The Pillars of Hercules

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.