A giant stone prison: a trip to the most unknown parts of Italy

BarcelonaSometimes hell and heaven coexist in the same space. Looking at the door of Palazzo Margherita, one of the most luxurious and beautiful hotels in southern Italy, it's hard to imagine what life was like in the village of Bernalda a century ago, when the Basilicata region was one of the poorest in Europe. Now, famous guests of the hotel's owner, film director Francis Ford Coppola, parade through. His grandfather, Agostino, was born here. A man who fled poverty, but who always told nostalgic anecdotes of his homeland. So, in 1962, the director visited the villa for the first time. He found it a poor, but beautiful place. And in 2005, he bought the most beautiful palace in Bernalda, commissioned by the Margherita family in 1892, to convert it into a luxury hotel that always has a bar open for the villagers. The bar is called Cinecitta In honor of the most famous Italian film studios, while sipping a coffee, Italian film classics that the American director has collected are screened.

Thanks to Francis Ford Coppola, Bernalda welcomes many tourists, when a few decades ago it was a region left to its fate. "This was a region ravaged by poverty," says actor Michele Russo, who has researched Ford Coppola's Italian roots. Russo believes that if Ford Coppola is an artist, it's thanks to his Italian family. He got his artistic side from his grandfather, Agostino, who had been a musician and a great storyteller. Like those from the time when Basilicata was full of bandits, known as the Age of the brigandage. Groups of thieves nostalgic for the era when southern Italy was a Bourbon kingdom, people opposed to the unification of Italy in 1861 and enjoyed the support of part of the population. In 1862, Captain of the Guard Luigi Franchi believed that some peasants were aiding bandits and, seeking revenge, locked twelve peasants, including women and children, in a hayloft on the outskirts of Bernalda and set it on fire. They all died. Agostino Coppola was fleeing this cruelty when he left for New York in 1904 with a wooden suitcase.

In 1895, some 15,000 people died each year from malaria in Basilicata, a disease that still existed in the area in the 1930s. It was a region with few doctors, which caused a host of problems, such as that of the dressmaker Filomena Coppola, the director's great-grandmother, who died from an infection that is now curable. without nose In Bernalda, where she married her first cousin, Carmine, who died of influenza at the age of 25. For the first time, Bernalda met elderly people who remembered having met the woman without a nose. And they told her about Donato Carella, the blind musician who played the organ in the church and who had taught her grandfather to play the mandolin. Zumbabalcone. That is, a person who jumps off balconies – because he did it to visit lovers.

Basilicata is steeped in legends. A land ignored until it was put on the map by writer and painter Carlo Levi, the Torinese, an activist against Mussolini, was condemned in 1935 to internal exile, a fascist policy that sent them to the most remote villages of Italy. Basilicata. So poor was this land that the government sent its enemies there. Christ has stopped in Eboli, in which he wrote: "The train leaves the coast of Salerno and enters the desolate lands of Lucania. Christ never arrived here, nor did time." Levi discovered a forgotten Italy, harsh and magical, where time seemed to stand still. That's why it was said that Jesus had stopped in the city of Eboli, the last before entering Lucania, and that he hadn't continued inland, toward Basilicata, a region where pre-Christian rituals were still alive—for example, people placing gold coins in front of the sick.

Levi spoke of Lucania to refer to his exile in the town of Aliano. Because this region in southern Italy, between the boot and the heel, has two names. Historically, it was known as Lucania, a name already used by the Greeks when they roamed the area. But in the Matera area, they felt the term didn't represent them. So with Italian unification, the term Basilicata was coined in honor of Basil II, a Byzantine emperor who had controlled the area. In cities like Potenza and Aliano, the term Lucania is still preferred, which fascism revived until 1947, when the name Basilicata was used again, as favored in Matera.

When Levi lived here, this was a land so raw and anchored in the past that the dead rose in his wake. Literally, almost. Here, the villages are all high on the hills so they could better defend themselves from the armies, bandits, and pirates who had brought bloodshed to the area for centuries. But because the land is dry and rains little, sometimes villages like Aliano suffer landslides that cause old cemeteries to emerge from the depths of the earth. Levi saw children and dogs playing with the shinbones and skulls that were coming back to light after having been underground for centuries, symbols of a past that never completely disappears, like superstitions. Everything was brutal and cruel, but at the same time, it was beautiful, like the songs in the dialect Levi didn't understand.

In a country like Italy, with some of the most famous churches in the world, in Basilicata, the temples are also underground. Until well into the 10th century, people here dug underground and used caves for mass or to build monasteries. The walls were painted with murals that have survived and were rediscovered centuries later, such as the beautiful crypt of original sin carved into the rock of a gorge near Matera, with 8th-century paintings from the Lombard period. Visitors, following a staircase in the ravine, enter the cave, and when the guide turns on the lights, they are fascinated by the cycle of frescoes dating from the 8th to the 9th centuries, the work of the artist known as the Flower Painter. It is not possible to visit alone, in order to protect this fragile treasure.

