The Pillars of Hercules

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.”