Seasons in Basilicata (32 page)

So, to clarify things for this next odd tale, let me provide an extended Levi quotation that might suggest the framework for yet another bizarre adventure into Basilicata's dark side:

My experience of this “natural magic” all began on a long drive back to Aliano from Matera, after one of my rare indulgences in the enticements of that intriguing cave city, and more specifically in the vast gourmet delights of its Carrefour hypermarket. I took a different series of backroads this time, a looping route past the prominent hill towns of Pisticci and San Mauro Forte. And another town, too: a dark and remote place, silhouetted dramatically against a purpling evening sky, high on a hill striated with precipices rising hundreds of feet from the lower foothills. And, unlike the other places I'd
passed in the gathering twilight, there were no lights to be seen there. Not a solitary flicker from the tightly packed houses that clung to the vertiginous hilltop like clusters of mussels on a pier post. No streetlamps, no glows from windows. Nothing.

Most odd, I thought. But I was getting used to things unexplainable in this region, and I almost forgot about the place until I was talking with a friend of Massimo's in Accettura a week or so later and happened to mention the unusual route I'd found through the back country on my return journey from Matera. I remembered that strange little dark and lightless village and asked Massimo's friend what it might be.

“Near Pisticci, maybe, ten miles or so to the west? On the Stigliano road?”

“Yes, that's about right.”

“That's Craco.”

“Oh, okay. I just wondered. It seemed a little odd. There were no lights there or anything. No sign of life at all.”

“Of course there were no lights or life. It's abandoned!
Fantasme.
It's a ghost village.”

“Really? Abandoned? The whole place? Everybody just left?”

“Oh, yes. And very quickly, too. They built a new village in the valley.”

“Why so quickly?”

“Well…” My informant hesitated just a moment too long, enough to make me more curious. “Well, they say it was because of landslides. The village is built on a very steep rock, and things kept falling off.”

“Looked pretty intact to me. Although I couldn't see too clearly. The sun was down and it was getting dark.”

He looked at me with a rather concerned frown. “You didn't go into the place?”

“Oh no. It was too dark, and I wanted to get home.”

“Ah,” he said, obviously relieved about something. “Good.”

“But I plan on going back and looking around. I don't think I've ever seen a totally abandoned hill town before.”

“Why do you want to go back? Why?” His voice rose a pitch or two. He sounded concerned, almost protective.

“Why? Because I'm curious.”

I didn't know Massimo's friend very well. In fact, I hadn't even remembered his name. But the way he reached out and touched my arm suggested a nuance of bosom-buddyness. “Listen. Maybe that's not such a good thing for you to do, you know?”

“Why? What's wrong with the place?”

Another hesitant pause. This was getting interesting.

“Well, maybe it can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous? How?”

“Well, buildings falling down, things collapsing. No one has lived there since over forty years so there are no repairs, or anything. It's a dangerous place. Why not go and visit Pisticci instead. It's nearby and a very interesting place. It's got…”

Our conversation meandered off into other areas, and then we both went down to the Hotel SanGiuliano to see Massimo for one of his superb, wood-fired–oven pizzas.

But I didn't forget that bizarre conversation. I felt as if Massimo's friend had wanted to tell me more. However, as happened so often in those parts, if there was any suggestion of strangeness in the subject under discussion, normal eloquent rhetorical flourishes ceased and people became noticeably uncomfortable and embarrassed, and nudged the dialogue in different directions.

My little Basilicata guidebook, one of the D'Agostini Touring Atlases given out at tourist information offices—if you're lucky enough to find one open or a rare copy in English—was also unusually devoid of background or factoids on Craco. It read:

C
RACO

Usually the D'Agostino guidebooks are generous to the point of loquacious overkill in their descriptive details and litanies of architectural and religious heritages. But this was all they offered on Craco. And in other guidebooks of a more general nature, there was no mention of the town at all, despite the fact that it had been
used as a backdrop for many of the scenes in Rosi's film of Levi's book.

A perfect place for an afternoon jaunt with camera and sketchpad, I thought. Maybe I could get up to the old baroque church where the brigands were shot or even to the castle tower that had stood out so dramatically when I first saw the place that dark evening.

So, off I went, hoping I might bring back some interesting tidbits of information and calm the obvious concerns of Massimo's friend. “Dangerous,” he'd said! Well, we'd just see about that…

 

I
T WAS A WARM
and beautiful blue-sky day, and along my meandering back-road drive I saw other all-white hill towns perched or sprawled across mountain peaks and ridges.

And then I spotted Craco, looming up to the south like some Tolkienesque fantasy. An ideal setting, I mused, for one the
Lord of the Rings
sequels. But as I drew closer, the place began to lose some of its fairy-tale charm, taking on a distinctly haunted appearance. A skeletal aspect. The broken walls of collapsed buildings reared up like bare, brittle bones and windows peered out at me like empty eye sockets in a catacomb of ancient, earth-stained skulls. There were no gleaming glass panes or brightly painted shutters to soften their vacant stares. And there were no doors either, so doorways gaped like empty, fleshless mouths, some twisted and leaning in agonized maws beneath massive stone lintels, where the deserted houses had buckled through neglect or the collapse of supporting structures.

