A Sweet and Glorious Land (13 page)

Bullitt also details how the archaeologists did this. They used new techniques and equipment, including the magnetometer, which records solid material, such as foundation stones and columns, as deep as twenty feet below the surface. Bullitt first imagined that these devices would locate the fabled grave of Alaric the Visigoth, buried in the riverbed of the Crati before it joined with the Busento at Cosenza.

But it was quickly determined, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that the search for Alaric, speculated about by Gissing in the 1890s and by me one hundred years later, was futile, given how much the town has been built up and how the river's now rigid course repeatedly shifted in intervening centuries.

So the Pennsylvanians redirected their energies toward the northeast, to the search for Sybaris. The tie-in with Gissing was symbolic. He and they first started searching for Alaric, then moved toward Sybaris. All were connected by the silver thread of the Crati, which flows over Alaric's bones, and whose waters were used to bury Sybaris fifty miles from where, centuries before, the Visigoth died.

What those researchers found in the 1960s, however, was not just Sybaris as they first thought, but the remains of the newer two cities, built on top. It took other Italian-led excavations to determine that, indeed, the three cities occupied the same space over the intervening centuries.

In Bullitt's book, published in 1969, Pennsylvanian archaeologist Froelich C. Rainey, then the university's museum director, wrote in the introduction: “We know now that Sybaris, like Pompeii, had the misfortune to be located where … two great plates of the earth's thin surface collide to cause earthquakes and volcanoes.… Today the charred remains of Sybaris lie below a vast blanket of sterile clay sealed in the earth beneath a fertile plain. No wonder it has remained a mystery—no protruding columns, no mounds, no scattered fragments of pottery on the surface to give a clue. Its existence and destruction are hard facts.”

It would take archaeologists after the 1960s to tie together the other two cities and explain why Sybaris's columns did not stick up out of the clay: They had become the building blocks of two other cities crumbled by eons of successive earthquakes.

Chapter 10

The Right to Work

The contemporary village of Sibari and its tiny train station had been renamed in the late 1800s from the distracting, unimaginative “Buffaloria.” Gissing rejoiced at this, happy that southern Italians, by grasping the Italian versions of ancient names, had finally recognized their Greek roots.

His destination was Taranto, known in antiquity as Taras when founded by the Greeks, and renamed Tarentum by conquering Romans. Taras was one of the earliest extensions of Greece's eighth-century-
B.C.E.
effort to expand its growing, crowded population to Italy's boot, a process driven by Greece's merchant class, eager to spread commerce around the Mediterranean world. This exodus to Magna Graecia—and also to the east toward Ionia in modern-day southwestern Turkey—was the ancient equivalent of the impact of Europe's “New World” that drew the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish to North America nearly two thousand years later.

The difference here, of course, is that the colonizing Greeks were eventually conquered by the Romans, who grew out of native tribes. These Greeks were either forced out of, or assimilated into, what has become the Italian culture. In North America, it was the other way around: Colonizing Europeans subjugated the original occupants, and European ancestors dominate American culture today.

Southern Italy, according to ancient writers, was viewed as a fertile, undeveloped paradise blanketed by forests and inhabited by groups of Italic tribes—apparently minor obstacles in the path of Greece's early westward expansion.

*   *   *

Coming by train from inland, I first spotted the Ionian Sea just northeast of Sibari and south of Trebisacce. It quickly became the Gulf of Taranto as the train curved northwestward and the bluish gray waters turned deeper blue farther north. The yellow wildflowers were especially heavy here at this lower, warmer elevation. Four days later, when I would head in the opposite direction for a layover at Crotone, they would be double in volume, as spring's warmth spread farther along the coast and into the shoreline's foothills.

The Ionian Sea, while viewed as a separate body of water, is part of the Mediterranean. It is in this sea that the Mediterranean reaches its greatest depth, some sixteen thousand feet at a point off the western coast of Greece, just east of Italy's heel.

Interestingly, the Ionian Sea does not lap up against the portion of southwestern Turkey that had been known as Ionia.
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
speculates that the sea's name originates from early Ionian Greek seafaring to the west. The Ionian's waters touch western Greece, eastern Sicily, and the underside of Italy's boot. A scholar friend points out that Turks refer to Greeks in general as “Ionians.”

I sat back as the train moved north along the coast, alone in my compartment like Gissing was in his, reflecting on time and place.

*   *   *

Southern Italy suffers from massive unemployment, as high as thirty-three percent in some provinces, and from domination by political and criminal factions more interested in putting into their pockets the billions of lire the nation has poured southward than in the region's revitalization.

I felt the emotions and saw evidence in the form of angry graffiti that such struggles cause:
Il lavoro è un diritto!
(Work is a right!) was spray-painted in bright red on a brick wall along the tracks near a tiny train station perched on the edge of the Ionian Sea.

I saw the dark, foreboding look in the eyes of a young man who engaged me in an energetic conversation on a bus during a long ride into the countryside. Why are you here? he asked me repeatedly. This is not Rome. This is not Florence, he said, apparently wondering why a tourist would venture so far south from the regular Italian tourist centers. We are poor. Do you come to stare at us?

Then, when my northern Italian–trained ears could no longer follow his rapid-fire southern dialect and I would reply with growing insistence,
“Non capisco, signore. Non capisco”
(I do not understand), he would turn and in loud angry asides say to the bus driver,
“Ricco americano! Ricco americano!”
(Rich American!)

