Introduction: Centres Adrift
When he got up and rushed out, the landslide was even bigger, the
ground was sinking. Domenico started to ring the intercoms of the
doors, knocking, screaming in the night: “Run! Run! The town is going away.”
– Vito Teti, Pathos (2020)
It is a familiar, ancient lament of this region, with its history of towns that leave and do not return, that move definitively elsewhere (1). Cavallerizzo, a small village in the inland of Calabria, narrates a structural movement in the southern region, a tale of ambivalence and contradictions. It is a narrow strip of territorial irregularities drawn by mountains and hills, with rare patches of flatland. The slopes terminate at the coast, which is several kilometers long. It is here, on the coastal lines, that we find a distinct array of towns with composite names, often including attributes like marina and nuovo (new) (2). The presence of these adjectives brings their names close to appellations; they allude to the existence of a complementary or former counterpart, to be found, allegedly, away from the coast. This dissertation analyses the abrupt displacement of entire communities, from mountain towns and villages to the coast of Calabria. It draws on anthropological studies of the local landscape, in order to inquire about collective identity and its peculiar duplicity. The newly created settlements are “doubles”, instances of cultural and notional extension of their inland counterparts (3). They represent the unfinished process of self-reappropriation, a process that lingers between the two places, which are at once united and separate. Over time, many sudden and slow descents have occurred: from the strategic or sacred locations of their settlements, the villages set off inexorably towards the coasts. The nature of this can be heterogeneous; over the past two centuries, natural catastrophes have contributed to the restlessness of the territory, its people and culture. Several seismic episodes, together with cases of landslides and floods, have been the catalysts of depopulation and abandonment. Closer to the coast this has manifested as hasty reconstruction. Belvedere Marittimo, Cetraro Marina, Marina di Fuscaldo, Longobardi Marina, Gizzeria Lido, Maida Marina, Brancaleone Marina, Bovalino Marina, Ardore Marina, Marina di Gioiosa Ionica, Caulonia Marina, Riace Marina, Badolato Marina, Marina di Strongoli, Ciró Marina – These are some of the names, from the Tirrenic to the Ionic coast, that refer back to long-lost originals, and thus speak of the fugue state in which entire communities exist. The places of the past, now mostly deserted, are only kept alive by the practice of memory, the fragile pillar of collective imagination. Nostalgia, and a ubiquitous fear of abandonment permeates people’s way of speaking; one of the most unwelcome curses translates to “May the grass grow at your doorstep” and works as evidence of the fear of abandonment, loss and exile. In Calabria, the destinies of places and people are intertwined. The anthropologist Vito Teti points out that they both had to get ‘out of themselves’; the physical abandonment was coupled by a symbolic one. Along with his town, the migrant abandons a part of him, which cannot be found in the coastal one, which rather seems like a suburb of a city that doesn’t exist (4). He becomes himself a double, and only redeems his entirety by engaging with the myth and ritual traditions, and with celebrations that periodically bring the community back to their sacred place of origin. The sense of bewilderment that he experiences when moving to the new town is perhaps a consequence of finding himself stuck between two incongruous ends: the ruins of his hamlet and a future that calls for connections. The connection between the two is broken, and collective identity is as fragile as memory because it is left with hardly a physical sanctuary.
