Exordium

Abstract

For the centenary celebration of the Italian Unification, alongside renewed interest in the questione del mezzogiorno (Southern question)—though often viewed through colored and moralizing glasses—the EXPO Director of the Regions, Mario Soldati, commissioned the well-known novelist and artist Carlo Levi to create a work of art that would capture the existential landscape of the South. The result was the mural Lucania 1961. Currently located in the main room of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, just a few yards from a panoramic viewpoint in the city of Matera, where tourists and locals gather at dusk, Lucania 1961 represents a unique visual and theoretical archetype to redirect our gazes to discern how landscapes speak to us as well as the signs and fragmentations of the lived worlds that they convey. The mural offers three illustrations of civic and political engagement that pay homage primarily to the young partisan-mayor of Tricarico, Rocco Scotellaro, immersing the viewer in Lucanian rural lives shaped by the natural weaving of valleys, rocks, rustic churches, and silent dunes moving between gravine (ravines) and piazze (squares). While the outdoor view may continue to encourage a sense of awe, an inside view cries the place of a speaking land, far from nostalgia. Interestingly, a few years earlier, Scotellaro penned an extraordinary description of a nuanced kinship of the natural and the human: “I hear the hum of crickets / and the sound of the bell at the neck / of a restless goat. / The wind wraps me / with oh so subtle silver threads / and there, dispersed in the shade of the clouds, / lies the patchwork of a tiny Lucanian town” (Decker and Angoff 1959, 158) (This is the earliest translation of the poem “Lucania,” published few years after Scotellaro’s death, in The Literary Review in a section dedicated to “Contemporary Italian Poets.” Recently, thanks to the passionate work of scholars Allen Prowle and Caroline Maldonado, an extensive compilation of poems has been made available for the non-Italian audience, renewing interest in the young peasant poet. I refer to the volume Rocco Scotellaro. Your Call Keeps Us Awake (Scotellaro 2013) and the collection of essays “Lucania within us. Carlo Levi e Rocco Scotellaro,” which were published in the magazine Forum Italicum (Dell’Aquila, Martelli, and Vitelli 2016). The latest and most updated Italian edition was curated by Franco Vitelli, Giulia Dell’Aquila, and Sebastiano Martelli (2019)). The relationality of the sensory domain and nature interweaves in a stratified consciousness of absence, where human words yield space to an aesthetic of trace, nudity, and pre-dialogical corporeality. In Scotellaro’s words, we may recall the post-humanist and poetic ecology of the late Leopardian (1845) La ginestra or the telluric surfaces in Andrea Zanzotto’s “chant in the earth” (Cortellessa 2021).