Basilicata: Right in Front of Their Nose

by Joseph Harris

Nine thousand years ago, somebody dug a home into the soft rock above a ravine in the instep of the Italian boot, and people have been living there ever since. Matera is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe and one of the oldest on earth, older than Rome by most of recorded time, older than Jerusalem. Its two cave districts, the Sassi, climb the walls of the gravina like a honeycomb stood on end: houses carved into the rock and built out of it, one family's roof serving as the next family's street, churches cut into the cliff face and frescoed by Byzantine monks. Beneath it all is a buried system of cisterns and channels that caught and kept every drop of rain the sky would give. That water system alone should have made the place famous centuries ago. The town itself forgot the largest cistern of all; it sat sealed beneath the main piazza until 1991, when locals rediscovered it and crossed its dark water in a rubber boat. It was engineering of a high order done by people with no money, and that is the most impressive kind.

The region around it has worn several names, and each one is a layer of the story. The Greeks arrived first, planting colonies along the Ionian coast when Rome was still a village on a muddy river. Metaponto grew so rich on wheat that it stamped an ear of barley on its coins, and Pythagoras, driven out of Croton, taught his last students there and died there. The columns of the temple of Hera still stand in the fields outside town, and the farmers plow around them. The Greeks carried a vine up from that coast and set it on the slopes of a dead volcano called the Vulture, and the descendants of that vine are in your glass tonight. The Romans drove the Appian Way across the region, called it Lucania after its people, and paid its cooking the empire's highest compliment: they named a sausage after it, the lucanica. The Byzantines governed long enough to leave the modern name behind, from basilikos, the emperor's official. After them came Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons, every one of them ruling the place and not one of them investing in it. For most of three thousand years, Basilicata was land you crossed on the way to somewhere else.

What held, while the rulers changed, was the culture of the hard land. Wheat grew on the Murgia plateau, and around that wheat the Materani built their week. Bread was baked in communal ovens, loaves the size of wagon wheels, each one stamped with the family's initials before it went to the town oven so that each household got its own back. A loaf stayed good for seven days, and an entire cuisine grew up around its lifespan: torn fresh at the table, revived with water and tomatoes when it got stale. It was ground and toasted in oil when it hardened, the mollica that Lucanians scatter over pasta and call the poor man's parmesan. Horseradish grew wild in the hills and stood in for the truffles of the rich north, and they call it the poor man's truffle without a trace of apology in their voices. The animal was the sheep, not the cow, and here Americans need a moment of adjustment: most of the world eats lamb and very little beef, and we are the exception, not the rule. Cattle need pasture, and Basilicata is stone and thistle, which is exactly what sheep are built for. The shepherds walked their flocks along droving roads older than the Appian Way and cooked cutturidd, the lamb of the oldest animal in the flock simmered patiently with greens and whatever the pot could gather, until toughness surrendered. And every first of August, the neighborhoods of Matera hauled a common pot into the street for the crapiata, each family contributing its handful of chickpeas, fava, lentils, and wheat from the pantry, the whole neighborhood eating from a soup no single household could have made. Poverty, cooked with that much intelligence, stops looking like poverty and starts looking like a philosophy.

Then the world tilted. Unification came in 1861 and brought taxes without bringing roads. The young left, first for Naples, then in great waves for New York and Buenos Aires, whole villages hollowing out a generation at a time. Malaria worked the lowlands. By the twentieth century the Sassi, which had been a functioning vertical city for nine millennia, had become a place where too many people and their animals shared caves without light, water, or drains. In 1935 the Fascist government exiled a doctor and painter from Turin named Carlo Levi to a hill village here for his politics, and after the war he published what he had seen. He called the book Christ Stopped at Eboli, after a saying of the peasants themselves: Christ, meaning civilization, meaning Italy, got as far as Eboli, up on the Salerno road, and came no farther. The peasants did not mean it as literature. They meant that their country had forgotten they existed.

