Warsaw, the differences between the remains of the socialist era and the present-day consumerist remake, the German past in Silesia, an essay on noise, Dernburg and his modernist warehouse in Breslau, the post-war history of Breslau/Wroclàw, Deep Poland, Austria-Hungary, the bricks with the ashes from Auschwitz, Stockhausen and Hawking, in six chapters obscure facts get linked to observations, walks, bicycle rides, bus travels.
” Poland was the strangest country I had ever lived in. It looked like a giant stretch of land, without any notion of a border. It was a country acting out a sur place, inhabited by accidental people. Speaking to them was like trying to catch fairies. They all escaped. They returned to their language. It was the only thing that had kept the population alive all through the centuries, when the country seemed to be forever lost in history.
But then we arrived in Deep Poland.”
©Copyright 2018 Rinus van Alebeek
Rinus van Alebeek
Deep Poland
The Mansion
Guru waited for me in the apartment, where he usually stayed during his visits to the mansion. His father had built the concrete structure in the early 1970s. Situated directly on the coast, almost carved into a rock, it counted seven levels with different apartments. Each one of them had their own terrace. The simple apartments were on ground level and faced the pool. Starting from the piece of land of the neighbours, the eyes of the guests would meet olive trees and a bit further, bordering the little beach, a cliff where falcons built their nests. The cliff was part of a series of crusts along the coast. The slope of Monteporo, a seven hundred meter high mountain, seemed to rise up out of the sea. When the guest looked inland their eyes met a wide amphitheatric hillside with its villas and gardens and the mountain rising above it on the south side. The single apartment on the top of the mansion offered the most spectacular panorama. The view followed the coastline up to Scylla, where it touched the northern part of Sicily. Mount Etna and the Aeolian Islands were visible on a clear day. The volcano deserved any description which included the word majestic. Guru’s sleeping room was right under the terrace of the top apartment. It faced an olive tree that didn’t feel too well, but kept on shooting its branches with every springtime, as if it wanted to reach higher and higher, to a point where it could forget the miserable existence of the roots. There was not much earth to expand into. But alas, there was more to the mansion that did not meet the eye. Guru knew it and I knew it, and probably he knew a lot more than he was ever willing to tell. But it was a very pleasant place, the style was a mixture of a James Bond villa and the Atlantic Wall. People loved it.
He made his appearance a few months after the tourist season had ended. In the second week of September the last guests had left. Guru arrived when the evenings were chilly and the apartments revealed other, less convenient truths. He sat in a beach chair, a blanket around his shoulders and on his legs, a little electric heater on the grey concrete floor. A spiral iron staircase lead up to the bedroom on the sixth level. It looked like it had belonged to a cargo ship. Next to him stood a heavy round iron black table, with the same anti-slippery fish-grate motive on the surface. Three little black stools surrounded the table, needless to say, that they were also made of wrought iron. The kitchen sink was behind him. He liked to hear my plans about the artist residency that I wanted to set up during the empty months.
Flashback
The last years of the 1990s were awkward. Life went on as usual, but now and then an intense feeling of euphoria took possession of most of the people that I knew. From one day to the other the spleen of the everyday routine which covered faces with an ash-grey veil, got replaced by a joyous mood that didn’t know any boundaries. People seemed shamelessly happy. The spirit remained a few days; it made the sunlight seem even more bright than it already was. The mountains were glowing with pride and the flowers seemed to send out love letters that everyone received but no-one could read. The word love was on everyone’s lips, as were countless kisses. I have no idea why it happened only in those years. Well, maybe I have a little idea. The twentieth century was not a very happy one. Two wars had destroyed the part of the world where I grew up. Entire generations were killed, a flourishing community disappeared completely. The second half of the twentieth century was full of gaps that couldn’t be filled up. Official history told us that the second world war ended in 1945. The victory over Nazi Germany was of incredible importance to the Soviets. It gave them a new identity. But the war went on. The Soviet Union annexed big parts of Eastern Europe. The allies were never allies. They just happened to fight the same enemy. On my side of the front the victors gave us capitalism. Prosperity came as a logical result. I have no idea what the people got from the Soviet regime. I only know that when the war finally ended in 1989, a lot of eastern european people wanted to come to our side, and adopt the capitalist lifestyle. The men and women in Yugoslavia realised that their country was a patchwork, stitched together by ideas they no longer needed to accept. When the 1990s were well on their way, rolling inevitably to the huge abyss marked by the year 2000, everyone I knew felt relieved. We had made it. We were still alive. And finally there was peace.
