AN ARAGONESE CASTLE tops the dense mountain village of Corigliano Calabro. Almost forty thousand people live along the coast and within this remote city, which seems to have been affected very little by the earthquakes that have continually ravaged the rest of Calabria. Douglas’s “little town … whose coquettish white houses lie in the folds of the hills” is amazingly well preserved, though many of these houses lie empty.Giuseppe and I walked up the sinewy cobblestone roads. He led, proceeding at a relaxed stroll, hands locked behind his back; he nodded at passersby and surveyed the building fronts, most of which were closed with heavy medieval-looking wood doors.
He looked at his watch. “He must have gone home.”
“Who?”
“A friend. An old friend. We’ll return tomorrow morning.”
The air chilled in the early evening. As shopkeepers pulled their heavy wooden doors shut, the streets grew crowded with villagers on their way home for supper. This was the time of the spassiaturu, dialect for passeggiata.
Every city, town, and village in Italy has an unstated but universally
understood time during which the entire population emerges from their houses in their evening best. No one discusses it; no one makes appointments to meet anyone; they all just converge to find one another out on the street.
The road led directly up to the front of the castle, but Giuseppe knew a shortcut that would take us straight in. We skirted the castle wall, which was a continuation of the sharp cliff. The drop would bring you nearly to sea level.
“Look.” He slapped the side of the stone wall. “Tufo. Even here. Tufo.”
We turned to face the sixteenth-century castle and, next to it, the Byzantine Chiesa di San Pietro. To the right was a single doorway—Giuseppe’s “direct” way in. Leading off from that corner of the church was an enclosed portico with small openings at eye level; this tunnel of sorts ended at the castle wall, where stairs then led down below the courtyard. Through one of the openings, Giuseppe pointed to a doorway leading from the church. “The bride went through that doorway,” Giuseppe said.
“To the castle?”
“First night,” Giuseppe said, then added: “The duke had the right to spend the wedding night with any bride in the village.”
Giuseppe must have seen the dubious look on my face. “It happened as recently as a hundred years ago. Really. The man came out alone. The bride never even made it out of the church.”
The sun dropped as we walked up stairs cut into the mountainside. We came out with our backs to the castle, facing the piazza, which was packed with cars. Drivers maneuvered, inching back and forth, trying to get out of tight spots and home in time for dinner, which they would never miss or be late for. I realized that I hadn’t had anything since that panino near Crotone, and I hoped that we would eat soon, too.
Giuseppe and I were staying in a hotel outside Rossano, a half hour away. Our rooms, down the hall from each other, were spare; the check-in counter also served as a bar, cigarette and newspaper shop, and cashier for a pizzeria down a narrow hallway.
Dinner was in a room the size of a small banquet hall. Only two
of the fifteen or so tables were occupied. A man sat alone eating a bowl of spaghetti, and four men sat at one curve of a large round table, oddly close together. As Giuseppe and I took our seats, I saw why: a television was suspended over the kitchen doorway, playing the news, and tables were placed so a patron could watch while he ate.
I always thought of the Italian evening meal as a time for conversation. But in villages like this in Calabria, where virtually everyone returns home at lunch for the family meal, the evening meal is a time to relax and be entertained, whether at home or in a trattoria.
I ordered a bottle of red wine, fatto in casa, and a pizza quattro stagione, which when it arrived was the perfect blend of artichokes, porcini mushrooms, whole olives, and spicy soppressata on a lightly cheesed, thin-crusted dough. The drone of the newsperson bounced off the concrete walls and floor, a lonely sound in the big room. Our evening in Rossano ended with the meal.
In Corigliano Calabro the next morning, we parked in front of the same heavy wood doors and began our stroll back up the same steep road. It was nine o’clock, and within fifteen minutes the streets filled with mothers and children, shopkeepers and artisans. Giuseppe and I stood in the middle of the cobblestone road like a rock in the middle of a shallow stream of people. People nodded hello. Giuseppe looked at me and nodded toward something ahead.
Walking with perfect balance and placement of footsteps, a tiny man negotiated the curb. He wore a snap-brim cap and rose-tinted glasses. Giuseppe approached; the man glanced up and smiled shyly; Giuseppe put his hands on his waist indignantly. Now the man broke into a grin.
“Pino! Come va?” he called out to Giuseppe.
Giuseppe introduced me, and the man, who stood as high as my chest, took my hand with both of his. “Piacere,” he said—it’s a pleasure—looking at me with crossed eyes behind the rose shades, his large smile revealing a single tooth clinging to the top front gum.
