A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  Eventually, I guess, we are all doomed to watch our stereotypes and preconceptions crumble. The movement away from traditional peasant dress, Gissing believed, was the result of “this destroying age” of nineteenth-century modernization. Strong words, but, in view of his Victorian, pre-automobile sensibility, he believed they were appropriate.

  Those words are appropriately strong today, if not more so. If only Gissing had lived to see the impact of the automobile on Italian cities! From my standpoint in the 1990s, “this destroying age” is best represented by the vehicles that pack narrow Italian streets from north to south. Another British novelist writing one hundred years after Gissing, Ian McEwan, uses in his book Amsterdam the most appropriate phrase: “tyranny of traffic.”

  Professor Baldassare Conticello, one of Italy’s preeminent archaeologists and an expert in early Greek colonization in southern Italy, checks a reference from one of the hundreds of books in his Rome apartment library. Photo by John Keahey

  I certainly can accept that it is not the job of modern Italians to walk around in “peasant dress” to satisfy the Gissings of the tourist world. Change, after all, is inevitable and proper. But I do regret the loss of serenity that I imagine used to hang over once quiet town squares that today have become giant parking lots. I grieve at my inability to walk down a narrow street lined with magnificent medieval buildings crafted out of stones pillaged from ancient Greek and Roman monuments without being narrowly missed by small, darting cars or by careening teenagers on high-pitched, whining motor scooters.

  Of course, while lost in such idyllic thoughts I choose to ignore why southern Italians, late last century and early this century, fled what today’s tourists view as quaint villages and countryside, vowing never to return or to look back at the crushing, bone-jarring poverty, malaria, and near starvation that were so prevalent here then and that still have not entirely disappeared.

  “You cannot eat ‘quaint,’” said an Italian man with whom I shared a train compartment a few days later as he shook out the newspaper he held, buried his nose deep within its pages, and silence enveloped our small, southbound compartment.

  Within this quiet space—the only sounds being a rustle of the gentleman’s newspaper and the clack of wheels—I shifted from reflecting about Italian poverty to the question of why Greece moved west so long ago.

  * * *

  I recalled a conversation in Rome, in a small, cramped, book-lined study located in an exquisite apartment owned by one of Italy’s leading archaeologists, Professor Baldassare Conticello. We have an appointment for an early afternoon lunch. I am delayed at the airport, picking up a friend who is being treated at a first-aid station for what could be food poisoning acquired during his long flight from Texas. I call the professor, and we reschedule for dinner. My friend is deposited in his room, sleeping off the mysterious affliction, which was never resolved. I arrive at the professor’s home at five o’clock and leave around midnight, my stomach full of fine Italian food prepared by Signora Lucia Conticello, my head full of ancient history.

  Conticello has an impressive résumé. He has been superintendent of archaeology for many regional areas, including ten years at Pompeii. Nearing retirement, the sixty-seven-year-old scholar is central inspector for archaeology in the Italian Ministry for Cultural Goods and Environment.

  As I write this, I visualize the mustachioed professor at his desk. Behind him are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves taking up most of the tiny room. Sometimes, to underscore a point, he reaches across the desk to where I am writing in my notebook, the index finger of his right hand tapping the back of my hand.

  Frequently, he jumps from his chair, scans his bookshelves, and pulls down and opens a volume to illustrate a detail. He is passionate, but calmly so. When my passion over the subject matter rises, I gesture expansively, raise my voice, and struggle with the words, whether Italian or English. Years of digging into the ancient past have made Conticello reflective. He leaves the outward display of emotion to students—and interviewers.

  His appearance is conservative. He is wearing a comfortable forest green sweater covering a pale blue shirt cinched together at the neck by a darker blue tie, specked with reds and yellows, that peeks above the sweater’s collar. He says he purchased most of his shirts at Brooks Brothers in New York City, a place he loves to visit.

