Andres Guida Disperazione. Oil on canvas. 50 cm x 70 cm.

Driving into Piano Vetrale in the mountainous Cilento, you suddenly come upon a colorful mural. You naturally slow down and see that it is an expressionistic rendering of men and women at work harvesting grain. The mural entitled La Trebbia (The Threshing) is by Andrea Guida (Agropoli), a Cilentan artist whose main oeuvre clearly reflects social awareness - trebbia in Italian may also refer to an instrument of torture. Many of Guida's paintings are images of poor farm workers, some with hopelessness in their faces, but also expressing how close-knit such communities can be.

Entering the main piazza of Piano Vetrale, you notice an old man is sitting on a bench with his newspaper and his little white dog. Is he real? No, there is a signature telling us that he was painted by M. Giglio in 1989. A little further on two surreal spirits stare out at you from the trunk of an old olive tree - a main player in the economic life of Cilento. There are paintings on the walls and doors throughout the village, executed in a variety of styles since 1980 as homage to the painter Paolo de Matteis, who was born in Piano Vetrale in 1662. No works by De Matteis is found here, but some of the murals refer to his work, among them the angel painted by Mauro Trotta (Capizzo) in 1996. Each year in August artists are invited to Piano Vetrale to paint for a few days, and anyone may attend to see the artists in action. Similar open-air events or open studios are organized in other locations in Cilento during the summer. The abandoned villages of Roscigno Vecchia and San Severino di Centola, both of which are slowly being restored, each have concorso estemporanea every summer open to any artists.

Mauro Trotta. No title. Mural. Photo: Aase Schmidt.

Cilento that makes up the southern part of the region of Campania, Italy, has been a place of artistic and intellectual endeavors since antiquity. It was here in the Greek colony of Elea, called Velia by the Romans, that Parmenides in the 5th century B.C. discovered the deductive method of argumentation. Vincenzo Cerino (Ascea & Naples) has made Parmenides and his importance to Western culture present by creating an elegant oversize bronze sculpture of this Eleatic philosopher, who has attracted the attention of the world for 2500 years; it is erected on the grounds of the Fondazione Alario in Ascea Marina. Cerino's Madonna di Portosalvo in Casalvelino Marina calls to mind the Hellenistic Nike from Samotrache. The Madonna, the protector of the seafarers, appears like Nike almost floating against the wind that makes folds in her garment. The same suggestive transparency is seen in some of Cerino's paintings that are close to surrealism with figures reduced almost to essential signs.

There are black- and red-figured vase paintings from the time of Parmenides in the museums at the excavation site of Elea, at the Antiquarium in Palinuro and at the larger museum in Paestum, which also houses Lucanian tomb paintings from the same period as well as Roman sculptures. At the Museum of the Grand Tour in Capaccio you find a collection of 18th century engravings of views of Paestum with its Greek temples, including works by the 18th century engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Vincenzo Cerino Madonna di Portosalvo. Bronze.

The ancient Greek artistic tradition is sensed in the bronze women of Andrea Celano (Perito & Rome), who creates nudes in the real sense of the word, as Kenneth Clark defines it, i.e. as an art form, not as the subject. Celano's nudes have the classical balance and repose of a Maillol and at the same time the sports-trained features of the modern, independent and self-confident woman - and are shown in provocative and dynamic positions. You may say with Nietzsche that they possess both the measured harmony of the Apollonian intellectualism and the irrational and impulsiveness of the Dionysian force of nature. Celano has created a large ceramic relief, hung at the main piazza in Perito, with reference to The Tempest with its mysterious landscape featuring a nursing woman and a soldier watching, by the Venetian Renaissance painter Giorgione. Part of Celano's recent oeuvre comprises a large number of ceramic masks, all showing the face of Christ in various expressive forms.

Describing in words the impression of the wooden sculptures of Roberto Baglivi (Perito) seems best done by quoting a couple of lines from the 6th century B.C. poet Ibykos, who came from the Greek colony of Rhegion (now Reggio Calabria): "...there where the maiden nymphs have/their secret garden, and grapes that grow/round in shade of the tendriled vine,/ripen."* Giuseppe Fortunato (Ascea Marina) is inspired directly by Greek antiquity. His ceramic rendering of Apollo and Daphne shows the moment when Apollo catches Daphne and her transformation into a laurel tree begins, indicating that the artist is interested not only in the content of the myth as a good story but also in the artistic challenge of the metamorphosis itself, the actual physical process of the story.         

