THE DOORS of the train opened at Naples. Shrill announcements twittered over the station PA system, babies cried, people argued, and beyond the tracks cars honked amid the din of Vespas and motorcycles. The passengers getting off the train squeezed their way past those trying to get on. Train workers, passengers, and merchants communicated with one another as if yelling across bleachers at a football game. The smell of fried zeppole and calzone filled the station. Vendors selling ice cream, water, and wine appeared and roamed the aisles, knocking on the doors of first-class air-conditioned compartments. When no one looked up, they opened the Plexiglas doors themselves. They were followed by Gypsy women begging for change, musicians playing guitars and accordions, and packs of children—many with piercing green eyes.My father and I, who had boarded in Rome, watched as the mob of people squeezed their way down the aisles, looking for seats. We were finally on our way to Gimigliano, in Calabria, the homeland of my grandparents.
I had been staying with my father in Perugia, where he was
sculpting stone, during the month of July. I had heard so many stories about Calabria, where his parents had been poor farmers. I suggested that we visit their village, but he shrugged off the idea. “That was decades ago,” he said. “Why go back to the past?”
“Why not?” I asked. “Anyway, what’s so bad about the past?”
“Nothing,” he said dismissively. Going back, I knew, would remind him of his mother, who had died the year before, and his father, who had died eight years earlier. My father pushed a hand through his full head of hair, a soft mixture of jet black and silver. “I don’t even know if we have family there anymore. They’ve probably all died—or moved to Torino or Milan.”
“Well, why not find out? What’s it gonna hurt?” I had already decided to go even if he didn’t, but I knew the trip would be better—would feel more appropriate—if we went together. “I know you’re at least a little curious. Anyway, look at it as the one time you’ll be able to take this trip with your son.”
My father laughed. “Jesus, you’re such a romantic.” He, too, is a romantic, but he wouldn’t give in just then. He wouldn’t admit that he might enjoy it. He fits the Calabrese stereotype of being stubborn, or having a testa dura—a hard head. My parents had taken my sister and me to Italy several times before, but this would be the first trip we had made south of Rome.
He looked at his watch. I knew what he was thinking. Our stomachs were on the same schedule.
“C’mon, let’s get some dinner,” he said. And with that, we walked to the trattoria up the street from the apartment we were renting.
At fifty-five, my father was fit and strong. Although he’s a head shorter than I am, everything about him is grand: his nose, his eyes, his smile. And he eats with purpose and intensity.
By the time we finished dinner and a liter of wine, he had agreed to take a two–day trip south, returning to Perugia on Sunday. Two days seemed like no time. But it didn’t really matter how long we stayed: I would finally see Calabria, and I would see it with my father.
The compartments filled. New passengers greeted the old ones and, like next-door neighbors, fell into conversations about the weather—hot even for July—and the recent strike of railroad concession workers. I unbuttoned my shirt and leaned out the window, trying to find a breeze. A man in a light brown suit claimed a seat across from us and joined me at the open window. He turned and greeted me with an exhausted smile, his thick mustache glistening with sweat. The train coasted out of the station. The thunk of windows sliding open sounded throughout the car. Passengers flocked to the windows, letting their shirts fill with air.
As the train, an express, left old Naples, the yellow and pink seventeenth–century buildings of the historic center gave way to shoddy, colorless Mussolini–era tenements, which then yielded to the cinder–block Soviet–style structures of the 1970s, whose facades crumbled beneath their sagging balconies, then to suburbs, the Bay of Naples opening up on the west. Blue-and-white fishing skiffs lined the shore, their nets spread out to dry. To the east, Vesuvius’s gaping crater broke through the smog.
This was Campania, and as the train continued south, I saw how the sirocco winds from Africa had dried the soil and left the bushes and trees scrubby and desiccated. Olive trees, fig trees, and grapevines—the only vegetation that can thrive there—lined the hills. The train passed villages and peasant farms, each smaller than the last. All the buildings were simple structures, painted pale yellow, olive green, or burnt red. All the shutters were closed, shading interiors that were most likely, in true Italian form, immaculately clean and organized.
This was the gateway to the south, the passage to Calabria.
Already I saw the difference. Campania’s hills are not the rolling hills of Tuscany Absent are wide-eyed pink travelers with their sulking kids. Absent are streets congested with souvenir shops. Absent are packed tour buses. Absent are crowded museums with their endless lines. Absent are English ex-pats and their summer villas. Absent are bilingual waiters and shop ladies. Absent are tourist menus in fourteen languages.
