Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

BASILICATA

Basilicata, a region bordering with

Campania (West), with Puglia (North-East)

and with Calabria (South), with a population

of about 610.000 people scattered in one

hundred and thirty towns, until 1950 had a

type of life modeled on an archaic

agricultural system, only in the last twenty

years updated with well-watered cultivation

areas, service sector jobs and pockets of

industrialization. The isolation of the small

communities has perpetuated archaic

customs and beliefs, linked to forms of

psychological impoverishment and illiteracy.

Italo Talia has written: “The same

Basilicata dialects distinguish themselves

from those of Campania and Puglia by a

more accentuated conservation of archaic

residues: in the Potenza territory the long