Yves Montand and Brizio Montinaro on the set of IL GENIO (1976). Click for credits
I met Brizio Montinaro once at a friends’ place. A friendly, curly- grey-haired Italian from Apulia, actor and writer, Brizio Montinaro is an expert of the Griko people among the rest.
Who are the Griko people? They are South Italians who more or less directly descend from the Greeks of Magna Graecia (with some influence from Byzantium.)
Griko speaking communities today. Click for credits
What’s interesting is that some of them still speak a form of Greek, Griko, that developed from both Magna Graecia and Byzantine Greek (see on the map the location of the Griko speaking communities today.)
[Note on Magna Graecia. We remind readers that most coastal areas of South Italy had been colonized by Greek settlers since the 8th century B.C., and that Magna Graecia (ie, ‘Big Greece’, coastal South Italy) was to mainland Greeks a bit like America was to Europeans: a land of promise where opportunities were bigger, and where everything - to travellers from mainland Greece - appeared larger and more luxuriant: Syracuse, not Athens, was the largest Greek city in the Mediterranean during classical times. See the map below for the past and above for what is left of the Greek-speaking people today]
Greek settlements in Magna Graecia, with their dialects. Click for credits
Montinaro, born from a Griko mother, wrote a few books on the Griko culture. Among his merits, that of having made known the beauty of the oral poetry of the Grikos.
I have his “Il tesoro delle parole morte” (Argo, 2009, Lecce) ['The treasure of the dead words']. I’ll summarize a passage from his introduction to the book:
Temple of Poseidon. Paestum, Campania, Italy. Click for credits
The traveller in the South of Italy admires the temples of Paestum, the Greek wonders of Agrigento, Taormina and Syracuse. Parmenides of Elea was born in Magna Graecia, the school of Pythagoras flourished in Croton. Archimedes, Diodorus Siculos and other prominent Greeks were born in Sicily.
However, if that traveller closes his eyes – while wandering in Aspromonte (Calabria) or in the land of Salento (Apulia) covered with centuries-old olive trees – he can still hear, carried by the wind, words such as: agàpi, dafni, podèa, vasilicò, alòni.
These are traces, just like the columns and the theatres, of another monument of the Hellenic culture: the Greek language.
These oral poems sing with great freshness the joys and sorrows of love, “with a look – we read in the back cover – that is still the darting gaze common to the boundless sea of Hellenism, and that was expressed by the rhythms of Sappho and Anacreon.”
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Some of these poems will be presented in the next post translated into an English (hopefully not too horrible) version.
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Related posts:
Do you ever wonder what might be had Greek culture remained ascendant and Rome not grown to be an empire? Or, perhaps, had the Greek emigres done what the early American immigrants ended up doing? Imagine a second Greek Empire arising on the Italian peninsula to rival the first.
Welcome back Douglas.
‘What if’ fantasies … it would take a book.
Superficially, in the first case – if you mean an overall Greek Empire instead of a Roman empire – so many things could be different today: the alphabet, Greek and not Roman; Greek words, and not Latin, prevalent in our languages; a possible greater development of sciences and fine arts; less freedom for women etc., and men that wouldn’t shave their beard LOL.
In the second case, had the South Italian Greeks united and created a mighty state rivalling Rome, again all would have been different.
Both your fantasies were about to happen when the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus tried to establish a Greek empire in Italy.
In 281 BC the South Italian Greek city of Tarentum, defeated by Rome, asked Pyrrhus to lead all the South Italian Greek cities against Rome. A war ensued but Rome proved more resilient and Pyrrhus, a relative of Alexander btw, had to leave Italy.
The clash of the two was inevitable. One of the two would have emerged as the greater power (and did… as you point out). In the US, as with Rome, we were able to throw off the old empire (Great Britain). I like to think about “what if’s” a lot. What if, the First Americans (aka “Native Americans”) had united against the European invasion? What if the North had not won the Civil War? What if Canada had joined us against G.B. and been absorbed into the U.S.? What if Hannibal had been victorious against Scipio? What if Germany had won the First World War?
Intriguing little mind games that I never quite complete.
I also find these mind games intriguing, and not at all useless. But they take time and some research to be played well. I wouldn’t mind any of your ‘what if’s’. Good that you didn’t mention ‘if Germany won the Second World War’. THAT would have been a nightmare, and I read a science fiction novel about it when in my twenties (whose title I forgot.)
I deliberately stayed away from that one (WWII). When I have considered it, I realized that would have also meant a Japanese victory in the Pacific, Mussolini’s Italy triumphant, and the inevitable (in my view) struggle between these three for total dominance. A true nightmare, as you say. A number of stories have been written on the premise of a successful Germany in the 40′s but they always ignore the Pacific Theater.
A number of stories have been written on the premise of a successful Germany in the 40′s but they always ignore the Pacific Theater.
True. I never thought of that.
I believe you’re thinking of Philip K. Dick’s “Man in the High Castle.”
Perhaps I read that one, since I saw in the Wiki the (horrible) detail of the destruction by Hitler of the people in Africa, which struck me when I read it. I’m not sure though since I found it in a bookstall and it was in French. A translation probably.
