COSENZA

AT ONE TIME the Busento and Crati rivers rushed through mountain valleys and converged as one. On this spot, Calabria’s indigenous people, the Bruttians, founded Cosenza as their capital. As the Greeks began settling Magna Graecia, they took control of the city from the Bruttians. While building the Appian Way to the north, the Romans wandered down through Calabria, settling around and building up Cosenza. Surrounded by mountains and the two rivers, Cosenza was, and still is, a serenely bucolic peninsula.

After he sacked Rome, Alaric the Visigoth left the city in A.D. 410 for Sicily, where he thought he might retire for good. With a convoy of soldiers to carry his gold and booty, he skirted the Italian coast and cut through the Greek Sila. When he looked down upon magical Cosenza, he immediately fell in love with the place and decided to rest there. His pit stop lasted for months. Alaric probably settled into a place right on the river, where he could be lulled by its powerful currents. But the river was also a bed of malaria-carrying insects, and Alaric probably contracted the disease. Just before he died he ordered that all his possessions be buried at the confluence of the two rivers.

Calabria has a history of diverting the flow of rivers. The city of Sibari was lost for centuries when the people of Crotone diverted the flow of the Crati River. Alaric’s treasures were forgotten for almost a thousand years, until the Middle Ages, when efforts were made to alter the flow of the rivers long enough to recover them. But no one has ever found—or ever admitted to having found—Alaric’s gold and silver.

I took the local train from Gimigliano to Cosenza, a three-and-a-half-hour ride to cover the distance a car could make in an hour and a half. The two-car diesel train cut northwest through the Sila Piccola, passing dense stands of chestnut trees and stopping at villages with such names as Cicala and Castagna—cicada and chestnut. We chugged through farms and fields of sheep until we entered a pass.

On the other side, raindrops speckled the train window, and the landscape was shrouded in mist. We followed a river to the right, and gradually buildings began to appear against the hills beyond. Cosenza is known as the city of five hills.

The train stopped and the conductor announced, “Cosenza Centro.” I got out and walked across the tracks, past the station and through a dirt parking lot. Across a small but busy street I saw a block-wide Victorian building with a sign that read ALBERGO CENTRALE. As I approached the entrance, I pictured a grand hallway with plush, albeit worn, couches on either side. Instead, after my eyes had adjusted to the relative darkness, I saw that there were no lightbulbs in the fixtures and that the hallway leading to the front desk was flanked by couches that looked as if they belonged in a college dorm.

“A room for three nights, please,” I told the attendant. He was probably in his late twenties but had large eyes and a sad face with a downward-turned mouth that made him look ten years older.

He flipped back and forth between three or four pages of the register. “You can have a room tonight, but unfortunately all our rooms are booked for the next few days,” he said apologetically.

“Booked?”

He frowned and apologized, “Mi dispiace. He looked through the book again and said,”Check with me tomorrow around noon; perhaps someone will have canceled.”

He showed me up to my floor by way of a gated elevator. My room contained a single bed against an opened window that looked out on the courtyard. A small TV with a broken knob sat on a movable table in front of the bed. The bathroom was clean with the usual showerhead, curtain, and drain in the tile floor by the toilet. For thirty dollars a night, I could have done a lot worse.

I called Luigi, Giuseppe’s oldest son, who was preparing for exams at the University of Cosenza, which was the newest university in Calabria and had a good reputation. Luigi was studying theater and was a member of a theater company that reminded me of the avant-garde Theater for the New City in New York. He said that he might be able to meet me the next afternoon before he went to work at the theater.

I had visited the university the week before, while returning from Spezzano Albanese with Giuseppe. Built in the 1970s on a mountain crest, the university had one of the oddest layouts I’d ever seen. It was long and thin, with buildings attached to buildings like the cars of a train. There wasn’t a single square or other communal unifying place that I could see. It was as if the university were mimicking the shape of Calabria itself.

