Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - Masters of Landscapes

...opere fotografiche che esploravano una geografia meridionale dei luoghi e degli spazi di feste e rituali religiosi, un sincretismo di cerimonie cristiane e pagane.

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY 5/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

Enzo Sellerio, the first contemporary Sicilian photographer to gain an international reputation, explored a Sicilian landscape devoid of romantic rhetoric. Sellerio began photographing in the early fifties, producing images in which he tried to overcome the stereotyped picture of the South, and the conventional desolate representations of southern daily life. His excursions into the poorest areas of downtown Palermo reveal a certain Sicilian esprit, a peculiar instinct or will to go through everyday life armed with irony, a self-imposed distance. His most famous photographs, taken from the early fifties to the mid-seventies, were later published in 1977 in his Inventario Siciliano (Sicilian inventory). Commenting on Sellerio’s photographs, Leonardo Sciascia states: “The specific human reality that was spotted, pursued, and finally surprised by Sellerio, as in a strenuous and laborious hunt, presents an alert and stubborn resistance, made of superstition and shame, a resistance to yielding to a photographic eye and above all to being caught while signifying. . . . These photographs are thus in a way ‘forms’ of a life almost un-graspable and refractory in itself. They narrate and signify Sicily with truth and fantasy (as there is no truth without fantasy) and they belong to the best literary and figurative tradition of the island.”

Ferdinando Scianna caught the attention of the photography world in Europe in 1965 with his book Feste religiose in Sicilia. It included some hundred images, which the photographer took during a sort of pilgrimage, following itineraries for some years of religious processions in Sicily. Although these pictures are still often read as anthropological documentation of the studies by De Martino, they are, rather, an archaeological study of the habits and postures of Sicilians; they constitute an investigation into Sicilianness, what Scianna himself defines as “a sort of autobiography through representations of people and things that I love and hate the most.” Scianna’s Feste religiose is a tragic look into a Sicilian mode of existence that is carried out and perpetuated through a complex collection of everyday gestures, continuous rituals: a veritable enactment of a Pirandellian play of simulation and dissimulation.

At the beginning of the seventies, following in the wake of a renewed political commitment fueled by the students’ movement, the South was viewed and pictured as a locus of research and investigation into the folkloric, which seemed to revive memories of anthropological missions of the early fifties. By the mid-seventies, Marialba Russo was producing photographic works that explored a southern geography of the sites and spaces of religious festivals and rituals, a syncretism of Christian and pagan ceremonies. Some of her most successful photographs—such as those of men entangled in thorns, documents of mass self-flagellation, pictures of black-cloaked, thorn-crowned women—reflect on popular religious festivals as announcements of sexual repression. One of the most striking photographs taken during this period portrays a ritualistic enactment—by men—of the throes of labor, testifying to an ancient awe and fear of matriarchy.*

To Mimmo Jodice, the South is a project to revisit cityscapes and landscapes long subjected to the colonizing gaze of the tourist industry, and to map out a geography of sites/sights that pertain to a Mediterranean culture. Jodice reexplores the tradition of Neapolitan vedutismo (view painting), according to which the city of Naples, as a metonym for South from the Quattrocento onward, was represented as an open and transparent site, displayed for view, readily accessible and identifiable. While Jodice’s images openly challenge those conventional representations and genre pictures produced for Grand Tour travelers, they also disorient the viewer, presenting him/her with peopleless and labyrinthine and devoid of people. To Jodice, the South belongs to the vision of Mediterranean civilization—a place at the threshold of history and mythology, that space between form and hallucination. In his migrations throughout his Mediterranean, Jodice frames seascapes and coasts, bays and piers, archaeological sites set against wide open skies, endlessly tracing and retracing outlines and borders, working on an ever provisional travel map.

Text is here: https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

*Opening image: https://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/fotografie/schede/IMM-3g010-0026927/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzo_Sellerio

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinando_Scianna

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimmo_Jodice

https://www.postcart.com/catalogo/autore/119/marialba-russo 

Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - Responsive Glances

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS

PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER

HALF OF ITALY 4/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

Among the early “literary missions” to recover an image of the other half of Italy stands Conversazione in Sicilia, a novel by Elio Vittorini. Written in 1938 and published for the first time in 1941, the book was republished at the end of 1953 in a new edition, with photographs by Luigi Crocenzi and a selection of images dated 1938 by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini. It was one of the first novels published in Italy to be accompanied by photographs depicting the interior of Sicily and proposing a tougher Sicilian existence, as well as by details of artworks that are part of the everyday Sicilian landscape. Vittorini himself directed the photographers and placed the images alongside the text. Each photograph in the book “reflected and reverberated upon the others, modifying both its own meaning and those of the accompanying images.”

