Seasons in Basilicata: a Year in a Southern Italian Hill Village.

Seasons in Basilicata: A Year in a Southern Italian Hill Village

David Yeadon

Harper Collins

10 East 53rd Street New York, New York 10022

ISBN: 006053110X $25.95 463 pages

At what point does a tourist become a traveler?

Seasons in Basilicata: A Year in a Southern Italian Hill Village is a major new work from seasoned traveler and illustrator David Yeadon. The basic premise of the book is to spend all four seasons in places that are off the crowded tourist beat. Seasons in Basilicata is the first in a series of such books. Yeadon's reasons for traveling to Basilicata are revealed to be as literary as they are exploratory.

Yeadon (accompanied for most of the year by his wife, Anne) has done what all serious students of literature dream about: he has followed the trail of one of his favorite books, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi, to experience for himself the uncanniness of southern Italy, replete with its superstition, poverty, ancient ways, curses, and the supernatural. "Levi's book on Basilicata was our first and most transforming inspiration. His descriptions were Siren calls to us" In a very Catholic country, southern Italy has always suffered a kind of annexation-complex from the rest of the nation. Nonetheless, its allure for Yeadon and his wife is contagious as the reader navigates his or her way through the marvelous strangeness of southern Italy.

Yeadon's writing style is straight-forward and lyrical at the same time. His descriptions of food preparation and consumption are not only informative, especially for those of us who enjoy our food wrapped in the sanitary plastic containers laid out in regimentary formation in supermarket isles, they are celebrations of the art of living. The meals described throughout the book are social events which bring people together in order to talk. Yes talk. Absent are the meals on the run we have become chained to in this velocity-determined culture in the United States. There are no mothers driving minivans rushing to get their kids to soccer practice here. In fact, what Yeadon and his wife are continually rushing off to (sometimes to their dismay, it becomes impossible to refuse) are meals that turn into impromptu feasts

Seasons in Basilicata is a book that defies classification: part travel book, part history, part fiction (so I'm told by a "reliable" source close to the Yeadons), part cook book, part literary criticism. Seasons in Basilicata has an allure that pulls the reader in and reminds us just how unexplored our world still is. More importantly it is a book in the most magnificent way. One does not have to be familiar with the works of Carlo Levi in order to enjoy this meditation, but it helps. The reader only has to bring his or her imagination and willingness to turn himself or herself over completely to what is uncanny while traveling. Part of the travel experience, Yeadon reminds the reader continuously, is the willingness to encounter that which is not planned. The Yeadon's did not have an excruciatingly structured itinerary (which ruins all spontaneity while traveling); this was no ordinary family "vacation." Seasons in Basilicata offers us a glimpse into the real lives of its citizens; citizens who are for the most part poor and forgotten by the rest of Italy. The "southern question," as it has been called, still remains a fundamental stumbling block in the Italian collective identity. The southerners are often considered backwards, superstitious and uncivilized, while the northerners are technologically advanced and civilized.

Seasons in Basilicata is an armchair feast for those who are unable or unwilling to leave behind "responsibilities" for more than a week or two. David Yeadon is a traveler in the most resonant sense. He travels to experience in order to understand. Although his writing is firmly planted in the 19th century era of travel writing as a form of knowledge production, Yeadon, for the most part (at one point he loses patience in a store while an old woman checks out her purchases), is willing to sacrifice the comforts of "civilization" (read velocity and convenience) and wade thoughtfully into a stream that is more calm, more serene.