I. Not Places Anymore, Not Places Yet
On the subject of landscape, the geographer Eugenio Turri clarifies the difference between two concepts that are often conflated. The word landscape, he explains, does not identify the shape of the territory, nor does it solely make its beauty and amenity explicit; instead, it represents the perception of each viewer, according to their individual sensibilities and sensitivity. Therefore, it is an anthropological concept, not a geographical one. On the other hand, geography provides us with a basis from which to examine culture in order to pursue a specific anthropology. Dedicated to deepening the concept of landscape, this anthropological construct is essential to comprehend the world we live in, and each other – both as civilization and as sentient creatures – in the everyday experience of it. A landscape, says Turri, is a representation, a result of the living and feeling of men, deprived of which, a place would only be territory – merely a physical or biotic container (5). The Calabrian inland is a repository of historic layers. Its harsh terrain bears direct and precise traces of human occupation and endeavor. Normally, the facts that turn the bare territory into a landscape are those concerning the activities of territorial transformation: the opening of a road, the start of the works for the construction of a house, the building of a factory, etc.; in Calabria, this process seems to work in reverse. Instead of the opening of something, what stands out and transforms the territory, is the perpetual closing; it is not the start of the new, and yet it is the finish of the past. A strong entropy reigns over all the motionless construction sites, that outline a contemporary landscape made of leftovers. The semiological reading of this landscape reflects the civilization that has marked it, seized it, leaving traces of its own passage. Crumbling mountain ways sketch the spine of the region and lead us to the stark location of its oldest villages. Here, over the steep and wooded wallsof the serra (6), the landscape discloses both its quintessence and peculiarity. A dense network of cobbled streets, locally called rughe (wrinkles), fits between poorly inhabited houses, built on two, sometimes three floors. Until the first half of the past century, people still used to build extra levels in their pre-existing houses, for each young family member to settle down in the future. Not only does this type of conformation narrate a long history of migration – once endured as a long-lasting, yet transient occurrence – but it does also document the unpredictable withering of the local life, the broken promise of a long-desired return. Apparently, the future did not suit to the tight space of the village, where today these levels only stand as an evidence of the lost sense of place. For their inaccessibility, places like these used to be strongholds of strategic importance; nowadays – for the very same reason – are on the verge of dereliction. The third landscape, here, thrives undisturbed, undermining the hegemony of the ruins (7). Their material nature, which Kerstin Barndt compares to deep cuts into the earth’s surface, does not hold much power to resist their further naturalization. From the cobblestones to the roofs, collapsed under the burdensome weight of uncertainty, everything seems to be evoking a story. In this fleeting dimension, an open door inspires awe. At times, the background sound of the waterways is muffled by human voices, a subtle indication of a past that strives not to fade away. Few last inhabitants still roam in solitude around the unburied body of their village, not ready to pass into memory yet. These clear signs of depopulation and natural reappropriation all across the urban spaces seem to have carved the old, constructed landscape to an extent that makes one wonder whether a place can decay from such statusand lose its title. The words of the southern singer and songwriter Vinicio Capossela lyrically evoke the atmosphere of this scenario: ‘Where people’s chatter has been nailed to the silent mouths of the closed doors, and the windows, abandoned, are left resembling black eyes.(8)’ Barndt also indicates that these signs instill a sense of loss: before our eyes, a forlorn past and its objects are frozen in time, like palimpsests that invite us to contemplate a layered temporality (9). It is a fact that, encountering these places, the eye perceives the strong territorial transformation, the traces of these – once – structured communities. Nonetheless, the landscape is mostly naked and enigmatic, left unprotected as if the genius loci of each place had rushed away overnight, leaving behind only dust and shadow. This emptying has relevant consequences on different levels: anthropologic, geological, social and economic. Most importantly, however, it constitutes a void of memory, of relationships, a desertification that acts not only on the environment, but also on the collective imagery of those who have left keeping the village in their mind, as a firm point of reference. We have to retrace the paths towards the coast, in order to detect the trail of new human settlements. Here, we suddenly confront with the coastline that Vito Teti has meticulously described, where the heart of the region seems to have been, improperly, transplanted. This side acts like a mirror of its inland counterpart. The architecture of these places, in particular, reflects a wounded past precariously disguised as progress. The new houses, without plaster, with bare concrete pillars, are the exemplary place of the unfinished of our days, of the ruins of a particular modernity (10). Several factors such as the lack of planning, multiple amnesties on the building sanctions, the failed attempt to uproot entire communities to places with no previous meaning, resulted in towns that never evolved from an embryonic stage, born dead, pervaded with the unfulfilled hope to rebuild the fundamental spaces and arteries of previous