Well, I guess I can see why people might be a bit leery of the place, I thought. Particularly at night, under a bright moon, when I could imagine it took on quite a ghostly character. But, I reminded myself, it's brilliant sunshine today and it looks like there are still alleys and steps intact so I should be able to get to the church at the top of the precipice and maybe even as far as the castle tower.

I parked in a vast field of rubble beneath the village. Remains of a once finely cobbled road led up to a broad broken flight of steps that climbed to a broad terrace—perhaps the remains of the main
corso
and
passeggiata
piazza.

The silence was intense. I started to climb. Even though I could feel slight breezes around me, there were no trees to reflect their presence in motion and sound. In fact, there was little vegetation of any kind, merely pockets of summer-brittle grasses and stunted scrub, much of it bleached white by the scorching late-summer sun.

I continued climbing up rubbly remnants of steps to the terrace and found it to be the forecourt of what once must have been an unusually elegant palazzo with huge windows of Palladian proportions, elegant wrought-iron balconies, and massively arched doorways…with no doors. An obvious invitation to enter, which of course I immediately accepted.

The lower floors seemed to contain mostly rooms of a mundane nature—storage
cantine,
a large kitchen with an enormous fireplace and even a few battered pans lying on its broken floor, and other eerie, dungeonlike spaces, small, cramped, and musty.

I followed what seemed to be the once-elegant main stairway to an upper level of a very different nature. This was obviously the living quarters of the palazzo's
padronale
and his family, and while in a state of miserable disrepair—its ornately tiled floors strewn with rubble, walls cracked, and balconies half-collapsed—I could tell that it had once housed a family of very substantial means. There were massive baronial fireplaces, some still framed in carved stone, remnants of elegant wood-paneling, and, most striking of all, exquisite hand-painted plasterwork on the ceilings and upper portions of the tall, once-refined rooms. The paintings suggested a life of luxury and amplitude, depicting garlands of exotic flowers, plump, smiling cherubs floating in pale blue skies, and bacchanalian profusions of fat fruit, huge fish, haunches of meat and game galore—pheasant, deer, hare, and boar.

I was particularly intrigued by the artist's rendering, high above a broken but once exquisite mantelpiece, of a boar's head. While the other depictions of animals, fowl, and fish were masterfully done, there was something unusually realistic about this particular boar. It seemed to project forward beyond the other images, and as I moved about the room its head seemed to grow larger and more three
dimensional. When I focused on it and stared harder, it receded, but when I shifted my position and turned quickly to look at it again, it appeared to protrude like a taxidermist's re-creation of an actual head, complete with fierce incisor teeth and a bristled hide so well detailed that it looked almost tactile.

Remarkable work, I thought. And then I peered even closer. Something about the boar's face seemed different now. Less animalistic and, well, more familiar. Those bright, intelligent, but cruel eyes and that half-smiling sneer of a mouth were, in the half-light of the room, almost humanoid.

Stupid idea, I told myself. A trick of light or a clever bit of artistic license. But I'll take a photo, I thought, and see how it appears on film. Only the camera wouldn't function. My big, fat, complicated Canon, with its almost embarrassingly long zoom lens, refused to work, despite every indication that the battery was fully charged and everything else in order. When I pressed the shutter button, nothing happened. No reassuring click or whirr of the winding mechanism. I gave it a little knock with my fist (a common and effective solution, I'd found, to many mechanical and electrical problems), but still nothing.

With a final frustrated glance at the boar's head, now looking more human faced than ever in the darkening room, I turned to leave but…

Why the darkening? I wondered. It had been quite bright when I entered the palazzo only ten minutes or so before. I walked to the window and peered out. There was my answer: The sky had indeed darkened, quite ominously, and what had been a perfect blue sky was now increasingly blotted out by huge banks of cumulus clouds, rolling in like invading galleons from the Pollino range. They must have been on their way here when I arrived, I told myself. I just failed to notice them on the western horizon.

It was now too gloomy to see much more in the palazzo, so I retraced my steps to the broad, marble-paved terrace and decided I'd better start climbing up through the alleys if I was to get to the church and the site of the brigands' execution before the weather changed.

I began clambering up steeply stepped passageways littered with broken bricks, stones, and pantiles from the half-collapsed houses that closed in tighter and tighter. Compared with the spacious luxury of the palazzo, these were miserable little hovels, single-roomed, cavelike dwellings crammed together with almost no windows, tiny one-log–capacity fireplaces, and no bathroom facilities of any kind. It was not a pretty picture of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century community life, despite the romantic silhouette of the hill village from the distance.