Highline above South Italy

“Crazy freaks”.
Referred to highliners is pretty funny, isn’t it?
And yet that is how most of the people of the small village of Castelmezzano would have called Benni and Mattia, some with admiration and some with ostentatious indignation. Thomas and I, on the other hand, watched, listened, and obviously took pictures.
“Castelmezzano is among the best places in the world that you have never heard of”. This is how yankee magazines defined it until a decade ago. A sort of Italian Machu Picchu: a hidden and lost place and, at a certain point, rediscovered. The origins of Castelmezzano date to approximately between the 6th and 5th centuries BC, when Greek settlers got into the valley of Basento. It is said in the tale of a pastor called Paolino that in the 10th century AD, the Saracen invasions forced the local population to take refuge between rocks from the steep peaks which could repel the invaders by means of rolling stone boulders on to the invaders.
After occupation by the Lombards, the Normans settled there between the 11th and 13th century AD and built a castle from which the town derived its name, the remains of the walls and tier of rocks allowed access to the higher lookout point are still visible.
With the arrival of the Crown of Aragon, between the 14th and 16th century, many landowners received Castelmezzano as feudo, although the economic and social conditions remained mostly unchanged. In the 19th century, Castelmezzano was affected by brigandage. Due to its location, rich in natural hiding places among the rocks and lush vegetation, it was an ideal refuge for many bandits. Today Castelmezzano enjoys a real second youth, also thanks to a wise administration and a far-sighted vision of the local authorities.

However, I don’t really know how I ended up in Basilicata.
Everything was born from Mattia’s inspiration after watching a movie called “An almost perfect country” directed by Massimo Gaudioso, set exactly in Castelmezzano. Last year Mattia, Benni, Thomas and I went to Scotland for the first highline in the world on The Old Man of Storr.
Already on that occasion, Mattia had told us about this place and this idea. “I know another very cool place where we could do it again, in southern Italy,” he told us enthusiastically. “We will need to contact the Municipality. We can shoot amazing photos. It’s worth trying”. With those words Mattia had tempted both me and Thomas at the same time, but it was simply too early. Not even 365 days later we were late for the flight that have would take us to Bari, Puglia. The team was once again complete. Four boys from the Trentino Alto-Adige into the deepest south may seem like just the beginning of a joke.
I would like to recall this journey for what it was: the most improvised project I have ever taken part in. Yes, because Mattia had taken care of everything together with the tourist office and the mayor of the town. Until a few days ago we didn’t know where we would take off and where we would land, we only knew what the destination was. We had a wild desire to discover a new place and leave a little piece of us, we hoped we would be able to have a nice and slow time, to “follow the flow” in a typical Mediterranean style. We liked the idea of going far away, even if briefly, far from the frenetic and unhealthy rhythm of our lives in the north. We wanted to fill our eyes with something beautiful, shoot it, and keep it as a nice memory. And fortunately that happened.

We will remember Nicola, the mayor, who invited us to share our passions with his fellow citizens in his land.
We will remember Lucio who accompanied us from Bari to Castelmezzano telling us the story of his country, his home and his family.
We will remember the rain and the fog, something uncommon in that corner of the world, which made us suffer a little.
We will remember Benni who, in the midst of that rain and fog, quietly walked on the highline, even naked.
We will remember the citizens of the country who welcomed us as if we had lived there forever.
We will remember Gigi Za, writer and inhabitant of Castelmezzano, and Lorenzo, who opened the doors of his bar for us.
We will remember the rock and the secret it held.
But above all we will remember ourselves. We will remember that, like it was a joke, we laughed a lot. Because maybe, we’ve always been a little bit “crazy freaks”.