A Terrace of Noepoli

It all begins and begins on the terrace.

Never ending.

Not the meandering hills of silent dwellings, some abandoned by the young, still others by the old when nightly visits to Mass one day bring that good rise to heaven. Nor the sky flowing down from Rome and Solerno when it tires of the rush up north.

So goes la vita in Noepoli, a town unseen by the rest of Italy, a proud little cluster high on a Basilicatan perch, a tight bundle of heavy stone and beams, a heft of wood no longer found in forests that still roam the slopes of brown and green. So many shadows, so many shades.

And a riverbed gone dry before its time.

The fruit seller and his truck clatter along slender, cobbled streets, his morning patter drawing mothers and widows and, one of few voices in the alley, beckoning from beyond thick walls and hearts. His peaches are ripe and pomodori red to the core. He sends us off with plastic bags rustling with lunch. 

Beyond the terrace, cliffs and dales beg for wings to give us lift over this forgotten fortress. Look down across the ribboning roads and silver-green olive trees and golden blossom-strewn cliffs cut through by a tunnel rarely used but by the few who love to live and die here. 

A dog gives warning from doorsteps below while cats tussle and a baby wails with hope next door. 

The chants of women float out from a church and descend over lounging men in the piazza like a soft rain from the divine. And all above the rooftops, swifts make the most of a late-afternoon meal, their language so common yet exalted when heard from within this terra cotta world of melancholy, antipasti and exile.

      But oh, the summer. Early summer on this terrace of brick and basil. A breeze quickens as we await the glory and solace of sunset. And the busts of poet men, their backs to the west, stare not at us, not at the reddening horizon, but at the never-changing walls of Noepoli.