In the year 1998 I lived on the top of a hill in a tiny village in the northern part of Tuscany. I had friends on the coast. Some of them were artists that had arrived to work with the marble. I had just lost my loved one to a guy twenty years younger than I was. I welcomed every opportunity to go to the coast. On one of such occasions I met Jessica, a fragile young woman, daughter of an American painter. She was an incredibly talented painter. She worked with pencil. Or did she? Maybe it was ink. She drew thousands and thousands of little lines to paint birds in their natural habitat. Was her mother Italian? I can’t remember. There was mention of Rome in the biography of her father. I never came close to her. There was always this strange wind of joy that separated us. I have no idea if she felt attracted to me. And I have no idea whether I could have felt attracted to her, if the wound left by the separation hadn’t almost bled me to death. I remember one moment of hidden eroticism. We were on our way to a friend. He lived somewhere in the hills, that lay in front of the Apuan Alps, part of the mountain range that connected the North to the south of Italy. The road was lovely chaotic, because of the fenced areas left and right, where the workers cut and unloaded the marble blocks. Hundreds of billboards adorned the side of the street. The Apuan Alps were always in sight, very near indeed, with the marble quarries clearly visible. We were in a good mood, because we liked the view that changed with every minute. Maybe we played some happy music. Cars were old in those days. They still had cassette players. Everyone was into mix-tapes. She stopped at a gas station. She faced the gasoline pump, controlled the counter, while she operated the fuel nozzle. Jessica, daughter of an American father, she wore tattered jeans, that accentuated her small behind surprisingly well. Surprisingly, because that was the first time I saw her sensualism shimmer through her appearance. I asked her if she was aware of it, that she looked like a pin-up at a gas station. She laughed, kept her eyes on the counter. She made a little move with her hips. Yes, that was a perfect curve. With one move of her lovely bum she had transported me to a gas station somewhere on a deserted US highway. The smell of petrol penetrated my nose. The counter arrived at 10.000 Lire. She put the nozzle back on the hook and walked to the shop. The next image of her is her happy face, when she came walking towards me, and said that it was all so bellissima. There was a big open field behind her, a resplendent lawn that went down a bit and ended suddenly to give way to a great view over the coastal region, known as Cinqueterre. The dark-blue mountains, the colourful villages on the slopes of the hills, the sparkling sunlight in the sea, it formed a perfect background to her smile. Jessica, her blond hair fell to her shoulders. It moved with the wind and with her soft bumpy walk. I don’t know what I answered. I only know that her face, and the way she looked at me, her eyes a bit shut because of the strong sunlight, had carved an instant on the surface of time. I don’t know how long she looked at me, if there was any answer at all from my side. I have no idea if she was courting me, or if the beauty of it all had overwhelmed her. I also have no idea why I didn’t put an arm around her shoulder to ask her if she could explain the art objects to me, or if she could take me to the table with the wine. It was a Sunday, and I was already thinking a few hours ahead, when this beautiful moment would be over and we would be sitting in a boring pizzeria in Carrara, where we had to listen to the useless ideas of our friend the sculptor who was always drunk. She must have felt pretty abandoned when I decided to leave with the parents of a friend of mine. I had broken a delicate and fragile tissue. In hindsight it was vanity that made me do it. It was not a fine move.
Byzantium
Guru had come down to Calabria to do what he liked best: talk. A man in his seventies, a big man by that, his torso held a good volume, at least that’s what people who knew about the bel canto might have told him, he had taken it upon him to drive the one thousand kilometres from Massa in his little car that smelled of pissed-down vanilla, thanks to the perfumed tree figure that hung at the rear-view mirror. Had he known about the letiga, a kind of sedan-chair, without wheels, most gaudily painted and decorated; but instead of being carried by men, two mules covered with gay trappings and small bells, are harnessed to it, one in front, the other behind, he would probably have spoken about it at length, and what a good idea it could be to carry the guests in such a seat to the train station, or to a restaurant. Preferably he would choose a carpenter for this story, and overload him with ideas on how to build a letiga, and he would even be willing to buy the mules, though he couldn’t spend too much, he would add in a side-note, because the latest mudslide, that had come down from the hills under the Apuan Alps, had swallowed half of his possessions. To get back to the subject, it is possible that someone had told him that those mules seldom, if ever, keep an even pace, and that the motion must be horrible, if not, I wonder how I could have escaped his proposal to be the donkey-driver, so that I could make a bit of money on the side by escorting the tourist. But, alas, he never mentioned it. Mules, apparently, are not on a nobleman’s mind.