Italy read the book and recoiled. Palmiro Togliatti came to Matera in 1948 and called the Sassi la vergogna nazionale, the national shame, and Prime Minister De Gasperi came two years later and agreed with his rival, which tells you how bad it looked. In 1952 a special law ordered the caves emptied. Some fifteen thousand people were moved out of the Sassi into new state-built quarters on the plain, and the fair thing is to say the reformers were not wrong about the suffering, because the infant mortality was real and the malaria was real. But in solving what they could see, they could not see what they were emptying. Nine thousand years of continuous habitation was ended by decree in about a decade. The oldest city in Europe was padlocked and left to rot, its cisterns dry, its churches stripped by thieves, its doorways bricked. Italy had looked at the most precious thing it owned and seen only an embarrassment, and it walked away from Matera the way it had always walked away from Basilicata, spending its attention and its miracle-years money on regions with better publicity.

The people who could see it were the ones who refused to leave, and the ones who crept back. Through the seventies and eighties, artists, students, and stubborn Materani reoccupied the Sassi, restoring caves by hand, often without permission, arguing to anyone who would listen that the shame was not the stone but the abandonment of it. In 1986 Rome finally passed a law funding recovery instead of demolition. In 1993 UNESCO declared the Sassi a World Heritage Site, the first in the Italian south, praising above all that ancient water system as an example of how to live on a harsh land without ruining it. Pasolini had already filmed his Gospel According to St. Matthew there in 1964, because Matera looked more like ancient Jerusalem than Jerusalem does, and Hollywood followed him for the same reason. In 2019 the national shame served its year as European Capital of Culture. From vergogna to capital of culture inside a single lifetime, and the distance between those two titles was traveled first and mostly by locals who saved their own heritage while their country looked elsewhere. When you meet a Materano today, you will find the pride has a particular temper to it. It is the pride of people who were told their home was a disgrace and turned out to be its curators.

The same story is running right now in the hill towns, told from the other direction. Emigration emptied Irsina and Pisticci the old way, house by house, and the houses sat for decades at prices no Italian would pay. Then foreigners began to buy them, Americans especially, and today you can stand in the piazza of Irsina at passeggiata hour and hear English, American English, spoken as casually as the local dialect. The newcomers paid the price of a used car for stone houses with five-hundred- year-old vaults, and the departed families' descendants in New Jersey read about it with complicated feelings. Irsina's cathedral, meanwhile, holds a statue of Saint Euphemia that scholars now attribute to Mantegna. A Mantegna, standing in a town most Italians cannot find on a map, unremarked for five centuries. Pisticci, whitewashed and stacked on its ridge like a Greek island that wandered inland, quietly produces Amaro Lucano, the digestivo it has blended since 1894. The strangers in the square see what the departed could not, and Italy itself has still not entirely caught on: Basilicata remains among the least visited regions in the country, and to this day the national railway does not run to Matera. A European Capital of Culture that Rome never bothered to connect to its own train network is the whole argument of this chapter, laid out in steel.

I have been circling the lesson, so let me say it plainly, because it is the reason this dinner exists. People cannot see the most precious things when they are right in front of their noses. Familiarity files the shine off. It took an exiled painter to make Italy look at Matera, a foreigner's checkbook to make Irsina look at its own piazza, and half a century of loss before anyone counted what the Sassi were worth. When people finally do step back, the recognition arrives together with the horror of what they have done, and then comes the scramble to save what is left before it is gone entirely. Matera is the rare case where the scramble succeeded, which is why it deserves a dinner. I run a restaurant on a foggy stretch of coast that the highway passes at fifty-five miles an hour, and I will let you draw your own conclusions about what is sitting in front of our noses here.

Tuesday night the table argues the case, dish by dish. The bread of Matera, baked dark on Franklin Street from durum and a living starter, is on the table all night, because in Matera the bread was never a course, it was the calendar. The rafanata opens the meal at room temperature, the way the hills serve it, with the poor man's truffle doing the work the rich man's truffle never had to. The cialledda is the harvester's lunch, day-old bread brought back to life by summer tomatoes. The cavatelli carry the crimson cruschi of Senise, peppers dried on balcony strings and fried for ten seconds into something Milanese chefs now pay dearly for, under a snowfall of toasted crumbs standing in for cheese. And then the lamb, braised the shepherds' way with chard and pecorino, ladled over the crapiata. In Matera those are two dishes, the shepherd's kettle and the neighborhood pot. At my table Tuesday night they share the plate, the communal soup holding up the lamb, which after everything you have just read seems like the only honest way to serve them.

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