A similar exploration into the texture of southern culture and territory was that of Fosco Maraini. This prominent Italian intellectual began his trip down South in 1951. He began his own photographic campaign to gather material for a book ostensibly to be published in 1951, entitled Nostro Sud (Our South), but which was not published until 1980, under the title Civiltà contadina (Peasant civilization). Maraini photographed for three years, in a comprehensive way, not only the familiar southern sights and landscapes but also interiors, faces, and images that represented rituals of daily life, those pictures that he understood as “occasions for quotidianità” (everydayness), invented by southern Italians.

By the late fifties Mario Giacomelli had toured Scanno in Abruzzo. His photographs of the little village, with its inhabitants cloaked in their black costumes, traveled all over the world. These images documented Giacomelli’s fascination with southern archaic conditions and their fabulistic atmosphere. Notwithstanding the harsh comments of Italian critics, which singled out the “Scanno” series as sheer “formalist” and “calligraphic” exercise embedded in a “trite southern rhetoric,” Giacomelli continued his travels, and in the same period produced a series of photographs on the Puglia region. Like “Scanno,” these later photographs were of no ethnological use, but rather captured crowds of houses, endlessly repeating their poor materials and basic shapes, as though squeezing themselves into the image, stretching the very edges of the frame. Giacomelli records a choreography of responsive glances of street children, and wary faces of young mothers, who are both intrigued and concerned with the photographer’s attention.

Text is here:
https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

Opening image:

https://www.fatamorganaweb.it/vittorini-crocenzi-e-ledizione-illustrata-di-conversazione-in-sicilia/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elio_Vittorini

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosco_Maraini

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Giacomelli

Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.

La foto d'apertura mi richiama nella memoria quelle immortalized dallo zio Giuseppino Mittiga a Platì vent'anni prima.

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - Ernesto De Martino and The Progressive Folklore

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. T. S. Eliot, 1942

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY 3/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

In 1948 Marxist ethnologist Ernesto De Martino set out through Levi’s Lucania on a mission to investigate the peasants’ religious/ magic practices and rituals, in an attempt to document the complexity of their beliefs, and thus to contribute to a historicization of these cultures and customs. All of De Martino’s missions were documented with photographs, the earliest of which were provided by Franco Pinna and Ando Gilardi. Moreover, some of these anthropological studies were, in fact, specifically initiated by photographs documenting archaic rituals.

Photography was a tool for De Martino in the fight against what he calls a “crisis of presence” for southern Italian peasants—the seeming inaccessibility of participation in contemporary society— a tool with which to catch them as they were struggling against history, to help them to record their own cultural memory and enter history “breaking the borders of Eboli.” For De Martino, the importance of a vernacular folklore laid in the possibility it provided to turn those people into protagonists of their own world, allowing them to write their own autobiography, to become conscious of the culture they engendered. What De Martino calls “progressive folklore” is a cultural entity that neither idealizes the peasant world nor fosters the growth of irrationalist mythology. Instead, it documents a culture and a system of beliefs that upset a bourgeois tendency to erase what is thought of as an “inferior social condition, one which allowed the anachronistic perpetuation of relics of archaic cultures.”

In the fifties, such attention to popular cultures was part of the program that was to unify the country; Gramsci and the Italian Communist party had proposed a “cultura nazionale” that was to eradicate the distinction between alta (high) culture and popular, bassa (low) culture. Ethnologists and photographers turned to the South for documentation of older cultures, primitive magic rituals, and a whole cultural system, for future foundations of the new “national-popular culture” that would help unite two struggling peoples: the southern peasants and the industrial working class in Northern Italy.

Despite the romantic haze surrounding this political project for peasants’ emancipation from historical obscurity, the publication of De Martino’s studies spurred a number of young photographers to look south and explore inland territories down at the bottom of the Italian peninsula, in a series of explorations into folkloric costumes and religious ceremony, along with the daily life of rituals with no mythology.

Text is here:
https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

Opening image is here:

https://www.chicagoreview.org/ernesto-de-martino-and-the-drama-of-presence/

https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ernesto-de-martino_(Dizionario-Biografico)/

Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - In the footsteps of Carlo Levi

...un inferno di superstizione, antichi rituali e una vita condotta secondo un destino sinistro.

