The Land of My Mother Francesco's Italy: Top to Toe

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

I've been travelling all through my country and now I've reached the south.

It is a region of great natural beauty

and villages where time stands still.

This is a land where religion still holds sway over reason,

tradition over modernity.

You know, northerners can feel a little daunted by the south, a bit out of place.

But I'm not worried... because I'm one of them.

My mother is pure Sicilian and our family has been here for 500 years.

In a strange way, this part of my trip

will be a homecoming.

I'm entering Puglia, the region we call "il tacco d'Italia",

the heel of Italy.

It's an enchanted land.

It's no secret that we Italians don't like paying taxes.

But only in this part of Italy

has tax-evasion resulted in a unique form of art.

This is the land of the trulli,

cone-shaped houses that date back hundreds of years.

The strange design of the trulli is for one reason -

so they could be dismantled very easily.

They were made without cement,

so they could pull the top, il tappo, the plug, out of the trulli

and all would collapse.

So when the local count heard the tax man was coming,

all the tappo were pulled out.

Each trulli would fall down and he wouldn't have to pay property tax.

But the Count was...

The word in Italian is bastardo.

You see, he didn't pay tax himself,

but he made all his tenants pay tax to him.

Over the centuries, entire villages of trulli sprung up.

This is Alberobello.

Nowadays, you are allowed to use cement

and the trulli make popular homes.

-Buongiorno.

-Buongiorno.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

In the Middle Ages, Puglia was the heart of a great civilization.

I'm heading towards a building

as mysterious as the great pyramids of Egypt.

This is Castel del Monte.

When I came here as a boy,

I thought I had entered an ancient and mystical land.

This is no ordinary castle.

There's no moat, no drawbridge, no windows for pouring down boiling oil.

No, this is a place devoted to magic.

The castle has eight walls,

each of which ends in a tower with eight sides.

In the middle is an eight-sided courtyard.

Inside, every floor has eight rooms.

Why all these eights?

In the Middle Ages, the eight was the number of divine balance,

of harmony between the real and spiritual world.

I said this castle is a mystery.

People came here in search of divine wisdom.

They would have understood the true meaning of this castle.

But we today can only wonder.

Below the town of Ostuni sit luscious and ancient olive groves.

But I am not alone.

Here lurks a terrifying creature.

Well, perhaps not this terrifying!

But a tarantula spider nevertheless that has inspired a local tradition.

I've come to Ostuni to see a dance so powerful

that it is said to cure the bite of the tarantula spider.

This is the tarantella.

At first glance, it looks not unlike your Morris dancing,

but this is about to get very wild.

The tarantella has been danced since the 1300s

when a plague of spiders hit the town of Ostuni.

For centuries, it was believed the dance was the only way

to cure the effects of the spider's poison.

Now, it's just an excuse for a good party!

In the past, dances like this used to go on for days.

Even now, when people hear the music, they feel compelled to join in.

I'm on the road to Matera, in Italy's poorest region.

Built into the side of a gorge,

it is a town of cave dwellings known as Sassi.

In a region of constant war and plunder,

the Sassi were easy to defend.

This was a town with one purpose - survival.

Well into the 20th century, Matera's poverty was shocking.

The reports of visitors describe starving and diseased children

begging not for money, but medicine.

Peasants and farmers lived here

with their families and their animals.

The only source of ventilation and light was the entrance door.

No running water.

It must have been really grim.

By the 1950s, the squalor of the Sassi was so staggering

that it became known as "la vergogna d'Italia",

the shame of Italy.

Back then, many Sassi were abandoned,

but 50 years on, the Sassi are being cleaned up and lived in again.

Today, even tourists are finding their way to Matera

to see a forgotten treasure.

This rock church was created in the Middle Ages.

It was carved out of the solid rock of the cliff face in the 8th century.

Frescoes, painted sometime around 1100,

decorate the triple-aisled church.

This is the Madonna del Latte,

the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus.

It is Easter Saturday, a day of mourning for the dead Christ.

Only on this day does the 16th century figure

of the Addolorata Maria, the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ,

leave the church.

She is carried through the streets of Nocera Terinese.

This Easter procession is typical of towns all over the south.

But here the villagers take their devotion further.

I'd been warned the scenes are not for the faint-hearted.

Events climax as the men of the town flagellate themselves

until the streets run red with blood.

They believe their suffering takes them closer to Christ in his passion.

