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Time has stopped“Even though it happened unintentionally, 'Basilicata Coast to Coast' has become a marketing tool and I don't mind at all”, says Papaleo. 'While we were still shooting the movie I realized that it could become one. The movie was so successful thanks to a network of volunteer promoters, the people from Lucania who live elsewhere. And we are many!” Francis Ford Coppola, for one... Yet there was a time when Basilicata represented the South that had been left to its own devices by the Italian State, forgotten, rural, backward and steeped in an archaic culture made up of legends, traditions and even magic. When Carlo Levi wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli, in which he narrated his confinement in Aliano, Basilicata became the icon of the underdevelopment of the entire Southern part of Italy, with highwaymen that were more frightening to the politicians than to the peasants. In 1979, Francesco Rosi chose the great Gian Maria Volonté to play the Turinese writer in the movie based on the book. It was a time when the Southern Italian question still represented an open wound, which Rosi did not fail to emphasize visually, by showing how the isolation of the 1930s was not only a matter of infrastructure, but also of human and social development. The film was shot between Aliano, Craco and Guardia Perticara, where the production found the intense landscape that was needed; by the end of the 1970s, other areas of the region had seen their share of modernity, with new buildings and electric poles. But it was the entire area that fascinated the director. 'It would be enough to dwell on the scenery - the countryside, the trees, the sky, the uneven fields, the barren hills, the lonely trails captured on camera, to see the quintessential image of a sort of atavistic fatality, of an immutable destiny'.
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