Bread (and mother) of life

This time I look out of context. Apparently. I am recovering “something” from few years ago because the last of the two protagonists of this story passed away in November Twenty Twenty because of the love for his people: father Angelo Iacono, a priest. He joined his sister Pierina, not even too long after her. With them this story is over. Or not? For now I am proposing it again in the way I told you. With dedication.

To Pierina e Father Angelo Iacono 

The earth is full of rubbish, and nature has rebelled. We need to return to the old work systems, in the sense that we need to go to the land with a new mentality, actually with the respect of the past”. When we meet in the cellar, my friends, while finishing eating their piece of rabbit, punctually implore me to convince myself “not to give up”. They repeat it, toasting. But they are not unprepared. They are outraged, but they keep it for themselves. Looking suspiciously the new outrages, the lobbies in ambush, of indebted and sterile, who plunder the ideas, who make the machete rotate to get the slice of landscape which, meanwhile, send help signs. Last time, at the table, in a joint table, between women and men, we fought over the last “scagliuozzi” (Italian dialect to indicate “small pieces”) of red flour: evocative tastes. In the meantime, a cold thundercloud was enveloping the night of our refuge. A winter atmosphere, ideal for telling ourselves that there are women and men still climbing among the schiappe , the terraces supported by drywalls (parracine), with pruning shears; and they jump down from the puoje, the southern hills, the embankments that modulate the slopes with clay and grass. Here they are, my friends, they are not old. And, although age is already advanced, however they did not get old prematurely. They caress the plots they hoed with the agility of those who love fertility, as the generator of all kind of good. “The good is not a small talk”, they insist. And it cannot be limited to greediness - to self-avid stuff from which Giovanni Verga distilled his fictional blood of the so-called “Verism” - to the point of promiscuously impregnating it. "They married in the family, between relatives, in order not to divide the property, split it, disperse it among undesirable heirs." We stare into each other's eyes. This happened in a time that, not only in Ischia, is quite close. Time of storms, testimonies and testaments. "Not anymore," repeat those who share my echo that glimpses the other, in an "other" Time.

On December 31, 2009 that time stopped on the hills of Serrara, guarded by Epomeo with its scattered boulders in the balance. I met him well before the afternoon. At least so it seemed to me, because the sun had not yet taken possession of all eyes. Mine and Angelo's one, or rather Father Angelo Iacono, the priest… who had been waiting for me for weeks.

And here, again in Serrara, I bent to the will of the gatherers bowing to a chicory, or to a chard that you eat with your eyes, for how beautiful it is; not far from the corn cobs, a “real” corn not even touched by the puffs of a possible controlled mutation. I slipped into a concentration of resistances to the terrible transformations, specific to an out-of-place modernity. However, suggestively, that rarefied and suspended dimension greeted the arrival of the new year. Of all the new years a thousand miles away from the whirlwind of the festive and touristy New Year.

Pierina Iacono was 76 when I met her, she was not married, and she lives with her brother Angelo, who is five years younger and is the parish priest of the Ciglio church. Both received from their mother Lucia - who lived until the age of 97 - that yeast of the identity. And they continue to work it, transforming it into loafs, baking it. Always with the same ritual.