“YOU CAN TELL which city is controlled by the mafia,” Giuseppe said. We were driving past Bianco, a small, decrepit city on the way up the coast to Locri. “Everything is falling apart; everything is abandoned.”We were returning from far south on the Ionian coast, almost to the point where the coast rounds back up to Reggio, facing Sicily to the west, then joins the Tyrrhenian Sea. The cities here are known for sequestering, or kidnappings, and while we were only two or three hours from Gimigliano, it felt like a different world.
“The mafia moves in, they open a restaurant or a store that competes with others in the city,” Giuseppe explained. “They lower their prices so far down that the other companies lose money, then go out of business. All that is left is the one restaurant that doesn’t provide good service. Any money they make is siphoned off by the mafia, and only people in the mafia work there.”
We passed through the town of Bovalino, which looked abandoned and run-down. But even on our brief traverse I counted eight Land Rovers and Ford Explorers.
Giuseppe pointed to the west. “It’s a different world in those
mountains. A different people.” He paused. “At one time the name alone made Italy wince. Aspromonte.”
Dark and rocky, the distant mountains even looked eerie. Sharply rising granite cliffs dissuaded any thought of travel through them. The absence of greenery made them look like lunar terrain. This was where, beginning in the 1970s, the mafia began taking people it had kidnapped and holding them for ransom. First it preyed on wealthy local citizens, but soon it realized that more money could be made from wealthy northerners. Before long, the kidnappings took on the regularity and smoothness of any other business transaction.
Then the police got involved. Once it was known that someone’s son or wife was kidnapped, the government would freeze the family’s bank accounts to prevent money from going into the hands of the mafia. But leads on the culprits were weak, and no one spoke out. The code of silence, omertà, would not be cracked in Calabria.
When weeks and months passed without a break in the case, family members, desperate to free their loved ones, would borrow from friends, colleagues, distant cousins. Villages would quietly take up donations until the family could pay to have its son or daughter returned. And the police would still be looking under the rocks of the Aspromonte.
When police intervention prolonged the process, the mafia resorted to more drastic tactics. In July 1973, American billionaire J. Paul Getty, who was living in Rome at the time, received a letter with a ransom demand of seventeen million dollars for the return of his seventeen-year-old son, Eugene Paul II. At first the older Getty refused to pay as a matter of principle. Five months later the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero received a box with a lock of hair and a severed human ear as well as a note saying that unless the ransom was paid, Getty’s son would be returned piece by piece. Getty paid what was thought to be about two million dollars, and his son was returned. The last reported kidnapping had occurred a few years before my trip. That time the police had found the victim after he had been held for a year and fed only every other day
“You’re wondering how they got away with this?” Giuseppe asked, seeing my mouth hanging open. The mafia preys on the
poor, he explained. “If you don’t have money, you’ll do anything. Only shepherds and farmers live in that region. The mafia hides the person with the help of locals. They offer a solid amount of money that no one can turn down.”
He paused. “There are so many caves up there. There are no roads—only trails made by humans and mules. Nothing else. Anyway, they pay each shepherd or farmer to take a captive to a certain point, and then they pay someone else to pick up that person and lead him to another point. Then they pay another person. The last person is in charge of feeding the captive, and how much the captive eats depends on how generous, or humane, that person is.”
We drove on in silence. “Also, it’s a different culture there,” Giuseppe said. “The people live in remote villages, only one road in. A few of them speak Greek …
“But that hasn’t happened for a while,” Giuseppe said.
We pulled into the village of Roccella Ionica. I slipped away while Giuseppe was meeting with one of his clients and went to sit in a small grassy park overlooking the Ionian Sea. A train track separated the park from the rest of the town, and in the center of the park two Roman columns rose against the backdrop of ugly 1980s apartment buildings.
I sat facing the ocean, with the sun burning my face and my notebook on my lap. I had noticed a teenage boy circling me, then leaning against the railings facing the beach. He walked over to me.
“What are you doing?” he said, sitting down next to me. Pimples spotted his face, and his teeth had bands for braces but no wires. His dirty hands were as dark and oily as his spiked hair.
“Just writing. Noting what I see.”
“Where are you from?”
“Where do you think?”
“Torino?”
I shook my head.
“Milan?”
“No,” I said. “New York.”
He paused and looked me over. “My uncle lives in Brooklyn.”
“Oh, what does he do?”
“He owns a restaurant,” he said. Then he turned to look somewhere behind me.
“I used to live in Brooklyn,” I said.
“His name is Mimmo Metici,” he said, looking behind me again. Bells rang behind us as the gates lowered across the tracks, closing us off from the rest of the city. “Tell him his cousin Aldo … of Italy … said hello.”
I wrote his name on a blank page of my notebook.
He looked behind himself as if he were searching for something.
I decided that it was time to start heading back, and when I stood up, he stood up with me.
“Can I have that?” he said, pointing to my notebook.
“Why do you want my notebook?”
“No, the page that you wrote on.”
I eyed him. He looked nervous.
“Sure, here you go,” I said, and tore out the paper from my notebook.
