La Ballata della Vucchiara
ovvero Tutto il miele è finito!
by Raffaele Giura Longo
The aim of the competition is to celebrate, commemorate and spread awareness of one of the lesser known rare poetic, ironic and satirical writings by Raffaele Giura Longo.
In recent years there have been many different public and editorial initiatives that document and spread the research and study work of Giura Longo. His political thought and relevant activity as a historian made him one of the most illustrious and well-known personalities of the city of Matera and Basilicata in Southern Italy.
All those who knew him will remember his witty and subtle irony, which only rarely appeared on paper in poetic form, as in the collection of Matera stretta, Saturday night epigrams (with drawings by N. Filazzola, Arti Grafiche Matera Stretta, 1983), and in the (unpublished) text from 2000 of an improvised theatre and music performance entitled Concavo & Convesso. This text, part prose and part verse, tells the story of the ancient district of the Sassi di Matera from its origins to the present day in a semi-serious satirical way.
Part of this text, La Ballata della vucchiara ovvero tutto il miele è finito!, is proposed as a text which may either be set to music or used as inspiration for the Concavo & Convesso competition. The Ballad, in metred verse, is full of references to the recent history of The Sassi di Matera, describing real people, and stories of the saints after whom churches and places in the city have been named, stories ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary.
part of installation by Marisa Saponaro
La Ballata della Vucchiara
Matera 2001
(detail)
La ballata della vucchiara
ovvero tutto il miele è finito! [1]
(extracts)
Concavo è il favo Concave is the honeycomb
ma è spesso convesso. but it's often convex.
E se il miele è dentro And if the honey is inside
io c’entro, io c’entro! I go in! I go in!
T’inguacchi le mani You're gonna get your hands dirty
ma dentro rimani. but inside you stay.
Se spingi la faccia If you push the face
nessuno ti scaccia nobody's chasing you away
com’un cane vecchio. like an old dog.
…………………………………………… ……………………………………………
Tutti quei massi All those boulders
mi sembrano i Sassi they look like the Sassi
mi sembrano messi seem to me
per esser concessi: to be granted [2] :
non sono caverne, they're not caves,
è facile averne it's easy to get
e quelle grotte and those caves
son tutte rotte. are all broken.
…………………………………………… ……………………………………………
Ma san Pietro Barisano But Saint Peter Barisano [3]
ci è sfuggito dalla mano slipped out of our hands.
e San Pietro Caveoso and San Pietro Caveoso
è piuttosto rumoroso; it's pretty loud;
la Madonna della Bruna the Madonna della Bruna [4]
qui si assonna fino all’una; here he sleeps until one o'clock;
San Giovanni lava i panni St. John washes clothes
e li asciuga con l’acciuga. and dry them with anchovies [5].
…………………………………………… ……………………………..………………
[1] The Ballad of Vucchiara (honeycomb in Matera dialect) or All the honey is finished! the author refers to Tutto il miele è finito by Carlo Levi (italian writer, painter and political), a travel story in Sardinia and not in Basilicata like the famous novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, where he tells about his exil ordered by the fascist gouvernament in Aliano, near Matera, in 1935 and 1936.
[2] here the reference is to the concessions for the restoration for housing purposes of the Sassi houses, ancient quarters of the city of Matera, abandoned in the 50s and then returned to the centre of the debate on the city with an international competition for urban and environmental restoration in 1975.
[3] San Pietro Barisano is a church in the Sassi of Matera. All the names of the saints mentioned are names of churches or places in the city; sometimes they are here personified in an ironic key and represented as characters who wander around the city and adopt its customs. Or - as in the case of San Pietro Caveoso rather noisy and more ahead of the scourged Christ consoling himself with ice cream - the author wants to sarcastically criticize the 'modern' use of the ancient quarters, reduced to a mere commercial background for bars, pubs and restaurants, that have made the Sassi hostage of mass tourism at the expense of their historical and cultural value.
[4] Our Lady Bruna patroness of the city
[5] the author refers to the popular tradition of the procession of St. John: in particularly dry years, a salted anchovy was put in the mouth of the statue of the saint, in the vain hope of provoking a great thirst and thus encouraging the arrival of rain.