Within the train compartments and along the hallways, conversations
grew comfortably loud; gestures became grander, more ebullient. An older woman (from Cosenza, Calabria, I found out) offered up nuts and fruits. A dapper Neapolitan pensioner talked local politics in a harsh dialect. The mustachioed man in the brown suit stood up to demonstrate the size of the fig trees in his backyard, his hands forming around each imaginary branch. The woman smiled and held up a white fig that she had picked from her sister’s garden.
“My God,” my father said as if to himself, “I’ve been all along here. I remember this.” He eased back in his seat and stared out the window, mouth open. The right corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.
I went to the carrozza ristorante, the dining car, to get us some bottled water. Outside the open windows, the train hugged the ocean, the slate-blue water crashing against the rocks and boulders. Occasionally the jagged coast receded to an alcove of sandy shores. The sunbathers on these secluded beaches, reachable only by boat, didn’t even register the train speeding above, but only stared out to sea, past their anchored motorboats rocking gently on the waves.
“The water is so blue, so light that it appears gray,” someone said to me in Sicilian.
I turned to a deeply tanned man who shot me a smile almost as wide as his panama hat. The Sicilian version of a well-off, relaxed Florida retiree, he had unbuttoned his brightly patterned yellow-and-red batik shirt, exposing a bare chest the color of a ripe tomato; two thick gold chains, one with a pendant of a saint, broke the wall of red.
“So does the sky,” I responded in Italian.
“The sky is gray,” he said, turning to me with an indignant glare. “It’s the factories.” He waved with one hand; on each finger was a large gold ring, embedded with colored stones that sparkled in the light. His hand floated through the air, then sailed downward like an unfolded tissue.
“The factories?” I knew that there was little industry for hundreds of miles south of Naples; Calabria’s economy was especially depressed.
“Yes,” he said, squinting as if about to impart a secret. “Up in the
north. Those Milanese destroy everything, they’re almost like the Germans.
“Did you come from Naples?” he went on.
I told him I planned to stop there on the way back. He rested his large, gentle hand on my shoulder. “È una bella città,” he said—it’s a beautiful city—and told me that whenever he passes through Naples, if only for a few hours, he ducks into a restaurant called Mimi alle Ferrovie, a block away from the train station. He had just been there, in fact: grilled calamari, mussels in a marinara sauce, and white wine—wine so distinct, he insisted, that you can taste the ashy soil of Vesuvius, where the grapes are grown.
“Ma, io sono Palermitano,” he said, making sure that I understood that as a Sicilian from Palermo, he knew what he was talking about. “The marinara could have been a bit spicier, but the mozzarella di bufala … nowhere else can you find it so fresh!”
He explained what he did in his spare time, which was mostly what he was doing now, traveling and talking with strangers.
As the pensioner spoke, his sh’s and ch’s clicked between his tongue and teeth in the distinct, forceful Sicilian dialect, barely understandable to any Italian off the great island, much less anyone living north of Naples—let alone me, who had learned Italian growing up in Connecticut and Florida and going to college in New York. Confident that people would work to understand him, he made no effort to slow or regulate his speech.
He glanced at his chunky gold watch and, as if he’d almost missed an appointment, announced, “Allora, it’s time for a caffè.” We walked back to the bar—he for his coffee, I for bottled water.
Four hours out of Naples, our train crept through a desolate station—no one waiting alongside the tracks, not a single station door open or a window cracked. A blue sign at the edge of the platform read TORTORA. We had entered Calabria. For the next two hours I gazed out the window, the sea to my right, and to my left, far on the horizon, the deep green foothills of Calabria’s Sila massif, locally known as the Black Forest.
The heat was suffocating, and I started feeling sleepy. As I was about to doze off, I caught sight of something I had seen in many old pictures of Calabria: ambling down a dirt path was a man riding a mule. Somehow, it fit right in with the landscape. I thought of the writer Carlo Levi, who in the 1930s described the south as a region that had evolved very slowly
Carlo Levi was a doctor and writer from Piedmont, in the northwest of Italy. A vocal anti-Fascist, he was arrested in 1935 and sent as a prisoner to the province of Lucania. This poor, almost completely landlocked region, now called Basilicata, borders Calabria to the north; the train had passed through it during my conversation with the Sicilian pensioner.