It was now early afternoon, and the sun had broken through the clouds and morning mist. I decided to explore the old town. The Busento River separated old Cosenza from new, although these days, thanks to Calabria’s long drought, the mighty rivers that had buried Alaric the Goth and his treasures were reduced to a mere trickle, and about a hundred feet of dry land now lay on either bank. My hotel was on the new side of town, and when I walked across the bridge to the centro storico, the historic center, I was immediately transported back in time. Like many southern Italian cities, Cosenza owes its layout to the Greeks. The Romans rebuilt the city on its original lines, and the Normans and Angevins, alternating rule with the Arabs, built upon the Roman city. And, like many Calabrese cities, Cosenza grew and prospered throughout the Middle Ages.

In 1509, Cosenza gave birth to Bernardino Telesio, perhaps Calabria’s most famous philosopher, who wrested scientific thought from the grips of the church and brought enlightenment from Calabria to the rest of Italy

But the growth of Cosenza—and Calabria—was stalled when the Spanish Bourbons gained control of southern Italy, cutting it off from the Renaissance of the rest of Italy.

Because Cosenza stopped developing during the Spanish rule, the old city is like a time capsule, with its tight medieval alleys and terra-cotta roofs. In the 1970s the government gave money to anyone who would relocate there and renovate the old buildings. After only a couple of years’ work, light finally broke through the boarded doors and bricked windows. Families reclaimed ancestral houses that couldn’t be given away; newer families, tired of living in the newer cities, hungered for a Renaissance their forebears had never experienced. Artists moved in. A bookstore opened in a snug corridor, and new restaurants took hold. By the 1990s there were coffee shops that offered the students of Cosenza places to hang out.

I followed the steeply cobblestoned Corso Telesio, one of the only streets wide enough to fit a car. Most of the roads sprouting from it were alleys that began or ended with a series of cobblestone steps. The road led past the cathedral, a Gothic structure that had been destroyed in 1184 by an earthquake and rebuilt by Frederick II at the same time as he was adding onto the Norman castle that towered over the city. Inside, it was dark and spare, and my ears tingled in the hollow silence.

It had been hours since I ate the brioche Angela gave me before I caught the train, and I was hungry. I remembered that someone had recommended for lunch a restaurant called L’Arco Vecchio. It lay at the very top of Corso Telesio, just under the shadow of the castle. Under the arch of the old aqueduct was the restaurant.

The headwaiter was setting tables. A nice-looking heavyset young man came out of the kitchen, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

“Are you open for lunch or just dinner?” I asked, seeing that no one else was in the restaurant at noon.

“We open at one,” the man said with a large smile.

“I see,” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to look around our city,” he said, looking at my guidebook.

“I just did”

“Have you seen the castle?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t,” I answered, somewhat curtly. Most Italian restaurants start serving at noon, and I was somewhat annoyed that this man, having filled himself with what I was sure was a delicious meal, was telling me that I had to wait an hour. “I was hoping to do that after I ate.”

“It’s about a fifteen-minute walk. È bella,”

I nodded and said I’d see him in an hour.

The fifteen-minute walk was more like half an hour. Not a soul was around, although just across the street, almost on the castle grounds, was a new apartment complex. I walked to a ledge that offered a view below of the city, which wrapped around three sides of the mountain. The medieval city clung close beneath the mountain but was dwarfed by the new city, which filled the valley and rolled up the sides of the five hills.

A van was parked along the ledge, and when I turned to explore the castle, I noticed that there were two people in it. A man leaned over a woman in a red sweater, her dark hair with blond highlights falling over her shoulders and onto the back of the seat as he massaged her breast. They hadn’t noticed me, or if they had, they didn’t much care. Her fingers dug into his hair.

The castle was still. Nothing hung on the chipped stone walls, and I could see into the grassy courtyard. I heard the tinny sound of a radio or television deep within. I followed the sound through two rooms until I came to a long, dark room where a twenty-something man in what seemed like a museum uniform sat on a wooden chair, staring at a small TV The light from the TV illuminated his face, and a heater glowed red at his feet.

