The womb of Matera hosts the extraordinary triptych Lucania ’61 by Carlo Levi, containing many of the values that, now just as formerly, characterise Basilicata and its people. Essentially, this means frugality, slowness, attachment to the land and environment that make Matera today not only a landmark of “lucanità”, of the South and the Mediterranean, but a prototype of an ecological town, in which the archetype finally merges with modernity. The Piedmontese intellectual achieved this monumental work for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Italian Unification, dedicating it to the Lucanian poet Rocco Scotellaro to honour their mutual profound esteem. Scotellaro, in the first picture on the right, harangues the crowd of peasants on the square of Tricarico with its usual momentum of active citizens, in order to praise that new cultural dawn for the Lucanians, which today finds its turning point in Matera European Capital of Culture 2019. This allows the town to shake off the unpleasant label of “national shame” (quoted Palmiro Togliatti, 1948) and open with resilience to a new destiny and a new identity. Lucania ’61 is consequently the best “anthropological film” that speaks of us, people of the South: a work in which the utopian figure of the town crier-poet, the citizen-mayor, is sculpted, inciting his fellows toward progress and the emancipation of the “last”, with the force of words and ideas, as weighty as millstones in the great vice of “choral autism” that all too often oppresses the Italian South. It was Levi and Scotellaro: they were the flames that inspired the MaTerre project carried out by Rete Cinema Basilicata co-designed with the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation and numerous other local, national and international partners.
