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want-to-be-better-but-can’t-seem-to-make-it-happen seaside community just on the wrong side of the Basilicatan border hadturned out to be a perfect place to pause for a day or so before continuing on into the increasingly dramatic mountainscapes of the South.

    M ARATEA P ORTO (NEAR S APRI )
    Viva is one of those buoyant young women whose lives have suffered unseemly numbers of slings and arrows and yet who still seem to emerge more sprightly, and certainly wiser, than ever. She’d asked if I’d like coffee, and I nodded blearily. Then we began talking, and the only time during our long roller-coaster chat—and a most unmemorable “continental” breakfast at the hotel (“You’d like an omelet?” she said. “Well, so would I, so would everybody. But, in this place, no omelets. No cook!”)—that I ever saw her vivacity wane was when she mentioned her husband…her ex- husband.
    â€œI made mistake,” she said. But it wasn’t too clear if she was talking about her divorce or her decision to move to Sapri. “There’s nothing to do here. Nothing! I don’t know why I came. Escape maybe. To get far enough away, and hide. It’s happening so much in Italy now. After seven years of marriage: divorce, with one child. Did you know we have lowest birthrate in Europe? In Italy! The land of romance, love, and passion! Isn’t that crazy? But it’s the way things are. And the family gives everything for that one child. Especially if the child is a boy, and even if he’s thirty he’s still a child and often lives at home with Mamma. Or if not, the family follows him around to look after him. But it’s always work. Work, work, work. Men, women: everybody work all the time to buy things and make it good for family, and for that one child! Stupid! Here I work in this hotel from h eight (Viva had an endearing habit of adding h ’s in the oddest places) to ten in the morning, and I get a thousand h euros a month, but my rent is five hundred, my babysitter is three hundred, my car and food and things, five hundred, so I don’t know what to do. Where are all the rich men, I ask! Maybe I could meet a nice doctor, but they are all married. They make lots of money and, just like all those lazy statali government workers, retire early and go and live in other fancy places. Never Sapri, of course. Never Sapri!”
    â€œViva,” I said, stopping her strident flow and trying once again to keep her on track. “You were telling me about the divorce.”
    She paused in mid-breath. Her vibrant, vivacious face puckered for an instant. “Mistake. Aghh! ” She shook her head. It was a sign to move on to other subjects.
    â€œAnyway, you were also telling me earlier about the problems in the Mezzogiorno.”
    â€œAh, Mezzogiorno!” Life returns. Viva revived, in that press-button passionate way Italians have of dealing with their rousting, everything-out-in-the-open emotions. “Those politicians. Talk, talk, talk. Promise, promise, promise. You give me your vote and I’ll bring you lots of jobs and factories and better roads and new houses. And what happens? Nothing! Nothing, nothing, nothing! Have you seen the A3 road from Salerno to Reggio? The main highway from the North to the South. How many years have they been ‘improving’ that stupid road? And look at it! It’s rubbish! The most dangerous main road in the country! And all those villages on the tops of the mountains. All full of old people. All the young ones have gone to the cities. Just the very old ones left. And even if the young ones stay because the politicians say, ‘We will bring you jobs, molto lavoro, ’ what do you get? Stupid jobs for a few weeks, building a road or a public toilet that nobody needs or uses, or a wall around the town hall, and then, no job! So, no pension. No—how you say?—security. And then they say,