Travels in South of Italy

#13 Arrivederchi Italy – We’re Alberta Bound

We are in the final day of our 30 days in Italy and are relaxing poolside rather than walking 10,000 steps.

The southern sun has warmed. We’ve driven for miles and miles around villages and farmland, walked through steep hillside towns climbing to their centres  and grandiose cathedrals.

Strolled through gardens and orchards with even M, a non-gardener, trying to help me identify sweetly scented blossoms. 

  And we’ve dined morning, noon and late at night.  (A 7:30 dinner reservation is early, most restaurants don’t get guests until 9 pm.) We even discovered what Italians do when all the shops close from 12:30 til 4:30 – they go home and cook big meals and rest, before restarting their work day late afternoon. 

    Though we planned this day to be chill  before our return to Alberta’s late spring we don’t sit still. We wander through a museum created from a restoration of La Posta Vecchia, a grand home first built on a then already ancient site in 1640! Destroyed in a fire in 1919 it evidently sat ignored until purchased and restored by the famous magnate J. Paul Getty in 1960 with the guidance of the archaeological societies of Etruria. But then, presto(!) – artifacts of all kinds, including finely crafted mosaic floors were discovered under the basement dating to the … hang on … first and second century AD!!

Trying to get our heads around that we took a beach walk along the shores of the Mediterranean. I had to pause and consider the history of what we’d just seen – trying to feel the spirits from 2000 years ago!

It makes me want to cry and be happy at the same time. Being close to works of art so ancient makes me think we have to get the most out of our time here on earth, create art,  put down our iPhones, lol, love the ones we’re with,  and be present for each other. It’s what we have.

As we watched the fishermen  on the rocky ledge I couldn’t stop considering how I might make life at home  more Italian.

I’ve decided I need to build a stone wall, install huge (maybe ancient – 1st century) terracotta planters, shine a light up my apple tree, plant a lemon tree (ha!), drink all my future cappuccinos from a pretty pink china cup, eat more bread and gelato and somehow be thin, wear pungent floral perfume and gaze at it all through popular crazy-huge black rimmed glasses. Prego. Prego. We’re soon to be Alberta bound. 

#12 ‘I Must Go Down To the Sea Today’

Do you ever feel as if you’re in a dream? You’re having an experience so foreign to your everyday life you wonder how you came to be where you are? Those were my thoughts seated with M on the sunny terrace of an ancient stone farmhouse, eating an Easter Monday lunch, looking over the green hills of Basilicata, Italy, while being serenaded by the most charming group of folk singers. 

   I closed my eyes to absorb it all. We left that comforting lunch of vegetable lasagna, grilled meats and fresh picked oranges to drive down the ever winding roads of Southern Italy towards the sea and Apulia. 

(M is getting accustomed to these Italian drivers, where they hug each others speeding bumpers until they make their daredevil passes. ) 

Farmhouses were on theme that day. We stayed in a romantic recovered farm property, at Masseria Montenapoleone, on part of a plain of centuries old olive groves.

The food this trip has been exquisite but made so by the atmosphere. We breakfasted on a terrace surrounded by a stunning array of geraniums, rose bushes, cacti and fruit trees and were hardly able to put down our iPhone cameras to eat our poached eggs and cream filled croissants. 

   Despite the beauty surrounding us we ventured out each day to hillside and seaside towns. 

       One day it was to visit Alberobello, famous for  the funny circular peaked roofed houses (called trulli), another to climb amongst the stairways of Ostuni, stepping into the magnificent basilica. We paused at cafes to refresh ourselves with gelatos or a cool glass of vino. 

     Other days we traveled to the seaside towns of Monopoli and Polignano a Mare. Staring out from the stone walls at the Adriatic Sea, I felt so far from my foothills home in Calgary. It was the end part of the trip where I had a greedy need to smell more Alpine roses, enjoy more pistachio gelato, and gaze longer at the sea. 

# 11 Prego. That’s Old

We were in the boot of Italy staying in the absolutely charming town of Bernalda, at a very special small hotel built by the Cópala family. The gardens were exquisite and though my family had told me there had been another spring snow storm at home in Calgary, I was still overwhelmed with plans to up my Canadian garden game. Whisteria hung over the garden walls, fig trees climbed around the breakfast veranda, and the geraniums had grown  into bright red geranium bushes.

  Still, we were tempted to drive out of Bernalda, passing families enjoying gelato on their Easter weekend strolls, to discover a true wonder of the world. 

The green hills of Basilicata

   After a trip through hills of the greenest farmland we gathered in an ancient building  to be brought by van into a valley and then carefully led into a cave, or crypt,  where it’s said a shepherd revealed that visible on the walls where he sheltered his sheep were some sort of paintings. Mama Mia! Paintings indeed! Under  special lightening (no photography allowed) we were staring at stunning frescos dating from the 8th and 9th century!

This rupestrian church was discovered on May 1, 1963 by members of the Circolo La Scaletta of Matera.

In 2001, the Zètema Foundation of Matera launched an exemplary, scientifically-based full recovery project of the rock monument with the support of the Central Institute of Restoration.

Called the Crypt of Original Sin – this cave was the “cult site of a Benedictine rock monastery from the Lombard period. It is embellished with a cycle of frescoes painted by the artist known as the Painter of the Flowers of Matera and expressing the historical characteristics of Benedictine-Beneventan art.” 

Sitting in the cool dim cave, listening to an audio presentation accompanied by low gorgorian chanting and imagining the monks painting a thousand years previously, left me feeling enraptured but also very small – ready to jump back out into the light and remembering to keep smelling the roses. 

Quotes and photographs are from the La Cripto Del Peccato Originale website copyright 2023. 

#10 My Geography Lessons Didn’t Do Justice To The Boot of Italy

On this special Italian holiday we’ve said arrivederci to Sicily, and Bonjourno to the boot of Italy. M and I flew from our tour of Sicily through Rome, back to Bari in the boot of mainland Italy. We drove the winding highway to a small hotel in Bernalda,  whose wisteria filled gardens made me want to stay forever and also to get home and wake up my Canadian flower beds.

Rome to Bernalda

   After being up close to Mount Etna, Sicily’s active volcano, we might have felt we were finished with astonishing sights – until we took a short drive from Bernalda to neighbouring Matera. This incredibly picturesque town has its roots in the neolithic period and was occupied essentially by cave dwelling people right up until the 1950’s when it was forcibly evacuated by decree of the Italian government. The decree was necessary because of sanitation and health considerations made necessary by the fact that the people, the children, the chickens, the donkeys, the pigs and everything else all lived in the same caves together.

Museum Depicting Traditional Cave Home

Alarmingly, these people relied upon animal manure to heat their homes, which gives something of a view of why in modern times, an end to it all was necessary. 

While the cave houses were condemned and empty for years, under strict regulations, they are now being renovated. Plumbing, sewer and electricity now adorn fashionable apartments owned by a younger generation, at considerable expense. The result is a picturesque and unusual location in southern Italy.

The location is sought after by filmmakers, including the James Bond folks who filmed No Time To Die here. We were told they poured gallons of Coca Cola on the slippery rock streets to make them sticky rather than slick for the speeding car scenes. The clean-up afterwards made them even more shiny white. If you ever are so fortunate to visit the south don’t miss Matera.