We drove into the mountains
Southern Italy
Driving in we were driving back
Into history
The simple ways of peasant life
Goat herds mountain streams
Heading for a monastery
And a land of dreams
Earthquake region
Shaken lives
Shaken buildings too
Redemptorist community
Come in how do you do
Southern Italian easiness
Pasta pomodoro
I could be at home here
Sicilian wine to die for
Christ stopped at Eboli
So the story goes
Off the beaten track down here
A place nobody knows
Lovely people poor as mice
Beauty all around
They honour the Madonna
In her is comfort found
Brian Fahy
3 May 2022
+ Carlo Levi was sent into internal exile in 1935 to the village of Aliano in Lucania. He spent a year there. The people say that civilisation stopped at Eboli, so many miles away, and their life in the mountains is unknown to the world, even to the rest of Italy.
I visited a similar place some miles north, forty years ago, when I went to the Redemptorist monastery at Materdomini, near Caposele. A recent earthquake has damaged many homes and lives there. It was like travelling back in time into earlier centuries.
The remoteness of the place put me in mind of my mother’s home in Glencullen, in Erris, County Mayo. It is a wild and barren and beautiful place, and for a long time unknown to anyone other than those who came from that spot.
Erris Poetry 