The couple who lived in nearby Vibo were friends of the house. R. played the Spanish guitar and would sing Calabrian songs once the Amaro del Capo started to warm our senses. R., a robust man with giant hands, played the guitar ever so smoothly, while he looked half in trance under his eyebrows, his mouth a little opened. Guru had invited R. and his wife to talk about the task that awaited them. The couple was visibly tormented by the burden of responsibility. They didn’t want the place to die, or to see it finish in strange hands. They were under the spell of the mansion, like everyone who became a regular visitor. They cared about the place; they considered it a true part of their lives. The agreement that should be reached, was about running the place during the tourist season. One would expect a technical discussion on the various tasks: to keep apartments clean and the guests satisfied, instructions on maintenance and about the financial aspect. None such happened. Guru created a big candelabra of words, and each word was a burning candle that casted its light on R. The candelabra was put in a spacious room, nay, a throne hall that became visible in more words and useless stories which the old man brought with what he thought was the eloquence of a modern-day Cicero. His deep voice carried quotes and memories of friends or so-called friends, the books he had read, the philosophers he had met, not to forget the writers. He introduced all those men one by one, made them sit in chairs, and nod seriously at every enlightening message he brought about. Voltaire, Seneca and an old Cardinal dressed in his scarlet red soutane finally had taken their places. Guru was ready to finish his story. The cardinal seemed to be asleep when the last sentence was on its way to the end. He shortly lifted the lid of his turtle-like left eye when silence arrived. Guru leaned back, his eyes wide open. He tried to suppress a triumphant smile by whistling a tune that for sure would have sounded great on a grand piano. R. lifted his head. Anger boiled under his skin. Whatever his answer would be, I was sure that he would put down the job within three months. Nonetheless he tried to come up with a response. Not familiar with the use of ornaments in rhetorics he looked like a serf who appeared in the house of his Lord, nervously kneading his hat. He tried, poor R. to make some verbal reverences. He also tried to keep his pride. There had been too many feuds and masters in his beloved land. He decided relatively fast to transport the discussion back to the apartment, where we sat at a table that usually was filled with food and wine, but now, without the uniting quality, looked lump and cold. He asked about finances. That was not a subject that Guru wanted to discuss now.
Flashback
F. was the youngest of four brothers. He was atypical tall for a Calabrian and just as atypical skinny. His head was disproportionate small. People thought that he was a bit simple. He lived in the nearby village. I first met the poor sod when I arrived at the mansion in the fall of the year 2003. I was once again in need of a secluded place, because I wanted to work on a book. The father of the wife of my friend, who had heard of my talents, was in need of a guardian. My friend Davide thought that I would be the perfect candidate. I got invited for a talk, not at the home of the father-in-law, but in a little garden house that was part of a marina owned by the family. I can’t remember much of that meeting, as for one weird fact, when he started to talk about provisions. He imagined, that it would be close to impossible to buy food and drinks. Going to live in the mansion was like setting out for a voyage in a vessel that would take six months before I could set foot on land again.
My solitary existence at the mansion didn’t last long. The owner, who hadn’t yet deserved himself the name Guru, thought it would be a good idea to move F. from his family house. This was obviously a noble deed from the silver-haired eminence, because of the troublesome circumstances that F. had to endure while living with his family. There was mention of blood in the description that he added. He spoke under his voice, or rather, he sounded like a big fish that had landed in the small wooden boat together with the mackerel and dorado. He felt very much out-of-place. That’s why the big silver-haired fish started to talk with a muddy voice. The terrified fisherman heard that his wife would leave him that very night to make love with the young parish priest, if he did not throw him back in the sea. Already back then, Guru held back his head and looked down on you with wide open eyes. The smile around his lips was not as malicious as it would become in later years.
