Pianette to the left; Cavellerizzo to the right. The view from Mongrassano.

This morning, I was reminded by Erik of the verb franare - to slide - and how it sounds so much like the verb frenare - to break, or stop. Opposite meanings, almost, so close to each other - just off by one vowel. 

In 2016, I wrote a story on Medium about the 2005 frana, or landslide, of Cavellerizzo, in Calabria. Cavallerizzo is a frazione, or section, of the village of Cerzeto, one mile from Mongrassano, my mother’s town. The frana left much of the town uninhabitable. Instead of rebuilding the old town, one which preserved the local minority Arbëreshë, or ethnic Albanian, culture, the regional government built a new town nearby, at the cost of more than 70 million euros. 

Nearly no one from Cavallerizzo wanted to move into that slapdash new town, called Pianette. Most residents wanted to remain in Cavallerizzo, where only 11 percent of homes were declared uninhabitable. Pianette was declared by the local government to be abusivo - illegal - because no environmental impact study was done before construction. Still, nothing was done to either rebuilt ancient Cavellerizzo, or improve the new town, or compensate any of the 300 displaced residents for what they had lost.

Fifteen years after the frana, little has changed for Cavallerizzo. In 2017, according to this article (one of few I have found that shed light on this issue - and includes some amazing pictures) the building project of Pianette was declared legal by the region of Calabria despite the lack of the environmental study.  No parks or green space have been built to mitigate the geological risk of building on such unsteady ground. Now, both Pianette and Cavallerizzo are nearly paesi fantasme - ghost towns. Hopefully, in the coming years, people who them will find their way to these homes, and the abuses that these lands have long suffered can be put right, so the region can rise again.