communities. Corrado Alvaro was one of the local journalists whose work is particularly concerned with a fair narrative of the ‘Calabrias’. By examining in depth the origin of the region’s multiple expressions and facets, he bucked all the hasty examinations of the passers-by that were merely fueled by sensationalism and stereotype. His writings shed light on the coastline’s long reputation of being an unsafe land, and provide an interesting starting point for reflection about its gradual transformation. These areas used to fall prey to frequent pirate raids and suffer from malaria outbreaks, which is why most communities formed in the less vulnerable inlands. Close to the mountain pastures, shepherds became the rich and dominant class of that time. With time, the then deserted coasts transformed to a golden land of citrus, the price of which can reach up to two million euros per hectare (11). The economy may have managed to find new ways to develop, yet the social identity of the newly established communities still appears to be irresolute, profoundly tied to the upper town. The place of the past, strengthened by the religious beliefs about its foundation, remains sacred but desolate. Becoming almost a tópos of the collective imagery, it guards memories of ancient stories and is always ready to provoke some new ones, silently waiting to be filled again (12). While the inland is studded with villages that are slowly surrendering to the eloquence of ruins, the health state of the coast, crowded with replicas, is not more promising. Homes seem on hold, in a state of never-ending pause, waiting for someone to come and give sense to those bricks and those breathless shaded shells from where you see the sea across (13). There exists, in both the spine and the skin of the region, something that has not arrived yet, or has never returned. Adapting the reflections on memory and ruins of Barndt to the Calabrian case, we are here invited to experience this kind of intermediacy, the in-between-ness of the landscape, in aesthetic terms (14). What is most pervasive, in this dimension, is the daily solitude and search of identity of the local youth, that on a side has to cope with realities isolated and emptied out by migration, and on the other faces the lack of definite community projects - in towns that chaotically sprung up from the ground. This widespread absence fosters the query on the sense of places. If the marinas appear to be many peripheries of a city that is slowly vanishing, the villages in the inland look at each other from afar, embittered yet incapable of converging towards a meeting point. A missing element, that has a life elsewhere, juxtaposes in their condition, partially revealing the intertwined truth about those that are not anymore places, and those that are yet to become ones.
II. The Tenacity of the Fragile
In the current times of preponderant globalization, we are growing to forget our disposition for places. In a whirl of replicas, it can seem pretentious to have claims of authenticity and the word ‘local’ can ring hollow. Our sense of place becomes vague because everything we were once familiar with – the whole network of relations and stories – makes way for new systems of signification. This situation could, at least in theory, catalyse a numbness towards sites in general – the end of a more traditional, concrete and intimate conception of them. To use Teti’s words, this sense of anostalgia would mean the bitter end of our feeling for a place. In reality, however, places and non-places are elusive poles, which overlap, oppose and evoke each other. In this context, the growth of localisms and the practice of nostalgia – not of a restorative, but of a constructive kind – may also be harnessed to subvert the flattening effect of globalization. The concept of a non-place, which was introduced by Marc Augé, is a powerful anthropological and literary image, but, as Teti argues, it does not correspond to the life of the people who are everywhere engaged in the pursuit of a centre (15). The Calabrian marinas are emblematic of this urge. They also point to the need of newly constructed identities to accept and build on this intrinsic duality. In the Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot says: It is the other who exposes me to “unity”, causing me to believe in an irreplaceable singularity, for I feel I must not fail him; and at the same time he withdraws me from what would make me unique: I am not indispensable; in me anyone at all is called by the other - anyone at all as the one who owes him aid. The un-unique, always the substitute. The other is, for his part too, always other, lending himself, however, to unity; he is neither this one nor that one, and nonetheless it is to him alone that, each time, I owe everything, including the loss of myself. The responsibility with which I am charged is not mine, and because of it I am no longer myself (16).These words echo the two-fold effort of Calabrian people, to rescue abandoned towns from oblivion, and at the same time to perform refoundation rites in the marinas, that manifest their strong aspiration to become places and be recognized as such, regardless of their ‘other’. Before the decline of the traditional societies of the inland, many people, known as ‘the walkers,’ used to move between villages, for work, to visit their place of origin, or to actively participate in the celebrations of the neighboring villages. Once a year, it was customary to participate in the long Christian pilgrimage dedicated to Our Lady of the Mountain, a celebration that saw many walkers from other villages, often even from other provinces, coming together along the natural itineraries that stretch between different hamlets. Together, they would reach on foot the sanctuary located at the heart of the Aspromonte mountains. Having a look at the trails of these pilgrims along the natural paths of rivers and mountains, it is easy to understand how fragmented the image of Calabria is, the one