It’s amazing what happens when you cross a mountain range. When one crosses the Cascades, for example, traveling from my home in Portland to the eastern half of Oregon, the lush, verdant landscape suddenly transforms into an arid range, thanks to those mountains hoarding the constant rain for the Willamette Valley. As for this walk, I set out from Italy this morning and yet I ended up in Albania. That was a surprise.
I departed with some uncertainty, as heavy rains had struck the refuge the night before, and I emerged to a misty morning, with the mountaintop thoroughly ensconced in dense clouds. With a five hundred meter ascent in front of me, I expected conditions to worsen, and indeed before long I was met with a light dusting of snow flakes, dancing through the beech forest, which persisted throughout the early morning. Still, that beats the heck out of rain. Alas, while I suspect there are some remarkable views to be had from the top, I could rely only on my imagination.
Once again, I found myself walking a pilgrimage in reverse. For centuries, the people of Civita have walked to the Madonna del Pollino, taking two days to make the trek. As I descended from the high point back through an extended, grassy valley, close-cropped by livestock, I entered the Acquafredda Plateau, where those pilgrims would overnight, setting out their donkeys and mules to forage as they prepared temporary huts from branches. Unlike me, they also brought their finest clothes to wear at the top, for the culminating church service. As relayed by the Cammino Basiliano site, the travel writer Norman Douglas observed that, “the Albanian girls of Civita stand out for their aristocratic elegance, in pleated black silk dresses, discretely edged with gold and white lace, with wide necklines… these women stroll around the lawn like living tropical flowers.”
After the plateau, most of my walk was spent immersed in woods, but when I finally emerged, a handful of kilometers from Civita, the world unspooled before me in dramatic fashion. In the distance, I caught my first glimpse of the Ionian Sea, while much closer was the plunging Raganello Gorge, the rocky cliff leading directly to the village of Civita, situated just across from a large grove of olive trees. The final approach wasn’t easy; a highway took its time, with pronounced switchbacks, while the Basiliano suggested a route that likely would have become a slide at the cost of half the skin on my back. And so, grudgingly, I added a kilometer or more to the day. Don’t cry for me, though, as I had those remarkable views to enjoy all the while.
Civita emerged around the year 1000, as residents of other towns in the wider region fled the growing threat of Saracen invasions from Sicily. While that brought peace for a time, an earthquake utterly flattened the village in 1456. One door closes, another opens. Some fifteen years later, Civita found a new path, when the first group of Albanians made their way here, encouraged to settle the area by the ruling Sanseverino family because of the ever-popular promise of tax breaks. Even that was only a temporary arrangement, though, until the region changed hands once again–this time back to Ferdinand I of Aragon, whose local representative brought a permanent Albanian population to Civita in 1485, a population known today as the Arbëreshë or Italo-Albanians.
The Albanians weren’t just looking for a scenic place in the hills. They were fleeing in huge numbers. The Ottoman-Albanian Wars had been taking place throughout the 15th century, with the Albanian efforts led by George Castriota Scanderbeg. A bust devoted to the man sits in the center of Civita, and it confused the hell out of me, as he looks like a character from Asterix, complete with a huge beard, a metal helmet, and what appears to be a small dragon perched on his head. Instead, this is the national hero of Albania, despite his death in the war, as he was transformed into a critical figure in the country’s 19th century nation-building project, a symbol of Christian resistance against the Ottomans. His niece eventually settled in Civita, as part of the wave of Albanians moving here. Thanks to a census from 1741, we know that Civita’s population included 231 Albanian families and 43 Latin families, underscoring just how prominent that population had become over the years.
It remains so today. The Arbëreshë language is still spoken fluently here, with its rights guaranteed by the state and reinforced by a municipal language office. The cultural traditions are also reinforced in the major church, Santa Maria Assunta, which features Greco-Byzantine liturgical services, Eastern Christian symbols like the icons of Christ Pantokrator and the Virgin Hodegetria, and a layout facing the sunrise.
For all that, the most popular sight is the Devil’s Bridge, situated far below town, at a crossing of the Raganello. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the locals needed to build a bridge, but it was far too dangerous a feat to be achieved by mere humans. And so, the overmatched builder sought supernatural help. The devil, all too willing, offered a simple bargain–a magnificent bridge in exchange for the soul of the first one to cross the bridge. Of course, the clever architect escaped his own likely eternal damnation by sending a dog across, much to the devil’s chagrin. Is there a bridge anywhere in Europe that wasn’t built in the same fashion? Why did the devil never learn? And does anyone care about those damned dogs?
