Fortified with a small tower, marked in solitude by two tufts of palms standing out of the inside courtyard exceeding the roof, some beautiful, of Arabic kind: such are the houses where landholders resort, only for short periods, for the vintage or the sowing. Many don't bring the families with them anymore. From the simple dinettes, among unpretentious 19th-century furniture, between servants or peasants turned into servants, seems to be emanating a patriarchal affability like there was one in Veneto half a century ago. One senses though that the Idyll is treacherous... There's a great ambiguity that could be defined double sincerity, caused by belonging to two masters¹ at the same time: You witness the ritual effusions between the peasant and the master, like they were father and son. Right after that, the master drops his voice so that the peasant does not hear what he has to tell you.
If you pass in the morning, the peasants meet you joyously; one thinks: "here people leaves like in the ancient times." But if you pass at night, in the hours of bad encounters, nobody recognizes you anymore; women look down or sideways and they cover their faces to say that they haven't seen anyone if they were to be called upon to testify. Beneath the patriarchal vest are invincible silences.

(...) This part of Sicily is all a swinging between morose moods and human sufferings and sublime landscapes. Between arabic houses, former feuds, stony grounds and villages of Mafia solitary stands the greek temple of Segesta. With the surrounding nature it makes one of the highest landscapes humanity have. (...)

Sicily, like Greece, puts in chain who wants to watch at it from its human side, and brings instead a great lightness of spirit to whom is content to watch its beauty.

_{1. Two masters: Tradition and Mafia}

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

Compared to today's, 1953 italian Mafia was a joke. Piovene even imagined, in the optimism of the post-war dreams, that the Mafia was about to disappear, substituted by a more modern partitioning of people: "the deathblow will be the diffusion of political opinions in Sicily. When all Sicilians will be divided according to political beliefs and not according to Mafia groups, the bonds between politics and Mafia will be severed."
Instead, starting right in those years was of course the contrary process, so that politics could turn themselves entirely into mafia to survive and prosper in the falling country.

-- In picture, above: Ralph Steadman, Tempio di Segesta, thanks to the wondrous blog "Il giornale nuovo"

But the best of Taranto's life is outdoor, at the wharfs, between the old bulwark and Mare Piccolo, Little Sea. It's one of the liveliest places of southern Italy, and I could not compare it with any other. It seems to be illustrating an oriental tale, one of those where fishes talk and precious rings pops up. Possibly because the goods are exposed and sold according to the old ways, there is here a communion between the port, the yelling folks and the depths of the sea. Seafood, oysters, mussels, dates, nuts squirting water, real walnuts from which is sticking out a strip of coral, and the fishes, rock-fishes, flatfishes, sea breams, other tapering fishes, emerald green with ruby-colored blazes and with a popular name which cannot be repeated, get humanized, become individuals, take on precious lights and colors... This small oriental harbor, this population of fishes and clams, it's one of my best Italian memories. And so, by and large, is the memory of Taranto, terse and light sea town, so much that walking into it seems like breathing in time with the music.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

The thing about the Italian food is that it used to be an excuse to be creative and to represent oneself. When the sea is sterile and the cities are turned into garages, the creativity isn't but an excuse to sell something to eat. And when everyone is convinced to be finally rich, it's the most irreparable sign of poverty disclosing itself.

Coming down I entered a tavern. The green air, reflected by the sun-wrought forests, invaded the bare little room; precious was the wine on the bar, precious the basket of bread on the floor wherein the eggs glittered. In a corner a little girl, with a red dress, had a greenish-pink maybug on her shoulder. I warned her; the little girl raised her arm, showed me a white thread disguised between her fingers. Tied with one leg to that thread, the bug was her toy. She took it from her garment, and dangled it like the pendulum of a dowser. This little country woman, character of a picture more than a human being, playing with a gem-colored bug, remains in my memory. On the beginning of our journey to Umbria, I see her as a sign of its alarming grace.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by italyisfalling.com)

My father told me once, in a rare moment of intimacy, that when he was a kid he used to tie threads to the legs of green maybugs to play with them. They flown and walked tied to the thread, for days. It was in the fifties, in Naples.)

If you lived in Naples, you'd discover that here it is impossible to have something copied. The appointee, workman or craftsman, will always make for you a different object; he considers himself under the actual spell of his own geniality, mysterious and uncontrollable. If you go to the gallery, and give a look at the copyists, you'll realize that they all change at least one detail; everyone betters the masterpiece with some of his own. Luckily there are the women, who are more practical: In no other city of the world they are equally needed to keep life in balance.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

So much for the industrial world of reproduction.

The milk of buffaloes (Italian buffaloes: see picture above). With the milk of buffaloes in Campania they make the "real" mozzarella (not the glossy white plastic you can find on most pizzas nowadays). But buffaloes are wild animals, not easy to tame and milk. Here is a bit of a story Guido Piovene run into, at the breedings in Paestum, Campania (y. 1953). Makes you think at the very beginnings, the mysterious moment when men began to tame wild animals with wise respecful tricks. I doubt things are still made that way though.

This primitive animal is strange and intelligent. She refuses to be milked if her calf is not attached at her nipple; only then, to feed him, she releases her precious milk, which otherwise she can hold back. And so, for each milking, the calf is shown to the mother; this ceremony, though, requires a sort of rite. At the moment of birth delivery, the only man the buffalo recognizes, the keeper, yells her name into her ear. The name does not consist of one word, but of a sung phrase. The buffalo does not forget the phrase anymore; it becomes her proper name forever, and at the same time the plea of the calf asking for milk. Even among two hundred buffaloes, each one of them knows her own distinguished phrase. The keeper told me some of them, which I transcribe from the local dialect: "She meddles in everything; you're never happy; the song is nice to hear; I like her because she's good looking and young; Donna Rosa controls them all; you are being presumptuous; I am truly beautiful". Other phrases, according to the moods of the keeper, reflect political ideas or sport passions; with some the keeper take advantage of his master, and even insults him, since the master cannot interfere between the buffalo and the keeper. As I said the phrases must be sung; it is an oriental chant, certainly of remote origins, similar to the one the muezzin sings from the minaret, and that the keeper sings at dawn before the cattle. After the song the buffaloes get out of the cattle and docilely give themselves to the milkers; without the magic phrase they wouldn't come out and they would use all their wild fury to rebel against any attempt to milk them.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)