Basilicata

Basilicata is an arid, burned-out region. To look at it you’d think it had nothing except burning heat: scorching, blasting heat of the sort which sucks the lifeblood out of everything. You can see why the Fascists liked to banish their undesirables down here - it is a land forgotten by God, unloved by man. The soil is poor and stony, the mountains solitary and distantly remote, and although the region opens out on to the sea on both the southern and the western sides, there are no ports of any relevance here. The only stretch of fertile soil is to the north, where the ashes of a dead volcano, the Vulture, have left the soil rich in minerals. The lower sections of the slope are covered in vineyards and olive groves. As you climb higher, these give way to oaks, ash trees and horse chestnuts. On the lower hills, stretching down towards the gulf of Taranto, an occasional pine tree will quietly remind you that these hills were once covered in woodlands, before they were stripped in a desperate attempt to create more fields for crops and to build ships for English shipyards! The plains represent about one-tenth of the region and were until very recently a malaria-ridden swamp, now reclaimed and transformed into more fertile countryside. Although the region is rich in rivers, all of them tend to be torrential, sometimes flooding over neighbouring fields, destructive and violent, then dry as a bone and useless during long, rainless periods. The inland areas of Basilicata suffer from harsh, cold and rainy winters, and the rest of the region never really recovers from the completely dry, breathtakingly hot summers.