For two years Levi was forbidden to leave the village of Gagliano. Italy had just invaded Ethiopia in the Abyssinian War; Mussolini’s army had drafted many of the south’s doctors (and its able-bodied men generally) and sent them to Africa. Levi offered his medical services in Gagliano, and did so openly, until the mayor, Don Luigi, feeling the political prisoner was becoming too popular, forbade people to visit him.
Thereafter Levi performed his work at night and in secret. During the day he painted pictures of the landscape and wrote about the villagers and southern life. His memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, was the first modern book to describe the people of the south, who, it seemed to him, still lived in the Middle Ages, practicing a blend of Christianity and pre-Christian paganism and fearing dragons, gnomes, and spirits that lurked in the forests.
According to Levi, the peasants with ancient Italic features, the natives of Basilicata, thought they were worthless people from a godforsaken place. They were not Christians, not even humans, but beasts. “Christ never came this far,” Levi wrote, “nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history.”
Levi famously characterized Basilicata and Calabria as “that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow … where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.” To this day, many northerners see
these regions this way: bereft of culture and economy, a burden to the rest of Italy.
In any case, the harshness of life in the south led many Calabresi to emigrate, especially to the United States. In 1936, the year Carlo Levi’s sentence ended and he was allowed to leave Gagliano for Piedmont, my grandmother, at the age of nineteen, left Calabria for America.
Now the train approached the toe of the “boot” that is Italy Out the window, I could see one, two, three more sets of tracks in each direction. Some tracks simply ended in mounds of dirt. We passed a freight train of two engines and seven boxcars, their open doors revealing their emptiness. There were several World War II—vintage locomotives and boxcars rusted to the rails.
This was Lamezia. Here train passengers can continue south to Reggio, where the entire train is pulled onto a ferry that continues the journey to Sicily, or they can take a train that cuts eastward across the peninsula, the narrowest point in all of Italy, to Calabria’s capital, Catanzaro, and the Ionian Sea. And it was here where the train and the Sicilian pensioner continued to Palermo, while my father and I disembarked and boarded a small diesel train to Catanzaro. We stuffed our knapsacks on the narrow wooden racks above the window and passed a bottle of water between us.
Because it’s located on one of the few plains in all of Calabria, Lamezia supports the region’s largest airport. A half mile from the train station, small houses and condos lined the crowded coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“I can’t believe you’ve dragged me all the way down here,” my dad said.
“You had a choice,” I said. “I was happy to come by myself.”
He rolled his eyes, but I knew he, too, was happy he had come.
The train veered across hilly, mostly barren land, past factories, tracts of plain new houses, foundations in cleared land. In time the hills grew to mountains. The train slowed to a walking pace. To one side, a field of orange trees bore rotting fruit that had not been
picked; to the other, a Gypsy camp pushed up against the track bed: shacks made of wood and corrugated metal, with smoke from working fires rising from within.
A thud on the window bounced my head up; the juice from an orange trickled down the dust-covered glass. I looked out expecting to find kids running and ducking behind a tree, but I saw nothing except the sunlit grove of orange trees.
Finally, the train passed through a long mountain tunnel and emerged at Catanzaro. The station was at the bottom of a cliff. The walled city of Catanzaro crowned its top like a daunting fortress. We stepped off into the open-air station. It was four in the afternoon, almost the end of the siesta; outside a shuttered trattoria hung a sign that read CHIUSO, closed. An adjoining bar’s door had been wedged open, and the entrance to the lightless room was covered only by a curtain of multicolored beads.
We still had one more train to take. We walked over to the local station to check the schedule of the Calabro–Lucano train to Gimigliano.
In Calabria and Basilicata there are two rail systems: one is the Ferrovie dello Stato, or the state railroad, which cuts through the low-lying valleys and skirts the coast; the other is the Calabro–Lucano Railroad, which traverses the mountain ridges, connecting the cliffside villages.
The train official at the ticket window motioned that he would come out from behind the window and talk to us. A short man who reached me just at chest level (and I’m an average five feet ten), he spoke in a voice both booming and raspy. He seemed to be missing every other tooth.
He explained that there were two more trains to Gimigliano, but that we would probably miss the last train back to Catanzaro and that we should stay in Catanzaro and visit the next day. We would have only a single afternoon to explore Gimigliano. In a display of what I would come to recognize as Calabrese hospitality, he walked us back to the state train station, where three cabdrivers stood talking by their cars under the shade of a portico. We took one of the cabs up to the city.
