The view of Southern Italy and Sicily held by educated Italians and Europeans is heavily shaped by literary images, ancient and modern. It is hard, perhaps pointless, to escape the suggestions of Carlo Levi's memoirs, of Verga's novels, of Lampedusa's Gattopardo, not to mention rural sociologists, who depict a world of millennial traditions, of immobile, proud backwardness, of resigned and internalized hostility to, and alienation from, public authority. Still today, many parts of the rural South appear to have changed but little in centuries, whatever the signs of modernity one sees everywhere. Leaving behind the highway in the Vallo di Diano, one reaches the village of Brienza much more easily than did its masters and visitors of old; but the village itself those masters would still recognize. The ruined medieval castle hovers over the remains of the old village, uninhabited after the earthquake of 1980, and climbing on its walls, one visually dominates vast fields, hills, and pastures. The way to the neighboring villages is harder, as it climbs over hills and mountains.