  He fits my image of a scholar, pausing occasionally to rub his eyes with long, tapered fingers that look like a piano player’s rather than those of someone who has pulled artifacts from historic rubble or unearthed massive Roman and Greek columns and statues. All that is missing to complete the professorial image is a pipe or wire-rimmed spectacles. He does not smoke or drink alcohol. “Sono astemio,” he says with a sigh.

  He used to smoke cigars—“the ones called toscani, a typical Italian cigar made of Kentucky and Burley tobaccos”—until late 1998.

  “I was famous among my friends for always having a cigar in my mouth. All my official and private photos are with a cigar. Finally, my family and my friends convinced me to renounce. I did it many times in my life; once for three years. I hope that this is the right one.”

  But why no wine? I asked.

  That, too, is unfortunate, he told me, sighing.

  “I used to drink wine and I make my own wine: vigna d’Aglianico from Rionero in Vulture, Potenza. Recently we discovered I have a C hepatitis still going on and I was forced to surrender.” He offers me wine, from his private label, at dinner, but alas I, too, for reasons of health, must say, “Anch’io”—Me too—“Sono astemio.”

  “Ah. Ho capito. Bravo,” I understand. Good for you, he says wistfully and, for both of us, sadly.

  We move from the pleasures of the flesh to those of the soul.

  Conticello lectures to his solitary visitor as if to a class, but in a way that captivates, holds attention. His words paint vivid, exciting pictures. Tough concepts, despite his heavily accented English, turn from murky to clear.

  The Greeks, the professor tells me, are behind much of Rome’s cultural greatness. Greeks captured by the Romans, he says, built the Latin language for their jailers in the third century B.C.E. The Romans did not use abstract expressions in their speech before the influence of Greeks. “This is a pencil,” Romans could say in Latin. What they could not put into words is the concept behind the pencil. The Greeks changed that.

  What drove their much earlier expansion into Magna Graecia, then wide open to sophisticated colonists? Frustrated Greek merchants, the professor tells me. Ah, I say to myself. Once again, money is power.

  He explains: In ancient Egypt, the people believed the king was the gods’ representative on earth. He owned everything: the land, the army, the people. The Greeks never took it this far. For them, the earth was legally the property of a single people, but mostly the king’s and the aristocrats’. But sometimes, Conticello says, private individuals—and even, on occasion, Greek peasants—owned property.

  Meanwhile, religion, a concept long used by governments to instill fear and keep diverse populations under control, was inseparable from the State. Such a combination of religion and state slows progress and hinders change, Conticello believes.

  Eventually, frustrated Greek merchants sailed the Mediterranean world, buying spices and selling vases. Between 900 and the end of 800 B.C.E., Greek cities and towns faced economic uncertainty. Social rebellions abounded. There were numerous conflicts among landowners and merchants, seafarers, and the more affluent classes. Greek merchants made lots of money, but had little power.

  This forced the most bold, courageous, and enterprising among them to migrate east and west. Away from mainland Greece, they established a new form of State, based on a larger, and more democratic, distribution of power.

  Conticello pauses. Knowing that my college background decades earlier focused on U.S. history, he smiles and says, “There is in this a similarity with the Pilgrims leaving for the New World of North America.”

  Southern Italy, incl
uding Sicily, was one of the Greeks’ destinations, and the western coast of modern Turkey another. The towns these Greek merchants founded in Magna Graecia, the name given the western colonies, flourished. At one time, Syrakusai, modern Siracusa in southeastern Sicily, was wealthier than Athens, located on the mainland of Greece. Syrakusai also became stronger, defeating Athens in several key battles on Sicilian soil.

  Eventually, in the sixth century B.C.E., the merchants got wealthier, raised armies, and returned to Greece, importing their new form of democratic government, principally to Athens. They started with the election of a tyran, a ruler for life, but quickly evolved toward elections of rulers and other authorities who served limited terms.