Catanzaro and its maze of streets are set on a plateau between two mountain gorges. The city can be reached from only two directions: one a narrow, spiraling ridge, the other a four-lane suspended highway, built in the 1960s. The cab cut alongside the mountain, climbed up a bit, then took the highway, which protruded from the cliff. I felt as if we were taking off in flight; the land dropped below us, the sea loomed ahead. At one point we stopped at an intersection—seemingly in midair over one of the gorges—to let other cars cross. With a final loop, we descended to a narrow cliffside road, where the buildings were packed tightly together in a discordant architectural mix of the nineteenth century and the 1970s.
We took a room at the Albergo Grand Hotel, a three-star establishment and one of Catanzaro’s four hotels. It had been built in the seventies, and to judge by the dark brown furniture, it hadn’t changed a bit since then. In my room, I opened the heavy dark green curtains to a breathtaking view of the gorge below me. Toward the right, the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Squillace spread out to the horizon.
Early the next morning, my father and I walked to a railroad station closer to the hotel. I would soon walk the streets of my grandparents’ village. Now even my father anxiously awaited the sight of Gimigliano. The cogwheel train pulled us up the mountain, then crawled along the ridges of cliffs. Below, veins of nearly dried-up streams lined the valleys. Dust and smoke from the diesel engine funneled in through the open windows. We passed in and out of tunnels cut through the mountains, and each burst of sunlight as we exited a tunnel offered an endless view of mountaintops along the horizon. After twenty minutes, the train veered closely around a mountainside, its sheer cliff dropping off to the left, and I spotted a tiny village on a peak even farther above. It was a cluster of yellow and cream-colored houses with red terra-cotta roofs. It looked like the tiny archetypal village in the distant background of a fresco.
“That’s it,” my father said. “That’s Gimigliano. Jesus, it’s exactly as I remember it.”
And I was sure that it hadn’t changed since his father left in 1913.
The train came to a gradual stop at a clean single-story stuccoed railroad station the color of mustard. I stepped onto the platform and craned my neck to see the village still high above us.
The train pulled away, blowing up a swirling cloud of dust. The sun beat down on us. We were left with a sound I had rarely heard and one that I would come to associate with Gimigliano—the constant, lonely scratching of cicadas. We had only three or four hours to explore the village.
To our left, jutting out on a cliff, was Gimigliano Inferiore; Gimigliano Superiore was above us, a steep walk. “As I remember, there wasn’t much in Inferiore,” my father said. “We should go to Superiore.”
A man wearing the official railway uniform of dark blue pants and a sky-blue short-sleeved shirt emerged from the station, and my father asked, “How do we get to up to Superiore?”
The man’s thin cotton shirt was unbuttoned to mid-chest, exposing a gold Virgin pendant on a chain.
“By car, five minutes up that road,” he said, pointing to a single-lane road that rose, then disappeared on the other side of the mountain.
“We don’t have a car.”
He pointed to the mountain. “Half hour up those steps.” He patted me on the back and went on.
The steps, hundreds of them, were irregularly set—a few short steps followed by several long ones. Weeds sprouted through cracks, and bushes grew over the sides. Olive and fig trees grew wild; any space in between them had been filled with short rows of grapevines.
“Mark, look at this,” my father said, pointing to a fico d’india, a prickly pear cactus. “To pick the fruit, they wear thick leather gloves; then they roll it in their hands to break off the spines.” He touched one of the spines with his finger. “It’s a lot of work, but the fruit is juicy and sweet.” We were drenched in sweat; I was thirsty enough to want to squeeze out the juice then and there.
After twenty minutes—almost to the top—we were greeted by an old man in a wool sport coat with a large smile.
He was deaf and mute, it turned out, but this didn’t stop him from conversing with my father. Their exchange took place entirely in hand gestures. A point to a tree; a cupping of the hand; a twist in the cheek with a single finger; a clasp of the hands, followed by a sigh. The man was at least seventy and seemed to be unaffected by the heat. After a few minutes my father turned to me and said matter-of-factly that the old man had recommended a café on the main street that served frozen orzata, a drink made of shaved ice, sugar, and crushed almonds.
“How the hell did you understand that?”
“Mark, weren’t you watching? Pay attention to the hands. It’s all in the hands.”
