I basilischi,[2] English language titles The BasilisksorThe Lizards, is a 1963 Italian comedy-drama film written and directed by Lina Wertmüller. It was Wertmüller's directorial debut.
Francesco, Sergio, and Antonio are three privileged young individuals residing in a typical provincial town, Minervino Murge, located between Puglia and Basilicata. The film portrays their lives, now saturated with apathy and provincialism, hindering any genuine desire to pursue more stimulating horizons.
When Antonio's aunt, an indifferent university student, offers him the opportunity to live with her in Rome and transfer his enrollment from the University of Bari to the capital, he eventually declines. Incapable of abandoning the ingrained prejudices, stereotypes, and rituals of his native province, he returns to the village, his decision irreversible.
The conclusion features a quote from the Southern Italian scholar Giustino Fortunato: "We are what race, climate, location, and history have determined us to be."[3]
^"The word "basilisco," derived from Greek, means little king, but it also refers to a genus of reptiles in tropical America. In the Middle Ages, the name basilisco was given to an imaginary creature, with a snake-like body and a head adorned with three small pointed protrusions. According to the beliefs of the time, the basilisk could cause death with its gaze and would die upon seeing itself in a mirror: this seems to be the zoological version of the mythological story of Narcissus. I believe that in the title of the film, a certain ambiguity or, if preferred, ambivalence persists. However, since the director was inspired by Federico Fellini's I vitelloni, a film from 1953, it could be inferred that "I basilischi," rather than evoking Byzantine reality and royalty, just like Fellini's masterpiece, alludes to and refers to a kind of ideal-typical - absit iniuria verbis - zoo-anthropological scenario, which Fellini first and Wertmüller later enjoy ridiculing. The geographical, economic, and social contexts are different, but the protagonists, mutatis mutandis, seem to be the same: the basilischi are indeed the local "vitelloni," from Basilicata." - Viscardi Giuseppe Maria, in his work titled LaBasilicata tra il Cristo di Levi e il familismo amoralediBanfield, Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa: 80, 2, 2011, p. 300 (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2011).
^Pietro Borraro, La questione meridionale da Giustino Fortunato ad oggi, Congedo, 1977, p. 139
