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I had never been to the Basilicata,
and quite honestly, had neither the interest in nor the intention of going
there, ever. (I would later discover, via a memorable taxi driver who I think
was called Cosimo, that both Francis Ford Coppola and Nicholas Cage, his nephew, are from the region – a fact that
surely should have increased my enthusiasm about it but didn’t.) It is
beautiful in a way the rest of Italy proclaims itself to be, but isn’t,
exactly. Flanked by generous coast in abundant hues of green and blue, the
hills of Basilicata are truly alive.
Still, if I’d had a choice, I’d
have skipped it entirely. There are sheep and Sannite ruins in Molise, too, the
region of my father’s origins, and I’d managed to avoid them (and his family there) for the last 26 and a half years; no
sense in making the detour for Francis Ford. Basilicata was an uninformed blip
on an otherwise immaculate itinerary for one.
I arrived in Policoro, a beach town
on the Ionian shores, past midnight. What I thought would be an overnight train
from Brindisi to Catania had turned into an overnight layover, two connecting
buses to Paola and Cosenza, Calabria, and the train in to Sicily and over the
strait of Messina. Were I defining the term only loosely, I could at least add
Basilicata and Calabria to my list of places “visited” in Italy – a badge I
wore proudly around non-Italians, and still more proudly around Italians
themselves. I could colour in those blanks on my map. I could consider almost
complete my tour of the meridione ten
years in the making, having already hit the major hot-spots – Campania and
Puglia – and on my way to the most canonical of all: Sicily. Well, to be fair
(and I am always fair), Sicily is a world of its own, conspicuously. But we’ll get there. As I did,
eventually.
In
other words, Basilicata was, for all intents and purposes, a mistake. A
fortunate one. One you appreciate having made, in the end. But still a mistake.
Even in its splendor, Basilicata was a passing thought, an oversight
misunderstood.
The
importance of research mustn’t be underestimated. As a scholar, I could say so.
After six weeks and a tour of Italy’s most prestigious (and complicated)
libraries dedicated to the work of a lifetime then already five years old (and
still growing), I got it. I understood the precious nuances of a capricious
schedule: open Mondays to Fridays, but only until 2 on Mondays and Wednesdays,
only until 1 on Fridays, and up until 7 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Continuous
distribution, hourly distribution, interrupted distribution; 9, 10, 11, 12;
9-12 and 2-5; open stacks; closed stacks; by permitted consultation only; see:
reference section, but never after 4. Preparation was a way of existence in
Italy. Precision (but not promptness, on the bureaucratic end, at least) was
neither a luxury nor a virtue, but a matter of survival. Life was in the fine
print, and I knew it. Still, booking my train ticket south, I hadn’t noticed,
or didn’t want to after what had been a disastrous and emotionally taxing week
in Puglia, the little bus diagrams beside connections that I interpreted as
stops along the way. The four-hour delay had registered as a programmed pause
rather than a jolt in the voyage. So at the very last possible minute, hours
from my departure, when I realized I’d likely be sleeping at the station in Policoro
that night, I was nothing if not profoundly embarrassed. Research was my job.
I
didn’t sleep at the station that night. I had absolutely hated everything about
the Bed and Breakfast I had stayed at in Brindisi, but at the very least, it
had come fully equipped with internet – a tool I more than happily exploited to
book a hotel: a one-night stay in a three-star establishment on the water. I
never went swimming. When I woke up the next morning (at 6am; my first bus was
scheduled to leave the station a little before 7, though transportation
scheduling is never quite either an obligation or a guarantee of anything in
Italy), the front desk had called me a cab, and by the time I checked out, my
driver had already loaded up my luggage in the trunk of his car.
What
kind of woman was I, he wanted to know? He only asked because I seemed young –
too young to be traveling on my own. He liked my earrings, he mentioned, and
the grace with which I wore them. They had been a compensatory purchase in Brindisi,
intended with their platinum sparkle to make up for the severe lack of joy the
city had brought me. Two silver balls dangled comfortably from their
rectangular nestle dripping down from my earlobes like swinging pendulums.
Italians appreciate simplicity and geometry: years earlier, a casual white
dress plumed with an ad-hoc green pattern had served me well all summer long;
did I like Pucci? He might like me, they observed.
Anyway,
I seemed young, said my cab driver, Cosimo. And from his middle-aged
perspective, he might be right to say so. I didn’t mind. Happiness was a date
of birth in the early 80s, or so I was later told. He took his duty (as an
Italian male of any age) of catering to me very seriously: we arrived at the
station early and rather than leaving me there to fend for myself, he took me
on a guided tour of the village, complete with commentary.
There was more to hear than to see.
Policoro is generically scenic, but otherwise unremarkable when compared with Italy’s
conventional “best.” But Cosimo spoke amorously of his hometown with pride. He
was giving me his land and, in those thirty minutes, his beating heart.
Italians are nothing if not generous with their love.
“Did you know that there are Sannite
ruins in this part of Italy?”
I knew, but it seemed rude to say
so. I held my tongue as we stepped out of the car and onto the rural path that
led to what were once domestic buildings, now a few piles of decadent stone.