On our way, we stopped at the first shop we saw. The proprietor was my father’s height and was hefty in the middle. In his late forties, he had wavy white hair and a thick black mustache. His shirt was drenched from sweating out the powerful July heat. Recognizing my father’s dialect as that of the village, he introduced himself, Giuseppe Chiarella.
“Rotella,” my father said. “Giuseppe Rotella.”
Giuseppe frowned quizzically, then asked for his mother’s maiden name, since “the women always keep in touch with family.”
“Critelli,” my father answered, then explained sheepishly that he had not been in touch with our relatives, didn’t even know if they still lived here.
Giuseppe stepped away from the cash register. “Today we will find them.”
In his car, a new Fiat with air conditioning, Giuseppe told us that he was a photographer. As the car squeezed through tiny alleys of two-story eighteenth-century houses, he explained that he traveled all over Calabria, taking pictures of the region. He transferred the film to slides, sent them out to be made into postcards and posters with
southern Italian greetings—“and then I go back on the road again.” This time he would tour the province and sell his postcards and posters to all the novelty stores, train stations, cafés, and resorts.
Giuseppe stepped out of the car and called up to a balcony. An older woman leaned over and nodded shyly. “My aunt,” he said, and told her my grandmother’s name.
“You know their family,” she said right away. “They live just down Via delle Grazie.”
He turned to us and announced: “Your relative is Angela Critelli! I dated her when I was a teenager!”
We knocked on the heavy oak door of 27 Via delle Grazie. A woman stepped out, and I saw my grandmother’s round face and warm eyes.
“Angela,” Giuseppe said, “your cousin Giuseppe Rotella has returned from America.” With a grand wave of his arm, Giuseppe presented us to one another and stepped back.
For a moment Angela looked as if she had been expecting us all along. Then she placed her hands on her waist and playfully scolded my father: “Thirty years and you don’t write!” We kissed and embraced. Angela cried. Tears welled in my father’s eyes, but he wiped them away as soon as they touched his cheek.
Angela showed us inside her house. Sitting under the low ceiling in the vestibule was an old woman dressed all in black, her gray hair pulled tightly in a bun. This was Zia Maria, Angela said, the widow of one of my grandmother’s brothers. Zia Maria, my father’s aunt, offered her hand and said between tight lips, “Last night I had a dream that a gift was coming from America.”
As we walked upstairs and through the kitchen, my father and I both breathed in the sweet and pungent smell of tomato sauce. My father glanced at a pot on the stove. “I bet that’s a rabbit ragù,” he whispered to me. “That was my favorite meal.”
My father apologized to Angela that we had to catch the train back to Perugia in a couple of hours; it was now just before noon. Wasting no time, Angela rushed to the bedroom window and called out to the next apartment, then darted to the living room window
and alerted what seemed to us to be passersby that i parenti sono arrivati d’America, relatives had come from America. Within minutes ten Calabresi were sitting at a huge table. They were our extended family—Angela’s daughters, Luisa and Sabrina, with their husbands, Tommaso and Masino, and their two children.
Angela’s husband, Domenico Cantafio, brought out two jugs of chilled red wine. He was well tanned, a deep red really, and his jet-black hair framed a friendly face.
“I made this,” he proudly exclaimed, filling our glasses. We toasted. His hands were large and thick and enveloped his glass. The wine had a fizzy bite on the tongue but went down smoothly
Angela set out cheese—from their goats, she said—and hot peppers and fried zucchini flowers grown in their garden. At the same time, she brought out bottles of Coca-Cola and a box of crackers, perhaps unsure of what would appeal to our American appetites.
“Are you crazy?” my father said. “What do you think Mama cooked for us?”
Everyone laughed, and Angela reappeared with the rabbit ragù, which she then served with perfectly cooked ziti. While we were eating, she brought out photos of aunts, uncles, cousins, many still living in the village. The whole family huddled around us. Tommaso and Masino looked on in disbelief.
For dessert, Angela brought out a bowl of purple fruit. At first I thought they were oblong plums. But when my father reeled back in awe, I knew they were something special. “I haven’t had these in such a long time,” my father said. “My father had a tree in our backyard:”
He reached in, pulled out a plump purple fruit, and handed it to me. “Fresh figs!” he exclaimed. “You can’t buy them this ripe in the States.”
It seems impossible to me now, but I’d never before eaten a fresh fig. I bit through the loose skin and sank my teeth into the juicy flesh. Angela, Domenico, and Giuseppe looked on in amazement at the rate my father was devouring the figs, as if they were manna from heaven. Why had he never introduced me to them?
