me to share their belief that the village of Aliano — many of these same buildings, in fact — had existed for the past two thousand years.

Because of our drinking — almost two hours of it — the lunch hour had passed. I was dazed from the alcohol and dazzled by the sun. They pointed me in the direction of Levi’s house, and there I went and found it locked. It was high, at the top of a steep street, off the crooked Via Cisterna. It was signposted Casa di Confina, and it had not been renovated, only preserved, with a crumbling wall around it, the shutters broken and ajar, facing south. There were two small hilltop villages in the distance, Sant’Arcangelo and Roccanova, each one “a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert.”

I sat on Levi’s porch in the shade, among the broken chunky walls of stucco and brick, the tiled roofs sprouting weeds, broken paving stones and ceramic shards and dusty cobbles. It was all poor, and lovely, and primitive, with no charm but a definite warmth of a savage kind. Its height was part of its beauty, so close to the blue sky, the clouds, the enormous view across the ravine to the sea.

There I stayed until I regained my balance, and then in the coolness of the afternoon I walked back through the village, noting the little quotations from the book, written on tiles, many of them not complimentary at all: “… cones, slopes of an evil aspect, like a lunar landscape.” (… coni, piagge di aspetto maligno, come un paesaggio lunare.)

Some students were sketching pictures of an old house in the town.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“No. We’re art students,” one of them, a young woman, said. “We’re from Eboli. Where the book is set.”

“Have you read the book?”

“No,” she said.

I said, “The meaning of the title is that Christ stopped at Eboli. The Savior didn’t get as far as Aliano.”

They smiled at me, looking incredulous, and perhaps thinking that I was wrong — that Carlo Levi was a man from Aliano who had written a book about their hometown of Eboli.

The cemetery was beyond the top of the town in a grove of junipers. Some old women were tending a grave there, weeding a flower bed, digging, their fatigue giving them a look of grief. The graves were of marble and granite, sarcophagi the shape of small cottages, with flowers and portraits of the dead in niches in their facades.

Levi’s grave was the smallest, the most modest, in the place, a gray slate stone: Carlo Levi 29.11.1902–4.1.1975.

Some birds were chirping in the junipers and on the gate of the cemetery was another quotation from the book, referring to this spot as “… il luogo meno triste,” a less sad place than the village itself.

How strange, the unusual power of a book to put a village this small on the map. It was also strange that this region was full of villages as obscure and poor as this one. It did not seem to me that Aliano had changed much. Already Levi was partly mythical, but one of the characteristics of Aliano he had described was the way its people did not distinguish between history and legend, myth and reality.

I was both uplifted and depressed by the visit. The village was unchanged, the people as enigmatic as those he had described, good people but isolated, bewildered, amazed at the world. I was uplifted because it was a solitary discovery; depressed because the National Alliance was part of the coalition government. That was the new name for the neofascist party. There were Fascists in power once again in Italy. The ministries of agriculture, posts, environment, cultural affairs, and transport all had neofascist ministers; and at least one of them was still publicly praising Mussolini.

It was growing dark. I hurried back to Metaponto. I got rid of the rental car, because it was dark — too late to go to Sant’Arcangelo to see the dragon’s horns.

From Metaponto to Taranto on the coastal railway line there were miles of pine woods and pine barrens on a flat plain stretching inland from the wide sandy coast, and there were dunes nearer the shore covered with scrub and heather, some of the pines twisted sideways by the strong onshore wind. This counts as wilderness in Italy, which has little or none of it, about twenty miles of empty beach: no road, no people.

A suddenness of scrappy settlements was a warning of Taranto and its smokestacks, its fearful-looking outskirts, depots and docks and freighters. Almost everyone in the train piled out at Taranto — youths, old people, nuns, and a Japanese girl who seemed terribly confused.

The Japanese girl, another solitary wanderer who had yet to master the language, asked me in basic Italian whether I was also getting out here.

“No. I am going to Bari,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

“Poco.”

“What about Italian?”

“Poco.”

“How long have you been in Italy?”

“One week, but I have studied Italian for four years.”

She was going to Alberobello, but where was the Taranto bus station? And did the bus go to Alberobello?

My map showed Alberobello to be a tiny hamlet some distance to the north. What was there?

“A certain building,” the Japanese girl said. “Very old.”

“A church?”

“I do not know.”

“A pretty building?”

“I do not know.”

“Why are you going there?”

My question bewildered her, but after I made myself understood she showed me a guidebook, in Japanese, filled with ugly pictures the size of postage stamps.