“Thanks,” he said, crumpling the paper and putting it into his jacket. “Just tell him Aldo said hello.” He ran off past the park and behind a building on a side road. I got to the gate in time to see him hop on the back of a moped behind another boy who had the same hairstyle. They sped by me and over the tracks. In a land where suspicion bubbles, this greasy kid was just as curious about me as I was about him. But here, it seemed, curiosity could get you in trouble.
Giuseppe and I were traveling along the Ionian Sea of Calabria by the same route Aeneas took on his journey from Greece. From the sea he saw the columns of Caulonia and the city of Scylaceum, or Squillace. But he steered clear of this city, knowing that harsh winds and rain wrecked ships when they sailed too close.
Soon then we saw Tarentum’s gulf, or Hercules’
If the old tale be true. There, dead ahead,
Rose the Lacinian goddess on her height.
Then Caulon’s towers and Scylaceum,
The coast of shipwreck.
If the old tale be true. There, dead ahead,
Rose the Lacinian goddess on her height.
Then Caulon’s towers and Scylaceum,
The coast of shipwreck.
The Greeks who settled the city called it Skylletion. Aeneas desperately wanted to leave the Calabrian coast, which he cursed:
The shoreline to the west, a part of Italy
Lapped by the tide of our own sea: the towns
Are all inhabited by evil Greeks.
Here the Locrians found a colony
And Lyctian Idomeneus with soldiers
Took the Sallentine Plain …
Lapped by the tide of our own sea: the towns
Are all inhabited by evil Greeks.
Here the Locrians found a colony
And Lyctian Idomeneus with soldiers
Took the Sallentine Plain …
From the vantage point of a Norman castle above the city of Squillace, I looked out toward the sea. The sky was clear, and the ocean remarkably blue with gentle waves. Just up from the shore stood the Guglielmo coffee company, which supplied its full dark ground coffee throughout Calabria. When it roasted the beans, imported from Africa or South America, the winds carried the scent all the way up here. Farther above us were the remains of a Norman castle, which had been leveled in the earthquake of 1783. The outside walls were all that was left standing.
Squillace is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Cassiodorus (480–575), a poet and secretary to the Byzantine emperor Theodoric the Ostrogoth. An aristocrat, Cassiodorus rose through the ranks to become an important statesman before retiring to Squillace, where he built a monastery whose monks devoted themselves to copying and preserving important books and papers of philosophy, theology, and science.
Giuseppe and I ate at a local trattoria. It served penne with tomato sauce, along with fava beans cooked in a pot and garnished with pecorino and bread crumbs. The beans gave a slight crunch when you bit in, then a fusion of the warm soft middle and the cheese. We ate fraguni, too, a kind of calzone filled with ricotta cheese, egg, and parsley.
After lunch Giuseppe and I walked down the narrow streets, which were clean and empty of cars and people. We passed a small bar in what had once been called the Quartiere de Giudei, or Jewish Quarter, which centuries before had housed a small but thriving population of Byzantine Jews who lived on the Ionian Sea. We walked past a shop that made and sold pottery Giuseppe checked the door, but it was locked. We passed another pottery shop, also closed, and then reached another. The door was cracked open. We walked in to find a large room stocked with various pots, bowls, and platters. Along the wall hung tiles and ceramic fish.
“Hello. Can I help you?” a voice asked from behind a door. A young man came out. He had longish hair and was tall and thin.
Giuseppe introduced himself and then me. The man offered to take us up to his workroom and show us how he threw clay
The potter used machines that had to be pedaled with the feet, and clay only from that region. Like the artisans in Umbria, these potters painted their pottery with only those colors that were traditionally used. In the same way that the pottery of Deruta (the town in Umbria famous for its pottery) is yellow and green, with bold red, which reflects its terrain (yellow sunflowers, reddish earth), the pottery in Squillace reflects the color of its surroundings. The potters incorporate the bright blue of the sea, the green and yellow of the fish. The base color was a light red, almost pink. The colors are not as bold as those in Umbria, and the lines not as sharp, tending to fade into one another. A pink might blend gradually with a faint green outline.
As had the women weavers in Gimigliano, these potters had formed a pottery guild. Where there wasn’t industry, the Calabresi put to use the work they knew While the artisans might have been able to earn a better living in the north, they chose to stay here in Calabria to make a living doing what they loved.
Giuseppe was thrilled to come across this potter. He knew that he could sell the potter’s handiwork at his store in Gimigliano. The man was excited at the prospect as well and gave Giuseppe samples of his work. Giuseppe said he would call to work out a price. When
I next visited Giuseppe in Gimigliano two months later, he already had two shelves stocked with the potter’s work.
Calabria held for me the prospect of handmade goods, of a simple lifestyle, but along with this rustic living came an antiquated criminal organization that prospered in the rugged mountains—mountains that are inhabited by people who hold the same beliefs and fears as they had in the nineteenth century. Here I was in Italy, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, yet I was wandering in a region so remote, so forbidding, that at times I could hardly believe it was the same country.