Very slowly, as if mustering all his energy, the man raised his head and turned to me.

I walked closer. “Do I pay you?”

The man opened his mouth and furrowed his brows. “What?”

“Do I pay you?”

He waved me away as if swatting a fly. “No, just go.” He locked back into the same position in front of the TV I saw that he was watching one of Italy’s many game shows featuring topless or scantily clad women. On this particular show, a large-breasted blonde wearing a tiny bathing suit was leaning over a glass table and blowing on a toothpick, trying to get it to roll through a simple maze. One of the cameras was set under the glass tabletop.

I walked through a series of empty rooms, my footsteps echoing, and emerged into the courtyard, where the sun beat down on the weeds and rubble. I was surprised to see that someone else was there. A woman sat in the sun, sketching part of the wall. We exchanged smiles; then she turned back to her sketch, still smiling. Her long, dark hair fell onto her shoulders and covered her face. She brushed it back behind her ears.

I found an arch that looked out below the castle. The van was still there, and the man had cleared his seat and had moved on top of the woman.

I circled back to find that the woman with the sketchpad was gone.

 

 

The moment I stepped into the restaurant, I inhaled the rich smell of grilled meat and tomatoes. The heavyset young man came out to greet me.

“Are you open now?”

He gave me a look that said, “Of course, why wouldn’t we be?” even though I appeared to be the lone diner.

I asked the waiter to bring me the house specialties.

First he brought out a liter of the house red wine, and soon after that an antipasto selection of pork balls stuffed with bread and deep-fried, followed by an assortment of stuffed vegetables: zucchini stuffed with eggs and prosciutto, served warm and drizzled with olive oil, and eggplant stuffed with artichokes, breaded and fried. Placed generously with them were roasted yellow and red peppers, also drizzled with olive oil, and flavored with a hint of oregano and lemon.

“Everything is brought from the owner’s farm,” the waiter told me. “Even the pigs and fowl.”

An older waiter joined us. He had relatives in Toronto. He wanted to make sure that the food was to my liking, and he assured me that on days other than Monday, the restaurant was very busy—especially at night. This led us into a conversation about how well the restaurant did and how hard he had to work to support his family As the rest of Italy got richer, Calabria, while still a relatively inexpensive place to live, was getting more expensive, too.

I asked him why Calabria was still poor. Was it the farmland, which was rich only in small patches? Was it the lack of industry?

“The mafia,” he said casually, neither embarrassed nor secretive.

“How, exactly, does that affect business?”

“The mafia is everywhere,” he said. “We all have to pay You pay.” He smiled and stood by as the other waiter brought out my first course, an amazing fusilli, corkscrews tighter than even my grandmother made, with Calabrese sausage and tomato sauce.

I drank another glass of wine just in time for the main course, pork fillets stuffed with zucchini and smoked scamorza cheese, which tastes like a combination of provolone and mozzarella. An orange sauce had been drizzled over the stuffed pork, and edible orange rinds garnished the plate.

“Mostly the blood oranges are from Sicily, but we grow our own here,” the young waiter said. “And of course, the pig is ‘free-range’” I tried to picture a pig roaming the hills.

To finish the meal, he brought out a tartufo di Pizzo, a chocolate and hazelnut gelato molded around a soft, syrupy chocolate fudge, then covered with a crunchy chocolate coating—“a specialty of the region”—and surrounded by small, tart fragole di bosco, wild strawberries.

When the older waiter brought the bill, he apologized for the expense and said that coffee and dessert were on the house. The New Yorker in me did a quick calculation and estimated that one of the best meals I’d eaten in all of Calabria had cost me under twenty-five dollars.

On the way back to the hotel, I stopped off and sat on the steps of the cathedral. Children yelled across the piazza, and a baby laughed on the balcony of a fourth-story apartment, playing in the sheets hanging on a clothesline. The screech of swallows cut the air, and the cooing of pigeons echoed from the alleys. The local artist had set up a chair outside his workshop, which also doubled as his gallery, and began cutting wood with a circular saw Hammering came from inside a twelfth-century building. The sound of construction echoed throughout the old city.

