One of the more difficult aspects of history to wrap my mind around was the sheer landedness of people. The fact that most premodern humans rarely traveled more than a handful of miles beyond their birthplace seemed inconceivable. Even without cars and roads, it seemed like innate curiosity and wanderlust would drive more out on even the most occasional journey. Even acknowledging the nasty-brutish-shortness of it all, certainly they could have carved out time for a periodic stroll, right? And related to that, the proliferation of local dialects seemed equally challenging to fathom. Even today, beyond Italian and the twelve officially recognized minority languages, Italy has hundreds of different dialects that remain in use, all of which suggest substantial periods of isolation, in order to make that linguistic proliferation possible.
When reading about the ancient world, much of the writing focuses on movement. The Odyssey, of course, is one giant travel narrative, and the gathering of forces for the Trojan War in the Iliad underscored the transit of so many far-flung warlords from their different fortresses around the Aegean and beyond. Across Rome, it’s impossible to miss the remarkable network of roads established by the empire, some of which persist today as parts of the Via Francigena and other pilgrimage routes. Given that, how could a region remembered for its connectivity and movement simultaneously produce such isolation and regional diversity?
But then I came to Calabria.
There are no straight roads here. There is practically no flat ground. I write of hill towns here, but I also wrote of hill towns in Umbria and Lazio and Tuscany, but they’re entirely different species. Calabrian hilltowns are like the faint dusting of snow atop summer peaks, the thinnest layer of white foam discernible amidst a raging tide of green waves. In Umbria, one bemoans that hundred meters of ascent at day’s end, climbing back from the valley to the defensible peak. In Calabria, though, there are only ascents and descents, often involving numerous switchbacks due to the steep, plunging mountainsides and thick growth. From any one vantage point, it’s usually possible to see one or two towns in the distance, but the journey in between is challenging, onerous, and maximally inefficient. And in an era in which people remained squarely ensnared in the Malthusian trap, that meant an awful lot of calories to burn in pursuit of a most intangible reward. Better, I suppose, to pour your labor into clearing out one or two more trees, in order to eke out another square meter or two of viable farmland.
Even today, movement remains quite limited. From Verzino to Savelli, the Basiliano sometimes follows the provincial road and sometimes hops between switchbacks on dodgy footpaths. While I’ve had more than my ideal allotment of pavement of late, car traffic isn’t a concern; maybe one car cruises past every 5-10 minutes, and the constant curves and sometimes shoddy road conditions mean they have to move slowly. Descending through the Sila hills through dense oak and pine, crossing a small bridge over the Senapite River, and then climbing back up the other side, I gradually warmed to the day. By Italian terms, Savelli is a “new” town, founded in 1638 by refugees from a massive earthquake in Cosenza. That helped to explain a genuinely humble church at its center, and the lack of noteworthy architecture throughout. The main work I saw taking place was the assemblage of firewood. A few days ago, the switch flipped. Suddenly, everyone was decked out in their winter wear, with big puffy jackets and thick woolen scarves becoming ubiquitous. Winter is coming, and warmth is won through labor.
From Savelli, I saw my next stop, Castelsilano, sitting atop the next peak over. A similar process unfolded, descending abruptly to the Lese River, topped with an elegant iron bridge, and then once again some huffing and some puffing onward. Dialect started to sound pretty good. As I entered Castelsilano, a man was gleaning something on the side of the trail. He turned towards me as I approached, smiled, and handed me a fistful of spicy red peppers. “For the energy,” he said. On the outskirts, a woman was gleaning along the trail for chestnuts. The land provides.
While the walk to my destination, San Giovanni in Fiore, didn’t involve quite the same trajectory, there was still one, last sharp descent to the Neto River and the crossing of the 18th century Cona Bridge. San Giovanni is the largest town in the Sila, with nearly 17,000 people, and yet it still fills the same general footprint of a hilltown, making for a chaotic center. It all began, though, with one building–the Abbazia Florense. Gioacchino da Fiore made it happen, as the founder and first abbot, in the 12th century, and in the process he earned a spot in Dante’s Paradise.
Like most everyone down here, it seems, Gioacchino was also seeking out isolation, Calabria’s most abundant resource. He had spent his early years learning about other monastic models, taking a particularly close look at the Cistercians, and for a time he thought about merging with the Abbey of Casamari, which today is on the Cammino di San Benedetto. In time, though, he realized that he was looking for something different, something that placed much greater emphasis on the practice of meditation. And seclusion facilitates meditation, so he was drawn to the Sila. Some of his backers tried to talk him out of it, but after first trying and failing at much harsher sites, he settled on what became San Giovanni Fiore, at the confluence of two rivers, and with just enough viable pasture land to make survival possible.
There is nothing elegant about the Abbazia Florense today. Its rough stone walls are impressive in their way, towering with serious intent above a barren single nave, with only two spartan side chapels. Those Romanesque roots have been given primacy today over the church’s Baroque era, which saw yellow, stucco walls imposed over the rustic stone, and the excessive decoration so common to the era made manifest throughout the structure. In 1989, though, restoration work occurred that stripped nearly all of those Baroque elements; only the altarpiece remains. Everything else is gone. A bold choice, one I can’t possibly judge given how little I know on the subject, but one that has left the church with an unfinished quality. At first glance, I assumed it was bearing the scars of a World War II bombing, like so many of its northern peers, but this was something else entirely.
The drive to preserve is profoundly complicated by our incessant drive to change, to evolve, to grow. Is the return of the original Romanesque look-and-feel a victory for preservation, even if it comes at the cost of the entire Baroque era–now four hundred years old? And is the protection of an aged dialect a triumph when it reinforces an isolationist practice that was driven by practical necessity, not an aspirational approach to how best to live? If people centuries ago had the same desperate hunger for something more, something better, as many of us do today, is it a mockery of sorts to protect what they had?
My host here is one of the people who is embracing change. She’s doing that in part by zooming regularly with two former American guests who visited San Giovanni in Fiore to reconnect with their time in Italy on military service, or in pursuit of long-ago family ties. She works on her English and they develop their Italian. And she’s also doing that through breakfast. She’s making me eggs this morning. Score one for change.
