A Small Place in Italy (21 page)

From time to time when we were staying at I Castagni we used to make excursions into the wild country that was little known to foreigners, high up on the Tuscan side of the Apennines. There we found villages, some of which had been partly or completely abandoned by their inhabitants. In them there was abundant evidence of a way of life, what archaeologists would probably quite soon be referring to as the
civiltà contadina
, a way of life that, apart from a few practitioners of it such as Attilio, Signor Anselmo who was still dropping in on us for a drink on his way to have his hair cut, Signor Settimo, the old Alpino, and the husband of Signora Zaira, the lady who kept a black cow, whose name I have forgotten, would soon be extinct.

One of the largest of these villages, one which we had always wanted to visit although it was by no means abandoned, or even partially so, was Sassalbo which was hidden away below the main road from Fivizzano to Reggio Emilia, which crosses the Apennines at the Passo del Cerreto.

When we finally decided to go we also invited Signor Giuseppe, Signora Fernanda and Signora Angiolina to come with us as none of them, so far as we could make out, had ever been much further into the outside world than the Sarzana market.

Their first reactions to our invitation were not quite as enthusiastic as we had hoped they would be. Apparently the Sassalbini were no strangers so far as they were concerned and they viewed the opportunity of renewing their acquaintanceship with them with a certain amount of misgiving. According to them the Sassalbini used to travel all over Lunigiana, and even further afield, going from door to door selling the
pecorino
cheeses for which they were renowned, and to some extent they still did so. They had a reputation in northern Tuscany for being as hard as nails. There was even an old saying, which Signora Angiolina now proceeded to quote with relish, to the effect that, ‘
quando incontri un Sassalbino lascialo andare per il suo cammino’
(‘when you meet a Sassalbino let him go his own way’).

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, the thought of going for a day out more or less extinguished their prejudices against visiting a place that for them, together with its inhabitants, had some of the characteristics that parts of Africa still have for me.

It was left to Signor Giuseppe to put a further damper on the plan when he decreed that Signora Fernanda would have to stay behind to guard their two houses, in case a band of robbers descended on them like locusts and stripped them of their contents.

It was unfortunate that the choice for this boring and quite unnecessary chore fell on Signora Fernanda, who was really looking forward to going on this excursion, rather than on Signora Angiolina, because Signora Angiolina was not considered by Signor Giuseppe to be sufficiently robust to repel robbers. She herself wasn’t really all that keen on going to Sassalbo because she was worried about what would happen to her rabbits in her absence. However, when Signora Fernanda heard that she had been chosen to remain behind, she put on a brave face and prepared a substantial
merenda
for the four of us.

The village was partly hidden in a large grove of chestnuts, some of which had attained an enormous size. It stood at the foot of the cliffs below the Passo del Cerreto on the right bank of a torrent called the Rosaro which had its origins just below the main ridge of the Apennines which loomed high overhead. When it was in flood, as it often was after a storm, the Rosaro brought down huge quantities of rocks and gravel leaving a stony, bone-dry wasteland in its path when it eventually subsided. At that time, before the road down to it was improved, Sassalbo was really remote, in winter often cut off from the outside world for long periods of time. And that morning, with its rather grim, grey stone houses which were roofed with heavy slabs of the same material, and its cowsheds which were made to match them, from which came the lowing sounds of cattle, it really did have a feeling of being a place at the world’s end.

At this moment its cobbled lanes were crowded with mules which had been bringing firewood down into the village from somewhere higher up the mountainside, and they were now being unloaded by their drivers, a bunch of hard-looking men, of a sort that I, personally, would not have been altogether happy about purchasing cheese from, whether
pecorino
or any other sort.

Apart from these muleteers, most of the inhabitants of Sassalbo that morning appeared to be women – the children were at school – all of them wearing hand-knitted woollen stockings and mountain boots; while a surprising number of them, even quite young ones, were dressed in deep mourning.

Until the outbreak of the Second World War the population of Sassalbo had numbered about 1500 persons. Fourteen men had been killed in the First World War, twenty in the Second. By the late 1940s or early 1950s, the population was 917. Up to that time the Sassalbini had owned big flocks of sheep and they had made a not-very-good living selling their
pecorino
cheese. It was then
that the men of Sassalbo began to leave their village, as did the men who left hundreds and thousands of other villages in search of work in the cities, in France, Germany and many other parts of western Europe. From then onwards Sassalbo became virtually a village of women and children, except at certain times of year such as August, Christmas and Easter when most of the men who could afford to do so came home.

The women augmented their earnings by spinning wool, gathering chestnuts and milking their cows. They were a strange, withdrawn sort of people but given their remote situation it was scarcely surprising. There were still, when we went there, a number of shepherds around Sassalbo, each of whom had a flock of about three hundred sheep. They took them up to the
crinale
around 20 June, together with their dogs, and usually stayed there with them, living in their huts and sleeping on beds made with beech boughs until October, when the weather began to break. They then took the flocks down in lorries to the Maremma, the fertile area near the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where they passed the winter, the shepherds renting whatever pasture they needed for the animals. Until after the last war they used to drive the sheep down to the Maremma on foot; but now the volume of traffic on the roads made this impossible.

Down by the river the sheep were being sheared in great numbers and the air was filled with their lamentations. The shepherds, men in their late twenties, were using hand-forged shears. Mist began to sweep down the screes from the
passo
, and suddenly Sassalbo was a cold place to be in.

Milk with which the
pecorino
cheese was made was now the only worthwhile commodity the sheep produced, so far as making a profit was concerned, the shepherds said, while resting between shearing sheep which was tough work with primitive hand shears. Their fathers had been shepherds before them, and now they
perceived themselves to be in a sort of trap with no real future to look forward to.

