Southern Peasants

Overview

Lucania, or the Basilicata, is a region in southern Italy where industrious farmhands have inexorably worked the hills planted with wheat for thousands of years. The labor of yore and the modern farmers of today coexist in a single era, caring for the land, crops and livestock, as the seasons come and go. Their sweat and tears are sublimated by Guastamacchia, a farmhand and songster who crosses the region as a day laborer. His voice evokes the tales of survival of a rural community marked by decades-long labor struggles and militancy. For these workers, who have transmitted their stories orally only, song is their elected form of speech, their universal language. The music flows to the verses of Rocco Scotellaro, the bard of freedom for the land workers, a militant among them and on the printed page. In what is left of the rural culture of the 20th century, the farm workers strain to hand down ancestral practices to a future as yet unclear.