The Pillars of Hercules

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.”