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY 2/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

If the eighteenth-century picturesque voyage fostered private images of southern Italy, the early-nineteenth-century dawn of the tourist industry turned traveling south in Italy into a public commodity, highlighting its exoticism and promoting its colonization. Topical southern sunny views, landscapes as photographers’ backdrops, and genre pictures of southerners, helped to inaugurate a new geography of stereotyped images: an exemplary itinerary of commonplaces that still shapes the current concept of southern Italy. A new army of foreign photographers operating in Italy— Giorgio Sommer and Alphonse Charbonnier among others— worked for the emerging “souvenir-picture industry,” bringing images of the Amalfitan and Surrentine coasts, the bay of Naples, Capri’s Blue Grotto, and smoking Vesuvius right into hotel lobbies, where they set up their shops.

In the thirties, the locus of the South came to function as an isolating prison, a natural solitary confinement severing intellectuals from the rest of Italy. In 1935, the writer Carlo Levi was exiled to the South because of his antifascist political activities. In his book Christ Stopped at Eboli (published in Italy in 1945), Levi depicts a desolate Lucania: an inland territory as a cultural wall separating the local peasants from the rest of the country, while poverty and isolation hold them in a hell of superstition, ancient rituals, and a life carried out as directed by an ominous destiny.

Levi charted a South that had been ignored by the Grand Tour map and tourist itineraries, and gave representation to the day-to-day struggle of the Lucanian peasants, condemned to isolation, and to the hostility of their unyielding lands. “No one had come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty [...] But to this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.” As historian Giuseppe Giarizzo notes, “Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli became the palimpsest of southern Italy’s intelligenstia.” Together with the republication in 1947 of Antonio Gramsci’s La Questione meridionale, Levi’s book helped to refuel the political debate over the necessity of a struggle for the cultural and political unification of the two separate halves of the country in post-World War II Italy, and focused attention on the desperate isolation of southern peasants, kept at the margins of the country and of history.

Of course, Levi was neither the first nor the sole author to deal with southern Italy’s social conditions. Nineteenth-century southern writers, such as Grazia Deledda, Corrado Alvaro, and verista writers Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, among others, wrote their literary masterpieces depicting the South and its universe. But whereas the work of all these writers was aimed at denouncing the ruthless behavior of landowners toward the peasants, Levi’s book focuses exclusively on the peasants’ conditions. leys, cloudy panoramas and disquieting solitary marinas. 

This South, cyclically toured as heavenly natural landscape, origin of all natural life, or searched and investigated as a reservoir of primitiveness, site of infinite rituals and a locus of folklore, is still viewed as a distant universe, a space exiled from history. A territory to be traveled by one who wants to explore absence, the South presents itself as yet another perfect picture of a bay, an inviting panorama endlessly advancing and receding in the loops of our imagination. To this traveler of absence, the South stands as that memory, that photograph to which one can always emigrate.

Text is here:
https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

Opening image:

https://www.wikimatera.it/guida-di-matera/la-storia-millenaria-di-matera/il-confino-di-carlo-levi-e-la-ribellione-contro-i-nazisti-medaglia-doro-al-valor-civile/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Levi

Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.

Cristo si è fermato a Eboli [Francesco Rosi, 1979]

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS

PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER

HALF OF ITALY 1/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

Throughout the history of Italy, the South—an umbrella term covering Abruzzo, Campania, Basilicata (formerly Lucania), Puglia, Calabria, and Sicily, has been considered a too-distant and altogether foreign country. The notion of the South filled in for a diversity of categories, most of which helped depict an otherwise unknown and unrepresentable region; this bassa Italia (“low” Italy), this “Italian India” (as it was referred to by sixteenth-century Jesuits, who thought they could train themselves for life in the wilderness of the West Indies in Italy’s South), came to be perceived as a reservoir of archaic cultures and costumes, and of inaccessible languages.

The configuration of the “other half” of Italy relied upon a series of vastly contrasting descriptions and on topoi of excess: inhospitable wild woods paired with inviting picture-perfect bays; unbearably hot weather in regions filled with equally hot-tempered people; urban streets populated with urchins and imaginative, colorful vendors; memorable Mediterranean sites decorated by vonGloedenesque, ravishingly healthy youths. Former home of brigands and present haunt of the Mafia, the South, in its “excesses,” seems to have always worked to trouble the dignity of Italy’s past traditions and to disrupt an otherwise uncontested advancement of “high” Italy into history’s scenario.

Most of the picturesque representations of Italy’s South came into being in the eighteenth century, forged by foreign artists, poets, and gentlemen on the Grand Tour of Europe, and were circulated throughout the continent in sketchbooks, journals, and literature. Drawn to the South of Italy by the discovery of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, many of these travelers ventured south of Naples, through Calabria into Sicily, following a new and reversed itinerary to rediscover the world of classical antiquity and “to recover the site of mythic Hellas.”