I'm going to the house of Giovanni Raschilla.

To smell the blood, to see the face of the little boy,

it's a day I will not forget.

It makes me feel a foreigner in my own country.

On the end of Italy's big toe sits the town of Reggio Calabria,

a dirty and bustling port, usually a place to pass through, not to stay.

30 years ago, Reggio Calabria wasn't on the tourist map.

Then in the sea off the coast

were discovered two of the greatest artworks of the classical age.

The Riace Bronzes were created 2,500 years ago,

but lost in a shipwreck.

It is thought they were made by the Greek sculptor Phidias,

who also sculpted the Elgin Marbles for the Parthenon in Athens.

What are these sublime figures?

Men or gods?

They look both human and divine at the same time.

They are an idealized view of the human form.

Their discovery would rewrite the history of art.

This was sculpture of a quality no-one thought possible of classical Greece.

They are made of bronze, but the eyes are inlaid with bone and glass,

the teeth made of silver, the lips and nipples of copper.

The statues are very lifelike.

Despite being bronze, they seem to be real flesh.

Indeed, it's all I can do to stop myself reaching out...

Always sign of a good statue, I think.

Grazie.

After my travels through the Italian mainland,

now I'm going home to the land of my mother.

I've spent so much of my life here.

This is how, when I was a boy, we would arrive to Sicily.

I always see this exotic island appearing before us

and I would feel a tremendous excitement.

Sicily is the jewel of the Mediterranean.

In its long history, it has been conquered by the Greeks,

Romans, Arabs,

Normans, Spaniards, French and now the Italians!

What has made Sicily so desirable

is its strategic position in the middle of the Mediterranean

and its fertility.

The Romans call it, "the nurse at whose breast the Roman people are fed".

This was a prize worth winning.

To travel through Sicily is to travel back in time.

I feel like your British timelord.

How you say? Dr What?

It was the ancient Greeks who first colonized Sicily

in the 8th century BC.

They transformed the east coast of the island into a centre of trade

and artistic excellence that would rival Athens itself.

It's often forgotten that the great minds of ancient Greece found their homes here -

Plato, the philosopher,

Archimedes, the mathematician,

Aeschylus, the playwright.

This is the Greek theatre of Taormina,

just one of Sicily's great ruins from the classical age.

Its stage provides a stunning frame for the volcano of Mount Etna.

From the dawn of time,

it has dominated the island and the lives of its people.

The name Etna comes from the ancient Greek, to burn.

It takes an hour to reach the base camp of the volcano by car

and then it's a tough four-hour climb through snow

to the rim of the crater.

-Ciao.

-Ciao.

Etna is the largest volcano in Europe

and one of the most active in the world.

Nine climbers were killed in a recent eruption.

In the 2nd century BC,

the Greeks were thrown out of Sicily by the Romans.

This is the Villa del Casale,

home to the greatest Roman mosaics in the world.

These mosaics are amazing.

For me, they are just as impressive

as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Roma.

They cover 3,500 square metres,

about 129 million pieces in 37 different colours.

They are an amazing window into Roman life.

Most breathtaking is this 65-metre-long mosaic.

It shows hunting scenes

with exotic wild animals from across the Roman empire.

It is believed the villa belonged to Maximianus Herculeus,

Roman emperor from 286 to 305AD.

He used it for entertaining!

Maybe these were some of the Emperor's girlfriends.

After the Roman Empire collapsed,

Normans and Arabs fought for control of the island.

For centuries, Sicily was a dangerous place,

so people built their homes on mountaintops.

Now they look picturesque, but these were villages built for defence.

You know, one of the things I love about Sicily is the little villages.

They feel so secluded and timeless.

When you come here, it's important to make time to stop and just walk around.

There are certain things you will always see.

Any self-respecting Sicilian village

will have lots of stray cats and dogs.

There are children playing football on the street.

The teenagers, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Old women making lace...

..while their husbands play cards in the bar.

I'm heading towards the south coast of Sicily on a personal pilgrimage.

I'm an architect and every architect has a dream -

that one day, he might be able to build a town entirely from scratch.

And that's just what happened in 1693

when the city of Noto was destroyed by an earthquake.

The reconstruction was given to the Duke of Camastra,

a powerful Sicilian aristocrat.

The Duke's vision was to build Noto bigger and better than before.