Guru called me almost every day to hear about F. I tried to focus on my own affairs. I tried to make this clear. After ten phone calls or so, he finally got the message, and reduced his calls to one per week. His next idea-fix was to help F. to become a fisherman. We drove to Bagnara, a good one-and-a-half hour ride. I joined him, always in for a visit and a panoramic ride. Bagnara is a small village on the sea, mainly consisting of one street lined with houses that were in the process of losing any faith of becoming the home to a future generation. They had grown old together with their occupants. The street was high up. The beach was one hundred meters straight down the rock. The sun disappeared after noon. The rock casted a giant shadow over the beach. It was the perfect place for Guru to find his boat. He loved Greek mythology. But what part did F. play in this all? Guru puffed his explanations in the face of a fisherman. The man listened. The two Italians were not only divided by one thousand kilometres of land but also by a huge cultural heritage. Guru had to give up the idea.
An unsettling incident occurred during a later visit. F. and his master spent more time together. One day, on a walk around the premisses, I passed Guru’s apartment. The door was closed. This was very uncommon. Normally he left it open, to enjoy the view, or simply because the apartments were rather uncomfortable and unappealing in itself. The curtains were closed as well. I heard voices. Slightly agitated, like someone who needed to explain something again, I heard him instruct the other person in the apartment how to play a certain chord. The chord was played on a Spanish guitar. It was a cheap imitation model with nylon strings. While the guitar player repeated the chord, Guru bursted into song. I watched at the bottom of the door. Those were clearly the feet of F. The young man with the guitar, sitting melancholy on a rock in the fields. Wasn’t that the image that all the travellers of the past had seen during their grand tour?
It made me think. Was F.’s education and partial adoption part of a bigger plan? Or was he the subject of an elaborate bet? Guru’s daughter had told me that her father was a freemason. Was the plan conceived together with his brothers? Would he, in the spirit of enlightenment adopt a savage wild and prove that the person could become a respected member of society? Bummer. The myth and the attribution of it to Rousseau was reintroduced by a racist faction in the Ethnological Society of London as part of a coup which aimed to divert the society from its anti-racist, pro-human rights roots. The myth was a vital tool which enabled racist anthropologists to promote the centrality of race as a scientific ideology while advocating violently racist modes of ordering society.
Summers in Calabria were full of hot days. Temperatures could reach 38ºC, sometimes they went up towards 40ºC. Those were not peak temperatures in a period of low thirties. No, it was hot for days on end and the only thing you could do was wait for sunset, when wind came blowing over the sea. At day it was so humid, that you never could get rid of a thin layer of sweat. In springtime when the fields were full of wild flowers and the shepherd took his sheep to the olive groves, temperatures were pleasant. Those were the T-shirt days. Those were also the days, that you noticed a silent pride in the people who lived here. And on one such day, when the Sun was already preparing for its summer reign, Guru had told F. to paint the pool. F. would get a big bucket of sky-blue paint and a big brush. It needed a few strokes to get a good layer of paint. It needed also close to eighty litres of paint to cover the complete bottom. The old man had given instructions and, having nothing else to do, returned every fifteen minutes to the pool to see how the work continued. It didn’t continue as he liked. The sun high in the sky, F. on the bottom of the deep side of the pool, where the heath accumulated and the poisonous fumes of the paint couldn’t escape, Guru shouted. And F. looked up. He didn’t fully comprehend his mistake. Guru kept on walking between his deck chair and the pool downside. His comments grew more ferocious with every inspection. That was their sadomasochist relationship. F. could have chosen a cooler part of the day to do the job. I went for a walk.
The coast of this part of Calabria consisted of little bays, hidden beaches, caves and big rocks. From way up you could see how turquoise waters met with the deep-blue. The mansion was like an unknown moss species that had covered a rock long ago. It had petrified with time and, paled by the sun, had taken on a weak milky colour brown. The top part of it was still lower than the field next to it. This field lay one terrace lower than a modest house right under the shadow of a plane tree. Ach, but who is there that will not, with good reason, be surprised to learn that a tree has been introduced among us from a foreign clime for nothing but its shade? I mean the plane, which was first brought across the Ionian Sea to the Isle of Diomedes, there to be planted at his tomb. Dionysius the Elder, one of the tyrants of Sicily, had plane-trees conveyed to the city of Rhegium, where they were looked upon as the great marvel of his palace. The almond tree at the other side of the house was not bad either. But that blossoming beauty had lost its petals weeks ago. The nuts were already budding between the fresh leaves. I walked to the onion fields, turned around at the big pine tree and walked back to the panoramic point.
