THE COLDEST WINTER I have ever experienced was that spring in southern Italy. I slept fully clothed. I would walk into the bathroom and run the hot tap so as to breathe a cloud of warm moisture. The chilly wind would whistle between the buildings and through the gaps in the window frame, which had been set in six inches of concrete.On Palm Sunday—typically a brilliant spring day in New York—I bundled myself in scarf and leather jacket and set out to explore my grandmother’s village, Gimigliano Inferiore. I was on my way to Palm Sunday services at Santa Maria Assunta, the church of Gimigliano Inferiore, where my grandparents had been married, and where my grandmother’s brothers and sisters had been married, and where her own parents had been married. When my grandmother died in 1994, her service happened to fall on Ash Wednesday. Every Ash Wednesday I think of her, and since then—whether it’s guilt, a desire to remember, or for myself—I’ve never missed an Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, or Easter service.
From my doorstep at the bottom of the alley, forty-five steps, long and irregular, led up to the top and opened out onto the
piazza. If I extended my arms, I could almost touch the houses on each side of the steps. A few feet away was a wall of rough-cut rock; several of the houses had been built directly into the mountainside. A balcony jutted out from nearly every house. Pots of pink and yellow flowers colored the balconies, and clotheslines zigzagged above, connecting each of the balconies—each of the owners’ lives.
Fog rolled in, dipping deeper into the village. Stray cats poked their skinny heads out of doorways and from under stairwells. A calico darted in front of me, paused, then crept past. As I continued up the steps I heard a fluffing of feathers and a couple of chirps. Below all the doorways were storage closets, some of which had been converted into chicken coops. They weren’t large, and they housed at most two chickens apiece.
With decades of emigration to the north and foreign countries, sons, daughters, and eventually entire families had left the village. But for whatever reason—nostalgia, desire to return one day—many of them never sold their houses. Now the houses lay abandoned.
“There are only ten families living on this street,” my aunt Angela once told me.
The abandoned houses were discernible only by their lack of potted plants on the balcony or clotheslines from the front door. Southern Italians seem to connect with the earth, with the land. They let the exteriors of their houses erode just like the mountains.
As I reached the top of the stairs and walked out onto the piazza, the mountains broke through the clouds, and the valley dropped below. The fog grew thicker, and with it came a chill. I expected to hear the clop of a mule’s hooves, the grinding roll of wooden wagon wheels, a voice calling for the dead.
I walked into the only bar on the piazza at about eight-thirty. A woman stood behind the bar; two men leaned against it; several others were playing a card game at the table on the opposite side of the room. Everyone turned to face me. The woman, who was probably in her late forties with long dark hair, smiled at me and shyly averted her eyes.
“Un cappuccino,” I requested.
“Cappuccino … sì,” she said, and walked to the refrigerator in the back of the room for milk.
All the men were in their fifties or sixties and wore the heavy tweed coats and sport caps that I had always associated with Ireland. Even the weather made me feel as if I were in the North Atlantic.
“Visiting family?” a man asked. He was the youngest of the men and was missing a couple of teeth. Brown spots darkened the bottom row of teeth.
“Yes. Angelina Critelli.”
“Critelli … Angelina … ?” he thought aloud. I couldn’t believe that in a village the size of a high school in the United States, a name didn’t automatically conjure associations. My idea of village life must have been formed by Italian movies or, more so, by tight Italian communities in the States, one of the many differences between Italians and Italian-Americans. In the United States, relationships became stronger in order for people to adapt and survive in a new country; for those living in small southern Italian villages, people needed to cultivate a sense of anonymity.
“My cousin is Luisa Cantafio,” I said, knowing that everyone would know Gimigliano’s former alderperson.
“Ah, yes, of course. Her father is Domenico,” another man piped in.
“Her husband is Tommaso,” an older man said. He put on his tweed cap and started for the door. “He’s my nephew,” he said with a smile. “See you around.”
The bartender set my cappuccino in front of me and courteously opened the silver sugar tray, ubiquitous throughout Italian cafés. “Where do you live? Torino?”
“No, I live in New York,” I said, putting in two spoonfuls of sugar.
“Aah, Niagara? I have cousins who live in Niagara.”
“No, New York City.”
“What’s your name?”
“Marco Rotella.”
“Rotella? I’m Rotella … Maria.” Her face lit up with excitement.
After going through our family lineage, we realized that we weren’t directly related. And she had never heard of Filippo Rotella, or his family, from Superiore, just minutes away.
Mass was at nine-thirty, and it didn’t seem that anyone else intended to go. Maria walked from around the bar and led me to the door, giving me directions to the church as if this foreigner were too limited to make his way around the village the size of a football field. Two men, eager to help out, joined us.
“First, you go across the piazza to the little chapel, there to the right. Stay to the right or you’ll miss it. That’s where you get your palm leaves. There’s a door there. Go in. Then after you get your palms, go straight down the alley, Via Assunta, to Chiesa Maria Assunta. And mass will be there.”
