It’s a sultry afternoon in June, we are at the beginning of the summer desolation, because summer here is lively only for two weeks in August.
I move from Bisaccia towards Calitri. I go down towards Ofanto, then the climb begins towards the first Lucanian outpost. I arrive a Pescopagano, but I don’t stop, I still go up. The pass is over twelve hundred meters above sea level. I take the descent towards Castelgrande, brooms and silence and a disorderly herd of mountains near and far, as if in these parts there were nothing but mountains without sharp peaks, mountains that look like rest areas for the clouds.
A Castelgrande I’ve always passed by just looking at it from below, a photo and off you go, a photo on the wall of houses plastered in a color between gray and dove grey.
There was a great earthquake here many years ago. They also rebuilt houses for those who were no longer there and for those who were there and have died in the meantime.
If you go and look the demographic trend from the post-war period to today in these countries the result is always the same: a third of the population remains and they live in a number of rooms that has tripled: it’s like losing weight and buying larger-sized clothes.
You can hear it here the silence of those who have left and that of those who have not come. I wrote this sentence for another country, but it’s still good. And today I’m very quiet too. I don’t think I’ll talk to anyone. The voice stays inside me, the voice that tells me about the difficulty of climbing. And then it even gets to the insolence of making me think of a disease that could be smoldering in my lung, since I have a cough that hasn’t gone away for more than a month. It’s certainly a false alarm, but I don’t know how to give up alarms, I produce them continuously, my body alarms itself so as not to get bored.
In the meantime I have reached the top of the village, I don’t take notes, I pick some cherries from a tree and I still get a disappointment about my body: my shoulder hurts, I can’t make the movement needed to lower the highest branches. I am here to visit a village and in the meantime I do a medical check-up on my body and I tell myself that I am not well, I am not well even during the descent.
I take some pictures behind closed doors, I also take pictures two women who seem to want to escape me as if they were wild animals. They are not used to passers-by here, I don’t know what they get from the way I move, the way I look. We live in the season of suspicion here too, I can’t expect them to tell me something. And I only came to make sure that Desolation rules this country as it does elsewhere.
I know there are subtle differences, there are even between one street and another, but it’s not a day of subtleties, I have a mood that makes me roll towards my car and drive away. The air is hot and sticky, humid even here where it has always been dry, a little lunar. Ultimately, the strength of this country is its reserve, its failure to participate in the fight over growth. It is a country on hold, it has taken its own shape and maintains it.
I return to Pescopagano, a short passage, just enough time to meet a person who recognizes me and offers me something at the bar. She tells me about a cousin I know who had a leg amputated. I listen to him, it seems to me that I’m just in a hurry to leave, today I came to these towns not to meet them, but just to pass through them without getting caught up in anything.
I’m stopping at Sant’Andrea di Conza to buy bread and a cake in a pastry shop that opened recently. Now I don’t know anyone in this town, I drive off towards Conza della Campania without stopping, I just take a photo from inside the car. Now I have to go back up towards my heights. There is a beautiful road that goes from here to Andretta, it is one of the places that I have photographed many times. Today there is a dirty light, a light that makes you see things without telling them. A sad light circulates within me too, a twilight without fury. In Andretta I still try to take a tour of the town, the town doesn’t give me any new news. I still feel a touch of emotion for certain paints on the doors, for some incongruous presence, like a plant placed right at the entrance of a house. After all, I come to places like these to find small anomalies, small perceptive scandals.
Paesology is more than anything an investigation of life in abandoned alleys, in streets where only a few people remain..
Things always tell me something and sometimes people do too.
An elderly woman in Castelgrande summed up the day. A man greeted her like this: where are you going?
And she: I’m going to the doctor, where can I go?
