Read Online A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey - Free Book Online

“human being.” And the poor people of the South were saying: “We’re not Christians, we’re not human beings; we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild.” The people of the South, at least before World War II under Fascism and, for centuries before under a succession of conquerors, “live in a world of their own.” It is their inward protection from centuries of dealing with forces beyond their control.
    Levi’s book is about his year-long forced exile in the mid-1930s. He, a northern Italian writer and outspoken anti-Fascist, spent the time deep in the mountains of Lucania, now known as Basilicata, a province in the heart of the boot’s mountainous interior. The region’s name, for centuries, had been Basilicata. But Mussolini, in his quest to create a new twentieth-century Roman empire, gave the region the old Roman name, Lucania. After Mussolini’s fall, Lucania once again became Basilicata.
    Levi described, in vivid detail, the conditions endured by the southern peasants from the time their land was first affected by Phoenician traders from Troy more than three thousand years ago. These traders first introduced a “set of values diametrically opposed to those of the ancient peasant civilization. The Phoenicians brought religion and the State, and the religion of the State.… The invaders brought also arms and an army, escutcheons, heraldry, and war. Their religion was a violent one, demanding human sacrifice.… The ancient Italians, meanwhile, lived on the land, knowing neither sacrifice nor religion.”
    This kind of conquering and the repeated subjugation of these southerners happened century after century, as foreign invaders and Rome itself swept over the land. The southern Italians from earliest, almost mythological, times have been leery of the State, viewing it always as something imposed on them rather than something they were part of. Instead, they prefer loyalty to family, village, and province above all else.

    In the mountains just inland from Italy’s west coast between Sapri and Paola, two Calabrians meet along a narrow, two-lane roadway in the midst of an olive orchard. The man on the left is carrying a piece of olive wood he just cut from one of his decades-, if not centuries-, old trees that dot this southern Mediterranean land.     Photo by John Keahey
    For example, more than two thousand years ago, many of these peoples rebelled against the yoke of Rome, even going so far as to ally themselves with Carthage in North Africa—from whom they had as much to fear as from the Romans—to help them toss off Roman control.
    Levi tells us that the period of the Italic wars between native tribes and the expanding Romans gave Rome much difficulty. In the end, the southerners failed to evade the more powerful and unified Roman State. Levi says, “But they kept their individuality and did not mingle [as did other conquered peoples all over the Mediterranean world eager for coveted Roman citizenship] with their conquerors.”
    No one, in the South’s long history, ever tried to make the people independent. The Normans ruled here between C.E. 1130 and 1198, and were succeeded by the Germans. Then came the French in 1266, who greatly expanded the power of feudal nobility. The peasants were then taken over and taxed heavily by the Aragonese, an independent kingdom in what is now northeast Spain, bordering on France. These late-Middle-Ages rulers required payments on sheep and other livestock. It obviously was in their best interests that livestock herds be expanded, so the rulers worked to reduce the number of small farmers and agricultural laborers, and converted cropland to pasture.
    Eventually, in 1734, southern Italy and Sicily became an independent Kingdom of Naples under the Spanish Bourbons, but the Mezzogiorno continued to be