by Pasquale Tuscano
The city of Bova and its territory have a long and glorious history, with all of the falls and revivals of natural and human events that are always subject to the chances of time that inexorably goes by. As legend has it, it was founded by a queen of Locri whose footprint is believed to be imprinted in the rock of the Castle and was a key landmark in the Magna Graecia civilisation. It was one of the most ancient Italo-Greek dioceses. Respectful of tradition, it was the last diocese to accept the order to switch from the Greek rite to Latin as obliged to under the new liturgical policies established by the Council of Trent. That was in the year 1575. The Greek rite had its own liturgy and its own teaching. It expressed the profound idea of Tradition, which was specifically that of the Fathers of the Church. The decision was taken by the then Bishop Giulio Stavriano, a Dominican, who came from the Greek church of Cyprus. It was an action that brought an end to centuries of civilisation. Nevertheless, the indelible trace of the style and flavour of the Greek dialect spoken in Calabria have remained anthropologically and still continue to exist to the present day. Take, for example, the predisposition for contemplation; those that a writer who is certainly not provincial, Corrado Alvaro, calls, “the great and universal ideas, the surge towards the unknowable and the sky”1; the symbols applied with gestures as well: crosses marked with the movement of the hand or engraved on work tools, or turned toward the fields or on the first measure of the first harvest (cereal, olives, legumes, grapes), or on the first yeast used for kneading the bread, etc.; conversing with the saints as if they were family members; the poignant cult of the Virgin, the pre-Hellenic Great Mother who Byzantium would have Christianized, likening her to the quintiessential Mother of Christianity. The Greek language was rooted so deeply in the people that it was still the official language almost four centuries after the ‘Stavriano operation’. This was naturally continued by the oral tradition of the lower classes tied to the area and not stamped out by a culture that considered itself superior to the Greek culture. Our grandfathers spoke only the Greek dialect of Calabria. It was their native language. Our parents communicated with the elderly and their parents in the Greek dialect.
The first accurate story about the legend and history of Bova is attributed to an 18th century Bovan historian, the priest Domenico Alagna2. A subsequent Enlightenment thinker, Alagna knew that the purpose of his essay was not to be only historical and cultural, but ‘practical’ as well. Therefore, it had to be scrupulous and truthful in its description of the ‘natural’ assets, from the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms to, and with equal dignity, the world of the beauties of the landscape.
What Alagna achieved in his story is a perfect symbiosis between two worlds: those of the farmers and the shepherds. Thus it gives an accurate idea of an area and people in which customs and traditions still today go hand in hand with intelligent rationality. He stressed how abundant the products were: cereals, olive oil, wine, dairy products, silk, linen and honey. In the past, as is also partially true today, these goods connote the vitality of an agricultural and livestock-breeding society able to manage the exceedingly fertile soil intelligently.
The products, which were so excellent as to be exported, were those still held sacred today, including in a symbolic sense, in the history of mankind: cereals, olive oil and wine.
The area offered a list of scientifically interesting varieties of cereals, including in terms of its socio-economic history: soft wheat, red wheat, light wheat, emmer, ‘trimini’, ‘iermano’, barley, etc. Every family baked its own bread at home. The oven was a primary feuture of the home. It was a rite that in part survives today. Whoever did not own a field, even one of modest size, in which to grow cereals and olive oil was considered ‘poor’. Flour for the bread that the well-to-do and middle-class citizens ate was made from the finer varieties (red wheat, soft wheat and light wheat). The housewives of the farmers and shepherds took several kinds of wheat to the mills for grinding. With a composite flour (miscitatu), they prepared a bread not considered of top quality, but particularly fragrant, sweet-smelling and above all nutritious, suitable for those working in the fields and the shepherds. Since they often had to stay far away from home, it was crisped to keep the flavour intact. There were many water mills.