 

 

With all my walking that day, exploring each alley and tiny piazza, I was able to work up another appetite—albeit a small one. About nine that night, I stopped off at a pizzeria close to the hotel. It was hidden in an alley behind two cinder-block apartment buildings. I ordered a pizza with porcini mushrooms and drank wine and sparkling water. A group of men was at one table; an older couple at another; a teenage boy and girl, obviously on a date, sat in the corner; and a family took up the large rectangular table close to the kitchen.

Everyone faced the large TV over the serving station. I’d come in at the midpoint of a made-for-TV movie, titled Com’è l’America, about a Calabrese family in the 1950s trying to assimilate into American culture. It seems that the mother and two teenagers have been sent for by their husband and father in America after years of separation. She finds him working on the railroad—and a complete drunk. In order to support the family, she finds work as a seamstress. The son is a high school track star who battles discrimination. The story covered everything that Italian immigrants might have experienced, from alcoholism and abortion to falling in love, but nothing about the location was recognizable to me. It definitely wasn’t an East Coast city, and it was too cold to be California. I thought perhaps the story was set in the Midwest or Colorado, but I couldn’t think of anywhere except Denver where Calabresi would have emigrated—and there were no mountains in the movie. I figured that the set must have been fabricated by the Italian movie industry. Then the obvious occurred to me. It was Canada, somewhere between Niagara Falls and Toronto.

During World War II both Canada and the United States, fearing their common enemies Japan, Germany, and Italy, created internment camps. Most recently, the Japanese camps have become subjects of movies and novels. But few people realize that Germans and Italians were also held captive.

Italians refuse to talk about it, or they downplay the situation, saying that they went along with it to prove that they held allegiance to their adopted countries. After the war the Italian economy tumbled, and Calabria felt it the worst. One of their largest waves of emigration from Calabria came directly after the war. Because of the strict quotas the United States had set on Italian immigration, many Calabrese immigrants opted to move to Australia, Buenos Aires, and, of course, Canada. To the Calabresi, America included Canada.

 

 

The next morning I left the hotel (I later learned that it had been filled with traveling businessmen) and moved to the heart of the new city The streets were busy with pedestrian and automobile traffic. Shiny new stores cast their light on the wide sidewalks. A store selling Diesel jeans, the Italian Levi’s, dominated one large intersection, and just across the street were two bookstores.

Cosenza, with its university and beautiful setting, appeared to be the cultural and economic capital of Calabria. Not coincidentally, it is Calabria’s northernmost large city

I met Luigi at the larger of the two bookstores. We surveyed the shelves looking for good books on Calabria. He had just finished an exam and had a couple of hours free before he had to go hang lights for a dance performance at the university.

We came across a book, Sull’identità meridionale (“On Southern Identity”), that Luigi said he had used in one of his sociology classes. I asked him about racism in Italy, namely, prejudice toward southerners in the north.

“It exists, but I think it’s worse for my father’s generation, those who desperately needed to leave to make money,” Luigi said, “the ones who took just any job up north.”

He pulled out another book and put it on my stack. “But in almost any Western country the youth now are more accepting, don’t you think? They’re bought up with more education and understanding of other cultures. Now when I go north, it’s for art, but I don’t feel I have to go there to make a living. I really think I can do it here. And I’d rather. But of course, I’m only in college now Everything is possible. We’ll see.”

I remembered Giuseppe’s worry that Luigi would be just a poor artist, someone out of touch with the real world. Their relationship reminded me a lot of mine and my father’s when I was Luigi’s age. Also, like me, Luigi was growing up in a time of prosperity that freed him from the anxiety about the future that his father had experienced.