I paid the fifteen hundred lire for my coffee, just under seventy-five cents, and left a small tip.
“Your change,” Maria called after me.
The men all looked up at me.
I said to Maria in a low voice, “It’s a tip.”
She knitted her eyebrows and looked at me in confusion. “No, no,” she said, and handed me the change.
Five minutes later I was lost. I walked in and out of the little alleyways (of which there were four). I turned back to the bar, where the patrons nodded at me, as if to say, “Yes, it is confusing, but try again.” Then I saw Maria’s hand direct me to take that first right. I gave her a look that said, “Of course, there it is.” Then I dashed into the first alleyway, hoping to spot someone handing out palms.
At the church, a small pink stone building with heavy chestnut doors, not a person was in sight though the bells rang loudly, tunneling through the alleys of the village and echoing throughout the mountains. I remembered that Luisa had told me to stop by before going to mass.
She answered the door in her nightgown and invited me in for coffee. I remarked on the time. “I heard the church bells,” I said.
“Oh, that’s just a warning. The one that counts rings at nine forty-five. It’s like hitting the snooze button on alarm clocks.”
She sat me next to the heater and poured me a caffè, my second of the morning, while everyone got ready for church. When the next bell rang, Luisa and her ten-year-old son, Francesco, bounced down the stairs, and we walked the hundred feet to the church. The women and children started filing in, while the men and older kids lingered behind. Luisa led me by the arm to a front pew. Mass had begun.
So this was the church in which my grandparents had been married. It was smaller than I had imagined—with only about ten short rows of pews—and less majestic. Bright frescoes had been painted on the pink-and-rose-colored walls, and a brightly colored statue crowned the altar. The Virgin Mary, dressed in robes of white, red, and blue, looked to heaven with outstretched hands. The gold trim of her sleeves and the starburst halo sparkled above her head. She was floating on a white cloud—ascending to heaven—as angels hovered around her. A saccharine sunburst had been painted on the wall behind her, probably added within the last decade. A comfortable soft light filled the church.
I was sitting among the mothers, children, and old ladies. All the men were standing behind the pews; the teenage boys slumped against the walls. Only two men were sitting anywhere around me: an older man who had obviously assisted his wife to the front, and a conspicuously pious man in his twenties sitting in the pew across from me, his arm looped around a very pregnant woman sitting next to him. Neither wore a ring.
After communion, the doors opened behind us, and the priest led the congregation, in the traditional Palm Sunday procession, outside and up the hill to the main road that wound around the mountain from Inferiore up to Superiore. Although it was drizzling, we stopped at a ten-foot-wide shrine of five icons set in stucco. Christ was in the middle, flanked on the immediate left by the Madonna di Porto, the patron saint of Gimigliano, and on the immediate right by a saint I didn’t recognize. My cousin told me that it
was Maria Assunta, for whom the church was named. When someone behind her asked her to repeat what I had said, she sighed. “I’m just explaining Christian symbols to my cousin. He’s from America,” she said, raising her lip as if to say, “He’s limited, you know.”
Realizing that I couldn’t do any more harm or look any more like a Philistine, I pointed to the one on Christ’s far right. “And who’s that?”
“That’s Matthew. No, wait, that’s … You know, I don’t remember.”
Back at Zia Angela’s, we all warmed ourselves by the fire in the kitchen. From time to time, Angela would open the potbellied wood-burning stove and toss some trash in—napkins, paper, even plastic disposable plates—to keep the fire going.
We all sat for a quick meal of pasta and lentil soup, tripe stew, and an onion-and-pepper frittata, while drinking wine that Masino’s father had made. Calabresi very rarely eat desserts; they prefer to end their meals with fruit and nuts. But at the end of this meal, Luisa brought out fresh pastries that she had bought in Catanzaro—cream puffs, rum babas, and torta crema chjina, which is sponge cake filled with ricotta.
Everyone retreated to home and bedroom for a nap. Not wanting to go back to my cold room, I took a walk around the empty village. Spying another bar—the only other one in Inferiore, it turned out—I walked through the beaded curtain. Boys and teenagers in heavy coats crushed around a video game. A boy with his arm in a cast walked by me and nodded, curling the corner of his mouth in a smirk. On his cast was written, in bold marker, “Rotella.”
In the back, six rough-looking men my age smoked and drank. They started a card game. I ordered a glass of wine. The bartender, in his mid-twenties with blue eyes and light brown hair, opened a bottle of homemade wine, discernible by its reusable glass bottle.
“You’re Luisa’s cousin?”
I nodded.
“I’m her husband Tommaso’s cousin.”
I extended my hand. I was so happy that someone recognized me.
“I’m also Luisa’s father’s nephew. We’re almost related.” He told me his name was Carmine.
I finished my wine and reached for change.
“No, it’s on the house. I’ll see you around.”