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Everything is related to Naples Ghost Towns  I am a believer in such
things as the UNESCO World Heritage List of sites in the
world that should be protected as part of our global
cultural heritage. A number of places in Italy are on the
list, including the historic
center of Naples. Lesser known is UNESCO’s more
recent ICH (Intangible Cultural Heritage) list of the oral
traditions and performing arts, some of which are on the
verge of dying out. One Italian item on the list is the Sardinian pastoral song form
known as cantu a tenore.Now, I notice an organization called the World Monuments Fund, self-described as the "leading private organization dedicated to saving the world’s most treasured places." That's fine with me. One Italian item on the list is not too far from Naples—the "ghost town" of Craco (photo, above) near Matera, about 25 miles inland from the coast along the sole of the Italian "boot." Craco shows up on other lists of ghost towns in the world, many of them quite recent (for example, Prypiat, near Chernobyl in the Ukraine, abandoned in 1986 after the disaster), places that have been abandoned by their inhabitants for one reason or other, a phenomenon that continues to fascinate us—for one reason or other. In this case, the reason may be that Craco is not the only ghost town in southern Italy, but it is iconic of the small medieval community, where you lived on a hill and in the early morning walked many miles down to farm someone else's land and then back up home again at night. It was one of many such small feudal cogs in the societal machinery of southern Italy, and even after Feudalism, it wasn't even as good as tenant-farming or share-cropping. It was hard-scrabble, if ever there was such, and Craco was one of many such places where the population was cut in half during the great wave of Italian emigration in the late 1800s (meaning, usually, the young half left; the old half stayed.) The first historic settlements at Craco are from the early first-century b.c. and, like elsewhere in southern Italy, are Greek. The settlers may have been from an earlier coastal site at Metaponte, part of the expansion of so-called Magna Grecia; according to some, the site may even have been an earlier Mycenaean settlement. Make it, give or take a bit, 1000-700 BC. In any event, it was off the beaten track even during the Roman Empire. By name, it is first mentioned as Graculum (a small area under cultivation) in 1060 and it did enjoy a strategic vantage point dominating the Cavone valley, important to Frederick II's defensive network in the south in the 1200s. The population reached 2,600 by 1561. In 1630, Craco established a permanent monastic order with the construction of the Monastery of St. Peter. The monastery influenced the local economy through the production of grains, vegetables, wine, and oil. Craco was a bulwark of revolutionary sympathies in the short-lived Neapolitan Republic of 1799, but was eventually supressed by the Loyalist troops of Cardinal Ruffo. At the time of the unification of Italy (1861), Craco had 2,000 inhabitants. That number was cut in half during the mass emigrations to America in the decades before WWI. Population rose somewhat under Fascism (1920s & 30s), and, indeed, continued to approach 2000 by 1961. In 1963, a serious earthslide caused the town to be abandoned and the inhabitants resettled elsewhere. And there it sits, an empty reminder of part of the history of southern Italy. You can visit, if you like that sort of thing. Some film directors seem to, and Craco has cropped up in a few scenes from films as diverse as Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (2004) and the umpteenth James Bond film, A Quantum of Solace (2008).
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