  “So there you have it,” the professor says. He sums up the evening’s lesson: “In the sixth century B.C.E. was born in Greece the main institutions of modern democracy: the splitting of powers among three branches of government—the rulers, the lawmaking body, the courts—creation of a national army where all male citizens could participate rather than just the aristocracy, and the idea of ‘one man, one vote.’”

  Here also was the development of the Greek temple, as the center of religion, distinctly separate from the State.

  Under this earliest form of democracy, Greece flourished. Before his death in 323 B.C.E., Alexander the Great had launched what is known as the Hellenistic era—a time of philosophers and magnificent strides in arts. That era lasted until after 31 B.C.E., approximately the historical time of Christ’s birth and when Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, was in power.

  Alexander’s Greek world had become divided into a series of monarchies, ruled by Alexander’s heirs. This lack of cohesiveness would lead to the Roman subjugation, first of the Greeks in Italy and then of the peoples on mainland Greece.

  This dynamic Greek culture was absorbed centuries later by the Romans and became the foundation of Western society.

  So why didn’t the Greeks survive as a major power in the then known ancient world conquered by the greatest Greek of all, Alexander the Great? How did Rome emerge, conquer all of Italy, and blend the southern Italian Greeks so smoothly into Roman society?

  The answer really is simple, Conticello says. The Greeks continued to fight among themselves, city against city, and were never unified as a nation. “They were so sophisticated philosophically and so well trained in the arts—so inward looking—that they never understood that the fighting among themselves kept them from being a great power.”

  They were just a collection of little towns, each with a little power. Conversely, the Romans, after consolidating power among Rome’s seven hills and varied tribes, became unified.

  Here the professor smiles ironically.

  “The Romans were shepherds who went down from the Palatine [one of Rome’s original seven hills] with the idea of conquering the world. The Greeks never thought that way.”

  Nor do, it seems, modern-day Italians, who, Conticello says, in the wake of the fall of Fascism in 1945, are content to let others do the job of policing the world. “The United States does a fine job of this for us,” he says, referring to the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo.

  Then he explains: “We Italians are not the heirs of the Romans, as the Fascists [and Mussolini] thought. We, as a people, never took from the Romans this concept of ruling the entire world. After the fall of the Roman (Western) Empire and the invasion of the land by the [Goths], we lost forever the good taste of freedom being subjected to, and subjugated by, wave after wave of invaders.”

  Once Rome fell, the economic power moved from the Italian peninsula to the periphery of the former Empire: France, Spain, and North Africa. When the empire was divided into two parts, about half a millennium following Christ’s birth, the power, Conticello says, passed to Germany in the West and to Byzantium, or Constantinople, in the East.

  “As the Greeks did, in Roman times we built magnificent monuments; we developed splendid forms of art; we created high, intellectual thoughts. We became cultural giants—and political dwarfs!”

  Chapter 4

  A Sicilian in Naples

  The train roared southwest out of Naples’ stazione centrale. I settled in, sharing my compartment with an aging Neapolitan businessman who was headed for Sicily to spend Easter, still a few weeks away, with his widowed mother. I didn’t ask his age—or hers—but he must have been in his early seventies. He sat, thin and erect, almost regal, already in place when I entered the compartment. He never stood in the two or so hours we were together, but I suspected that if he did, he would be tall, well over six feet. Most southern Italians, particularly Sicilians, are short, stocky.

  This gentleman had a fine goatee, clipped tightly against his chin and well groomed. A clump of white hair framed his face like a well-combed mane, cresting his long, gently sloping forehead above a distinguished nose that sloped quickly downward at the same angle as his brow. He was impeccably dressed in a light-chocolate suit and a creamy tan shirt, set off with a custard-yellow tie and complete with cuffs held closed by gold-colored links. On the seat next to him lay an expensive-looking overcoat of a lighter brown.

