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, right around here, Coppola. His grandfather, Agostino, was born here. A man who fled poverty, but who always told nostalgic anecdotes about his homeland. The project was completed in 1892, converting it into a luxury hotel that always has a bar open for the villagers. 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 truly 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 as they passed, almost conjuring up ancient cemeteries from the depths of the earth. Levi saw children and dogs playing with the bones and skulls that were coming back to light after having lain underground for centuries, symbols of a past that never quite goes away, like superstitions. Everything was brutal back then, like the songs.

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 is Matera, the most visited city in Basilicata. Its historic center is made up of the Sassi, houses carved into the limestone over centuries. A giant labyrinth of houses and neighborhoods that climb hills and descend underground. When the streets are lit up at night, the spectacle is thrilling. When Levi visited this city, the more than 15,000 people who lived there lived in very harsh conditions. Nowadays, tourists sleep in the caves, but back then, people lived in poverty without electricity or water and with a humidity that caused disease. Infant mortality in Matera was four times higher than the Italian average as late as 1955, when residents were relocated to modern neighborhoods as part of a redevelopment process in the Sassi, which were falling into disrepair. Some 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. So he returned to shoot two more films.

Traveling through Basilicata following Levi's trail is exciting, although many locals no longer appreciate it. Claudia Durastanti, a writer born in New York but raised in Basilicata, writes that "even when I went on vacation abroad, they called me 'Ah, Basilicata! Fall in love with you.'" But the reality is that Levi is still the great ambassador of the region, although he explained a reality that has changed. Matera hosts the main exhibition of his paintings, many of which were painted during his exile. They are on display in Palazzo Lanfranchi, a Baroque building where the most notable work is the monumental Lucania 61, a giant painting Levi made for the centenary of Italy's unification to pay tribute to a land he returned to many times, sometimes with photographer Mario Carbone. His photographs can also be seen in Palazzo Lanfranchi. It's a real home; the pain that no one understands is real pain. History and mythology, current events and eternity," Levi would write, promising he would return when his exile ended. The entire town of Aliano took to the streets to say goodbye the day he left, with grandparents in tears. He wouldn't. Almost no one ever did. But the painter did. 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 boomed 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 as 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 group 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 blend together in Basilicata, or Lucania, as you prefer. 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.