“This is an ancient holding. You
must have seen it coming out of the station yesterday, it’s just nearby.”
I felt guilty for not having
noticed it sooner. It was not particularly impressive, but Cosimo was convinced
of its exceptional beauty. He motioned to a short brick wall a few feet shy of
the car, and shifted gears as we took our seats there for a moment, breathing
in the early morning air.
“Do you like it here?” he asked. “I have never been married, but this place is as close to my
heart as a wife would be. I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him
that “my stay” consisted of one night’s 5-hour sleep at a hotel fifteen minutes
away that I neither had the opportunity to explore, nor to leave temporarily.
So I told him I wished I’d had the chance to stay longer. It didn’t feel like
lying.
“If you ever return – and I hope
you do, and I think you should – you should let me take you to an
olive-pressing demonstration at one of our olive oil factories. You were saying
earlier that you like Tuscan olive oil, right?”
Right. I did. I still do.
“I think you’ll love our olive oil.
It has a different taste, it’s not as bitter. Some say it’s a little heavier,
but it makes the best savoury pastries I’ve ever had. Have you had taralli?
They’re traditionally from Puglia, but we make them here as well. Those are
made with olive oil.”
It’s hard to say now whether I had
already known that bit of information then, having read it on a package of the savoury
looped cookies my mother routinely purchased at our Italian bakery back home. I
liked to read food labels; nutritional information brought me closer to the
ingredients I was eating, so I appreciated my driver’s inclusion of what he
couldn’t know was, to me, a particularly familiar detail. Perhaps it, or
perhaps the warm wrinkles around his soft and kind eyes, or Policoro’s relative
geographical proximity to my father’s Molisan village infused me with a sense
of nostalgia I couldn’t understand: I’d never been here before. Most likely,
I’d never be here again. Yet in this one instant, as the sun steadily lifted
its rosy head over the station and shook out its golden locks over Cosimo and
me wandering along the southern Italian countryside, I felt at home.
“Last summer, I took a lady on a
tour of our vineyards,” he said, climbing back into the car. “She was visiting,
just like you, and she was also alone. Well, she was a lady of a certain age …
closer to mine than to yours. I think she’d seen her share of company over the
years, and was glad to hoof it on her own. Still, she was happy to share some
of her stay with me. I took her to my favourite spots, and she e-mailed me when
she got home, just to thank me. She said she might come back this year or
next.”
I wasn’t surprised. Cosimo seemed
to me a thorough and attentive host, as most lonely people are. I understood
the condition of being alone as a peaceful one, though not unambiguously. Being
– and, perhaps more importantly, traveling - alone is the freedom to plan your
life by the minute or not at all. It means having the liberty to seek out a
deserted solarium on the outskirts of a remote fishing village and taking the
risk of diving into the agitated waters before it without the constricting
warning of a cautious voice. It means sharing every moment only with nature,
and experiencing a heightened sense of objective (if personalized) reality. But
it also means living many restless moments in the company only of your own
thoughts – good or bad. It means accomplishing great feats of courage and
resourcefulness without celebration or external validation. It means that the
only thing separating you from the friendship of another person is a fleeting
conversation – on a moonlit shore, on a highway lined with plane trees, on a
hike to the summit of a long-coveted mountain – that instantly brings you
together in some way that soon becomes clear to both of you. Loneliness is an
easy opportunity for human connection at even the slightest sign of its potential.
Cosimo got it.
He was telling me something but, my
glance drifting somewhere (or nowhere) in the distance and my mind with it, I
hadn’t heard him.
“If you’d like,” he repeated, “I’ll leave you my card, so that if you
come back here next year or the year after, I can take you on that tour. It
would truly be my pleasure. There’s my e-mail address and my telephone number
right there.”
It struck me as strange and a
little funny that a taxi driver should have his own business cards. Still, I
watched him as he pulled out a small stack from the old brown leather wallet he
kept under the dash of his car and handed it to me tentatively. I thanked him
with a smile and a handshake that seemed entirely too formal: in our short time
together, Cosimo had revealed himself to be a comrade and an ally, a voice in
the ongoing musical composition of my voyage.
Thinking back, he may have been my favourite
part of Basilicata.
I climbed out of his cab and
thanked him again as he handed me my luggage, pulling it out from the trunk
where he had strapped it down with care. Would I be okay bringing this up to
the bus? I would, I assured him. I had done it before, many times. He smiled
and got back into the driver’s seat, but didn’t move from there: Cosimo watched
me walk to the bus stop, board with my bags, and settle in. I saw his car sit
motionless across the street from the station as the bus prepared to leave, and
in the window behind me, watched him follow us until the road forked and his
next caller took him in a different direction.
I missed him on the bus in to
Paola, although, with Daniele Silvestri (or was it Gianmaria Testa?) blaring in
my ears from my even then obsolete iPod, I almost didn’t have the opportunity
to. Cleaning out my wallet that night of recently acquired receipts and other
trinkets, I found Cosimo’s card. I put it away somewhere I told myself I’d find
it, somewhere important. I’m not sure where it is.