  I could picture this man, walking arm and arm with a male companion, down a narrow Neapolitan or Sicilian street, speaking low into his friend’s ear, gesturing with his free hand, his coat slung over his shoulders, arms out of the sleeves, like a cape—like so many inspired gentlemen of regal bearing I have seen all over Italy. Linking arms with a companion of the same gender is common in Italy. I have seen it between small children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly. They hold close together and bend toward one another to speak in low tones, twisting their head toward the other’s ear and making eye contact as often as possible.

  This signore had been a bookseller, he said with obvious pride, a dealer in both new and rare volumes. I could visualize his long, tapered fingers lovingly caressing the well-worn pages of dusty books. He wore half-spectacles, the kind used only for reading. The glasses sat low on his nose; he looked over the tops as he spoke to me.

  We talked for about half an hour in an interesting combination of English and Italian phrases, each struggling to communicate with the other. I was asking him about the economic conditions in the Mezzogiorno, a name Italians use to mean either “midday” or “noon,” or to describe Italy’s southern half, which encompasses the regions of Abruzzi, Molise, Campania (the region that includes Naples), Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria. It also includes the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. A writer friend tells me that the reference alludes to the noonday sun, the hottest of the day. The South is known for the sun’s burning, inescapable intensity during the long Mediterranean summer.

  The gentleman on the southbound train told me that as a middle-class American, I could have no comprehension of what it is like in the South. Our communication soon ended. Neither of us could pursue the nuances of the other’s language. I ran out of Italian words; he ran out of English phrases. For the remainder of my few hours’ ride down the Tyrrhenian coast to Páola, we sat in comfortable silence—he buried in a newspaper, me with my eyes on the rolling scenery of the west coast of the Italian boot.

  * * *

  My thoughts were a mix of archaeology and poverty. I knew the train’s tracks were crossing over the buried remains of ancient coastal trading cities used by Greeks and Romans alike, their precise locations lost centuries ago under the rubble left by vast armies: Saracens, Germans, Normans, Spaniards, the French. Some came only once; others returned again and again. Archaeologists know those cities are there somewhere. Buried under modern towns and villages, no doubt. Or under alluvial deposits washed down by streams and rivers flowing west and south out of Calabria.

  Many times during this trip I would spend long moments trying to understand the sad economics of the South and why it differs so much from the North. The old man sitting across from me had tried to describe it, but our language barrier proved insurmountable.

  What truly made clear to me the plight of “the other Italy” was a c
areful reading of the classic memoir by Carlo Levi, who, following World War II, wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli. Despite the title, the book does not suggest that Christ actually visited that small town in Campania. Instead, in the manner of speech used by peasants of the period, Levi tells us, Christianity stopped there, failing to spread into the darker, more mountainous inland reaches of Calabria and Basilicata.

  To southern Italians, Levi wrote, “Christian” means “human being.” And the poor people of the South were saying: “We’re not Christians, we’re not human beings; we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild.” The people of the South, at least before World War II under Fascism and, for centuries before under a succession of conquerors, “live in a world of their own.” It is their inward protection from centuries of dealing with forces beyond their control.

  Levi’s book is about his year-long forced exile in the mid-1930s. He, a northern Italian writer and outspoken anti-Fascist, spent the time deep in the mountains of Lucania, now known as Basilicata, a province in the heart of the boot’s mountainous interior. The region’s name, for centuries, had been Basilicata. But Mussolini, in his quest to create a new twentieth-century Roman empire, gave the region the old Roman name, Lucania. After Mussolini’s fall, Lucania once again became Basilicata.

  Levi described, in vivid detail, the conditions endured by the southern peasants from the time their land was first affected by Phoenician traders from Troy more than three thousand years ago. These traders first introduced a “set of values diametrically opposed to those of the ancient peasant civilization. The Phoenicians brought religion and the State, and the religion of the State.… The invaders brought also arms and an army, escutcheons, heraldry, and war. Their religion was a violent one, demanding human sacrifice.… The ancient Italians, meanwhile, lived on the land, knowing neither sacrifice nor religion.”