I PARCHI LETTERARI® IN CALABRIA “JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE OF MEMORY” - I PARCHI LETTERARI IN THE MARQUISATE OF CROTONE

The delightful, pacifying calm of Norman Douglas on the tranquillity of the seaside near Crotone:

"It is lovely to rest here, immobile, but well awake, in the midday heat wave without any breeze. The heat is discharged in benign torrents above this desolation; there is not even a shadow of mist that fogs the horizon; neither a veil or a wavelet interrupts the line of the sea. Only silence is heard. Drowsiness enshrouds all earthly beings… Such torrid splendour, when it bathes the earth in its most austere simplicity, redirects the spirit to a state of primitive satisfaction and equally primitive reception. A new vision of human things is outlined in our imagination, a suggestive sense of well being, with no place for the foolish difficulties and conflicts of the present day. Freeing oneself from these bonds, rediscovering the affinity with an elementary and vigorous archetype, a lover of the earth and the sun… “How happy are these moments of golden equilibrium!” (Old Calabria, 1915)

April 1948, Alberto Savinio accompanies a minister on his electoral campaign journey in Calabria. This experience results in eight articles for the Corriere d’Informazione and for L’Illustrazione Italiana. Upon viewing the extended and solemn landscapes of Calabria, flashes of light, forms and colours from his early youth, which he spent together with his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, re-emerge in Savinio’s mind.

"Just outside of Crotone, forty-two years of my life suddenly fade away. Until the age of fourteen, I lived part of my life in Attica and part in Tessaglia. My brother and I left in the afternoon for walks full of adventure. Once outside the city, all traces of man and his work disappeared. Wild plants, anemones and wind grass. Dry roads and creek beds, on the rocky shore of the river, the white skeleton of a donkey and crows passed above with a flutter of wings. Once outside this mythical land, there was nothing more than domesticated countryside, fields of crops, square formations of trees, roads bordered by hedges and low walls, farms and workshops, agricultural and industrial waters. And here, after all of this, here on this Ionic coast of Calabria, here is the countryside of my childhood. Intact land. Ancient land. Barren land. And the crows halfway to the sea, moving slowly towards the mountains” [...]