A Night in Sassi di Matera circa 1950

                *

A burnt-back day in the field,
we're all aching and tired,
huddled on this rank straw,
too close, too hot for sleep;
 
the animals press and heave;
coughs, heat, sweat, rise,
drip from the clammy roof,
pierce our ragged sheet;

the make-shift door, mil-
dewed tarpaulin off the hay,
has blown open, I re-tie it,
lose my place on the straw;
 
the sick child whimpers in
the dark, a third burial will
be hard, another one less
to help scythe and sow;
 
soon, we're being moved
from centuries of dwelling
in these caves, the only life
we've known, how will we

cope with water on tap,
a place to piss and s**t,
windows, heat, lighting,
a fancy door we can close;
 
what will become of us,
where will our animals go,
will startled tourists witness
the fetid misery we've endured?

                    

                        *

Author's Note

Sassi di Matera, a Unesco World Heritage Site is one of the first human settlements in Italy. It was almost abandoned in the 50’s when the government forcefully relocated many inhabitants to the developing modern city. The town’s prehistoric cave dwellings had by then become “dark holes” riddled with filth and disease, where barnyard animals were kept in dank corners, chickens ran across the dining room tables, and infant mortality rates were horrendous, thanks to rampant malaria, trachoma and dysentery. Matera’s obscurity ended in 1945, when the Italian artist and author Carlo Levi published his memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, about his year of political exile in Basilicata under the Fascists. Levi painted a vivid portrait of a forgotten rural world that had, since the unification of Italy in 1870, sunk into a desperate poverty.

Reviews

[NotUsinganymore]

Very fancy french words. I enjoyed it a lot. c:

[Gerald Parker]

Italian: Matera is a World Heritage site. Sassi are the caves people lived in till the 1950s.

[NotUsinganymore]

Interesitng. thanks!