In our rapture, we hadn’t noticed another woman arrive. She was in her seventies, but her short hair was still a nice blend of black and gray.
“Zia Caterina!” Sabrina and Luisa called out in unison. They guided her over to my father and me. She gave both of us a full, strong kiss on each cheek.
“You were always up to no good here,” she told my father, and pinched his cheeks. Then she grabbed my hand in both of hers. “After your grandmother died, I thought I’d never again hear from America.”
“She’s your grandmother’s niece,” Angela explained. “But she knew her better than anyone else.”
“She was a sister to me.” Caterina sighed, and she, Angela, and my father fell into animated conversation in a dialect I had trouble following.
Because I had taken Italian classes in college, I had been correcting my father’s Italian throughout our trip. But here, in Gimigliano, it became clear to me that he hadn’t been speaking incorrectly; he had been speaking the dialect of the village.
But even here his dialect stood out slightly. The children listened, fascinated. Just as television has smoothed the regional accents across the United States, so it is gradually eliminating the dialects throughout Italy. While the Calabrese language has evolved, my father was speaking the way his mother had spoken when she left in 1936. His speech, learned in Connecticut, was a relic of the Gimigliano of the early twentieth century.
Angela turned to me and took my hand. “Allora, so how is your sister?” she asked.
“How did you know I had a sister?” I said. Surely my father hadn’t mentioned her already
Angela reached into the bookcase behind her and pulled out an intricately hand-embroidered photo album. Inside, the pages were filled with pictures my grandmother had sent: my sister and me sitting on our grandfather’s lap under his grape arbor in Danbury; the two of us sitting at her kitchen table. The Critellis had watched me grow from birth through college, while I had had no idea they existed.
Giuseppe tapped my father on the shoulder. “We should go. You still have another cousin to visit.”
Everyone fell silent, not knowing how to say farewell when we’d only just arrived.
“lo ritorno,” I said, promising to return with my wife, Martha.
“Ed io aspetto,” Angela said—and I will wait—and waved to us as we walked up the alley.
Saveria Critelli stepped out of her house unfastening her kitchen apron. Her dark hair was pulled back. With a shy smile offering a glimpse of silver teeth, she walked out with her arms open; her husband, Cecco Trapasso, tall and thin with a serious face, walked behind her. Saveria was Angela’s sister. Giuseppe had phoned her, and she had been expecting us.
“Please, you must join us for dinner,” Cecco said.
“We can’t,” my father said. “We are going back north.”
Giuseppe slapped his head and laughed to Saveria and Cecco. “Their train back to Catanzaro leaves in about half an hour.”
“Today?” Saveria said. “Today?”
My father and I nodded our heads, embarrassed, as if in the never-ending struggle between Italy’s north and south, we were on the wrong side.
“Why don’t you just go back tomorrow?”
“I’ve got to get back to Perugia,” my father said.
“For what?” Saveria said wryly.
“I have to go back to the studio,” my father said. I knew he was wishing his excuse were more dire.
“Aah.” Saveria rapped her knuckles on her head. “Typical Calabrese—testa dura!”
We talked for a few minutes about Grandma and about Dad’s first visit, many years before. As we made to leave, Saveria brought out two long, thick pieces of soppressata, spicy Calabrese sausage.
“No, you shouldn’t,” my father said, but his gesture—he brought them to his nose and breathed in—said otherwise. We would return to the north with some good southern soppressata.
As Giuseppe drove to the station, my father asked if he could stop to make a donation to the church to which my grandmother had been sending money since she left the village fifty years before.
“You must mean the Madonna di Porto,” Giuseppe said, conveniently producing a postcard of the sun-bleached white church from the glove box.
“Yes, that’s it!”
“The church is a little ways away, and you probably wouldn’t have time to make it before your train.” Giuseppe said. “But you can make the donation at the church in Superiore, where the annual festival begins.”
Five minutes later we were there. Three arches spanned the entrance to the yellow stone church. A half dozen men sat talking on the steps. As we walked by, they fell silent and stared. The doors, opened only during mass, were locked shut. Giuseppe directed us to the side door, introduced us to the priest, a dark-haired, soft-spoken man in a white collar, and explained our visit.
My father took out a combination of lire and U.S. dollars and gave it to the priest. “For my mother, Angelina Critelli.”