Just thirty minutes from the crypt lies Matera, the most visited city in Basilicata. Its historic center is made up of the Sassi, houses carved into the limestone over centuries. More than 15,000 people who lived there lived in very harsh conditions. Nowadays, tourists sleep in the caves, but back then, they lived in poverty without light or water and with humidity that caused disease. The houses have been preserved as they were then to explain the past of a city that has become a major tourist attraction and the setting for many films, as directors find this stone city ideal for filming historical films, especially religious ones. In the 1960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed his own here. Gospel according to Saint Matthew, since he imagined that the old Palestine of the Gospels must have been something similar to Matera. Years later, Mel Gibson did the same with The Passion of Christ. When film director Francesco Rossi decided to bring Carlo Levi's book to the screen, he was also seduced by that region. He returned to make two more films.

Traveling through Basilicata following Levi's trail is thrilling, even though many locals no longer appreciate it. "We would ride on the back of a mule and distill menstrual blood into the coffee of an unfortunate victim to make him fall in love." But the reality is that Levi is still the great ambassador of the region, although he explained a reality that has changed. Matera houses the main exhibition of his paintings, many of which were painted during the exile. The most notable work is the monumental Lucania 61, a giant painting Levi made for the centenary of the unification of Italy to pay tribute to a land he returned to many times, sometimes with the photographer Mario Carbone. His photographs can also be seen in Palazzo Lanfranchi. "Lucania seems to me, more than any other, a true place, one of the truest places in the world. Here things are true. The bread that's missing is real bread, the house that's missing is a real home, the pain that no one understands is real pain. History and mythology, current events and eternity," he would write of his exile when he returned. The entire town of Aliano took to the streets to say goodbye the day he left, with grandparents crying. They assumed that, like most emigrants, Levi said he would return and didn't. Almost no one ever did. But the painter did. And many times. So many, that he decided to stay there forever and even had himself buried in the Aliano cemetery, in a beautiful tomb overlooking the valley, where people leave pebbles on the tombstone to remember him, following Jewish tradition, since Levi was from a Jewish family, although he was not religious.

Film and cinematic wedding scene

Aliano still welcomes thousands of tourists each year to see the town where Levi lived. It's nothing short of poetic: from being considered a prison because it's so far away from everything to having a place on the map thanks to one of the prisoners who was there. The area is beautiful. Dry, but magical. With towns like Draco, a ghost town abandoned after an earthquake. It's full of olive groves and vineyards, as the wine industry has grown significantly in recent years. Ford Coppola, who produces wine in California, has also purchased vineyards here. "I would like to help this region, which I prefer to call Lucania, with a new kind of tourism, one that combines the beauty of the places with their history, culture, and gastronomic delights," the director said years ago, recalling that when he was a child, he had never seen "a table that didn't have a bottle of wine on it. During Prohibition in the United States, I knew that if one day I could, I would buy vineyards." No sooner said than done. Lucania wine was served at the Palazzio Margherita when the hotel served as the setting for the wedding of Francis' daughter, Sofia, the director of Lost in translationShe married French musician Thomas Mars, singer of the band Phoenix, in her great-grandfather's villa. In Lucania, everything makes sense. So does the fact that the great-granddaughter of a local musician should marry a singer. That day, the residents of Bernalda were invited to toast with Hollywood stars outside a hotel where each room bears the name of a member of the Coppola family: Sofia and Francis included. The room named after the director has Arabic touches, in homage to his grandmother, Maria Zasa, born to an Italian family in Tunisia. Africa isn't that far away, in fact. Bernalda is located ten minutes from the sea, where you'll find the ruins of ancient Metaponte, where the remains of Doric-style temples from the 6th and 5th centuries BC are preserved. This port was where Hannibal sailed with his elephants and where Pythagoras died.

The stories of the past and the present intertwine in Basilicata. Or Lucania, as you prefer. A region that people used to flee and is now visited by people with a sense of humor who want to discover local wines and eat in a farmhouse: The typical agricultural complexes of the area, a kind of imposing fortified farmhouses converted in many cases into restaurants or hotels. Or the restaurants that use local products that were once eaten by poor peasants, and which now have a Michelin star, such as the Vitantonio Lombardo in Matera. A restaurant inside a house of the sassi, within the stone, of course. As journalist and traveler Guido Piovene said, "This is an ungrateful land. Many villages didn't receive water or electricity until 1945. However, the region possesses in abundance the virtues we'd call ancient, being a hardworking, stubborn, calm people with a deep sense of family." Families who, like the Coppolas, didn't forget Bernalda, even crossing oceans, winning Oscars, or spending decades away.