made of multiple separations, of non-communicating places, historically isolated. All the inland towns and villages used to behold each other, almost as a way of defeating their possible solitude; they would cross, meet and sustain one another. These long-established bonds and movements, however, were put at risk when the communities started to descend towards the coast. A new dimension, different landscapes, required the affirmation of new creeds, as an act of signification for the new settlements. Water, for instance, has been a ritual element in many re-foundation events. When the scarcity of drinking water made the inhabitants of Cerenzia decide to move away from their old town, the local administration hired a commission responsible of finding a site with abundant water, temperate weather and salubrious air to build the new town. Behind the culture of water, the abandonments and the fugue state, the pauses and the research, there exists a geography of thirsty villages. The natural element is constitutive of people’s identity, a distinctive trait of Calabrian people’s nostalgia and memory. As Teti deduced, a great deal of the sense of place in the region has been in fact the sense of water (17).Prayers to ward off the rain and chants to invoke it would be carried along to the new town, together with other myths, mourning traditions and the folklore of agropastoral towns. Thus, a dual communal identity began to emerge. The harsher the rupture, the more necessary the construction of continuity. This continuity is of course deceptive; it is not just the place that changes, but also the perception of it, the relationship with the past and that which has perished. For the community this represents the beginning of a new history, yet there is no intention to erase or mislay the one that preceded it. These efforts subtly speak of a yearning for unity, which is also manifest in the rituals created to embroil both halves, town one and town two, in the attempt to place back together – even if for an instant – all the scattered fragments that constitute the town, the peripheries left without a town center. Often, a foundational myth is merely a myth of abandonment. Not only the founding, but also the destruction and abandonment of places tend to have a mythical explanation related to men’s flaws and mistakes (18).According to cultural and sacral modalities, the villages were founded following miraculous events, most of the time attributed to a saint or the Virgin, who would afterwards become the patron saint of the place. The old town continues to be part of the imaginary of those who had to leave it, who were born in the marina or somewhere else. Meanwhile, its streets and houses become emptier and emptier; the saints have no inhabitants to protect or immigrants to welcome anymore (19). The intrinsic mobility in the region dates to as far back as the Ancient Greeks. This and other, more recent, precedents mean that abandonment ceases to be viewed as an ultimate event. In fact, many places, despite living a progressive depopulation, experience the cyclic return of old inhabitants, who have now settled in the duplicate towns along the coast, in the flatlands, elsewhere in Italy or abroad. Some of the new coastal towns still have their cemeteries and places of worship in the inland. It is a remarkable paradox, for a region that clings on to faith, that large inhabited centers on both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts hardly have any sanctuary, and others, that are deserted during the year, teem with people on religious occasions. In Nocera Terinese, Sant’Andrea, Badolato, Caulonia – to name a few – inhabitants organize their rituals and celebrations not where they factually reside, but “above”, as people refer to their respective inland towns. People from the unlinked surroundings, as well as migrants who annually travel back from their new countries, gather to set up some sort of operation aimed to reconstruct a social identity, and to avoid the absolute dissolution of the original town. The occurrence of return is essential, for going back to celebrate a ritual means, in a way, to re-sanctify the place. Ceremonies are followed by banquets where people feast to honor the dead ones, a peculiar symbolic attempt — with somewhat pagan traits — to restore contact not only with those who passed away but also with those who no longer live there, because both are deceased in terms of their existence in the community. Processions are the expression of a general wish for orientation; they alleviate the sense of distance and bewilderment of those who have remained and those who have left. Separate towns are linked by ancient traditions as well as postmodern initiatives, at different moments of the year. A brief, but rampant example of town reunification is the procession of Madonna di Porto Salvo, which brings local people back to retrace their identity. The painting of the Madonna dates back to the seventeenth century and its rediscovery is attributed to local sailors. Starting from the sanctuary in Melito di Porto Salvo, a town that was built on the site of the discovery, by the coast, the procession carries the canvas all the way up to the ruins of Pentedattilo. It will rest in the local church for about a month, becoming a popular destination for pilgrims from all over the region. Melito is another replica where the fleeing residents of the upper town had found shelter and established their community, after a series of destructive earthquakes. Nowadays, observing a centuries-old tradition, the inhabitants from Melito still entrust the effigy to the few remaining people of Pentedattilo, raising the ruins to places of recognition and attachment, and encouraging reflections about what is, to use Blanchot’s words, “the irreplaceable singularity” of the community and its possible future destiny (20). Beside describing Calabrian folklore and analyzing the importance of processions beyond the mere municipal borders, Corrado Alvaro glimpsed