Looking forward to the next issue. I don’t remember any Greek words among my childhood experiences, but then, I would not have known them to be Greek.
Always instructive and most interesting.
Hi Rosaria, thank you.
I hope I can render the beauty of those poems in English. According to a legend, Venosa, your hometown (in Lucania, South Italy), was founded by the Greek hero Diomedes after the Trojan War, who dedicated it to Aphrodite Venus, thence the name. So, there might well be Greek words in your childhood language, although only in the above mentioned areas Greek really survived.
Most interesting post and comments. All those what ifs seem, however, to ignore the Ottoman Empire. What if the Holy Roman Empire had resisted and survived the Ottoman push? What if Christianity and Islamism had not existed?
What if MoR had not been around to raise all those questions.
Ah ah ah, the last ‘what if’ especially, so crucial. Well, had the Ottoman Turks (and Islam) not existed, I cannot think of the big changes. Possibly many more people would speak Greek today since the Ottomans absorbed, among the rest, the Greek speaking eastern Roman empire. And the Arabs also, at an earlier stage, conquered lands where Latin and Greek (plus the local languages) were spoken.
What if Italy was united during the Renaissance specifically the so-called “age of exploration?”
I remember coming across an obscure periodical doing some research for a paper in university titled, “Italian influences in the Iberian world” or something like that. I still have the paper somewhere. It talked about how Italian merchants basically financed early Spanish and Portuguese explorations to the new world. It got me thinking, what if the Italians had consolidated power before the 19th century would the Americas (the south in particular) have Italian as its “prima” language?
I even posited this argument in an exam leaving the professor to conclude, “fascinating to think about but the “what ifs” of history are futile.” I paraphrase of course.
Italy had a shot at a “second” Rome. It did with Venice and Florence. Imagine if it united what it could have done – not that what it accomplished wasn’t astonishing as it was to begin with.
And I often wonder the same question Douglas did about Canada siding with Britain.
Italian merchants basically financed early Spanish and Portuguese explorations to the new world … what if the Italians had consolidated power
I think that, had Italy consolidated his power in a unified state during the Renaissance, the impact would have been not negligible, also on the New World perhaps.
Considering only Spain, the biggest power during the Renaissance, its commerce and economy was totally controlled by the Genoese bankers, until the bankruptcy of Philip II. The century from 1550 to 1650 is at times called “the century of Genoa.”
When one thinks about the Renaissance Venice and especially Florence come to mind. But Genoa has not to be forgotten.
And yes, I guess you’d have preferred Canada sided with the US instead
Pragmatically, absolutely.
And yes, we mustn’t forget Genoa. Perhaps even Piemonte, Milan and the Papal States.
Of course.
When I was in my teens and not at all equal to the subject matter I collaborated with a friend on an alternate-history thriller predicated on the idea that the American Revolution had succeeded so far as preserving independence from Britain but fallen apart eventually so that the North American continent was subdivided into ethnically distinct principalities which squabbled and feuded, leaving Britain a stronger hegemony, no mid-19th-century season of revolutions in Europe, but an eventual push for the idea of a world government UN-style as Britain lost its grip… Oddly it looked a bit like what’s going on today as the US is forced to recognize the clout of emerging nations. Curiously, we decided that the world government movement should be based in Iceland…
A world government UN-style … mmm, don’t like much the idea, I wonder why.
Curiously, we decided that the world government movement should be based in Iceland…
Probably for the charm of a people there speaking a sort of ancient Norse?
The search for the roots … is important.
Well half the point of the book was that no matter how noble the ideal, people still fucked it up. The leader of the “Peace Brotherhood” in the story barely escaped two colliding power plays by French Canadian separatists and his own cousin inside the Brotherhood, involving a manufactured treason trial of someone close to him. We were cynical young people in the sixties after all… remember?
Yes we were, in some kind of idealistic way, we were.
I’ve always liked Philip K. Dick, and it strikes me that he might have written the book I read in my 20′s.
I think you’re alluding to the New World Order….?
Yes, a UN-style world order.
Your post and the map threw me back into my book research: Tarentum is the site of the struggle between Hannibal and Fabius in one chapter, Crotone the site of a scandal involving Scipio in another chapter.
Messana is the topic of the tragicomedy that led to the First Punic War, Syracuse the venue of Archimedes’s famous death….
My imagination has inhabited this map for the past few years.
(If I were to visit today, i would almost certainly be disappointed.)
Well, South Italy is beautiful and attracts many tourists.
Yet much depends on our expectations. You would see nothing of what you have imagined – apart from the monuments. Syracuse is still beautiful (but certainly not much is left of the glorious Greek town that defeated Athens) but modern Croton is horrible and has totally absorbed the ancient one.
One additional problem is perhaps the overall idealisation of the classical world (I idealise quite a lot).
We might be disappointed even if we had a time machine. Diseases, poverty …. Let’s just take the ancient ‘smiles’: given the backward medicine they’d mostly be toothless or with teeth missing and the higher the social class the less teeth they’d have (more food, cakes etc.).
A toothless Cleopatra? A bit grotesque isn’t it (even though they may have shaped animal teeth to replace the missing ones. But in any case.)