(by Andrea Gropplero - Cinecittario: Archivio Luce)
How is Calabria, the heart of Magna Grecia, cradle of Western philosophy and birthplace of Parmenides, Zeno and Pythagoras depicted in Italian film?
Print itineraryMimmo Calopresti has revealed his Calabria in a variety of ways. In Aspromonte Land of the Forgotten (2019), he focuses on the community of Africo, a small village in the Aspromonte mountain range, forgotten by the State and dominated by the ndrine (the local units of organized crime), as the inhabitants decide to build a road to link them with civilisation and allow a doctor to reach the village.
This is a very different perspective to his previous L’abbuffata (2007) where three youths from Diamante decide to make a short film despite the many obstacles in their path. They begin a disjointed attempt to find the two key ingredients to make this happen: an actor and a director. After a trip to Rome, Gerard Depardieu agrees to act in their short film. Hearing the news that the famous French actor will be arriving in the village, the entire community pulls together to build the set: a large banquet in the town square overlooking the sea. However, an unexpected event, reminiscent of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), brings the effort to a halt.
Corpo Celeste (2011) marks Alice Rohrwacher’s very successful directing debut. Presented at the Quinzaine di Cannes and awarded the Nastro d’argento for best director, it is the story of Marta, daughter of Italian emigres to Switzerland, who returns at the age of 13 to a Reggio Calabria that she no longer recognises. Surrounded by degradation, ambitious priests and a religion eroded by reality television culture, the girl finds her own way into the mysteries of faith thanks to an elderly priest in Africo Vecchio, a semi-abandoned village in the Aspromonte mountain range, who has been marginalized by the church hierarchy.
What do Corpo Celeste and L’abbuffata have in common? A gentle and loving approach to this land and a careful attention to the rituality of food that has come to us, across three millennia, directly from Magna Grecia and her philosophers with their theories of the unchangeability of being and the impossibility of the future.
Gianni Amelio’s The Stolen Children (1992), winner of the ’92 Cannes Gran Prix, two Nastri d’argento and five David di Donatellos, tells the story of Antonio (Enrico Lo Verso), a young Calabrian carabiniere, who is sent to escort 11-year-old Rosetta, forced into prostitution by her mother, and her little brother Luciano to an orphanage in Civitavecchia that turns them away. This is the start of a journey that takes them first to Antonio’s home in Calabria where they stop at the young officer’s family restaurant, before returning to the road to head to an orphanage in Sicily.
The journey, which includes the desertion of Antonio’s fellow officer, Grignani (Fabio Alessandrini), who gets off at the first station, is evocative from the start of the most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes: Achilles and the Tortoise. Zeno, pupil of Parmenides recognised by Aristotle as the inventor of dialectics, used Parmenides’ thesis on the unchangeability of being in his arguments. The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise reminds us that movement is simply an illusion, the result of perception alone.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges recounts the paradox of Zeno as follows: “Achilles, a symbol of speed, is challenged by a tortoise, the symbol of slowness. Achille runs ten times as fast as the tortoise so allows a 10 metres head start. For every ten metres that Achilles runs, the tortoise covers a metre; Achilles runs that metre and the tortoise a tenth of a metre; Achilles runs that tenth of a metre and the tortoise covers a centimetre; Achilles covers that centimetre and the tortoise a millimetre; Achilles covers that millimetre and the tortoise covers a tenth of a millimetre and so forth infinitely: Achilles can run forever without ever catching up with the tortoise”.
Who knows what Zeno would have said about Amelio’s film: very probably he would have seen some harmony between the road movie and his most famous paradox, very probably he would have said that travel is pointless because beings do not become, but are. For all our travel, we remain what we are: children returned to childhood.
The sequence in Antonio’s family restaurant in Calabria in The Stolen Children is probably the most important turning point in Amelio’s film. During the ritual unfolding of a celebratory meal for a family member’s first communion, Rosetta is confronted with her past as a child prostitute, an indelible stain on her life. This is when a deep empathy and friendship forms between the three which sees Luciano treasure a photo of Antonio as a child dressed as a cowboy, signifying the transposition of two different ways of being a child. During the familiar motions and rituals of lunch, the carabiniere Antonio is faced with the proof of his family’s criminal element and the gratitude that they nurture for the local organized crime families. Between a bite of pasta al forno, soppressata, nduja and a sumptuous dessert, he distances himself from his family and his empathy for the two children grows.
On the whole, contemporary Calabrian cooking is the same cuisine that was used in Magna Grecia: the food of the Greeks and the Latins, which represents the dawn of the Mediterranean diet. Naturally, Arab, Norman, Spanish and French influences have been incorporated over time, but on the whole, many of these dishes were also eaten by Parmenides, Pythagoras, Zeno.
In the plain of Sibari (Sybaris), laganon – wide tagliatelle – were a favourite of the Sybarites, famous for their elegance, luxury and, especially, vices, and were later documented by Apicius. Makaria, a type of small, cylindrical gnocco, a precursor to present day maccheroni, was probably a food used in religious rites or was perhaps brought for that purpose by the Greeks.
As Alex Revelli Sorini and Susanna Cutini note in their Taccuini gastrosofici, Calabrian cooking was greatly conditioned by ritual and famine: “An old popular song says ‘Unhappy is he who has no pigs to kill’ because cured meats, lard, cheese, potted aubergine and sundried tomatoes provided a chance at survival during the not infrequent times of famine for people in Southern Italy. There is something sacred and ancient in the Calabrian way of eating, an observance of those rules of behaviour that come from centuries before. It could be said that between the Sila mountains and the Straits of Messina the connection between nutritional and spiritual needs is felt particularly strongly: every religious festival in Calabria has its specific food, every event in family life its gastronomic complement. It was a rule that there would be 13 courses on the table at Christmas, and also at Epiphany; that Carnival celebrations required a menu based on maccheroni and pork; that Easter could not be celebrated without the prescribed breads and roast lamb; for Ascension, tagliolini al latte; and for the feast of St Roche, sweets in the shape of the body parts that could be healed with the thaumaturge’s intervention. The rigour of this calendar has faded over time, however traces can still be seen in the culinary repertory of the region”.
This dish of tagliatelle with chickpeas, of Hellenistic origin, is cooked across the region of Calabria. The recipe that follows is from Piatti tipici calabresi.
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
Soak the chickpeas overnight in water with a pinch of bicarbonate. The following day, rinse and place in a pan with abundant water as they will absorb a great deal during cooking. Add the garlic clove and bay leaves. Boil until soft.
Keep some cooking water aside for use later and remove the bay leaves. Bring the chickpeas in their water back to the boil and add the pasta. Add salt and a pinch of chilli powder and cook.
If the mixture becomes too dense, add some of the chickpea water to finish cooking the pasta.
Dribble with extra virgin olive oil and serve cold or hot.
This game is for anyone who wants to make a homemade trailer for L’abbuffata, Corpo Celeste and The Stolen Children. We’re providing the time codes for the film clips. Any edit program will work for this. Input the following data into the timeline and you’ll have your trailer in minutes.