in the mountains an essential element in local people’s individual background. In such events, the sierra forms an amphitheater around the old town; it is no longer a watershed between fragments of an exploded universe, but instead a powerful call for reunification (21). Around it, the piazzas of the villages witness the processions ascending and evoke the impression of being inside a shell that resonates with the roar of the crowd, as if it were the sea (22). Such rejoicing of ‘return’ to the original upper towns, has obviously little to do with the traditional ancient rituals. The slow rhythms of the procession mark the interim between being deprived of the sacred effigy and reappropriating it. A common hesitation accompanies the delivery of the painting to the hilltop sanctuary, a gesture that can be read as a form of superstition. The reluctance to share the privilege of protection with the old town is, in fact, moved by the fear of suffering the same fate. Taking place far from the inhabited area, the square and the houses, this is an invented celebration, which intends to assert the presence of the new generation next to the memory of the elders. As a matter of fact, it would be wrong to impose a binary rhetoric of tradition and modernity on these places, because the two celebrations are inextricable, just like the two towns, the two stories, the two places. Both are dimensions where the past strives to pass, but at the same time they are new places in the process of self-articulation. In this delicate interlude of reframing, the disaster would be related to forgetfulness (23).The youthful velleity of unity, though at times suffered, creates the indispensable shield for a still fragile, disharmonious identity that tiptoes to situate itself in the future. Without memory of values both tangible and intangible, that are linked to the spaces of the old town, without even these sporadic motions that bring people back to their roots, we would force a retreat of something that has not been treated, and in doing so allowing the new town’s collective identity to define itself would be severely compromised (24).
III. The New Ruins
However justified an abandonment, it is never conflict-free. There will always be those who want to stay, and even some that do not intend to leave, especially since a return is precluded. In Calabria, it is a common belief that when all inhabitants leave a place, it is because all protecting deities have already left, or have become impotent. The pact between divinity and man will be renewed and strengthened in the new place. For people who are born and raised in places like these, marked by perpetual abandonment, in towns that on a daily basis transcend their physicality and almost turn into archetypes, it is natural to imagine how it must feel to be the last inhabitant of a place, to bear this responsibility. Those who leave last, occupy a dimension as dramatic as the mythical founders’ one. In this imaginary, sympathizing with those who had to leave last seems to be way easier than with the joy and passion of the founders. It is easy to understand why. The occurrence of death of an elderly person, in the inland of the region, can easily determine the conclusion of more than one story: the end of an era, the extinction of a surname. Therein lies the conjunction between forgetfulness and disaster, which the marinas seem to embody. Between the ‘classical’ Calabria and its new version with the desolate beaches, there exists an extensive wound, that is still unhealed. Even those settlements that are not at risk of imminent abandonment feature uninhabited areas and empty, decaying houses, as though decline were an inherent quality of the local topography. These gaps transform them, sometimes, into uncanny spaces, left in suspension, waiting for the worst. The waiting implies that nothing is over or that everything has happened, and the void renders this to a zone of nobody, as if it were a frontier, not frequented, dodged away (25). In the coastal replicas, modernity acts as a disguise of a broken past; it helps create a place which appears like a hybrid compound. Jean Baudrillard argued that modernity is not an acquired quality, but rather something one is born with; ‘it is a characteristic mode of civilization, which opposes itself to tradition, that is to say, to all other anterior or traditional cultures.’ (26) The double towns of Calabria carry on their shoulders a long history, although it often feels distant, almost unseizable; only traces remain, which reside in the nostalgia of the elderly. It follows that modernity, here, continues to be a falsely assumed notion. Rather, it is possible to glimpse a sort of supermodernity throughout the region, which, even though ancient, gets incessantly destroyed and unsettled, rebuilt and refashioned. It is widely thought that a total, radical form of modernity is only possible in places like America, without ancient history. Europe, with the heavy weight of its history, will never be truly modern. In this continent, the ‘urbanscape’ of the future, as well as the identity of its communities, is built on layers. Will there be room in such a loaded environment for meaning or awe? According to Dolores Hayden, issues of identity are strongly tied to the individual’s perception of the past. The experience of the present is largely dependent on the knowledge of the past, whose abandoned buildings can be used to understand it (27). Without critical knowledge of one’s own time and space, the gap between the bare inland and the expanding coastal towns would exponentially increase, until determining on the one hand a definitive demise, and on the other hand the loss of collective consciousness, of the community’s archetype. Vito Teti introduced the crucial concept of restanza, the meaning of which is not merely to remain, but instead refers to the conscious and responsible construction of ‘staying’ (28). Choosing to stay in a place, as opposed to leaving, entails a strive to change