Eventually, I got off that bus with the young man's angry words bouncing off my back. It was upsetting. But over the course of my visit, I began to gauge, at least a little bit, his frustration at living in a land where work and lire are scarce.

I thought of conversations I had in Rome, days before I began my southern journey: one snatched on a bus traveling between the Vatican and the train station. A young Italian air force officer, pointing to an obvious pickpocket on the crowded bus—the notorious
Numero 64
that hauls mostly tourists, prey for pickpockets—winked. With my eye peeled toward the short, stocky thief nervously casing the people around him, I changed the subject. What about the South, I asked. Is it as poor as I hear? I knew the answer, of course. I wanted to see what the young man, obviously gainfully employed in the military, would say.

He identified himself as Valerio and said he was “from the North,” adding that he held a typical northerner's view of unemployment and poverty throughout the South.

“In the South it is always the same, no matter what you do,” he said in English. “[Southerners] are like that. It will never change.” I thought this unusual because I had seen the spray-painted plea for work. Wasn't that a sign that southerners are willing to work?

Later, I recounted this discussion with Professor Baldassare Conticello. He was born in Palermo, so wouldn't he, as a proud Sicilian, dispute the young air force officer's position? The
professore
didn't. He agreed.

“On one side, Italy is the fifth largest economic power. It all comes from the North; on the other [the South], we are a third world nation,” Professor Conticello said sadly. “The North is like Switzerland and the South is like Africa! The ‘Italian Problem,' I think, cannot be solved.”

He continues: “We [in the South] have a sense of dignity and courage, but our limit is to be individualists and reactive to each other.” Problem-solving cooperation in the South is hard to come by, he says.

“We are able to discuss with excellent arguments, and for hours, about the beard of Mohammed, but we cannot organize a business!” Northern Italians, he says, “and now even foreigners, profit from our lack of concreteness, and have established a [modern-day recolonization] of southern Italy.”

Who is guilty? he asks. Those who do it to the southerners, or the southerners for letting it happen? He does not expect an answer to his question, nor does he offer one.

But the Italian government is trying, once again. In late 1998, the State, driven, says Conticello, by the Communists, created a public agency called
Sviluppo Italia,
Development Italy, that is designed to spark economic growth in the Mezzogiorno. In early 1999, the government named board members known for embracing market values, not politics, according to announcements I read in Italian newspapers.

But this agency “is the daughter of the old
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno,
created in the nineteen fifties by the Social Democrats, and is the granddaughter of an earlier agency, which was created by the Fascists in the nineteen thirties.”

The professor remains skeptical of the latest efforts; he has heard all this before. These organizations, with each reincarnation, “are only useful for personal, political, and bureaucratic dishonesty, and for the profusion of organized crime.”

Generally, he says, few jobs are created, and despite the billions of lire that have been poured southward, nothing has happened to rectify the imbalance between the Italian North and South.

Visitors to the South often see what I have seen: unfinished freeway ramps hanging out into space, or factories now standing unfinished and empty, that were built for industry—amid much pomp and celebration and fawning newspaper articles—that never came. Much of the money that went south over the last few decades, instead of enhancing the region and its people, ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, bureaucrats, and politicians.

*   *   *

The angry young man who had lashed out at me in frustration on the bus in coastal Calabria cannot be blamed. He was not angry at me personally, the traveler trespassing in his land; his anger was born out of generations of southern hopelessness.

But everywhere in the South, gracious, enthusiastic individuals stand out in greater numbers than the one encounter with that young man. I often think of the cab driver in Táranto—“I am called Giuseppe,” he said proudly, as he wrote his name in my notebook—who called me back and pointed to a one-hundred-thousand-lira note (about fifty-seven dollars) I had unknowingly dropped after paying him. I also remember a bus driver at the beginning of my trip. Eager to practice his high-school English learned twenty years earlier, he allowed me to stand in his usually-off-limits-to-passengers driver's area while we sped through the late evening streets that curve around the northern shore of Táranto's Mare Piccolo or Little Sea.

We talked of Greeks, of the wild dogs that, unimpeded by owners or collars, roam Italy's heel and who are fed by locals from garbage pails (
“Sono liberi,”
They are free, he said of those dogs), and of life in America.

“Ah, America,” I remember the bus driver saying. “I would like to go there and visit
mio zio
” (my uncle).

“Will you go?” I asked.
“Ci vogliono soldi!”
(You need money!) he replied, rubbing his thumb against his first two fingers—a gesture that means “money” but often is also tinged with the frustration I saw many times as people I spoke with on trains, buses, and in hotel lobbies described life in the South. “Ah,” he said wistfully.
“Magari!”
If only!

Southern Basilicata/southern Puglia

Chapter 11

Sunlight on Old Stones

I arrived about midday. Taranto is a strange and wonderful city high on the inside of Italy's heel. From the train station, I took a quick bus ride across a bridge to the island containing the old medieval city that was built on the ruins of Roman Tarentum and Greek Taras. The bus carried me farther east toward a hotel on a side street in the modern downtown, the Albergo Piasi. This new city,
città nuova,
developed across from the southeast end of the island, was connected by a drawbridge.

The old city, the
città vecchia,
is made up of structures dating back to the medieval period. Very little exists from the Roman era, and, near the drawbridge, a single stone column juts into the sky—the only visible evidence that Greeks first settled this spot, and in the light of the setting sun, that column becomes a golden tribute to that era.