The panoramic point was once thought to become the terrace and garden of a small villa. The construction stopped when the house was almost finished. This happened more often. People started to build houses without permission. Sometimes the owners received their permission halfway the construction. It also happened that they had to stop. This house, that everyone knew as the notary’s house, was left by its owner years ago. It had many little rooms, and a lower part that was accessible after a risky descent. In that part someone had put a mattress in a room, and probably had also emptied a bottle of perfume over it. As happens with such abandoned houses, it falls victim to minor destructions. And slowly the villa lost its white colour, saw graffiti appear on the walls, tiles smashed and plants grow from the roof. The place in front of the house was popular with young couples, who could find the privacy which they lacked at home. Wild fennel and agave grew in a field with herbs. Yellow moss covered big stones. A small pathway went down to the sea. Men arrived at the end of the afternoon, stood on the rocks with fishing rods and waited for the sun to disappear behind the horizon. I walked up here almost every day, to watch the sky take on all colours orange, pink and purple during sunset. I also went here to look at Stromboli, the volcanic island. When the sun hit it hard you could see the houses on the east side. I had grown used to it. The day didn’t feel complete without an evening salute. I walked up the little grid place, looked to the notary’s house as usual, and spotted F. He sat against the wall, his elbows resting on his knees. His face darkened, as if he had cried. I asked him if he was okay, if I could do something for him. He looked up and said: “No, Rinus, it’s okay, thank you.” There was something in his voice that struck me. It sounded more dignified than I had expected.
The Contract
He waited for me in the apartment, where he usually stayed during his visits to the mansion. He had taken a little nap after his talk with R. He sat in a deck chair, dressed in a warm navy blu pullover. A little electric heater stood in front of him. The doors of the apartments were transparent. The welder must have had the time of his life when the construction arrived at the finishing touch. He had made the spiral staircases, the round tables and stools, frames of mirrors, the supports of the benches and the dining tables. He had also made all the doors, a check-board frame with twenty-four little windows in it, a cleaning woman’s nightmare. I knocked on one of the windows. Guru opened his eyes, gave a big smile and invited me in. Here was another chance to talk. He offered a chair, and there was the introduction, which, to my amazement he cut short. Maybe it was a rhetoric trick. Surprise the opponent and give him no time to think about a counter-argumentation. Moreover, the question was quite straight forward. How did I plan to do this?
When my friend Davide offered me to go and live at the mansion, I had asked him very explicitly if his father-in-law still had a say in the business. I added that I didn’t like changing situations, that were a result of his restless mind. Your father-in-law, I said, is very good at destroying things that are well on their way to become a success. Davide secured me that there was nothing to worry about. He was old; he had his little things in Massa. He was in charge now. I was on a tour in Italy, had performed with my tapes and tape machines. Thanks to this tour I finally could visit Davide and his wife at their home. To my surprise he, together with two of his friends, were leaving to the South the next day. They could offer me a ride to Naples. In Naples I played in front of twenty people in a record shop that was also a boutique. I had some days off. I decided to visit Davide at the mansion. It was one of those days in October, that was made for eternity. Calabria was very much the right place. It felt like I had left not thirteen years ago, but only yesterday. This was not true of course. I didn’t see the change of time in the landscape. I was suddenly aware that the change of time had happened inside of me and my body.
