Matera, February 18, 2011
I think that most of us are familiar with the romantic serenade: a masked musician stands beneath the balcony of his lady-love, wooing her with songs. But a rowdy group of masked singers, armed with tambourines, maracas, and a cupa-cupa, clamoring for vittles—what do you call that?
A mattinata, as I learned last night.
One of my friends belongs to a cultural association called I chicchi del melograno (The Pomegranate Seeds). The group decided to revive the Materan custom of the mattinata. In the days of peasants and landlords, during Carnevale the peasants would disguise themselves and descend upon the house of the padrone, making as much noise as possible, and clamoring for food and drink. Whatever the padrone had in the house was to be served. In the traditional song, the peasants inform their padrone that they are well aware that a pig has just been killed—so out with the grub, and give us a flask of wine while you’re at it. Just like a serenade (deriving from serata, or evening), the mattinata takes place at night. Why is that, when mattinata means “morning”? I learned why the day after.
We revelers convened at 10:30 p.m. on a hill overlooking central Matera. I was sitting in the car, chatting with my friend and two Melograno members, when I noticed that other cars had gathered around us. Within ten minutes we had a cavalcade of cars, engines running, ready for a signal from the lead car. We arrived at the apartment complex of our first victim around 11. Twenty of us crept through the halls, up the stairs, muffling giggles and instruments. We clustered around the door, someone rang the bell, and once the door opened, a short, seventy-something-year-old man broke into lusty song. The singing did not last very long, as we were missing both guitarists. Singing soon petered into talk and jokes while the victims scrounged their kitchen for something to serve. While Stefania, our conscripted hostess, laid out olives, potato chips, beer, and coca cola, our host prepared spaghetti for a spaghettata. Within minutes Stefania brought a bowl the size of a small kiddy-pool heaped with steaming spaghetti to the table. It was a plain dish, only spaghetti dressed with olive oil and specks of pepperone crusco, a specialty of the area. The pepperone is not spicy at all, but rather bitter.
(Note: The spaghettata is one of my favourite Italian customs. It is not just the making of spaghetti, but the making and sharing of spaghetti with friends late at night. Once my housemates, returning from a concert around 3 o’clock in the morning, held a spaghettata. I, sleeping in the next room, never heard a thing, finding only the pot in the sink the next morning.)
We ate, talked, went through several rounds of brindisi. By then it was 12 o’clock, officially the next day. Mattinata accomplished, right?
Four months in Matera, and I still have rather rigid American notions about time. We had only begun. At house number two we were joined by guitarist number two, guitarist number one being our previous victim. Thanks to the guitarists, we sang steadily for an hour. I did not know a single word to any of the songs, but I was not alone. The Materan dialect is so different from standard Italian that some members brought bi-lingual copies of the songs. While I was reading the lyrics, a Melograno member asked me, Lo capisci?
Per niente, I said, pointing to the Materan lyrics. “This might as well be Arabic.” Then, pointing to the Italian lyrics, I added, “This at least is Greek.”
But if I could just vocalize the songs, I could at least dance. Linking arms with Lucrezia, I began to dance to the song in ¾ time. Sway, two-step, clap at the second step, loud clap and twirl at the end of the phrase. Stefania ran to join us, and we had a troupe. We danced to every song after that, choreographing a different sequence for each dance. Stefania tried to teach me the pizzica, but I would not advise undertaking the leaps of the pizzica at one in the morning.
After another round of brindisi, we flocked to the cars for house three, on Via Santo Biagio, in the outskirts of the Sassi. We wound our way through cobblestone streets, passing under arches hanging with ivy and other plants that I don’t know. All of the Melograno members are open-minded, mellow people, rather like San Franciscans. The home of victim number three reminded me of my relatives’ home in San Francisco: the kitchen jostled the sitting room, wooden stairs led to intriguing lofts, and books bristled in every corner. As there were more bookshelves than furniture, we settled ourselves on the hearth, on stools, on the stairs. I did not manage to secure a seat, so I swayed my way through the evening, sometimes, I’ll admit, disguising my sleepy swaying as the movements of a dance. (N.B. The Italian verb for unsteady moving, traballare, can be roughly translated as “dancing across,” or perhaps as “exaggerated dancing.” So this was really a case of traballare.)
Eventually, my sleepiness obliged me to traballare my way home. I do hear tell that the mattinata went on into the wee hours of the morning—otherwise it wouldn’t be official, right?
The astonishing thing is that the next morning, as I wended my way to school, I met some Melograni in the piazza, looking far more awake than they had a right to be. What is it? The siesta? The caffè? The spaghetti? Or perhaps the notion that morning doesn’t begin until one o’clock?
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