“My father works the same grueling hours that his parents did,” Luigi said. “But not on the farm. He spends all his time at the shop or traveling. It’s almost the same peasant determination that drives my father, the same that his parents felt, that got him off the fields.” Luigi paused. “But of course, I realize that my father is making enough money to put us through college.”

Luigi put one more book on my stack, a book on the food of Calabria. “This might be interesting, yes?” he said. “I know that your grandmother cooked Calabrese food for you, though she might not have cooked everything that we eat here.”

A young blond woman, with a sharp nose, blue eyes, and thin pink lips, had been perusing the shelves next to us, and I’d had the sense that she’d been listening to our conversation. She turned to us now. “You know, there is a great bookstore down around Via Piave that has so many different books on Calabria’s history.” Her voice was soft but strong, and her blue eyes sparkled, but she spoke seriously, without the slightest trace of a smile.

“Thank you,” Luigi and I said, almost in unison.

“My pleasure,” she said, and turned back to the shelves.

 

 

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said between bites of my pizza. “What are your thoughts on the mafia here?”

Luigi looked up and wiped his face. We had just finished a couple of arancini, rice balls filled with ground meat, tomatoes, peas, and cheese that had been deep-fried to the bright color of orange.

This was one of the questions that I had not intended to ask everyone. It embarrassed me, for my sake and for the sake of my father, who wanted me to come back from my travels with a picture of Calabria as beautiful as the stereotypical view of Tuscany. And so did I. I didn’t want to play into the stereotypes about southern Italians as ne’er-do-wells and mafiosi. I saw potential for growth everywhere in the region, but I couldn’t help asking myself, “Why has Calabria not gotten further along?”

One obvious answer was unfortunately the mafia, but of course no one would speak about it. When asked, people simply shrugged their shoulders or pointed to the next town.

“Again, the young people don’t fear it because they didn’t grow up with the violence of the seventies,” said Luigi. “While the mafia is on the streets, there’s no violence on the streets; when there’s no violence, the mafia goes out of your everyday consciousness. But I think the violence is cyclical. When times get hard, the violence will return.”

The restaurant started filling up. We talked more softly, almost conspiratorially. Luigi continued. “But then now, in this entire world, who is not involved with the mafia? People say that Berlusconi has to be, or else he wouldn’t be president. Look, even great artists—they say Gianni Versace was.”

We talked about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the fashion designer’s death, then got up from the table and walked outside.

“Even your President Kennedy was involved,” Luigi continued.

A few streets away we came across the address the woman had given us for the bookstore. There was no storefront or sign, just an ornately carved door to what looked to be a residential building with the name of the bookstore below the buzzer. We rang. The door opened partway, and a well-groomed old man in a tweed coat appeared.

“Is this the bookstore?” I asked.

“Ah, yes. Please come in.”

He directed us into a smallish room filled with books in plastic wrappers. He placed a catalog in our hands, and we studied the titles, most of which were books praising the glory of Calabria. It didn’t take us long to realize that this was a Freemason shop, a fact we acknowledged with a glance at each other. Italians love conspiracy theories, and the Freemasons are often the subject of these theories. Many Italians believe they run the country—as ultrasecret and powerful a society as Yale University’s Skull and Bones is rumored to be. Another man walked in, and they both eagerly presented us with books, waiting for a reaction. Not immediately finding what we wanted, we thanked them and said goodbye.

The heavy door closed behind us.

“Amazing,” Luigi said. “But you know there are people who believe that both the mafia and the Freemasons control Italy”

 

 

Four men were gathered inside the Duomo Art Shop, across from the duomo in the historic center. Two of them were painting; the other two sat on small wooden benches.

The eldest of the men, the one whom I had seen the previous day working outside his studio, introduced himself as Giuseppe. He painted murals of the city, much the way that Ferdie Pacheco paints Ybor City, Florida, or Howard Finster depicted his rural Georgia. Giuseppe pulled up a heavy wood footstool and asked me to sit and join them. He had white curly hair that came down to his ears and wore a blue painting smock.

I told them where I was from and what I was doing in Calabria.