I explained to the head of the family, what I had done while living abroad. It didn’t feel comfortable, but I had to stress that I had become a very little node in a giant network of artists who mainly worked with a DIY-ethos. Some of them operated very far away from the institutions, others were lucky enough to find grants or organisations that would finance their plans. Their activities were so slight that they hardly got noticed by the press, let alone find a place in a concert hall or a museum. Guru did not express it as such, but his attention shifted from the financial aspect of my proposal (the profit that he and his family could have from an artist residency, which would at least cover all the costs) to a sheer anthropological interest in my whereabouts. I talked of basements and under-crossings, of squats and white cube galleries, of bars and small cinemas; I talked of all those places that real estate agents and local governments had neglected for so long, that they were now in risk of destruction. Maybe that was the wrong approach. Guru and I both knew the real state of the mansion. Its complete ruin seemed a matter of time. That’s why finding new ways of making money was so important to him. I knew that I was losing ground. The main concern was to finish it in a pleasant way, with light talk. I could go ahead and try, but whatever I had to say was of no value. And that’s how I started. The family never showed any interest whatsoever in what I was doing, or what the invited artists had been up to. Some of the members of the family didn’t even know about the artist residency. I didn’t care about that. I knew my place very well. I also knew what to expect. Things developed step by step, not because you pushed them, but because you cared. That was enough. It was the first thing I had understood from living in Calabria. I thought that I, already in a grandparental age, did not have to explain that aspect of my plan to a man who was many years my senior.
Eighty Miles into the Northwest Wind
In his book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino wrote: Proceeding eighty miles into the Northwest wind you reach the city of Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox. There comes a moment in someone’s life that he comes across this book, starts reading it and won’t stop until he turns the last page and puts his hand on the back cover. It must have happened to my friend Michal from Warsaw. He had come to visit me in Calabria. He had especially bought a car for the occasion, a 150€ black Nissan in which he drove down all the way from Poland. Calvino’s book was in his luggage. Back in Warsaw one of his friends, also called Michal, ran a bar, named Eufemia. The bar was in one of the basements of The Academy of Fine Arts. Eufemia is an old name of this space. They made the first bar in there in the 1960s. It has changed its name a few times and it was also closed several times. Sometimes it was just a student cantina, sometimes something more. Legend says that Eufemia was a name of the girl posing for students at the Academia. Eufemia had been around some time. One of the women, called by that name, had made it into a saint. I have no idea when the bosses of the catholic church handed out saint titles to all the martyrs they could find. It must have happened when the use of the calendar entered the daily life of the common people. To attribute each day to a different saint was a master move. It was equally an achievement to have a village named after a saint. Reading Italo Calvino’s „Invisible Cities” while travelling among unknown cities of Calabria Michal must have felt a double hit between the eyes when he came across the name Eufemia in the book ànd on the map. The similarities had been striking. His Aha-Erlebnis gave birth to an ambitious project: "Rinus and I set out for a dozen of excursions into Calabrian towns to recite, talk, read, listen, drink coffee, perform, play, record, play back… or: blow, bow, rub, explode, scrape, walk, ignore, talk, screw up, dance, whistle, which are all suggestions of Alvin Lucier to make large and small resonant environments sound." I had tried to explain to Guru, that the artists and their work would give an identity to the residency. In my estimation this process would take three years. The visits were fundamental in the slow process of becoming recognisable on a local and on an international level. Santa Euphemia was our first destination: Proceeding eighty miles into the Northwest wind, you reach the city of Santa Euphemia D'Aspromonte, but the pictures of the dwellers reach you long before the arrival. Their faces are wounded and deformed. They are also hostile and proud. They all come to you at the same place and at the same time, some twenty miles before the gates, when you already crossed the desert and travel up the river. They all come in the same frames and in the same light, doubled, in two perspectives – en face and profile. Against the background of height measures and a board with date and place of birth.
When we searched for images of Sant’Eufemia d’Aspromonte, the computer screen showed thirty pictures, half of which were mug shots of condemned criminals. They were not the most beautiful men. They were young, middle-aged or old, some of them had big scars on their faces. The village was surrounded by rising and descending serpentine roads, olive groves and the woods of Aspromonte, the most southern mountain of the Apennines. Huge apartment blocks with space for shops on street level and unfinished top floors with bare concrete pillars supporting the roof lined the street. Tiny alleys went up to the main square in front of a church, that maybe once had known times of great splendour. Everything would have looked different, had we arrived during the funeral of a boss. But we didn’t. We took a beer at a bar, sat for an hour and observed the men playing cards, while some of them were observing us. It was a peaceful Saturday afternoon. Nothing happened. The voices of the arguing card-players and the onlookers mingled with the radio playing inside the bar. It was still warm enough to sit outside, under the pergola, that during summer must have showered its fragrance on the card-players. (There was no reason to think that one day would pass by without these men sitting here and playing cards.) They knew that we knew and we knew that they knew. They also knew that we would never really know what they knew. This was the kind of traffic that went from our eyes to theirs and back again. It was my first confrontation with a blockade by silence. The troupe of card-players would have looked the same in a prison courtyard, on a steamship to the Americas or a very long time ago at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels.
