LEO WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
I looked around nervously at the darkened streets near the deserted Metaponto train station, every shadow a potential mugger or rapist. At least I had no wallet to steal.
I didn’t know what the crime rate was in Basilicata, and right now, I didn’t really want to know.
The five other passengers who had gotten off the train with me had quickly met their rides and were off. I briefly considered hopping in and hitching a ride to town. I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. But I waited instead.
I looked up at the stars and tried to make out a few of the constellations, their Greek names swimming in my head, just to calm myself and pass the time. But there were just too many stars up there, all crowding together and confusing me and making me feel even more lost and insignificant. I craned my neck and looked down the dark and dusty road leading to the station.
No Leo.
I glanced over at the small station café, called Grofé, with its bar and couches and tables, but its lights were out and its glass door locked tight. I was alone. With no cash. No credit cards. There were no taxis. And once the train pulled away, no people. No stray dogs or cats. Not even any lizards. Just me. And the ghost of Vita, laughing in my ear.
I felt unmoored.
After about ten minutes of nail biting, I finally texted Leo. “I’m here!” I wrote, trying to sound upbeat and not too pushy. (I wanted to text, “Where the fuck are you?!” but I hardly even knew the guy and was grateful he had agreed to come and get me.) Southerners were notoriously late. And I knew it. But I was a tangle of frayed nerves.
“On my way,” Leo wrote back, and within moments his compact car was rounding the curve to the station’s pickup point, going so fast it practically screeched in on two wheels.
After a brief hello and a hug, I told him my wallet story.
Leo smacked the steering wheel with an open palm and chanted, “Zingare, zingare, zingare.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will take you to dinner. You don’t need money.”
We headed to Bernalda for pizza and a beer, taking seats in an outdoor garden of the town’s newest pizzeria. Though I hadn’t eaten in more than eight hours, I had no appetite. The owner knew Leo and brought over a giant plate of appetizers: triangles of provolone, homemade circles of soppressata and soft mounds of ricotta, roasted red pepper strips, pickled artichokes, and some local peasant bread. It looked delicious, but I barely picked at it. I happily drank the beer, though, a local brew, served in what looked like a wine bottle. It was called Jazz Beer. The restaurant was packed with Bernaldans, including small children, though it was close to midnight. Leonardo knew everyone there. He chatted with some, waved to others, but greeted them all.
“Isn’t today a holiday?” I asked Leo.
“Not so much down here,” he said, shrugging. Leo’s shrug said more than the volumes I had read back in New York about the history of Basilicata and the rest of the South. Centuries of domination had left the Southerner with a fatalistic view of the world—the Italian shrug, half-closed eyes, and melancholy outlook its main symptoms.
As Leo drove me to my apartment, my mind wandering in my delirium, I thought about the history of the dark fields we were passing. When I had first seen this landscape ten years ago, I had been struck by its simultaneous beauty and sadness. But since then, I had learned its history, which helped explain that sadness: decade upon decade of repression and the failed attempts, one after another, to remedy it.
A Neapolitan revolution, led by the Jacobins, broke out in the winter of 1799, with the invasion of revolutionary France. They promised reform for the peasants. But that summer, a Bourbon monarch took control, sentencing the Jacobins to death.
In 1806, Napoleon placed his brother, Joseph, on the throne in Naples, throwing the ruling Bourbons into exile. Serfdom was outlawed, with a plan to redistribute the lands among the peasants. But reform failed once again.
I thought of Garibaldi, and how he, too, had promised reform and a better life for the peasants. But the South suffered more at the hands of their northern brothers than they had at the hands of all those invaders.
Unification seemed to be the straw that broke the farmer’s back. Brigands started to appear in the countryside, robbing the wealthy landowners, maybe not giving it over to the poor but nonetheless giving the peasants something to cheer about. Industrialization had taken hold in the New World. And so the peasants began to leave—streaming over to the Americas by the thousands.
From 1906 to 1915—the year Vita died—Basilicata lost nearly 40 percent of its population to emigration.
The government started to worry about the loss of its best and strongest, and finally made an effort to entice them to stay. After World War II, a series of identical white houses with arched doorways were built for the Metaponto-area farmers, which came with a small parcel of land.
Leo pointed the colonica houses out to me. It was like the American program of forty acres and a mule following the Civil War, but without the mule. In the 1950s and ’60s, crops were diversified and true change started to take hold.
These days land was cheap and available to anyone who wanted to farm it, though it was hard work. Many of the young men in and around Bernalda wanted nothing to do with the agricultural life of their ancestors. They wanted instead to be rappers or videographers, chefs or bartenders.
Or beach bar owners.
Many of those small white houses, the ones set aside for the farmers, were now summer cottages. Some were rented out to tourists in the high season. In fact, Leo owned one of them. He pointed it out to me as we sped past, his small dog running out into the dark road to greet him. Leo nearly ran him over.