the world, to try to reach new horizons of sense. And yet, from ruins — and thanks to those who left — new people and worlds were born. Perhaps the last inhabitant of a town feels just like the newly arrived one in the coastal settlement: confused, agitated by mixed feelings that oscillate between the desire to escape and the dream of rooting, floating amidst the nostalgia of the lost world and the one for the unknown elsewhere. Clues of a veiled symmetry briefly emerge when they both look around and behold ruins, effects of a progress that has no name and no mercy. And yet, this time, the old and the new hardly recognize each other. The love and hate relationship, the simultaneous distance and affinity, their complex and twisted knots are unraveling forever. Now, the two towns stand alone, their daily life seems no longer based on duality and needs to seek new reasons of presence. The new coastal agglomerates are what Smithson would define as the zero panorama, composed of ‘ruins in reverse’. These are the opposite of the classical ‘romantic ruins’, because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise into ruin before they are built (29). Although being the new official administrative centers, the marinas keep resembling suburbs, escaped from a rational past and without big historical events. In Calabria, modernity has not yet succeeded in turning crisis into a value. The replicas are full of holes, which, in a sense, are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memorytraces of an abandoned set of futures (30). The illusion of control over perfect, linear cities, has generated a diffused rejection of irregularities. It has led us to ignore the fact that we dwell upon the death of others. Paradoxically, ruins from a remote past are today widely appreciated, and thought of as unique documents of a time that no longer exists; they arouse the most disparate emotions, but they do not disturb us. On the other hand, places that have been recently abandoned make us feel uneasy; it is difficult to enter houses where life still lingers, where people seem to have only drifted apart for a moment. But in the instant that we walk in, the far dimension of ruins becomes contemporary, invasive, needing to be dealt with. Calabria is a region where the decay of the landscape has been a background throughout its history. Here, the ruins have grown to inhabit the restless spirit of its people, along with their constant attempts to overcome a condition of alienation. Abandoned towns perturb us precisely because people feel tied to their vicissitudes. According to Robert Harbison, a new consciousness is being forged ‘by picking around in the bones of various pasts, which sometimes feel like obstacles deliberately erected just to show how hard it is to enter the mind of anyone from another class’(31). Nevertheless, by deciding to confront these bones, they no longer appear as insurmountable barriers, but as thresholds from which to imagine new worlds.
Conclusion: Re-reading
The Oxymoron From the multiple fils-rouges of interpretation about ruins, it emerges that what turns an abandoned building into a ruin, is the gaze. To look is not only a perceptive act, as John Berger underlines, for it interweaves with people’s lives, their history and memory. It engenders a complex experience that has no set rules, and where looking means to be constantly surprised by something (32). However, a place deprived of life can easily sway from being a cluster of muted remains to being a precious coffer of evocative layers, able to unleash new sensations and dynamics. Since the end of the last century, the interest of artistic media, in Europe and in the world, has initiated an operation of recovery, aimed to turn the places of forgetfulness and suffering into something ‘familiar’. For the first time, southern regions of Italy have witnessed the rescue of places that otherwise would have been consigned to oblivion. By reintroducing them as elements crucial in understanding the existential and painful present of contemporary cities, these interventions helped to slowly transform the widespread feeling of discomfort and rejection into one of curiosity, aimed at a more imaginative projection of the landscape. All the arts, literature and media concerned with the issue of abandonment have encouraged the creation of a new kind of imagery – the first step in resignifying, revaluating and reimagining the forsaken and destroyed places that surround us. It has become clear how essential it is to exorcise our feelings about the remains in both the past and the present environment, and to furnish them with new identities, before we can finally accept them as the ruins of our contemporaneity, as part of who we are. These neglected spaces shall be claimed as places of urban reappropriation, placing cultural attributes before the material ones, in which it is essential to once again choose to act, putting aside that sense of inadequacy that is the fear of questioning oneself. For this to happen, it is essential to confer them with a renewed sense, related to memory, and to pay attention to the temporalities they narrate alongside all the imagery that they continuously urge. For those passing through, both the entrance and the way out of Calabria are marked by places that are visual tales of beauty and decline. The ‘gates’ of the region are emblematic of what the traveller will encounter and leave behind again: cyclical stories of destruction and reconstruction, not only of places, but also of collective identity. A common practice among the local people is to dismiss the region’s latest misfortunes using, almost religiously, the oxymoron “land of beauty and disrepair”. This expression draws the contrast between the natural beauty and the cultural misuse. Or, upon a second reading, perhaps it speaks of the gradual acceptance of the ruins as eloquent fragments, constitutive elements of the region’s topography, and formative of its inhabitants’ lives and collective identity.
