Seasons in Basilicata by David Yeadon

thepocket-handkerchief patches of hardscrabble land way up in the mountains.
    But soon it was northward again, hairpinning like a pinball, dizzied by heights and constant glimpses of vertical-sided canyons and gorges dropping off a few inches from my front wheel.
    Infrequent white hill villages popped up, perched on distant puys, and then vanished almost magically into the swirl and tumble of the ranges. The lower foothills were often cloaked in deep, dark forests of oak, beech, and holly, while the higher peaks—Volturino, Caperino, and Montemurro—rose bold and bare, the great ancient bastions of Basilicata.
    â€œNo wonder Christ stopped at Eboli,” a wisecracker once suggested. “Our mountains keep out anyone coming from the North.”
    â€œWell, they didn’t stop all those invasions though, did they?” I wisecracked back, only to be told with fierce southern logic that “the invaders cheated and came by sea!”
    I was tempted to remind the wisecracker that Christ could walk on water and obviously had the option therefore of entering Basilicata by the aquatic route. However, as would happen later in Basilicata, I found it best not to carry my “Italianish” repartee too far. A lot gets lost in the translation, and apologies for unintended slights are not always accepted gracefully.
    Just outside Laurenzana, one of the larger hill towns of the region, and perched even more precariously than most on a sheer precipice of rock, an ancient castle tower rose like a warning finger…one I perhaps should have heeded because I was soon about to have my first little meeting with misfortune—and the “dark side” strangeness—in this desolate realm.
    Â 
    I T ALL BEGAN PLEASANTLY enough as I came upon a sign handpainted on a rough slab of wood. It read Castelmezzano and pointed down an enticing-looking backroad that sinewed its way across the top of a high forested ridge. My map showed no such road, but I’d been told that Italian maps, despite their elegantly nuanced colors and air of authorative accuracy, were often notoriously deficient in the finer points of what one might call definitive cartography. So, off I went down the road, dust clouds spuming behind me from the unpaved but relatively rutless surface.
    It was a little late in the evening, and dusky shadows were rising up from the valleys far below as the sun began its final declining arc, spraying the higher hills with brilliant flares of gold and amber. According to my crow-flying estimates, Castelmezzano couldn’t have been more than twenty miles or so to the north, so I reckoned I should reach the comforts of an evening coffee—or maybe even a real cocktail, a multicourse Italian dinner, and a cozy bed in some local pensione —in an hour, tops.
    A few miles farther on, deeper and deeper into those silent, seemingly unpopulated ranges, my schedule became somewhat disjointed. As did my little Lancia DoDo. (I knew I shouldn’t have trusted a car with such a dumb name.)
    Maybe I’d become a little too cocky on this particular backroad, but its relatively rutless, uncorrugated surface encouraged speed and the pleasure of seeing half a mile of dust trailing behind me in true outback-explorer fashion was captivatingly hypnotic.
    Then came the rut. Some massive gouge out of the road’s surface possibly caused by erratic drainage following one of Basilicata’s sudden and very fickle spring thunderstorms. Anyway, the rut came, and I didn’t see it, and the little DoDo slammed into it at full speed. First there was an abrupt downward crunch, then a wheel-spinning surge upward, with the impact of an untamed bucking bronco, and then the car crashed back down onto the road, pebbles and rocks flying, dust everywhere, me choking and spitting…and the engine dead.
    Dead, as you might appropriately say, as a DoDo—that huge, ungainly mega-turkey creature from Mauritius that has