Today, Goethe’s Italienische Reise still remains a paradigm of the picturesque and romantic mode of viewing, sketching, imaging the South, a mode that informed much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Goethe marvels at a South that discloses its natural wonders in a delirium of enchanting panoramic views, much like a photographic diorama—a phantasmagoria of colorful natural scenes.

It was in Sicily that Goethe believed he had found the long-sought Urpflanze, the origin of the vegetable world. For Goethe, “Italien ohne Sizilien macht gar kein Bild in der Seele: hier ist erst der Schluessel zu allem” (Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: here is the key to everything).

Text and opening image [Ferdinando Scianna Enna 1963 (particolare)] is here:
https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinando_Scianna

Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.

BOTTA E RISPOSTA il sequel: In Paradisum

Curia Vescovile di Gerace 10 Aprile 1934

Rispondo ai quesiti proposti all’att.ne Vostra Curia dal Consiglio della Ven. le Confrat. del SS. Rosario in Platì in data 5 marzo 1934

1° Quesito -  Nell’Oratorio del SS. Rosario possono essere celebrati funerali e messe cantate a richiesta dei fedeli tranne quelli praesente corpore?

Risposta -  Dopo il primo funerale nella Parrocchia possono essere celebrati funerali nell’Oratorio pei soli Confratelli defunti, nei giorni in cui le leggi liturgiche lo consentono, e in modo da non disturbare le funzioni parrocchiali.

2° Quesito -  In caso affermativo il Rev.do Clero è obbligato a intervenire per entrare in porzione?

Risposta -  Il Rev.do Clero che deve essere regolarmente invitato, per entrare in porzione deve intervenire, sono dispensati i Sacerdoti ammalati, che non possono celebrare Messa, e il Parroco quando è impedito dall’esercizio del suo ministero.

3° Quesito -  I diritti delle campane e dell’organo spettano al sagrestano e organista della Matrice o piuttosto a quelli dell’Oratorio del Rosario, che prestano servizio?

Risposta -  I diritti delle campane e dell’organo spettano alla Chiesa funzionante. Però quando interviene il Clero, il sagrestano della Matrice deve avere una corposa porzione.

4° Quesito -  Come dev’essere interpretata quella parte dell’art. 16 dove si legge «… potrà solamente la Congregazione celebrare, nel primo giorno che si può, un funerale con l’intiero ufficio dei morti e Messa cantata»?

Risposta -  L’art. 16 degli statuti qui depositati in copia, parla del dovere che hanno i Confratelli di intervenire agli accompagnamenti funebri e alle Processioni. Né in altro art. si leggono le parole surrifferite.

Il testo trascritto [come la grafia] sono nell'Archivio dello zio Ernesto il vecchio. Lo stesso, come la precedente pubblicazione, testimoniano un dissenso interno alla Chiesa di Platì allora curata da Mons. Antonio Pipicelli e culminato con la proposta di creare una seconda parrocchia, quella del SS. Rosario, rimasta lettera morta. A onor del vero ho il sospetto il Priore Domenico Marando abbia solo firmato entrambi i testi concepiti dallo zio, visti i contenuti e le citazioni.

Il brano che segue di Gabriel Fauré come la pubblicazione sono per:

Domenico Papalia (1945 - 2026)

 

BOTTA E RISPOSTA [Mario Soldati, 1950]

 

Confraternita del SS. Rosario

(Reggio Cal.) PLATÌ

Platì 14 - 3 - 934 XII

Eccellenza Reverendissima

Ho creduto doveroso fare i quesiti di cui l’alligato per la ragione che è mio intendimento trovarmi sulla maestra e mai sulla traversa.

Il primo quesito perché il Rev.mo Arciprete ebbe qualche volta a dire che nell’Oratorio non si possono celebrare messe Cantate né funerali, bene s‘intende non praesente corpore.

Il secondo perché essendosi celebrate delle messe cantate e dei funerali il Clero intende avere la porzione e a me sembra né giusto né onesto.

Il terzo sebbene sia chiaro da per se stesso perché improntato al principio dettato dal Redentore e da San Paolo predicato «quoniam si quis non vult operari nec manducet*» frustrerebbe quei principi morali e legali sui quali si basa la Religione di Cristo.

E poi non sarebbe giusto che il sacrista e l’organista della Matrice ricevessero due prebende e quelli dell’Oratorio stessero a guardare il sole. La logica, perdoni Eccellenza, mi pare conduca alla risoluzione che ognuno che lavori abbia quel tantum di compenso che possa spettare.

