Ann Cornelisen of Southern Italy

Having wandered around Southern Italy a good deal--specifically Basilicata and Calabria--and thereby having had the always unsettling experience, no matter how many times experienced, of wandering into a village by foot and seeing no one around yet knowing everyone in the village is looking at you, I am thrilled to read a writer who was unknown to me, Ann Cornelisen.

Ms. Cornelisen, an American, wrote four books. Her masterpiece is Women in the Shadows, subtitled Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy, published in 1976. Her other masterpiece, written before her first, is Torregreca, subtitled Life, Death, and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village.

Women in the Shadows has been compared to Agee's Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, though Corneilsen is a much less florid and much more straighforward writer than Agee. I suppose it's the photographic content: Agee had Walker Evans while wandering through the southern US in the 1930's; in the early 1950's, living and working in several villages in southern Italy, Corneilson has only herself and a small Leica. Torregreca focuses on a specific village where Cornelisen resides while running, of all things, a nursery school: the inwardness of the place, populated by people who have lived under almost everything (slavery, war, religion, crushing poverty) is rendered with compassion, love, and hard-eyed judgements without being judgemental.

Corneilsen must have been a remarkable person if for nothing more than the trust she gained from the locals. By rendering in words and pictures the insularity of the place, (post-WW2), the essential inbred lunacy of peasants, nuns and priests, dirt-poor natives and aristocracy, arrievste Communists and established self-important male politicos all living together somehow, she's left behind at least two valuable documents, which are two more than most any writer can ever hope for. I don't know that I've ever read a writer who draws so directly from both the universal and the particular, nor have I read a woman writer who honored women more or more clearly understood their men, that is if men can be understood. Cornelisen writes as if writing is a survival technique, with the kind of urgency that insists on trying to make sense of her experience and still be centered enough to both interpret and report. 

Both of her masterpieces may be plugged into our present social & political time. For example: of her attempt in one village to help build a community oven--the villagers are always short on bread, a staple--she secures the funding and creates the initiative, only to see the whole plan unravel in a series of misunderstandings, centuries' old feuds, purposeful dissembling among the the potential beneficiaries, political maneuvering among petty bureaucrats etcetc. Cornelisen writes in Torregreca:

"Discussion and decision and rediscussion are part of that much-vaunted concept--the democratic process. It can be a squirrel cage or a slow unraveling of confusion that eventually leads to the entrance of the maze."

Detail, Roman wall painting, Pompei, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, photograph by the author, 2016. With gratitude to W.S. DiPiero of San Francisco who referred this author to the work of Ann Cornelisen.