The Climb: A rural Italian youth considers his future
POMARICO, Italy — We stand amid the downtown bustle of this ancient southern Italian village, at a spot where the newer section gives way to the historic district, or Centro Storico.
Along with my 19-year-old cousin, Gabriel, I gaze skyward, shielding my eyes from the afternoon glare, toward a precipitous hill clustered with centuries-old whitewashed dwellings with pockmarked facades that glisten in the summer sun.
This antiquated hilltop community, founded around the fall of the Roman Empire, is connected by a warren of crooked cobblestone alleyways that veer off this way and that like hardened arteries, a maze that defies solution.
It’s a good place to come if you are trying to lose someone, or get lost yourself.
At the hill’s precipice looms a 16th Century church and various fortified Medieval towers that have crumbled over time. And our destination: an oversized Christ-the-Redeemer statue, its whitened stonework arms spread wide, as though to cast a blessing over this town and a surrounding countryside that rolls off into infinity in every direction.
But for nearly 2,000 years, that biblical grace alone wasn’t enough to protect inhabitants here from a very dangerous world at large. Over successive centuries, invading hordes poured into the region, from the Bourbons, Normans and Vikings to the Greeks, Spanish, Moors and marauding Byzantine armies, each seeking to assert their will.
The ever-present danger led the citizenry in this region once known as Lucania to build hilltop fortresses for defensive purposes, with thick walls and steep embankments — citadels against the latest foreign threat, and from each other.
“When I see all those hilltop villages,” observed Francesco de Sanctis, the foremost Italian literary historian of the 19th Century, “I conceive wild times of men against men, in which people sought shelter on the tops of mountains, as in the flood.”
Now the threat is gone, but the fortifications remain. On this day, we’re not exactly climbing a mountain, but something close.
Gabriel sizes me up as if to determine my stamina and then heads off. “C’mon,” he says in Italian. “Let’s take the steep route.”
I sigh, take a deep breath, and follow on.
I am summering in this town of 4,000 residents to explore the early life of my paternal grandfather, Antonio Glionna, and perhaps learn a bit about myself in the process.
Like millions of other early 20th Century immigrants, my grandfather abandoned this place in search of a better life in America.
But why did he leave? Was it personal circumstances? Poverty? A scourge of disease or lack of opportunity? Or maybe a curiosity of a world outside this tiny hilltown.
The young man by my side offers clues.
Gabriel is skinny, rangy, recently graduated from high school, with his mother’s soulful eyes, someone who dresses as hiply as any urban American his age, with his sunglasses, earring and ever-present cigarette. From when he was a boy, he has explored every twist and turn, every alleyway, of Pomarico's old town. Luckily, he’s offered to serve as my guide of this archaic place.
I quickly become winded. The bursitis in my left hip throbs, but I try to keep pace with this young mountain goat. Too proud, too foolish, to say anything, I press on.
The exotic setting makes me forget my pain.
Over the eons, the cobblestones have been re-grouted and the walls re-plastered. The higher we climb, the scenery becomes more desolate, more deserted, with abandoned domiciles, their doors ajar, showing the left-behind detritus of families driven away by a fear of being crushed to death in one of the region’s many earthquakes.
There’s an eerie ghost-town quiet to these forsaken buildings and alleyways, with a discarded past lurking around every corner.
Gabriel keeps turning back to check on my progress. He lives close by, in a towering five-story building in the new part of town among three generations of his family, sharing a flat with his parents and two brothers.
His grandfather, my namesake, Giovanni Glionna, now 85, like my own grandfather Antonio, fled this town as a young man because he imagined that there was more to life than tending to the sheep and goats that on his family’s rural homestead.
He immigrated to northern Italy and Germany to find work in construction, yet eventually returned here to marry Laura, a girl from the village, start a family of three daughters while working for years as a village firefighter.
Now he’s a great-grandfather, growing vegetables and raising chickens on family land, at last proud of his campesino roots.
Unlike his grandfather, Gabriel isn’t so quick to abandon this place. Like 60 percent of Italian youth, he’s happy to live with his parents, sharing a small room with brothers Giovanni and Christian. He’s used to the home-cooked meals and his mother’s attentions.
But now that high school is over, he faces a difficult choice.
With no interest in attending university, he wants to become a mechanic, like several cousins. The problem is there’s no place to learn his desired trade, or any other.
Not in Pomarico.
Joblessness among young men Gabriel’s age is a brutal reality here. In the so-called Mezzogiorno, the poor agrarian southern province of Basilicata where he lives, youth unemployment can reach 50 percent or more, nearly double the national rate of 31 percent. The U.S. figure is below 10 percent.
Yet unemployment is endemic among older rural Italians as well. Those who do find work must often make mammoth sacrifices. Gabriel’s uncle works in Austria, away from family for most of the year. His brothers have luckily found work in the nearby town of Matera. His mother works for the local park service, but only six months a year.
Meanwhile, others sit and wait.
At 9 a.m., when I roll into a local coffee bar called Madness, across from the Catholic Church in a central square, out-of-work men lounge around outside tables, drinking beer, chain-smoking cigarettes, gesticulating with their hands as they warble in the local dialect, known as Pomaricana.
Amid the exotica to the outsider, there’s a sense of economic stagnation here. The region is hemorrhaging it's young. Each year, some 3,000 young people leave Basilicata for good. They have no choice.
Basilicata’s current 570,000 population could drop to 450,000 by 2050, to roughly the same population it had in the 1800s. The province’s birth rate - seven births per 1,000 inhabitants - is below the Italian average, which is itself low by European standards.
Pomarico, my grandfather’s birthplace, is slowing dying.
So what’s a young man like Gabriel supposed to do?
Lighting yet another cigarette, he shrugs. He works a few hours on call at a motorcycle repair place, hoping that his brothers can get him on at the Matera machine shop.
Sometimes, he’s anxious. With more pent-up energy than the men who frequent the bars all day, he tours around town in his grandfather’s car, flagging down the occasional friend.
Like youths in many small American towns, he complains that there’s nothing to do in his tiny hometown. He plays soccer many evenings in a new field near the center of town, but even the most fanatical fan can play soccer only so many hours of the day.
As we reach the summit, with me huffing and puffing, wiping the sweat from my face, Gabriel guides me to several vista points where we can see forever into the southern Italian countryside. Each view is more commanding than the one before it.
“This is why I stay here,” he says. “For this.”
It seems a hollow claim for someone so young.
But Gabriel has carved out a life here.
He leads me through several alleyways to an unassuming wooden door that he pushes open. Inside is a windowless room with wan lighting and a few couches, a space that might have served as a stable in distant times.
For Gabriel, it’s a haven where he and his friends can gather to smoke cigarettes and maybe drink a few beers, to be themselves and forget life in Pomarico for awhile.
Walking back down the hill, he describes the northern Italian town of Torino, near the French border, where he visited a few years ago with one of his brothers and a few friends. The place seemed like a cultural paradise, but an expensive one.
How could he even think of relocating without a job or training? And what about his mother here in Pomarico? His departure, he knows, would break her heart.
And so, for now, Gabriel stays, hoping for a more-fulfilling tomorrow.
We reach a popular village square, walking past a lineup of old men lounging on wooden benches in a shady square like old crows perched on an electric wire.
We pause at a large wall that bears an oversized drawing of an older Italian denizen puffing on a cigar. Yet someone has added some telling graffiti.
Pomarico, it says, “is no place for the young.”
My grandfather left Pomarico, so did my older cousin Giovanni. Now this member of my family’s newest generation may soon be forced to follow in their footsteps.