“I can say a mass for her tomorrow afternoon.”
“We’re leaving today”
“But this money … it’s for a mass, yes?”
Grandma had sent money in part because she believed in the power of the Virgin. My father was no longer a practicing Catholic and thought it hypocritical to act otherwise, but in his mother’s village, his stance softened.
“Yes,” he said. “It would make her happy to know that money was given in her name.”
Giuseppe’s store was across the street. There he brought out a handful of his postcards, flashing them before our eyes like a dealer at a casino. Each one offered a glimpse of Calabria—tiny cliff villages, ancient Greek temples, the beaches of Tropea, the clear blue waters of Taranto, and the deep, snow-covered forests of the Sila mountain range.
I pulled out from his stack a postcard with the name SCILLA blazoned across the top. A church crowned what looked to be a huge island boulder, white waves crashing against it. I could almost see the pass between Scilla and Charybdis, the coast where Odysseus faced the six-headed monster.
Another postcard showed the ancient trading city of Crotone, where Pythagoras, once exiled from Greece, formed his school of followers. I imagined leaning against the Greek ruins. The Calabria I’d read about was a harsh, dry terrain where cities had been devastated by earthquakes and where people, like my great-grandmother, had died by the thousands from malaria. Now, in Giuseppe’s postcards, I saw that the region from which my grandparents had emigrated held its own treasures. The portals of rustic houses hadn’t yet been fitted with modern windows; clotheslines still joined buildings across alleys. This is what Florence must have looked like when E. M. Forster set A Room with a View there. Calabria is old Italy; Calabria conforms to our idea of what Italy is.
Giuseppe had brought my father and me together with our Italian family. Now he offered a glimpse of a world where families stayed together and lived in the same town, perhaps on the same street. Giuseppe showed me a life I wanted access to, a life I wanted, in some sense, to live. I knew I had to travel deeper into Calabria.
Giuseppe must have registered my excitement, for he spoke the words I wanted to hear: “Come back, I’ll take you around. I’ll show you Calabria.”
And I did. After that first trip I returned regularly for the next decade, usually every other year, or as Giuseppe would say, come l’ulivo, like the olive, which bears fruit only once every two years. It is with the olive in mind that the Calabrese gauge the passing of time: ten years become five, four years become two, and two years become one.
Meanwhile, I became obsessed with watering my Calabrese roots, with strengthening the strands between myself and the land that my grandparents had left. I began the process of getting my Italian
citizenship. I asked my cousin Luisa in Gimigliano to send me my grandparents’ birth and marriage certificates while I sent away for their death certificates in Connecticut.
I had always known I was Italian, but it wasn’t until my first year of Catholic high school in St. Petersburg, Florida, that I learned that I was Calabrese—or that Italians identified themselves first by their region, then by their country. A boy who recognized my Italian-sounding name asked me where my family was from and proudly announced that his came from Sicily. I answered with a shrug.
That afternoon I asked my father, “Are we Sicilian?”
My father glared at me. “Hell, no. We’re Calabrese! We’re from the toe of the boot, the part that’s kicking the shit out of Sicily.” I had never seen him get his hackles raised over his nationality. From then on, my father (drawing on hearsay) would identify fellow Calabresi.
“Tony Bennett,” he would announce, “he’s Calabrese.” The list grew: the singer Lou Monte; the Yankee great Phil Rizzuto; the actors Kaye Ballard and Stanley Tucci.
My father no doubt was always proud to be Calabrese. But after that first trip he became more vocal in his expressions of his Calabrese heritage. On Dean Martin (“an arrogant Napoletan’”); Sinatra (“a great artist, but he’s a Sicilian’”).
I was driven to learn more about Calabria. I browsed the travel sections of bookstores. Rome, Venice, Florence, and Tuscany generally dominated the shelves. There was nothing on Calabria—and almost nothing on the south, although it appeared that Sicily had gained a toehold. At the public library, the database listed three books on Calabria, three for the entire twentieth century.
I sought out Old Calabria, written by a Scot named Norman Douglas and published in 1915. Douglas, legend says, came to know Calabria better than almost any other foreign traveler.
One afternoon I called Giuseppe from New York City, and just as my aunt Angela appeared to have been expecting my father and me all those years ago, Giuseppe answered as if he had been waiting for a call from me taking him up on his offer: “Ah, Marco. Come va?” And with this, I set out for my grandparents’ village once again.