Carlo Levi

(….) And I finally started looking for the town. I went away from the station and I reached a street, flanked with old houses on one side and coasted by a precipice on the other side. Matera is in that precipice. But I saw almost nothing up there because of the excessive steepness of the coast, descending nearly perpendicularly (.....)(.....) The shape of the ravine was strange; it looked like two half funnels flanked, separate from a little spur and linked in a common apex. Up there there was a white church. Santa Maria de Idris, which seemed poked in the earth. Those upset cones are called "Sassi": "Sasso Caveoso" and "Sasso Barisano". When we imagined the hell of "Divina Commedia" by Dante at school, we thought of that shape. And I started going down a sort mule-track, from circle to circle, downwards. The little and narrow road, winding its way down, went along roofs of the houses, if we can call them so that. They are caves excavated in the clay baked hard of the ravine; each of them has a façade; some are beautiful with plain eighteenth century decoration. These false façades rise at the height of the mountain because of the inclination of the slope, and they overhang a little on highs; The streets go along a narrow space between the façades and the slope, and they are both floors for people living in the upper houses and roofs for the lower ones. Doors were open because of the hot weather. While I was watching, I saw the inside of the caves which are lit only by the door. Some of them have not it even: you can go in from the top among trap doors and little stairs. I saw beds, miserable furnishing, rags hanging from the earth walls in those dark holes. Dogs, sheeps, goats, pigs were lying on the floor. Each family usually has got only one of those caves to live in and men, women, children and beasts sleep together. Twenty thousand people live like that. There were swarms of children. They appeared from every part, entirely naked or covered by rags with that warm weather, among flies, in the dust. I have never seen such an image of misery: and yet, I am used to see a considerable number of poor, ill and undernourished children every day, this is my job. But I have never imagined such a view like yesterday. I have seen children sit down at the door of the houses, in the dirt, with the eyes half-closed and red and swollen eyelids while the sun was burning. Flies alit on their eyes, but they were motionless and didn't send them away with hands. Yes, flies were walking on their eyes and the children didn't seem to hear them. It was the trachoma. I knew already it was down here: but to see it in the dirt and the misery is another thing. I met other children, skeleton of hunger with little faces wrinkled like the old, and hairs full of lice and crusts. However most of them had an enormous and swollen belly and a yellowish face suffering of malaria. Women watching me on the doors, invited me to come in: I saw some children lying down, under blankets in tatters in those dark and stinking caves, children who were chattering for being so sick. Others dragged themselves with difficulty, reduced to skin and bone by dysentery. I have seen those ones with wax faces who looked suffering from something worst than malary, perhaps some tropical illness, maybe the Kala Azar, the black fever. There were slim women with underfed and dirty sucklings tied to withered breasts. They were greeting me kindly and gloomily: it seemed to me that I found myself in a plague-stricken town. . (.....)

(Drawn from the book "Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli")

by Carlo Levi