In quanto poi all’art. 16 dello Statuto mi pare che non avrei dovuto fare il quesito, ma per quel principio «melius est abundare …» ho creduto e credo doveroso di sottoporre ogni cosa a V. E. che vagliata la cosa possa decidere in merito evitando così continue noie.

Ove occorresse posso mandare altra copia dello statuto che Governa la Confraternita e che a suo tempo fu debitamente approvato.

Perdoni Eccellenza i fastidi, e La prego di volermi essere preciso onde evitare dissensi.

Le bacio il S. Anello e chiedendo la Benedizione per me e per i congregati tutti

De’  V. E

umilissimo Priore

D.co Marando

*Chi non vuol lavorare non mangi. Seconda Lettera ai Tessalonicesi 3, 10 

Il documento riprodotto e trascritto proviene dall'archivo dello zio Ernesto il vecchio.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Seduto sotto un platano

Statistiche blog del 15 agosto 2026

 

L'addio (Прощание) [ Ėlem Germanovič Klimov, 1983]

“Ricordare non è mai un motivo, ma solo una via, un metodo.” Sigmund Freud, 1895.

"C'è sempre qualcosa di ineffabile nel passato ... e in tutta la sua gloria originaria, indispensabile retaggio." Susan Sontag, 1978

Quando nell’Anno Domini 1966 Pasquale Laria fu Saverio eresse l’Edicola che vedete in apertura non poteva immaginare che Lui e la sua opera sarebbero tornati alla luce nell’anno, certamente non Domini, 2026. Chi scrive ricorda quella devozione, alias figureja, indietro nel tempo, non ritoccata com’è nella foto del 2020. Essa si affacciava sul panorama di Platì, come protezione, un viatico. Nel 1966 Pasquale era un cinquantaseienne emigrato in Australia. Intendeva, con quella contenuta costruzione, elevare un addio, formale, per non dimenticare le sue origini. Figlio di Saverio e Bettina Sergi era nato a Platì l’11 febbraio 1910. Le sue origini affondano nel Catasto Onciario come nei Registri della Parrocchia. Nel 1939 sposò Domenica Iermanò di Antonio e Cata Oliva di venticinque anni con la quale generò quattro figli: due donne e due maschi. La linea Pasquale – Saverio – Pasquale arriva ai giorni nostri. La famiglia era una delle innumerevoli vittime della crisi economica e d'identità che destabilizzò Platì a partire dalla grande Alluvione del 1951 e come tanti, tantissimi, scelse l’Australia come Patria adottiva. Griffith dapprima, Hackett a nord di Canberra definitivamente. “We moved in Hackett in Sept 1963 with my parents Pasquale and Domenica Laria and my two brothers Tony and Mick”, ricorda la figlia Caterina*. Pasquale Laria lasciò definitivamente questo mondo nel 1991, Domenica Iermanò nel 1995.

A questo punto è auspicabile che una lungimirante Amministrazione Pubblica prenda in carico la catalogazione e conservazione dell’opera di Pasquale Laria come ancora non ha fatto per altri Beni Artistici e Architettonici platiesi.

*https://www.northcanberra.org.au/hackett-history/

Il film citato in apertura era stato inizialmente concepito da Larisa Efimovna Šepit'ko, bella e most prominent regista sovietica, la quale morì tragicamente durante i sopralluoghi nel 1979.

NONNO SCATENATO [Dan Mazer, 2016]

“La riverenza li ha resi interessanti, il tempo li ha resi innocui e sin troppo umani”. Susan Sontag, 1978

Municipio di Platì

Tariffa per la vendita al minuto del pesce stocco e baccalà

Baccalà secco                   al kg £ 7,60

Pesce stocco bagnato     “  “       5,00

Platì 7 – 2 – 924

L’assessore delegato

    LGliozzi

Extra non classificati:

[Sacerdote] Saverio Oliva da Siderno 2 ottobre 1911

SPADARO Prof. Nicola Farmacia Chimica 26 luglio 1923

Demarco Pasquale Barbiere [alias gloriusu] 21 ottobre 1930

Le riproduzioni sopra riportate testimoniano, molto più di una fotografia, una pluralità di significati non riproducibili, citarle non è la stessa cosa che citare un libro, un film o una foto, ad esse bisogna associare un tempo di lettura lento, per cogliere un passato che non esiste da, ormai, molto.

Documenti conservati dal nonno Luigi nella casa di via/vico San Nicola, dove un tempo esisteva anche la Farmacia Spadaro.