DOVE SONO?

I’d like to describe the area I’m living in and studying; below is what I’ve come up with. It’s more just a series of impressions rather than a coherent description.

Last month I read a small collection of essays on the 1980 earthquake, which was centered very near where I am currently living. It was one of the worst natural disasters Italy has ever seen, with thousands losing their lives, thousands more losing their homes. Author Leonardo Sciascia called these towns “paesi-presepi” (crèche, or nativity scene towns), a description that some locals regard, fairly enough, as patronizing.

Let me list a few details of everyday life in the two towns I’ve gotten to know best, Cairano and Calitri. We live in Cairano and go to Calitri at least three times a week. The towns sit on neighboring hilltops, and they’re quite close as the crow flies; by car the only way to go from one town to the other is to drive down one windy road, across a larger connecting road, and up another windy road. The trip takes about 15 minutes in my Peugeot, now that I know the road, and along the way I pass farmland, a few shepherds with flocks, old folks tending to their small vineyards, two battery factories, heaps of garbage, and even, if I’m lucky, an old man on a donkey with bundles of kindling on their backs.

Both towns’ architectural style is medieval—narrow streets, cobblestones, stairways that lead nowhere, castle ruins. Cairano has fewer than 500 people, Calitri a little over 5000 (in the 1940s, Cairano had close to 2000, Calitri close to 8000).

Calitri is small but sustains dozens of shops, two hotels, a franchise from a large supermarket chain, a few pizzerias, pastry shops, delis, bars, and three high schools.

Cairano has four stores, two bars, a baker, and a tabaccaio (run out of the entryway of a man’s house). The barista of the main bar in town is also the man who delivers and installs your gas tanks (for cooking and heat); if you run out of flour, you can buy it at the baker (along with eggs or fresh ricotta that his mother-in-law makes); if you need matches you can only buy them at the tabaccaio, etc. You cannot buy a newspaper in Cairano, but you can buy minutes for your cell.

As another point of comparison: all the towns in the region have a weekly outdoor market; they vary in size according to the size of the town and the weather. This time of year Cairano’s market tends to feature between two and four stalls, Calitri’s around 25.

Cairano has a school that only goes up to fifth grade. From D’s preschool to fifth grade there are a total of 20 children (21 now that D is here). The kids are split into three classrooms: preschool, 1st -3rd, and 4th-5th, but it’s more of an old-fashioned one-room school house set-up. It’s not unlikely for us to find D in the first grade classroom hanging out; all the kids snack together and take their gymnastics class together once a week. One appealing part about the setup is that D knows every child under 13 in Cairano; that is, he in fact knows more people than we do in town.

There are very few young people here. When I said earlier that we went “trick or treating” at Carnevale with everyone in town (with only some exaggeration) who was under 60, that meant about 40 people. There are few jobs in the area, and young Italians with college degrees have few professional options. A 26-year-old neighbor with a college degree tells me she’s the only one from her graduating class who is still in Cairano—and she’s here mainly because her family told her not to bother looking for work in Napoli or another big city and pushed her to come back after college.