CALABRIA runs about 150 miles from north to south, and she is only 25 miles wide at her narrowest point. Looking at Calabria on a map, you search for the bold letters that indicate a city of moderate size. You see masses of brown and green in the center. Your eyes immediately scan the east coast. The first city you see is Catanzaro, Calabria’s capital. Just above lies Crotone. Your eyes move southwest across the peninsula to Vibo Valentia, then down to Reggio di Calabria. With one last glance to the north, your eyes settle on Cosenza, which is buried in the mountains. That’s it: five cities. The rest of the map is spotted with villages marked in fine print. You get the feeling that in the ages that Calabria could have been settled, there was little to draw people—that Calabria has remained the same since the landmasses formed.I would love to get high enough to see an aerial view of Calabria. Maybe the mountain range would resemble the spiny back of a long-extinct creature; Gimigliano would lie just about in the middle and just to the east.
Two mountain ranges fall south of Gimigliano: the Le Serre
Mountains and, at the land’s end, the Aspromonte range. North of Gimigliano are the Sila massif and the Pollino mountain range, which separates Calabria from its neighbor, Basilicata, and from the rest of Italy.
The Sila massif is divided into three sections and is one of Italy’s largest, least-settled areas. Most of the Sila has now been designated a national preserve. Gimigliano clings to the southernmost section of the range, the Sila Piccola. Beyond, and much more remote, lie the Sila Grande and the Sila Greca, named for its many Greek Orthodox Albanian communities.
In the center of the Sila Piccola, deep in its folds and crevices, lies Taverna, known throughout Calabria as the birthplace of her most famous artist, seventeenth-century painter Mattia Preti.
Although it is just twenty miles from Catanzaro and fifteen from Gimigliano, Taverna is reached only after an hourlong drive along nauseatingly winding roads—especially when Giuseppe takes his scorciatoia. “You see, the average driver would drive to Catanzaro, then take the newly built autostrada to Taverna, but from Gimigliano, that adds another half hour,” Giuseppe said, explaining his shortcut. “I’ve traveled these roads since I was a kid; they aren’t on any map.”
Recollecting, he went on: “When I was about twenty years old, I had an old Fiat. A friend and I were driving fast on these roads … right about here,” he said, pointing to a curve, where the road fell off thirty feet or so.
“Back then, not many people had cars, and these roads were originally cut out of the mountainside for mules and two-wheeled carriages. And, Marco, I went off the road, we rolled and rolled, then suddenly the car stopped. A big olive tree had stopped us from a sheer drop. We both crawled out and walked the rest of the way home,” Giuseppe said.
We had come to a plateau, where half-finished buildings dotted the ridge: light brown walls, four or five stories high, protruding from the deforested land.
“This was going to be a hotel,” Giuseppe said. “Ten years ago
they were going to develop a resort. But the owner took the money and left.”
“Mafia?” I asked.
“Who knows? Everything’s mafia, but in this case, I think it was the promise of damming one of the rivers and building a lake resort.”
Along the way patches of cleared land broke the otherwise dense forest. On a few of these patches of land stood more abandoned construction; the state had given the owners money to build here, pledging to create a tourist site to attract business.
“But nothing has ever happened,” Giuseppe said. “They live with the promise of construction, but money is slow in coming, and progress is slow here, as it is throughout Italy.”
To me, these were like the empty promises from the north, where industrialists pledged to open car and gun factories throughout Calabria to boost employment.
Once we passed the decaying hotel along the ridge, we could see the valley crevice within the trees and folds of the dark green mountain. Within a deep valley lies Taverna, which is like schist; the hard, unassuming outside hides its center crystals.
The road gradually narrowed until we came to the village of Sorbo, where the houses crept right up to the road, making it too tight for more than one car to go through. The road, and village, dropped precipitously, and it seemed that the unwritten code was that cars heading up had the right-of-way. With each car that approached, Giuseppe pulled his Fiat up on the sidewalk or squeezed into any nook or cut in the buildings that was available.
The rules changed at a hairpin curve, after which the road plummeted even farther into the valley. As far as I could tell, whoever approached this point first had the right-of-way, meaning that the car in the opposite direction—as well as every car behind it—had to back up. I’m sure that it wasn’t mere coincidence that the town’s only café stood at this point. The Italian lover of spectacle would find an endless source of entertainment here, watching—and wagering, I imagined—which car would make it through first and which
would be forced to back off. Wool-capped and tweed-jacketed men took their front-row seats, sipping their anisette-enhanced coffee.
Once in Taverna, Giuseppe parked directly in front of a store similar to his, and we went in. The walls were stacked with toys, and behind the counter were shelves of stationery—and a photocopy machine.
“Pino!” the owner exclaimed, using Giuseppe’s nickname. “Come va?” He was about six feet tall, with neatly trimmed thinning hair. He wore a tailored tweed jacket and a fashionably wide silk tie. He was light-complexioned, with a prominent nose.
Giuseppe introduced us—his name was Walter d’Aquino—and told him that I was writing a book about Calabria.
“Ah, very good,” the man said. “And I can see that you hurried to Taverna, I’m sure, to see the birthplace of Mattia Preti.”