The other men beamed with excitement that a son of Calabria had returned. Each told me a story about a relative who had emigrated to the States or Canada, never to return.

“So what have you seen of Cosenza?” they asked.

“Almost everything of the old city and a good part of the new,” I said. “But I’m most intrigued by the legend of the treasures of Alaric at the bottom of the Busento.”

“Oh, yes,” Giuseppe said. “Well, all anyone has ever found were a few gold coins. Roman coins. But those are all over the place.”

After a while I excused myself, promising to stop by again the next day Giuseppe walked me across the piazza to the restaurant, Bella Calabria, which he described as one of the best in Cosenza.

The maitre d’ greeted us.

“This is Signore Rotella, a friend of mine from New York. Treat him well.”

Like L’Arco Vecchio, where I had eaten lunch the day before, the restaurant had exposed chestnut beams on white stucco ceilings. I ordered a plate of mozzarella di bufala and tomatoes, which were served sprinkled with oregano, not basil, and a liter of light red wine that was slightly chilled and a little effervescent. The waiter served dessert to a couple in the far corner who were speaking English with an American accent. Aside from the former railroad worker back in Cerchiara di Calabria, this was the first time that I had heard English in weeks, let alone from the mouths of Americans.

I approached them. “I’m sorry for interrupting, but I couldn’t help overhearing that you were speaking in English.”

“Oh, my, yes. I had no idea you weren’t Italian,” the man said.

“My family is Italian, but I’m visiting from New York,” I said. “Where in the States are you two from?”

“The States? We’re from Canada,” the woman said. She was in her fifties and looked as if she had spent most of her life on the beaches of Hawaii.

“Sorry for the assumption,” I said, knowing how much Canadians hated to be mistaken for Americans. “What brought you to Cosenza?” I felt like my father: I wanted to hear them say that they were awed by the beauty of Calabria, that they had read about it or been intrigued by this mysterious part of the country, that this was their destination, not merely a resting point on the way to somewhere else. I wanted to hear that they had chosen Calabria.

“Well, we just spent a couple of weeks in Sicily—I’m a travel agent,” the woman interjected, “and we are just checking out all the hotels. We were on our way to Naples, but because it was getting late, we decided to stop here in Cosenza for the night.”

Oh, well, so it was just a stopping point.

“Yes, but we did spend some time in Reggio to see the Riace figures,” the man added, referring to Calabria’s most prestigious artifacts, two pre-Greek warriors that had been raised from the Ionian Sea.

“And we stopped for a short time in Tropea.”

“How’s the trip been so far?” I asked, still hopeful.

“Well, we were underwhelmed with the food in Sicily,” the man said. “I’d heard that it was so good there. Perhaps we just selected the restaurants poorly”

“But we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the food here in Calabria,” the woman said. “It’s simple, but that’s what I think is so good about it.”

When I told them what I was doing in Calabria, the man commented, “Well, I’m sure you must have read Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria’

“Yes,” I said, surprised and happy that he had even heard of the book.

“It seems like things haven’t changed much since his time,” the man said. “Except the food is better.”

At that moment, the waiter placed in front of me a plate of tagliatelle with zucchini.

“We’d invite you to join us, but we are just finishing,” the man said. But when I had finished my bowl of spicy zuppa di pesce, they were still at the table.

“You know, it’s getting a little dark,” the woman said. “And we don’t know this city. Do you mind walking with us?”

“I’d be happy to,” I said. And I was.

I said goodbye to the waiter, and we walked out together. A table of men who had been seated just after me looked up at us as if they were hearing English spoken in their city for the first time.

“You know, we have about two hundred thousand Calabresi living in Toronto,” the man said.

“I’m beginning to realize that,” I answered.

Swallows flew above us. We headed down Corso Telesio; the dull lights from the windows of medieval buildings flickered as if they were candles. As we approached the bridge, I looked down at the Busento River, and beyond at the Crati. Moonlight shimmered at their joining point.