“This is the most popular guide in Japan,” she said. “It says to go to Alberobello.”

“Good luck,” I said. “But you should also be careful.”

“The Italian men,” she said, and compressed her face in consternation. “They say ‘Let’s eat,’ or ‘Come to my house.’ I always say no, but they still ask. I think they are dangerous.”

Off she went to an uncertain fate. I boarded the train again and it swung inland, crossing the top of Italy’s heel through gullies and rocky ravines and a shattered-looking landscape. Seeing ruined and cracked houses at Palagiano and Castellaneta, I turned to an old man near me.

“The war?”

“The earthquake.”

Dust and yellow clay and rock gave way to flatness and agriculture, vineyards and vegetable fields, then the poor suburbs of Bari.

I finished reading Frankenstein, sad that it was over. “I am … the fallen angel … Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.” Also, I noted, the monster was a vegetarian: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”

It had been cold and windy at Taranto, and the people were dressed unfashionably in sturdy clothes for the bad weather. But here in Bari the weather was pleasant, and I decided to stay for a while to do laundry and make phone calls and make plans for the journey ahead. I had run out of books to read. Bari seemed to me a useful city in every sense. It had bookstores and restaurants and inexpensive hotels. It had a concert hall and an ancient fort. It was small scale, everything in the city was reachable on foot.

There was an air of unfussy helpfulness and goodwill in Bari that I put down to its being a Mediterranean port which dealt more with people than with cargo. With Ancona and Brindisi it was one of the great ferry ports of the Adriatic. The fact that it was a busy port meant that it had to be efficient. At the moment the ferries to Croatia were suspended, but there were numerous ferries to Greece and there were four a week to Durazzo (Durrës) in Albania.

I ran into a man in Bari who said that if I stayed another week he would take me cross-country skiing.

“You mean there’s enough snow in southern Italy for cross-country skiing in March?”

“Plenty,” he said. His name was Ricardo Caruso, he was a fresh-air fiend after my own heart. He hiked, he rock-climbed, he skied.

I told him I had been to Aliano.

“That’s a good place,” he said. “Padula’s also good. There’s an old ruined abbey near Padula. Hidden — and so beautiful.”

Having established some rapport, I asked Ricardo about the Albanians who had escaped from their country and come to Bari in their thousands in big rusty ships, so laden with refugees that the ships were on the verge of foundering. At first the Italian government had admitted many of them on political grounds. This charity provoked an outcry: What will we do with these indigent Albanians?

It was only an overnighter from Albania to Bari. What if thousands more came?

Thirty thousand more did arrive, very soon after. Some worked as waiters or manual laborers. Many joined the beggars on Bari’s streets — panhandlers often advertised themselves on placards as “Albanian Refugee” or “Ex-Yugoslavia,” meaning Croatian.

“It was terrible,” Ricardo said, with such feeling that I dropped the subject.

I asked a woman at my hotel. What exactly was the story on the Albanians?

She made a grieving sound, and she was so ashamed, she said, she could not talk about it.

“A tragedy,” she said, and turned away. “Please.”

I finally found a man in Bari willing to talk, and more than that, he drove me to the Bari Stadium, where the Albanians had been held until they could be repatriated.

“Thirty thousand of them,” Giacinto said. “Most of them young men, all of them screaming. But we have problems, we couldn’t let them in.”

There was Albanian graffiti still scrawled over the stadium door; the largest motto read in Italian: We Are with God, God Is with Us.

“The worst was when some of them got loose,” Giacinto said. “So they’d be running all over the place — in the city, all over the streets. Listen, this is a nice city. Then you’d look up and see some skinny strange Albanian guy, his eyes like a madman’s. He’d run into a restaurant, to hide, or into a hairdresser’s. And the police would have to drag him out bodily, while he’s struggling and screaming in Albanian.”

Giacinto smiled at the weirdness of it.

“Misery turned them into fiends,” I said, quoting Frankenstein.

“True. And this is a little country. Business is awful. What are we supposed to do?”

Three days of good meals in Bari set me up, too. Gnocchi was a local specialty, so was risotto made with champagne; eggplant, olives, cauliflower, and fruit and fish. My laundry was done. I had books to read, among them one by Italo Svevo, who had lived in Trieste, where I was headed. I bought some more maps. Everyone in Bari had been pleasant to me.

I went on my way, up the Adriatic coast in a mood of optimism. For consolation and mothering, I thought, no country could match Italy.