THERE IS NOTHING ROMANTIC ABOUT THE NAME. Calabria. It sounds like a threat, a curse. The hard c dances on the sharp l before smacking you with its rolling one-two punch of the b and r. The name lacks the worldliness of Roma, the sophistication of Firenze, the medieval grace of Bologna, the fluidity of Emilia-Romana, the complexity of Venezia.Calabria. It sounds like the name of a hard-lived whore, a prostitute in a Fellini film who has given everything she has except her protective, tough shell.
Calabria. The Byzantine Greeks named her—from the hyphenated term kalos-bruo, which means “fertile earth.” Fecund she is, but her history is long and unglorified. The Italic tribe native to Calabria, the Bruttians, warmed to the benevolent Greeks when they arrived and began colonizing her in the eighth century B.C. The Greeks founded the cities of Locri, Sibari, Crotone, and Reggio. They brought with them figs, olives, grapes, and written laws.
It was around the fifth century B.C., with the rise of the Roman Empire, that Calabria’s love affair with the Greeks came to an end.
The Romans, growing stronger, pushed the Etruscan and Samnite tribes from Tuscany and Campania farther south. The Samnites invaded the Greek colonies. The Romans, eyeing Calabria for her land and potential trade routes, followed the Samnites, engaging them in a series of wars that began around 343 B.C. and lasted about fifty years, ending in a Roman victory—with Calabria as a nice piece of ass. The Greeks had given the Bruttians and Bruttium, or Calabria, a taste of sweetness, a sense of glory that they would not feel again for the next two thousand years. Calabria would be known as that hunk of land between Naples and Sicily, a land grab for all who entered her.
Calabria, surrounded by ocean on three sides and mountains on the fourth, was isolated and in need of company. She opened her arms to Hannibal and his Carthaginians, who fled from Campania to Calabria after the Romans defeated them in the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to 201 B.C. The Romans chased Hannibal out of Calabria’s bed, while she, in turn, embraced the Romans once again. Rome flourished, and Calabria offered up her fruit, vegetables, and forests, which fed, fueled, and fortified the Roman Empire.
But in time Rome’s contentment led to its decline, and by the sixth century A.D. southern Italy had fallen under Byzantine rule. Calabria once again succumbed to the powers of these new Greeks, and during this time many of her cities, such as Rossano and Stilo, grew wealthy. But within four hundred years the romance would end when she was invaded by the Saracens, or Arabs, who had already taken Sicily. They ravaged Calabria and, in payment, tossed at her feet eggplants and peppers.
During these Arab invasions, the Calabresi—a people in which Bruttian, Greek, and Roman blood now mingled—retreated to the mountains for protection from invaders. The Byzantines and Saracens fought over Calabria, taking advantage of her at every step, until the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard and his nephew Roger II, conquered it in A.D. 1053. Hoping to centralize power—and tame the wild and fickle Calabria—they introduced the feudal system. Under the Normans, the Kingdom of Sicily—which stretched from Naples and the Abruzzi south through present-day Apulia, Basilicata,
and Calabria to Sicily—was formed, and the Arabic, Greek, Bruttian, and Roman cultures were brought under one, so to speak, roof.
Frederick of Swabia gained rule in 1197, and while he tried bringing law and order to his kingdom during his reign, he also levied heavy taxes to pay for this extra attention. From 1261, beginning with Charles of Anjou, until 1442, the time of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, the Angevins ruled.
While art and thought flourished in northern Italy, the south—under the rule of the House of Aragon and later Ferdinand I—dug deeper in the fields. Calabria was kept down by fist and at knife-point.
For the next three centuries, the French, Spanish, and Austrians battled for a piece of her, knowing with taxes they could make a quick buck off her. Most of the rulers were fly-by-night noblemen, wanting just a taste of honey—a dip of the wick—not even thinking to leave bills by the nightstand. These barons and padrone, having to offer their king increasingly more, became Calabria’s pimps. They took advantage of the feudal system and imposed even heavier taxes. Writhing naked on her dirt floor, Calabria would never feel lower. When she opened her eyes and looked out the window, the sight of oranges, grapes, olives, and the ubiquitous figs, which bear fruit twice a year, kept her going.