Few people wanted the wool any more – this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s; but until recently, the vests and socks worn by all the country people had been made from it. It was still on sale in some market places, but very few people now bought it. The wool was too rough for modern tastes. Soon, they said, they would be shearing the sheep and throwing away the wool.

This was the wool the women used to spin while watching over the flocks, or when walking from one place to another, or when sitting by the fire, or simply while talking to a neighbour. Each one carried a wooden spindle tapered at either end, with a perforated stone in the middle of it, at the top of which the woollen yarn they were spinning was attached, with the rest of the wool wound round a distaff, a piece of wood which was carried tucked under one arm.

In the
caffè
in Sassalbo four old men were playing
briscola
, smashing their cards down on the table as if they were trying to split it in two, swearing dreadful religious oaths of the kind known as
bestemmie
(the only words they uttered that I could understand), and contesting every point as if they were temperamental tennis players at Wimbledon. Or else discussing what sounded as if it might be some ancient wrong – probably, as Wanda said, something connected with a right-of-way.

During a lull in what sounded remarkably like a battle, while one of the players went off to the lavatory, Wanda took the opportunity to ask one of the remaining players, an authoritative-looking man, if he knew anyone who had any old furniture to sell.

This brought on a dead silence while the other two players watched the one to whom the question had been addressed, as if awaiting the pronouncement of an oracle. By this time, the fourth man had returned and he, too, had to be put in the picture which took some minutes. What emerged eventually from the mouth of
the man who had been asked the question in the first place was a collection of sounds of a similar sort to those we had already been listening to, presumably in the Sassalbino dialect. It seemed unlikely that all four of them could have been suffering from a speech defect.

Apparently somebody’s cousin had a very fine old
madia
that she might be persuaded to part with, providing the price was right. ‘But you understand, Signora, that this is a very valuable piece. Would she like to give it a glance?’ All this was translated for her benefit by Signor Giuseppe who appeared to be able to understand the
dialetto Sassalbino.

And Wanda, although she didn’t need a
madia
, as she already had one, said yes. So the
briscola
player’s little nephew was dispatched with the four of us behind him in Indian file down the narrow alleys to visit the place where the
madia
was on view, which turned out to be a small shop selling a bit of everything.

The
madia
could be seen through the back door of the shop, standing in a yard where it obviously had been for some time as one of its front legs had moss growing on it, and the whole thing had been painted a horrible shade of green which didn’t quite go with the moss. Closer examination showed that after being painted it had become infested with woodworm and it now gave the impression that it might well turn to powder if it was moved.

We all looked at it for some time, during which Signora Angiolina said,
‘Ma!’
very audibly and Signor Giuseppe began humming one of the tunes he used to hum when coming down the hill to I Castagni, and wanted to warn us of his imminent arrival on the premises.

‘How much are you asking for this?’ Wanda asked the cousin of someone or other who, although only about twenty, was already dressed in the fashionable black, had a wedding ring on her finger, and looked like the Miss Otis of Sassalbo.

‘Quanto costa?’

‘You know,’ the cousin said in a voice that had very little
dialetto
of any kind in it, but had probably been developed in the sixth form at Fivizzano High, ‘that this is a piece that is extremely valuable.’

‘Quanto?’
said Wanda.

‘I couldn’t consider selling it,’ the cousin said, very seriously, ‘for less than forty thousand lire. It has been in our family, here at Sassalbo, for many, many years.’

‘I cannot buy your
madia,’
Wanda said. ‘I suggest you should continue to keep it in your family.’

‘E una ladra’
(‘She’s a thief’) Signor Giuseppe said when we were once more out in the lane, on the cobbles. He sounded really happy. His worst forebodings about the Sassalbini had been more than realized.

He was even more happy when the parish priest, having been apprised of our arrival on some papal grapevine, had sent an emissary to the
caffè
to invite us to view what he described as a fine old
letto matrimoniale
, which he no longer had any need for. What a priest was doing with a double bed in the first place was not clear. Basically it was quite a good metal bed for two people, but its mother-of-pearl embellishments, and the little pastoral scenes which should have appeared in oval frames at either end, had all been painted over. In fact the whole bed had been painted with something that smelt like tar. Why it had been treated in this barbarous manner was a mystery.

His estimate of the value of this now hideous object was fifty thousand lire. None of us really believed that he was going, as he said, to devote the proceeds of the sale to the improvement of the church.

‘Anche lui è un ladro’
(‘He’s also a thief’) Signor Giuseppe said happily. It reinforced his feelings, as a supporter of the Left, about the Italian clergy in general.

And now we drove away, still further into the mountains, from this strange, rather sad village, the like of which, we all agreed, none of us had ever seen.

Almost twenty-five years were to elapse before we visited Sassalbo again. By the time we did, the year before we left I Castagni, Sassalbo had changed not beyond recognition but sufficiently to make one rub one’s eyes. It was not only the village that had changed, the inhabitants also had undergone a degree of metamorphosis. Many of the old houses had been rendered with cement and only very few had the big stone flags we remembered on the roofs. Most of them now had red tiles and inside many of them were equipped with modern kitchens, baths and bidets. Outside most of the cobbled lanes had been cemented over. All this prosperity was paid for by those expatriate Sassalbini, some of whom had returned to Sassalbo to pass the evening of their days; others still working abroad, those whose Peugeots, Renaults, Mercedes and Toyotas now filled the lanes at holiday times. The day we were there the funeral took place of a man aged eighty-five, bringing the population down from 150 to 149. And now in the entire village there was only one cow.