The landscape even more at night is wild

Automotive leads full headlights on a height of Murge, greyish stones, with an ochre HLM bar rolling mountains. Incongruous spectacle on the desert plateau. The building resembles a sinking vessel. Laces, the road bypasses the building and turn smoothly downhill without end. At the bottom of the ravine, hell is paved from good intentions. A city emerges, in his humanity. The visitor expects to see that a torrent has the terrible air of the hero of Conan Doyle discovering the "lost world". No dinosaur, of course, but at this time, a ghost city was public lighting in an architectural unnamed junk, mixing fascist "Novecento", baroque churches official buildings three hundred years old and a tracery of hidden caves worth-that-worth in homes. Welcome to Matera, 60,000 inhabitants, cave city and its "sassi" (the "pebbles"), name given to the neighbourhoods of caves.

The landscape even more at night, is wild. Illuminated crucifix there seem to repel the telluric forces. The devil, if it exists, must have his residence of summer in the darkness. It prowl, one feels, but it does not dresses in Prada, "country" yet. The mysticism of the places in hit more than one, iconoclastic Byzantine hermits fragile Hollywood actors. Mel Gibson here turned his "Passion". Before him, Pasolini, Arrabal, the Taviani brothers had put their cameras. Welcome to the capital of Basilicata, in the heart of the "deep South" of the Italy in the "Mezzogiorno" who was the bad conscience of the country.

Carlo Levi, Savior of the caves

Which could put between Campania Basilicata to the Northwest, Calabria to the South and Northern Apulia This Basilicata, that it would tend to forget is so embedded. Is wrong: it is one of the last wild areas of the country, it is of another age, wild and proud as a heroine of Mythology. On the "boot", it corresponds to the ankle. It takes its name from the byzantine presence: "basilikos" was the Governor sent by Constantinople. Yet, human kind is active here since the Paleolithic. Matera saw pass in the world. Lucani, the original inhabitants, aborigines therefore; hyperactive Greek settlers; Christian monks of the East forced by adverse councils and Muslims little you bring. Norman and Angevins fleeing the Northern mists. Life was long pleasant in these regions. Even in these caves built by the hand of men in this supportive clay. And then everything bascula with baroque. The caves became grotesque in the eyes of contemporaries, and their despicable inhabitants. "Honest men", the "galantuomini", came out of the ravine, opened to the world, built on the heights, and the plebeians, this small people of termites, unless it was Mole, was ordered to dig in the caves, in the darkness and suffocation. Over the centuries, this arid land interested more person. The Bourbons, at their dynastic quarrels, forgot it and the light of Italian unity, contrefichèrent. Wrens, these men of the caves in which the lights were not provided, were abandoned to their despair.

It will be necessary as an Italian of the cities, a man from the North, the Turinese Carlo Levi (1902-1975), doctor, painter, writer, reveals to the world the plight of these men in "The Christ stopped at Eboli" that their damnation take end. Carlo Levi, is Dr. Schweitzer of the people of the "sassi". He discovered this region by chance. Forced, since he has landed hands, accompanied by "strong two representatives of the State". Socialist, co-founder of the Justice and freedom movement, he was "confined" for anti-fascists ideas to Aliano (Gagliano in the story), about 50 kilometres from Matera. "Confined" is the literal translation of the Italian "confinato." Would be better to speak of house arrest, for assignment to residence. For the Piedmontese bourgeois, burst into the world of the "cafoni", derogatory term for these poor farmers, was a shock. "We are not Christians, he repeated;" "Christ stopped at Eboli", the first city when you arrive in Naples. Chrétien, here, means human. "We are not considered as men, but as animals, beasts of burden, yet less than animals, less than the gnomes who live free life, diabolical or angelic."

Rock churches

The book, published in the release, had a great echo. After all these years of dictatorship and war, the thirst for justice was great. The Italian political class was moved to tears. Shame, as parents realizing the abandonment of their children. The President of the Council Alcide De Gasperi did vote legislation, in 1952, to relocate these twenty thousand men and women. Was therefore built these HLMS bars. "My mother lives there, says Paula, a young woman." For nothing in the world, it would undermine the feet in this hell.