Antonio Bellitto was the fabbro, or village metalworker. Inside the
shop’s sixteenth-century wooden doors, tin colanders and copper funnels of all sizes hung on rusty nails. Sheets of copper were neatly piled on shelves. Three or four pictures of the Virgin Mary and the saints hung from the racks.
Antonio’s tools included hefty metal-cutting scissors, a knife, a shoehorn, a hammer, pliers, and a blowtorch. He went to work, and Giuseppe and I looked on. With a knife he cut out a pattern in a piece of aluminum. His hands deftly rolled the piece into a cone. He soldered the ends and curved the rims with heat. He then added a heavy metal handle. He had formed a basic funnel, the way funnels had no doubt been made for centuries. He set it aside to let it cool.
Giuseppe presented Antonio with the map of Calabria that he had designed. Antonio looked over the map, his eyes following the roads, mountains, and coast. He pointed out cities that Giuseppe had marked with apt local symbols; with his finger, he followed the road from the coast to mountains and stopped at the image of the Castello Compagno, which crested his city.
“Va bene,” he said. “Bellissima. Ah, ecco Rossano.”
“We’re going there soon,” Giuseppe said, and winked at me. “Una città molta antica.” Then he told Antonio that the map was a gift to him.
“No, I can’t,” Antonio said. But he soon relented. He folded the map neatly and lightly placed it on a far shelf. He then pulled down two funnels and wrapped them in newspaper. He offered them to Giuseppe.
“Nino, I couldn’t,” Giuseppe said, and sighed.
Antonio forced them into his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” Antonio said. He picked up another funnel, wrapped it, and handed it to me. “It’s simple, but it’s a gift from Corigliano.”
“Grazie tanto,” I said.
The cool metal heft of the funnel was satisfying to the touch. This was not molded plastic; it was simply made, but there was nothing cheap about it.
“Maybe he’ll write about you,” Giuseppe said.
“About me?” Antonio said with a hopeful lilt in his voice. “No, I’m just an artisan. He can write about the castle, but no, not me.”
Now he took the funnel out of my hand. “Too small,” he explained, and searched his shop, which wasn’t much bigger than a hallway. “No, I don’t have much today,” he said, then took down a second funnel. “Take two, it’s nothing.”
I nodded, but it was something. The funnel—the raw copper and the silver solder—was more beautiful than even the most ornately painted ceramics of Tuscany. While Italy is full of specialized artisans, I have rarely seen as many as I did in Calabria. In northern Italy, mass-produced products are filling the shelves as in the rest of Western Europe and America, but in Calabria handmade goods—the stuff that Americans pay a premium for—are still less expensive than the stuff made in factories, and far more satisfying as well.
Rossano perfectly tops a mountain plateau, which seems to have been thrust up from the ground separated from rolling hills leading up to it, a mountain city that hangs in the clouds by itself. Fig and almond trees spread out from the base of the red mountain, but one’s eye trains to the top of the plateau, where the red gradually lightens, and falls on the sand-colored Chiesa di San Marco from the sixth century, one of the Byzantine treasures of southern Italy.
Giuseppe stopped the car in front of the archbishop’s palace, which houses the diocesan museum, the proud keeper of the Codex Purpureus, or the Purple Codex. This sixth-century manuscript is a copy of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark. Of the 400 original pages, only 188 pages remain.
I waited in the car while Giuseppe approached a stern-looking man standing by the door, which was closed. There were shrugs and pointed fingers. Then the man began what seemed to be a windy monologue.
Giuseppe walked back to me, rubbing his hands together. “Marco, it’s really difficult to understand them. The dialect is so strange. Even for me. And I’m sorry, but the church and palace seem to be undergoing renovations—renovations that should have been done for the jubilee. So we can’t see the Archiropita today.”
Not wanting to admit defeat, he smiled and said, “Ritorniamo.”
We’ll return. For the Calabresi, it could be tomorrow, it could be five years from now, but we’ll return.
The road leading out of the city was clogged with traffic. Boys and men of an indeterminate age came up to the cars stopped at lights, hawking batteries and cheap toys. Some offered to clean windshields. Their teeth were marred by dark stains.
“Marocchini,” Giuseppe said. There was no judgment in his voice; he was just pointing out another aspect of Calabria. The Arabs were returning to Italy, and their first stops were Sicily and Calabria. Like the newly emigrated Albanians, the Moroccans were subjected to xenophobic prejudices.
Soon the traffic thinned out. The aroma of blossoming clementine flowers wafted through the open windows of the car. Far beyond the North African merchants and the fields of mandarins and clementines, the snow-spotted, sharp-peaked Pollino Mountains cut into the clouds. They signify the end of Calabria to the north and the beginning of Basilicata. Here Cerchiara di Calabria, our northernmost destination, is nestled within the mountains.