There’s a town on a mountain in Calabria where, if you ask them, octogenarians will quietly lead you to the empty house where they grew up. Void of earthly life, the houses remain full of pots and pans, broken chairs and beds, fabrics weathered by the wind that sweeps through the vacant windows, grazing no one. They’ll point to these relics of their childhoods left strewn in abandoned homesteads, the materiality of their lives fixed in a time from before the town centre became its own skeleton.
Verbicaro’s one-room houses, like those in the rest of the region, began to fall into decline sometime in the eighties after a century of continued poverty and remote isolation. At some point, it was decided that there was enough money to build new housing — simple apartment blocks with small balconies — but not enough funds to demolish what already existed. Instead, when approaching the town from the valley, the apartments you see up above form a ring around Verbicaro’s old core, left for dead with its contents intact like the Marie Celeste as though the inhabitants were interrupted in the middle of dinner, got up and walked away. To get from one side of Verbicaro to another, then, you have to pass via the ghost town at its centre. It’s not uncommon for older residents to visit these residential gravesites as they go about their days. It is a place where the past bleeds into the present, where the living and dead inhabit the same space.
Early on in Chiara Ambrosio’s Calabria-set documentary, La frequenza fantasma [The Ghost Frequency], we’re with an old woman whom we follow to her evening prayers. Other than local errands, it’s the only time she spends outside of her apartment unaccompanied by her husband and so she makes a point of going nightly. We follow as she winds through the old town’s crumbling cobbled paths, spitting out on a modern paved road on the other side that leads up the hill.
In Calabria, the women agree that the spirits pass by at dusk1 and so reasonably that’s when the women can gather to summon them. Women in my family said that nightly they could leave and go ‘to church’ but in places like these — remote as they are — the religiosity manifests in one sole icon: a cross of simply cut wood affixed to a rock on the side of the road.
The woman greets the rest of her group at a lookout point. They’re in a huddle, silhouetted by that inky indigo the sky turns just as night falls, scarves over their heads to protect them from the cooling wind that brushes fiercely across their bodies and into the valley below. We hear their voices in muddled unison as they perform their incantations — the Marian prayer recast as a spell, repeated for each bead on their wooden rosaries to revoke (or invoke) the ills of the malocchio [evil eye] while summoning their dead for a nightly visitation.
Santa Maria, Madre di Dio,
prega per noi peccatoriSaint Mary, mother of god,
pray for us sinners
This is prayer in its broadest definition, a syncretic tool of spiritual worship that bears the name of Catholicism but is scarcely a distant relative. In this world, everything from a family’s unlucky circumstances to a hangover can be written off as malocchio. The evil eye can be bound to anything — to people, to objects, to weather patterns, even — and it’s the territory of women to disarm its prowess as needed, and deflect its power elsewhere as necessary.
Male viente maledette
e vattine a mare a necàDamned evil wind
go drown yourself in the sea
Spirits known to the women appear and dance with the wind, imparting premonitions and warnings that secure the women’s utility as they re-enter their earthly masculinised spaces.
After some time of recitation has passed, their women’s work is done, and the other reason for their nightly visits is revealed. This is social escapism, time excised from their feminine duties, from husbands with wanton rage manifestly saved for them returning home after rounds of cards and amaro. The women are laughing freely, riffing off each other in a shared tongue and enjoying cigarettes seized from husbands’ pockets. It’s a joyful scene, as though being let in on a secret.
At some point, as a young woman bound to gendered divisions of space within the family, you learn about the men who flanked the women that raised you. You don’t learn about them all at once, but the facts of their empty malice trickle down the walls bit by bit, from up on concrete roofs watching football and setting off fireworks as and when. It’s not hyperbolic to call them brutish, sincere and romantic all at once. In my Nonna’s tellings, men in 1960s Calabria didn’t bring flowers to their futile gestures of apology, as men with little accountability might do today. Instead, they serenaded open windows from the streets with picked flowers in their hands and a single guitar between them. Nonna described being serenaded as “something that the men would do when they were drunk, when they wanted something.”
In Paola Cortellesi’s C'è Ancora Domani [There’s Still Tomorrow] — the film to outdo both Barbie and Oppenheimer in Italy’s box office last year — this gendered dynamic is at the fore.
In the film’s opening image, Delia is awaking peacefully next to her husband in an overexposed black and white. She quietly says buona mattina, Ivano, who greets her with a slapstick literal slap in the face, forcing Delia’s gaze directly to camera as the music and title card appear. The tone is set for a post-war Italian film with all the fixings of the neorealist cinema to come before it.
