My son looked at me askance and muttered ‘more nostalgia’. I smiled, recognising he was right. My Mediterranean journey really began in this unlikely valley and its off-the-beaten-track places that I have dreamed of revisiting. For two full days, my long-suffering son has to put up with my recollections of archaeologists, digs, and surveys decades ago. We shall eat sea fish at Termoli, I promise, by way of compensation.
First, though, some context. As a young university lecturer I set my heart on doing a project in Sicily. I took a team there in 1977, but for various reasons the permit never materialised. I phoned my Sheffield University colleague Graeme Barker, who was directing a big project in the regione of Molise. It was not easy to reach him, but I did, and inimitably he was very welcoming. To get to Molise, we drove through the length of Calabria, where the accelerator cable broke and a helpful mechanic replaced it with one from a lawnmower. In a thunderstorm, we struggled through Benevento and, after a further hour, reached the dour town of Campobasso. Here I was to rendezvous with Graeme at the offices of the Soprintendenza, the state archaeological authority. While waiting, a young inspector – on learning of my interest in the Middle Ages – told me of a monastery called San Vincenzo al Volturno that was well worth visiting. Brashly, I responded that I was only interested in villages. When Graeme arrived, he took us to Saepinum, a jewel of a Roman town mostly occupied by four farms, in the shadow of the Matese mountains (see below). There, we camped in the Roman forum! The next day, Graeme took me on a tour of his summer domain: the Biferno valley. Driving his Land Rover with the aplomb of an estate agent selling property here and there, he chattered about the sediment history, the Bronze Age farms, and the myriad Roman farms near the Adriatic Sea. Down the valley we rattled, castles loomed in airy villages high above us, in what immediately appeared to me to be what Carlo Levi once derogatively called ‘the Other Italy’. This was a striking but wholly forgotten world.
Molise had been rich in the Roman period, but suffered abject poverty in the later 19th and 20th centuries, when the greater proportion of its people migrated. The area is named after a Norman duchy, and was until 1974 part of the region of Abruzzo. Then it gained its independence to become Italy’s second smallest regione. To give it some fresh identity, a brilliant young Superintendent of Antiquities (born in Molise), Adriano La Regina, invited Graeme to replicate the British School at Rome’s South Etruria field survey of archaeological sites in his new patch. La Regina knew his man: Graeme was never a slouch! On agreeing, he ambitiously aimed to survey a valley that led from the Matese mountains, forming part of Italy’s Apennine spine, to the Adriatic Sea at the bijou port of Termoli. This was a canonical Mediterranean valley, as he would call it in his classic monograph published 20 years later.
Garden cities