Before Garibaldi became a street, a square, a station, a town, a biscuit, a restaurant, a park, an aircraft carrier, a statue and a monument he was Giuseppe Garibaldi, a general. His campaign lead to the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the unification of Italy. During this campaign he and his troops arrived in Calabria, on a boat from Catania. They took Reggio Calabria without any fight and then went on to the North, joined and cheered by Calabrians who opposed the old Bourbon regime. The last part of the trip he travelled by train. When he arrived in Naples he showed the King of the two Sicilies the door, and awaited Victor Emmanuel II to hand over the keys. Italy was not completely united. The pope still had some property. Two years later Garibaldi set out for a second campaign, determined to conquer the papal states, and probably send the pope abroad. Avignon was a possibility, but an exile to New York also appeals to me as a way how history could have taken an interesting turn. The king however sent his army to stop Garibaldi. This happened not very far from where the men in Sant’Eufemia were playing cards. Apparently Garibaldi had told his soldiers not to shoot. The rest of the story is part of the legend, where the brave general awaited his capture, leaning against a tree, while he smoked a long pipe. Yes. Maybe. The pope at that time had already been exiled once. All of Italy was in turmoil since decades. It was not too far stretched to think that one day the revolutionary forces would seize Rome and kick him out of the Vatican. To use Garibaldi, his army, and his popularity to show to the pope what might happen if he wouldn’t give in to negotiations, could have been a clever strategic move. Eight years after Garibaldi’s halt the pope gave in. He exchanged the papal states for an annual allowance.
Some historians hold different views on the ‘glorious’ unification. The Risorgimento apparently had its collateral damage. Roberto Martucci substantiates the claims made by many other writers that many of the Bourbon troops who surrendered under the armistice were never released but instead transported to concentration camps in Piemont, where large numbers died of malnutrition, disease and hypothermia. Norma Dauby found also this quote: In October 1860 newly appointed governor Luigi Carlo Farini wrote to Cavour:”But my friend, what lands are these, Molise and the South! What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa.” She writes about Domenico Lopresti in her study ‘Risorgimento in modern Italian culture.’ He was born in 1813 in Calabria to a noble Italian family…Lopresti decided to join Garibaldi in his fight for Rome. He was with Garibaldi’s army when they reached Sant’Eufemia d’Aspromonte. Each one of the card-players could have told us how to get to Via Garibaldi in their village. I am afraid that asked about Domenico Lopresti maybe a few of them would have answered that Domenico had a shop in Palmi where he sold fruit and vegetables. Lopresti has a number of first-hand experiences of how the construction of the South as a barbaric land to be tamed and civilised on the part of the Northern “conquerors” is providing the North with a justification for endless acts of violence and abuse. I am even more afraid that almost all the card-players would know about Lopresti’s food and vegetable shop, and probably also about the Calabrian nobleman, because it needs just one engaged teacher to plant the seed of knowledge, but when asked, they would have remained silent. Knowing both Loprestis could lead to secondary questions and information about their movements and relations. Family ties and the lines they drew inside a contemporary web just as across generations, had created an impenetrable network. Would one walk back through the decades, be welcomed by one grandfather after another, he might arrive in Garibaldi’s time, and a young man who sat on a rock, resting from a long day’s march, could have looked up to the visitor. This young man might have been one of the deported ones, who ended his life in a detention camp way up north. He might have been a wanted man, who had to flee from the King’s agents, hide in the mountains and join the brigands. He might have joined others who emigrated to the Americas. His story would have travelled through generations. It would have become part of the identity, not only of his family, but also of the town and the region. And one thing each of the descendants would have learned was to not speak with strangers about personal matters. I think that is how the complete region became a personal matter.
If you like what you read you can order the complete e-pub for 3.70€
> /> /> /> /> /> /> /> /> /> /> /> />The make-up of the pages is different from what you get if you buy the e-pub version of the book. Words in Italics indicate where quotes or additional information are used.