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By Root 1557 0

Committee – indeed a rather hard-line Stalinist – and an expert in the history of religions. He therefore noted with approval that the followers of a Tuscan rural Messiah killed in 1878 had quietly survived to have another try at the millennium by rising in 1948 after the attempted assassination of the Italian CP leader, Palmiro Togliatti. He also told me about the problems arising for the Party leadership from the insistence of several rural Party branches – 1949–50 was a great era of radicalization in the south – on electing as branch secretaries members of the Seventh Day Adventists or similar sects, who would not normally have been regarded as obvious material for the cadres of a Marxist party. Who were these people, who brought ways of thinking which would have been quite usual in the Middle Ages into mid-twentieth-century political movements? Who treated the era of Lenin and Stalin as though it were also the era of Martin Luther? What went on in their minds? How did they, as distinct from the political movements which drew strength from their support, see the world? Why was so little attention paid to them, except by Italian thinkers such as the extraordinary Antonio Gramsci? Italy, it seemed, was full of their traces. Fascinated and moved, I tried to discover them by travelling along Mediterranean back roads for the next few years. Luckily some anthropologists were developing an interest in similar problems they encountered in their enquiries into the anti-colonial movements in Africa. Max Gluckman of Manchester, a man of great originality and a formidable academic chieftain who took his department every week to support Manchester United in the proper anthropological manner, arranged for me to give three lecture-seminars, in the course of which (also followed by his tribe) he gave me my first sight of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and decided I should expand my lectures into a book.

I recall my first visit to Sicily in 1953, where I was taken under the wing of Michele Sala, mayor and deputy of Piana degli Albanesi, a red stronghold since 1893 when the noble Dr Nicola Barbato had preached the gospel of socialism to the inhabitants of what was then Piana dei Greci from the rock in the remote mountain pass of Portella della Ginestra, still known as the Barbato Stone. (In his youth Michele Sala, born in the neighbourhood, had himself heard the good word from the apostle’s lips.)8 Rain or shine, war, peace or fascism, some Pianesi had never since then failed on the first of May to send a demonstration to this place. The occasion in 1947 when the bandit Giuliano massacred this May Day meeting has been wonderfully reconstructed in Francesco Rosi’s superb film Salvatore Giuliano. Shortly after this the Party had sent Sala to take charge of this complicated part of Sicily. He had the Sicilian sense of realism. In his youth he had signed up, among others, Giuseppe Berti, a leading communist in the Comintern era, and then a student in Palermo, because having carefully situated the socialist office strategically in an apartment facing the exit to a brothel, he could rely on meeting potential recruits ready for red propaganda in a relaxed mood. He had combined this with the hardnosed political experience of Brooklyn, where he spent twenty years of political emigration and learned enough English to show me the masses of masonry with which he was filling the outskirts of town (‘lotta guys need jobs’), as we criss-crossed it in his mayoral car, greeting citizens to the right and left (‘In this town I know who I gotta say hello to!’).

I was shown the cemetery, or rather the necropolis of the Matrangas, Schiròs, Barbatos, Loyacanos and the rest of the Albanian Christian families who had emigrated to southern Italy and Sicily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every modern gravestone, large or small, had the photograph of the departed. Death, respected and unforgotten, was always present in Piana. I saw what was still taken for granted, the silent black-clad women sitting in the street, but always facing indoors. We