We hadn’t gotten there yet, but I nodded, realizing how pleased and surprised he was to have a visitor to the village.
D’Aquino disappeared behind the counter, then emerged with brochures and two paperback books about Mattia Preti, about the church where his work is hung and the modern museum that, because of Preti, has drawn funding to show the work of living artists.
“So your name is Rotella?” d’Aquino asked. “Any relation to the artist Mimmo Rotella? We held an exhibit of his work here in 1990.”
I told him I wasn’t, but I knew of the artist who had made his name in the politically tumultuous 1960s with collages made of torn posters. Mimmo Rotella grew up in Catanzaro, then moved to Rome, where he still lives. He was part of the New Realist movement whose artists incorporated the time’s icons and pop culture themes into their work.
After a while Giuseppe turned the conversation to business. Walter, impressed by Giuseppe’s postcards, agreed to carry more. Walter looked at his watch and suggested we rush to the church before it closed to see Mattia Preti’s paintings.
All the while I had been curious how my guide had got such a German-sounding first name. Now I asked him: was his family from the north?
He smiled. “No, no, we are from here originally, but during the war my father, who was stationed near Naples, met an American soldier. They became close friends, and he gave me his friend’s name.”
The twelfth-century Chiesa di San Domenico dead-ends a street. Alongside it is a row of eighteenth-century buildings, the baron’s palazzo. The windows face the promenade, offering a glorious view of the rest of the village of three thousand people, the valley, and the Ionian Sea in the distance.
At one time Taverna was located on the sea, halfway between the settlements of Squillace and Crotone, but the village was destroyed by Saracen invaders in the tenth century. Like many other seaside villages, it was rebuilt inland. By the fifteenth century Taverna was thriving again, this time as a stopover for merchant travelers between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas.
D’Aquino directed Giuseppe and me inside the church. The interior was light yellow stucco, with white-and-gold trim. I first noticed a statue to the right, the Madonna Addolorata holding the dead Christ on her knees. The Madonna gazes at her dead son’s hand. Hers is not a beatific expression, but that of a defeated Calabrese mother who has not yet accepted her son’s death. Looking at the hole where the nails had been driven, she seems to say, “How could they have done this to my boy?”
The left side of the church was lined with Mattia Preti paintings. Because it was Easter week, the lights had been turned off the paintings to draw the focus to a statue above the altar of the crucified Christ. There was just enough sunlight filtering through the stained glass to get a good look at Preti’s paintings.
Painting in the latter part of the 1600s, Preti, known as the Cavaliere Calabrese, the Calabrese knight, was part of the Neapolitan school, and the almost impossible realism of his work is reminiscent of Caravaggio. The largest painting, Cristo Fulminante, pictures an angry Christ against a blaze of orange throwing down lightning bolts from gray clouds; the Virgin Mary is next to him, almost pleading
with him to stop. The next painting shows the sermon of John the Baptist, who, set against dark cave walls, has a burnt red robe draped over him. Preti has painted himself at the bottom, ironically smirking back at the observer. Perhaps the most famous of his paintings is displayed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It’s a portrait of himself wearing the costume of a Knight of Malta; he lived and worked for many years on the island of Malta, where he died in 1699.
On the way out of the church, Giuseppe ran into yet another business associate, a tall, soft-featured man named Rinaldo Veraldi, the owner of one of the card stores that lined the main street, two blocks down from Walter.
“Do you get many tourists?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, then muttered, “but they are mostly schoolkids from Calabria and Sicily.”
I asked him if he was from Taverna originally. He nodded and pointed to the palazzo behind us. “This is my family’s. My distant grandfather, Cesare, who was at one time the baron, bought this in 1771. We are descended from the Normans. And this place has been in our family since then. Would you like to see?”
“I’d love to,” I said, and looked at Giuseppe, who was clearly eager to talk business.
“I’ve never been in,” Giuseppe said, giving up on the business prospect. “It would be a pleasure to see inside.”
We faced two garage-size doors made of chestnut. A small door, just tall enough for a single person to duck through, was built into one of the larger doors. Rinaldo directed us through it and into a cavernous stone carriage house, then through a back door to a garden. The decrepit palazzo walls surrounded us.
“I apologize about the state of the place,” Rinaldo said, pausing before we ascended the wide marble stairs. “But restoration costs so much money, especially if you want to do it right.”
He walked us through bedrooms and living rooms that hadn’t seen a paintbrush in at least two centuries.
“This was my grandmother’s room, until she died a few years ago.” The bedroom had twelve-foot ceilings and was as wide as a village block. The room dwarfed its contents: a bed, a painting of
the Virgin Mary above it, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, and a prie-dieu. Frescoes on the ceiling, damaged by water and humidity, had peeled off and hung in strips.
“My wife and our children live in the next part of the palazzo. It’s completely redone with modern fixtures,” Rinaldo explained, pointing to a door beyond which I could hear a television and smell peppers sauteing.
He led us back outside. The bottom corner housed a very modern store, with bright lights and neatly stocked shelves.
“Oh, yes,” Rinaldo said, noticing where I was looking. “That’s my other store. It’s for baby supplies as well as for geriatrics. The new and the old.”