The war is over, but the Americans are still kicking around, chatting on street corners with their tanks, just around the corner from Delia’s friend’s vegetable stand she frequents daily. As Delia passes by the soldiers one day, she finds a weathered portrait of a Black family blowing around on the street. She looks over to the young men (the oldest, 25 at most) and spots the only Black soldier in his group and approaches to return the photograph. He’s beaming and grateful, and Delia picks up on this despite them not sharing a language. He gives her American chocolate, which she pockets to give to her boys at home. Ivano is suspicious of the gift, and a volcanic eruption ensues, the family’s oldest and only daughter dragging the boys out as soon as Ivano rises from his chair. She knows what’s about to come.
Delia continues to pass the Americans’ outpost on her daily errands. The soldier — William, we learn — is warm and curious towards Delia. He begins to notice her bruises. He learns some Italian phrases, she learns that there are other kinds of men beside Ivano’s kind who have the capacity to see her as a fully formed person.
There are some gruelling scenes of Delia in servitude, both in a figurative and literal sense. We’re hopeful for any sign of possible escape each time she intentionally squirrels away some of the money she’s earned for a secret stash before giving the rest to her husband. There are, finally, plans to make some kind of escape — as the audience we just don’t know where to. Will she take a train up north to find work, or start a new life with the local mechanic, or some third option? The ending unfurls this third option, as the title’s true meaning is also revealed: “There’s still tomorrow” — two full days when Italian women snuck out of their homes to cast the first women’s votes in the history of the country. Two full chances for choosing something different.
In the twilight hours, Calabria feels like a movie set. And with no one around, it’s easier to take notice and to spot the graffiti affixed to every surface — graffiti unlike anywhere I’ve seen. Artist Cy Twombly was enamoured with the public cacography of Roman times; he devoted several pieces to what he dubbed this ancient vandalism. In Calabria today, every ancient wall or even cactus leaves are acquainted with the Twombly scrawls of young people imploring their lovers like some spiritual call into the dark night.
TI AMO. TI PREGO, CARMELA, RITORNO A ME.
I love you. I beg you, Carmela, come back to me.
To say ‘I love you’ in Italian one would usually say ti voglio bene, the literal translation of which in English is I want you well. I want you so much, I want you well. It’s warming, but a cool contrast to the more amorous ti amo used across these harried inartistic scribbles. Ti amo is simply romantic — the young men so potent and direct in their yearnings. Sprawling, desperate, hysterical even — the same act by a woman would be called all these and worse.
To locate the authors of these scrawls, you’d just need to pass by the beach clubs after hours — once the plastic chairs have been stacked up for the day and the families have returned home. The young men are somewhere on the pebbled sand, with too much hair gel and cologne and fitted denim — still they’re playing old folk songs on a single guitar.
But the young women aren’t hearing these serenades or reading the messages left for them. They’re somewhere up on the hill as the sky darkens, laughing with their friends.
The Feed (take what you need, leave the rest)
There’s still time to see BYE BYE TIBERIAS (dir. Lina Soualem), a beautiful film about four generations of Palestinian women
There’s also still time to send e-sims to folks in Gaza. It’s easy — info HERE.
A podcast on the history of the war crime decision-makers in this episode of Throughline, “The Rules of War”
A podcast on how what we watch on screen affects how we perceive the world around us, in this episode of 99% Invisible, “You Are What You Watch”
The easeful sonic magic of Labi Siffre
It’s election day in the UK. Go kick some Tory arse and vote.
Be well x x
NMO
ON L’ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER:
There was a lovely human I lived with years ago, with whom I’d always have the best chats. He sometimes used the phrase l’esprit de l’escalier [in English, the spirit of the stairs] to describe what it felt like to tumble together towards some shared understanding in deep conversation. Like ambling down stairs. Thing is, that’s not what it means at all! It’s: the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late. Either way, the phrase really stuck and it became the title of the note in my phone where I collect little snippets of thoughts, and here we are….
This is a spot for all the writing I haven’t yet found a space for — a nice combo of text and images on film, culture + politics that lets me pretend I’m dawdling down serpentine streets with Teju Cole or John Berger talking about everything and nothing, point-and-shoot in hand.
You can find my work in film + talks programming (among other things) on my web site, HERE.
Ernesto di Martino, Magic: A Theory from the South (1959)