A new interpretation of the places – that begins from what remains – has led to conversations about recovery. When and how, by what criteria and for what purpose – these are difficult questions that the double towns address firstly to their communities, then to all of us. Are the villages up on the hills reclaimed by nature, or are they asking for a new kind of presence? John Berger once wrote that ‘the past is the one thing that we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we cannot do is change its consequences.’(33) Although the aftermath of the past is out of our control, people’s vision is not; it is constantly active, continually moving, and so is the nostalgia that cyclically reveals new layers of meaning in what we see, and presents the powerful critique needed to overthrow, then piece together again, a present so full of itself, that seems unable to imagine a future.
Note
1) Salvatore Piermarini, Vito Teti, Pathos. L’inquietudine della Talpa (Rubbettino 2020), pp. 73-74.
2 The Italian word ‘marina’ describes a place that sits next to the sea or something that belongs to the marine world; it is used in this case to name the towns that were
rebuilt near the coast.
3) Vito Teti, Il senso dei luoghi (Rome: Donzelli, 2004), p.42.
4) Teti, Il senso dei luoghi, pp. 40-42.
5) Il paesaggio racconta: Proceedings of the 4th Convention in March 2000, ed. by Eugenio Turri, (Reggio Emilia: Osvaldo Piacentini Foundation, 2000) p. 1.
6) “Serre” is the way some mountain formations of Calabria are referred to.
7) Gilles Clément introduces the concept of the Third Landscape saying: “the Third Landscape - an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden -
designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone.”
8) Vinicio Capossela, ‘Il Treno’, Canzoni della Cupa (Warner Music Italy, 2016) [On MP3].
9) Barndt, Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures, pp. 270-83.
10) Teti, Il Senso dei Luoghi, p. 42.
11) Corrado Alvaro, Un treno nel Sud (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 1996).
12) From Ancient Greek: τόπος “place”: a traditional or conventional literary or rhetorical theme or topic.
13) Viviana Rubbo, The waiting city, Urban Reports, 2017 <http://www.urbanreports.org/waiting-city/> [accessed on 16 February 2021].
14) Barndt, Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures, p. 290.
15) Teti, Il Senso dei Luoghi, p. 19.
16) Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015) p. 13.
17)Teti, Il Senso dei Luoghi, p. 500.
18) Vito Teti, Terra Inquieta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2015) p. 53.
19) Teti, Il senso dei luoghi, pp. 385-89.
20) Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 13.
21) Corrado Alvaro, Polsi nell’arte, nella leggenda e nella storia, (Reggio Calabria: Iiriti Editore, 2005).
22) Alvaro, Polsi nell’arte, nella leggenda e nella storia.
23) Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 3.
24) Ibid., p. 3.
25) Teti, Il senso dei luoghi, pp. 322-23.
26)Jean Baudrillard, French Fantasies (Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Volume XI, No. 3, 1987), pp. 62-63.
27) Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1997), p. 46.
28) Literally, the word refers to the act of staying where one belongs, more specifically in a town or a territory.
29) Robert Smithson and Henry Kuttner, The Monuments of Passaic (Artforum, December 1967) pp. 52-57.
30) Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic, p. 54.
31) Robert Harbison, Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (London: Reaktion Books, 2015) p. 31.
32) John Berger, About Looking, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 38-40.
33) Nicola Slawson, ‘A life in quotes: John Berger’, The Guardian, 2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/a-life-in-quotes-john-berger> [accessed on 1 April 2021].
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