In 1713 the Austrians emerged victorious and, indulging their territorial fantasies, changed her name to the Kingdom of Naples (which also included Sicily) and later to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Two decades later the Spanish Bourbons, under Charles of Bourbon and later Ferdinand IV, took control and ruled the kingdom for the next century. Bourbon rule was interrupted in 1808, when Napoleon gained control and placed in the throne his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who imposed legal order by installing the French Civil Code. That ended in 1815 with Murat’s execution and a combined British-Spanish victory over the French.
During Spanish rule the now-hardened Calabria realized she needed to regain her strength. She built up her own internal defenses,
creating her own secret laws enforced by bandits and brigands, the precursors to the mafia.
In 1861 the Bourbon kingdom fell when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army of Red Shirts united Italy under the Sardinian House of Savoy, ruled by King Vittorio Emanuele II. But Garibaldi’s plan for a stronger south was thwarted as the new monarchy continued to take advantage of the south with high taxation. In time, many Calabresi came to believe that the Italian monarch was just another form of foreign rule that would continue to exploit them. Though victorious, Garibaldi felt defeated, knowing that his ideal of a truly united Italy would never be realized. The Risorgimento marked the beginning of the mass exodus to America.
For the next hundred years impoverished Calabria struggled on.
The 1940s saw riots and peasant uprisings as the farmers tried claiming land that had been owned by absentee landlords, good fertile land that had been wasting for centuries. In the 1960s the central government boosted Calabria’s economy with funds called the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, billions of lire for roads and public works. It helped set Calabria on her way While Calabria benefited from this purse, the factories promised by the government—the employers that would have enabled Calabria to survive on her own—never came. Many Italians (both northern and southern) believe that the cassa has helped only superficially, a larger purse for an expensive call girl.
Today southern Italy suffers one of the highest unemployment rates in Western Europe. Drought, earthquakes, sandy soil, antiquated farming methods, corruption, and a distant national government have all played a part in Calabria’s economic suffering. Northern Italians seem to enjoy debating the problem of the Mezzogiorno, any point on the Italian peninsula south of Rome. Can the south be brought up to the efficient standards of the fair-skinned young men in the cafés of Milan, Florence, and Bologna? Northerners believe southerners remain poor because of their own laziness and dependency on a powerful mafia. Meanwhile, Calabria, desperate to bring more money into her home, has awaited the government’s
transfer of industry to the south. But the government’s promises are corrupted by its suspicion that she will sneak in her apron pocket any federal cash that it sends. So far the only market Calabria has found is for her produce. She exports a large share of olives, olive oil, and figs but sees very little monetary return.
Calabria has other problems. The mafia, which had its roots in defending her from foreign exploitation, is still strong. In Naples the government has been able to rein in the criminal Camorra; in Sicily the most extensively and reliably networked organization, the Cosa Nostra, has come under increasingly intense government fire in the past decade. The Sicilians, many of whom broke from their tradition of silence, paid a price for speaking out against the mafia: in the early 1990s, two major crime-fighting judges were assassinated. The people of Calabria, on the other hand, don’t acknowledge their own criminal element, the ’ndrangheta. They prefer to speak about their gardens. They still keep their omertà, their code of silence.
Kalos-bruo is indeed fertile. She has given her peppers, olives, oranges, and figs. But more than food, she has offered her heart and soul, giving the world her sons and daughters. Since the 1880s millions of Calabresi have left the region in hopes of finding work—in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, anywhere.
Few people in North America realize that after Campania and Sicily, the largest group of Italian-Americans trace their lineage to Calabria. Perhaps it is because of the quiet nature of the Calabresi, who are overshadowed by the Siciliani and Napoletani, that little is known about them.
In America, as in Italy, each region of southern Italy has its own reputation, however cliched. The Napoletani: loud and gruff and love to sing. The Siciliani: secret, guarded, and arrogant. The Calabresi: hardheaded but kindhearted. The mere mention of the region causes people to knock their knuckles on their heads and say testa dura, hardheaded. Because the Calabresi are quieter than their southern Italian neighbors, they tend to blend into their environment.
Americans tracing their ancestry brought Calabria into contemporary
consciousness in the late twentieth century. Gay Talese wrote his Calabrese family history in Unto the Sons; Barbara Grizzuti Harrison stopped off in her ancestral Calabrese village while writing Italian Days.
In the last few decades, as the Italian economy has strengthened, Calabria has come to life with the beginnings of her own tourist industry. Now the aged province in Italy, wizened in her experience, may be ready to share her stories.