Today, it is difficult to represent this population literally at the bottom of the hole, "children in the small faces wrinkled old skeletal and hungry, head full of scabs and lice", "half eyes and red and swollen eyelid", as Carlo Levi described them. The site is rehabilitated since 20 years. It is now listed in the heritage of humanity. Everything is clean, sometimes chic. A little mess, of course, but any more than if the Luberon, so chic and ways, had suffered a light (2 on the Richter scale) earthquake. The visit, the promenade of the two neighbourhoods of this cave universe, Sasso Caveoso South and Sasso Barissano to the North, is necessary. The caves are artificial almost all. They were excavated in the clay wall to build a piece of home, a cellar, an oratory, a church. For the poorest, the cave was the only piece of housing. The

less poor the extended outside with walls, a façade, Windows. Is between side street and is dug in the rock. A Museum, the Casa Grotto di Vico Solitario, gives an idea of the Interior. The furniture is intact: the bed of the parents, the cradle of a child within two metres of the straw to the animals, dogs, goats, horses even. But everything is creased, too clean to be true. How to represent the stench of the beasts, the cries of the unfortunate is emptying to die in the gully, the Gravina said here, where the real masters were malaria and dysentery. The museums still idealize the past, it is their sin of youth. At the exit of the Museum, vendors on the street vending offer whistles and terracotta in the form of bird: "cuccus" ("cuckoo").

Matera is sparse of Rupestrian churches there are more than 150 in the city and its surroundings. They have been excavated in rock, also first by of hermits, then by monastic communities which have developed without barguigner of places of worship and the parts live, cisterns, stables. Faith gives wings and zeal. In the "sassi", cannot escape some of them: San Pietro Barisano, visible to its bell tower leaped. Madonna delle Virtu and San Nicola dei Greci, former monastic complex consisting of a dozen caves the Madonna dell'Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone, churches connected. The city deserves its name. Mother city, the Romans, foster city offering shelter in caves. Or city intaglio, fulfillment in rock dévidée for the Greeks. It is easily lost in this chahutée topography. A Board: choose for rallying point place Vittorio-Veneto. From there, all paths are on via Fiorentini, entry of "sassi".

Fascist teachers

Carlo Levi lived in Aliano. It is easily accessed by a small mountain road through the villages of Ferrandina, Oisticci, Sant'Archangelo. 50 Km in total. Physician-writer arrived at Gagliano one afternoon in August, "in a small jolted auto". He was not there as a tourist its hands tied. Aliano, Gagliano in "Christ...". ","is not located at the top of the mountain, as all the others, but in a kind of irregular fork, in picturesque and deep ravines. Access is by a steep road alternating one-way. Two traffic lights, one at the bottom, the other at the top, regulate traffic. They believe in "Russian mountains", and rides. The town did not take a ride in sixty years. "The place has houses on one side;" on the other, there is a small wall above a ravine, the pit of the Bersagliere, which takes its name from a Piedmontese bersagliere precipitated, at the time of banditry, by bandits who had trapped a day it was lost in the mountains.

There, Carlo Levi is supervised by Professor Luigi Magalone is that teacher, but the title is more resounding , "the youngest and the most fascist of the podestats of the province". The France had its "black Hussars", intransigent Republicans. In Italy, they were fascist ("the Italy, was at that time in the hands of teachers"). They attempted to put order in the province who had memories of the enchanters of wolves; the bandits and brigandesses of which the most famous was the cruel Maria'a Pastora; men who claimed to have the mother one of the "monachicchi" the souls of the children died without baptism of small beings happy out the soles of the feet, reversing red glasses, scrap the extended cloth. But that hide a great wisdom, since they know all the secrets of the Earth. "The gods of the State and the city may have their worship in these clays the Wolf and the ancient and black wild boar", wrote Carlo Levi after his forced from 1935 to 1936 (then he won Paris and returned to Italy in 1943, where he was one of the leaders of the florentine resistance). The House where he resided was built by an another "confinato." You can visit. It is modest, it was "bland mediocrity of a priest House", but it had the advantage of being at the end of the village, free from continual observation of the thugs responsible for its monitoring. Today, it would be leased in time: three parts in enfilade, strangely arranged: a kitchen giving on a room, where he installed his bed, another, larger with five small Windows. This is that Carlo Levi painted, much painted. You can see paintings in Matera, a museum which is dedicated to him. His paintings have an air of Francis Bacon. But finally, made it to write. "Christ stopped at Eboli" is a great book, "The watch" and "The fear of freedom", an essay, deserve the detour. Back to the large room. It gives on a small garden four steps below, with a fig tree. The bedroom leads to a small balcony from which share a small outdoor staircase on a terrace covering the entire House. From there, it dominates the Basilicata. It is hot, very hot, very beautiful. And you want to swim. Real estate tourism has its limits. Branch South from Maratea, an extended 10 km City, the mountain to the sea. The centre is on the heights, the hamlets in the commune on the coast. They are called Fiumicello, Porto di Maratea, Marina di Maratea Marina. These are beautiful coves. We took a bath in Acquafredda. The water was hot and black sand.