It would be marveled at for its beauty and brilliance

and his name would be remembered for evermore.

The Duke enlisted the greatest Sicilian architects of the day.

They created a baroque masterpiece.

This city is a stage set.

Every facade is designed to impress

with fine decoration and sculpture.

You know, Noto has many beautiful buildings,

but what I like best are the little details.

This style of balconies,

supported by strange creatures and cherubs, is unique to Sicily.

I love them.

But while being very beautiful, Noto was doomed from the start.

The problem is that it was all made from this - the local limestone.

It's soft and good for delicate carving.

But it has a bad side.

It's very fragile.

Within 200 years, Noto was falling apart.

The city of beautiful facades and promenades

has become one of not so beautiful scaffolding.

This is the duomo.

It is in so much trouble

it has scaffolding on the outside and on the inside too.

It breaks my heart to see it.

Like Venice, a tragic uncertainty hangs over the city.

RADIO:

HE SINGS ALONG IN ITALIAN

HE SINGS ALONG IN ITALIAN

In the 18th century,

Sicily was controlled by a handful of aristocratic families.

It was an age of extravagance.

In the town of Bagheria, they competed to build

the most brilliant and impressive country houses.

This is the Villa Palagonia, built in 1715.

The garden is full of grotesque statues.

They were made by a prince of Palagonia

as caricatures of his wife's lovers.

Like most feudal lords,

the Sicilian aristocracy were rich, but did no work themselves.

Their lives were dedicated to pleasure

and no palace was complete without a ballroom!

Imagine this place lit by a thousand candles,

dark, handsome princes wheeling their elegant, dazzling women

in a waltz around this room.

And the mirrors on the ceiling repeating to infinity

the image of the dancers beneath.

And everyone dizzy and spinning with champagne.

They must have thought the dance would go on forever.

But the aristocracy spent beyond their means.

In the late 19th century,

the princes of Palagonia, like many Sicilian nobles, had to sell up.

It was the end of an era.

Palermo is the capital city of Sicily.

Its elegant streets are lined with magnificent buildings and statues,

amongst the finest in Italy.

But step off the main streets and it's a different story.

The city was badly bombed in the Second World War

and it has never recovered.

I'm in the centre of Palermo.

It's incredible that, after all these years,

these buildings have been left like this.

Why?

There is a word that might explain it.

After the war, money was siphoned

into Mafia-controlled building projects on the edge of town

and the centre left to rot.

For several decades, Palermo was a difficult place to live.

And as late as the 1980s and '90s,

violent death was common on the streets of the city.

BELL TOLLS

Sicilians see death kind of like un parente noioso, a boring relative,

not much fun to be with,

but since a visit is inevitable, one might as well make the best of it.

Until a decade ago, when it was outlawed,

it was common for people to have picnics on their family tombs.

Flowers and picnics is one way of dealing with death.

But under the ground here is another.

I've only been here once before, as a boy, and I was fascinated by it.

But I know you British have a problem with death,

so those of you who are a little "sensitivo"

may want to cover your eyes.

For the past 500 years,

this has been the resting place of the Capuchin monks.

They didn't like to bury their dead, but to embalm them.

At first, only monks were interred here.

But then anybody who could afford it could find a home here too.

There are special sections for men, women, lawyers, doctors and priests.

There are about 8,000 bodies here.

Once you get over the shock of this cemetery, it is empowering.

We spend so much of life worrying about Death visiting us,

so it's nice to go visit Death.

And when I am bored of her company, I can leave.

Ciao!

I'm heading for the airport to pick up someone very special.

She's coming in on the flight from Venice.

In my tour through Italy, I've tried to show you the things that make us unique.

But I still have to show to you the most valuable thing.

For us Italians, it's more important than religion, art, or politics.

Mama!

The relationship between the Italian male and his mother is sacred.

He never grows out of her control.

My mother's family have been in Palermo for 500 years.

Her family, the dukes of Archirafi,

once owned the land in the centre of town

which is now the Botanical Garden.

My mother is going to take me to the old family home where she was born

and where my cousins still live.

Seeing these photos, it makes me think about my own children.

It seems so long ago I left them behind in Venice.

My journey has come to an end and I have to say,

it is difficult for me to come to a conclusion about my trip.

We Italians say our country is un bel casino, a beautiful confusion,

not to be explained, but experienced.

But what a journey!

It was great fun, no?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006

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