Catholicism has nurtured another artistic tradition in Cilento - that of religious images. In the Capella di San Filadelfo at Pattano, Byzantine frescoes reveal the model beauty of that time, tall slim figures with small faces dominated by large eyes, clothed in magnificent garments. A 10th or 11th century painted, wooden sculpture of San Filadelfo has been moved to the Museo Diocesano in Vallo della Lucania. Works from various churches in Cilento are also on view in that museum. Among them is a polyptych by Cristoforo Faffeo from 1482 with its graceful and delicate figures of Maria being crowned, Madonna and child, and Christ in Pietá with saints and disciples. The museum also houses works by Marco Pino da Siena, a forerunner of Neapolitan Mannerism as well as other 16th century and later Italian artists.

Rocco Cardinali (Abatemarco) experiments with color and form in his ceramic work, combining two- and three-dimensional forms, as in his Madonna di Porto Salvo erected on the waterfront in Ascea Marina. Some of his bronzes carry the mind to Wilhelm Lembruch's expressionistic figures with their elongated forms that transgress nature. His various versions of a man and woman in close embrace also recall Brancusi's The Kiss with its touch of tranquility, but characterized by modernity. In a field outside of Pellare, you may see the sculptor Emanuele Stifano (Pellare) at work on his monumental rendering in white Carrara marble of St. Bartholomew, who is slowly emerging from the stone. According to tradition, St. Bartholomew was flayed alive for his beliefs, and is the patron saint of Pellare that used to be a center for tanneries.

Andrea Celano. No title. Bronze.

The fresco of Mario Modica (Vallo della Lucania) in the apsis of the church in Ascea Marina is carried out in the spirit of the Middle Ages as a homiletic illustration for the churchgoers to view and ponder, but done in a photo-realist style and with reference to our own time. Two groups of fishermen and women are on the beach of Ascea looking and pointing to an approaching fishing boat or maybe also to the Madonna, protector of the seamen, appearing in the sky. In the church in Casalvelino Scalo Modica's similarly photo-realist frescoes feature Christ surrounded by some of the saints, we know from our own time, including Padre Pio and Mother Theresa.

Cilento is an area consisting of approx. 100, mainly farming, municipalities with a tumultuous history and a landscape that is so beautiful that Romanticists surely feel overwhelmed. All of the paintings of Mario Romano (Gioi) tell the story of a young man who went to the city and there saw only the fruit and the vegetables, so he had to go back to the country where he belonged to paint. His paintings are narratives, they tell about times that were; Romano paints the farmer with his oxen, the farmer on his way home from the field, but always with a look of determination, with certain elegance in spite of the rural get-up.

In La fiera (The Fair) by Pericle Sarti (Postiglione), a fresco in the Town Hall of Postiglione, representing the hilltop town and below it the inhabitants, people and animals together may be perceived as a reflection of the town. You could almost say that it is like Ambrogio Lorenzetti's fresco in Siena, an allegory of Good Government. The town is as peaceful as the gathering of people (some are clearly doing business, others probably discussing politics) and well-nourished cows, goats, etc. Sarti's work may contain hidden social comments. La Fortuna portrays a mother with her sick child and a fortuneteller with her bird in cage that will pick up a note telling a person's fortune. Cilentan nature and environment are the motifs in the paintings of Cesare Iacovitti (Vallo della Lucania), and a critic has said that Iacovitti's works "send us back to a spiritual Eden". Cilento may well nigh be seen as the Paradiso of Dante, it is a place where literary allusions compete with the scenery in impressiveness - Punta Licosa is said to be the rock from which the Siren threw herself because she did not get the attention of Odysseus.

The village of Sessa Cilento recently opened the Pinacoteca Comunale "Pietro Volpe" with 20th century, mainly Italian, artists, and Elea Arte Club has established a permanent exhibition, Il Permanente, of works by its members, including Giuseppe Lista, Vincenzo Spagnuolo and Gabriella Neudecker, at La Palazzina in Casalvelino Scalo. Elea Arte Club may be contacted about any artist in Cilento. Art by local artists may often be seen on the walls of bars and restaurants, and most artists welcome visit to their studios.

*Translated from the Greek by Richmond Lattimore

(Else Mogensen holds a doctorate in classical philology and lives in Cilento. Photos by Donald Clark (unless otherwise noted))