Rural desolation
A scene from the depopulated Italian south
A dusty track diverts me away from the tarmac. It climbs through a rolling expanse of newly shooting crops towards a tumbled ruination of stones on the near horizon. Rain begins to sprinkle the earth, but soon stops, and the grey semi-cool, almost-sunny quietness continues.
An old metal sign is ahead, rusty and weatherbeaten like I imagine the abandoned frontier towns in the USA to be, ordering me to make way for a train that will never come. I imagine the creak of a weather vane or the puffing of a horse, but there is nothing nearby to creak or puff. The steel tracks are long overgrown with weeds, so I pause the car on top of them and look around, just for the novelty of doing so.
The old hilltop ruin sprawls amid long grass and rubble. It’s larger than I thought, and better built too, constructed from carefully hewn rectangles of sandstone, precisely aligned. I scan for some clue about its origins or purpose, but its secrets are withheld. Some of the windows seem large and close together, suggesting quite a grand room inside; other apertures remain a mystery. Is that a window or a door? What happened to the roof? Which side was the main entrance? Was this extrusion an outbuilding for livestock or part of the main home? Did it suffer a slow decline or was it abandoned overnight? How long has it been here?
Driving on, I realise I am on the cusp of a much larger emptiness. House after house, abandoned. This isn’t a village, but a strung-out sequence of collapsed properties. Houses, barns, shelters, planted on either side of the track – not quite a row, not quite a settlement, not quite neighbourly. Bullet holes pepper a concrete water trough. There is no church, no school, no shop, no trees, no river. Only soil. Soil and the young, unidentifiable crops that sprout from it for miles around.
Heading further south-east, the emptiness deepens. House after house on hill after hill, then a small railway station with a pair of buzzards wheeling high above and finally an old church – all isolated from each other, shut up, collapsed into ruin. Occasionally a small olive grove adds the promise of Mediterranean vitality, although I see no tractors or livestock, and not a single human being.
The Greeks once ruled this terrain of Basilicata – later the Romans, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines and even those pesky Normans – and it feels strange to find a void in the midst of so much history. Barely 50 miles away on the south coast are the columns of Tavole Palatine, a Greek temple to Apollo and Hera dating from the 6th Century BC. The same distance in the opposite direction stands the huge Castle of Melfi, an earthquake-proof palace derived from an 11th Century fortress, now a museum. Thirty miles west is the huddle of curious stone huts known as palmenti, used for processing grapes for wine but looking for all the world like a real-life Hobbiton surrounding the remote town of Pietragalla (where most of my Fiat Panda images were taken). And just a few miles south is Matera, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world (you’ve seen it in No Time to Die and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ).
In fact, Basilicata is teeming with curiosities. But take an unfortunate slice through the middle of it, and you won’t know they’re here.
I sense a kind of deadness in this landscape, the sterility of monoculture and the withered fabric of a society that could not hold. Why am I drawn to these places that echo with the unwanted stories of unwanted lives?
