Septizodium

Carlo Levi describes a fascinating drinking game called La Passatella. It seems to have been new to him, coming as he did from Turin. But the tradition of drinking games with a nominated arbiter bibendi is attested in ancient sources. Horace mentions a regna vini in his fourth Ode, and Cicero describes in his “On Old Age”: me vero et magisteria delectant a maioribus instituta et is sermo, qui more maiorum a summo adhibetur in poculo. But Levi shows how acrimony and resentment are central to the game in Basilicata.

Passatella is the most popular game in this part of the country, and a particular favorite among the peasants. On long winter evenings and holidays they play it for hours in the taverns. It often ends in violence; if not with drawn knives, as on the occasion I have just described, at least with quarrels and scuffling.

Passatella is not so much a game as it is a peasant tournament of oratory, where interminable speeches reveal in veiled terms a vast amount of repressed rancor, hate, and rivalry. A brief session with the cards determines a winner, who is then the King of the Passaella and his assistant. The King holds sway over the wine, for which all the players have paid their share, and he fills the glasses or leaves them empty according to his fancy. His assistant holds the glasses out to be filled and has veto powers, that is, he can prevent the would-be drinker from downing his wine.

The King and his assistant alike must justify both their choices and their vetoes, and this they do in the form of a cross-examination carried out in long speeches, replete with irony and concealed passion. Sometimes the game has an innocent character and does not extend beyond the pleasantry of piling up all the drinks on one man who is notoriously unable to hold them, or denying them to the keenest drinker at the table. But more often the arguments proffered by the King and his assistant reflect the feuds and conflicting interests of the players, expressed with all the slowness, roundabout ways, astuteness, inistaist, and deep conviction characteristic of the peasants.

Cards and bottles of wine alternate for hours on end, until tempers boil from the effect of drink and heat and the rekindling of smouldering passions, which are in turn sharpened by vindictive words and yet lulled by drunkenness. Even if a fight does not develop, all those present are aware of the bitterness latent in what has been said during the exchange of veiled insults.

More from Carlo Levi. He’s describing the typical peasant house in Gagliano:

The peasants houses were all alike, consisting of only one room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and usually as quarters for the barnyard animals as well, unless there happened to be an outhouse, which they described with a dialect word of Greek derivation, catoico. On one side of the room was the stove; sticks brought In every day from the fields served as fuel, and the walls and ceiling were blackened with smoke. The only light was that from the door. The room was almost
entirely filled by an enormous bed, much larger than an ordinary double bed; in it slept the whole family, father, mother, and children. The smallest children, before they were weaned, that is until they were three or four years old, were kept in little reed cradles or baskets hung from the celling just above the bed. When the mother wanted to nurse them she did not have to get out of bed; she simply reached out and pulled the baby down to her breast, then put him back and with one motion of her hand made the basket rock like a pendulum until he had ceased to cry.

Under the bed slept the animals, and so the room was divided into three layers: animals on the floor, people in the bed, and infants in the air. When I bent over a bed to listen to a patient’s heart or to give an injection to a woman whose teeth were chattering with fever or who was burning up with malaria, my head touched the hanging cradles, while frightened pigs and chickens darted between my legs.

From Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of his banishment to a tiny town in the south of Italy during the Fascist war against Ethiopia.

One ten-year-old boy, Giovanni Fanelli, a pale little fellow with big, black eyes, a long, slender neck had a particular enthusiasm for painting. All the children begged for my discarded tubes and brushes to play with, and Giovanni got his share of these, but liked to put them to a better use.

Without so much as a hint to me he made secret attempts to become a painter. He watched very carefully everything I did, from sizing the canvas to stretching it on a frame. Just because I did these simple things they seemed to him no less fundamental than the actual laying on of color. He picked up sticks and made them into irregular frames; then on these he stretched odd bits of old shirting and covered them with some sort of sticky substance in lieu of size. When he had done this much he thought that the worst was over. With what was left in my used tubes of paint, an old palette, and worn brushes he tried to imitate my exact strokes.

He was a timid, blushing boy and he would never have summoned up the courage to show me his work. I happened to see it only at the prompting of his young friends. His would-be painting was not the usual sort of childish thing, nor was it a mere imitation. He made shapeless masses of color, which were not altogether without charin. I do not know if Giovanni Fanelli had it in him to become a painter, but I have never seen another boy with his faith that a spontaneous revelation would come out of his labor, that the practice of a technique would work like magic, and that his efforts would bear fruit as certainly as a field that has been plowed and sown.