An extemporary poet who was a meticulous descriptor of a reality that he relived amidst nostalgia and amazement, the Reggio Calabria native Nicola Giunta (1875-1968), brings us the traditional The Wheel of the Mill:
A small mill is on the bank of the river. The old house looks like a tenement. The miller, with his sharp talent, gets ready to grind the fine wheat, with which the farmer will make his bread. The millstone is not moved by the wind. It is moved by the water, and a wooden wheel turns along with the simple mechanism.3
The wine was of the finest quality owing to the incredible diversity of the vines and grapes it is made from, and was sought after by famous wine merchants.
The olive oil was particularly sweet and fragrant.
Beside these products, to this day the cheeses (goat’s, sheep’s, cow’s) and dairy products distinguish themselves. The expert shepherd made several unique specialities that were some of the highest in demand, like a special fresh cheese (musulupu) and fresh and salted ricottas. The salamis and cold pork meats were also particularly esteemed. The great festival of slaughtering the pig called to mind customs and delicacies made from the pork for which Bova enjoyed enviable prestige:
And here's the housewife, in a dish wide and capable, frìttole e gamboni she gathers with elegant gestures, and the sight makes friends eager, while on her back the cat clings and the dog jumps without a sound… And, trembling and smoking, is ready on the dinner table God’s gift, actually the pork’s…4
The magnificence of the green of the fields and woods, the ‘vast forests’ that surrounded - and still partially surround - the city like a stern and picturesque natural fortress holds a special place. The enormous number of conifers that connotes Campi di Bova, for example. At one time generous with precious tar, the production of which is today out of use. This sought-after and costly product, essential for the shipyards, was a symbol of incomparable wealth. The humble and tenacious Basilian monk Leo Rosaniti (5th Century) gathered it and sold it as far away as Messina to buy bread to hand out to the poor. He became the patron saint of the city, and tradition portrays him with a loaf of tar in his right hand and the hatchet for extracting it in his left hand.5
Alagna’s description of the ‘nearby and vast lateral forests’ and of the woods of the mountain ‘in the North of the City, where various timber is processed and tar is made’, would have returned 80 years later, in 1847, in the pages of traveller-artist Edward Lear (1812-1888), in the book Journal of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria published in 1852. Lear wrote: ‘Far away stood the blue Bova, apparently inaccessible; we could catch a glimpse of some sort of castle, sheer rocks and a fringe of forests’. He remembered with astonishment as he left the city, ‘the thick forests of oaks that surrounded Bova’.6
Centuries old, Bova is still beautiful with its mysterious charm. A visitor today will no longer find the Bova of legendary tradition made famous around the world. Nonetheless, he can reconstruct time periods and events with the written memoirs and the remnants that have remained. That Magna Graecia that gave civilised humanity the song of Nossis, Ibycus and Stesichorus; the though and science of Pythagoras and Hipparchus, who immortalised the names of Locri, Crotone, Reggio and Sibari; lands and seas sung by Homer; that Magna Graecia can still utter a warning word splendidly projected into its air of legend. So the ancient memories cease being illusions, dreams of visionaries, and will be life-giving voices of a past that must not die and that gives us credit.
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1 C. Alvaro, Itinerario italiano, Milan, Bompiani, V ed., 1967, p. 13.
2 D. Alagna, Bova. Città nel Regno di Napoli nella Calabria Ulteriore (1775). Edited by Pasquale Tuscano and Francesca Tuscano, Delianuova, Nuove Edizioni Barbaro di Caterina di Pietro, 2005, pp. 280.
3 N. Giunta, Il poema della mia terra, R.C., Libreria Editrice Carmelo Franco, 1951, p. 117.
4 Ivi, p. 31.
5 The following is still fundamental on the subject: AA. VV., San Leo. Santo dell’Aspromonte greco, edited by Pasquale Faenza and Francesca Tuscano, R. C., Laruffa Editore, 2012.
6 E. Lear, Diario di un viaggio a piedi. Reggio Calabria and Its Province (25 July-5 September 1847). Translation by E. De Lieto Vollaro, R. C., Laruffa Editore, 2003, pp. 31 and 34.