SOMETIME AROUND A.D. 800, villagers along the Ionian Sea began migrating to the interior, the area that is now Gimigliano. Individual family settlements opened up to extended family members, until they grew to frazioni, or hamlets. These hamlets bordered others, each with its own church. From there, thirty such frazioni came together to form Gimigliano, a village of just over thirty-five hundred people.Each hamlet had its own family head and even ethnic origin. One of the first, Villaggio Rejina, was settled by Greeks. In Villaggio Casale, Greeks lived with Jewish settlers. Villaggio San Biaggo was founded by a Domenico Chiarella, who could very well have been one of Giuseppe’s ancestors.
Shortly after I arrived in Gimigliano, Sabrina’s husband, Masino, presented me with a thin book on the history of Gimigliano (many villages, I would learn, have printed their own history books).
The origin of the name Gimigliano is not known. The book suggests that the name comes from the Latin oppidum geminianum or the Greek gimilon, both of which refer to its fertile land. Some say that the village is named after Saint Geminiano, from Modena. Others,
considering the two most populated parts of the town—Inferiore and Superiore—say the name may come from the word gemelli, or twins.
Eventually, people in the outlying villages moved to the mountaintops, where they were protected from invading Saracens and Normans and from malaria-carrying lowland mosquitoes. From a distance the town must have seemed impregnable. Its connected buildings formed uniform rings and its terra-cotta-roofed houses were stacked one on top of another, built on the mountains’ farthest outcroppings, with no visible means of reaching them.
This was Gimigliano Superiore (susu in dialect), where my grandfather was born and where Giuseppe keeps his store. Superiore contains about two-thirds of the village’s population, and even now they consider themselves better and more sophisticated than the people of Gimigliano Inferiore (jusu in dialect), where my grandmother was born. Historically, the villagers of Superiore were better prepared against enemies and were farther away from disease-carrying streams (they tossed their waste and garbage downhill).
Situated within Superiore’s walls are the church and the narrow rectangular piazza, where every other Friday vendors from all over the province set up their booths. The main street that leads off the piazza is Corso America, one of the only streets in the center of Superiore where there’s enough room for a car. Alleyways leading down the mountain from Corso America are lined with eighteenth-century houses.
A quarter mile of mule path, loosely paved with irregular cuts of stone, connects Superiore and Inferiore. Halfway down, there is a dilapidated one-room chapel. The roof has collapsed, and the windows have long been without glass or frames. The yellow stuccoed walls have faded in centuries of sunlight. The path descends along the back of a building, then cuts between two more buildings, family homes, and ends at the tiny open piazza of Inferiore. Through the beaded doorways of the houses, you can almost detect movement within. Human voices compete with sounds from the radio or TV. The aroma of sauteed garlic and peppers wafts onto the street.
My father always told me that Grandma and Grandpa were poor farmers—peasants—and that all our relatives before them were farmers, too. Growing up in Florida, I imagined them living in a single farmhouse, working acres of tomatoes or groves of oranges. I never would have pictured farmers clumped on top of one another in one village. But they were. Before the sun rose, men, women, and children would walk two or three miles to their fields—actually, slopes where mules can’t even work. On these slopes they cultivated figs, oranges, and olives and grew tomatoes, grapes, and eggplant. At the end of the day, just as the sun was setting, they wearily made the same journey home.
But for the people of Gimigliano, their village reaches beyond the medieval walls, beyond their farming fields; their village extends to the Chiesa della Madonna di Porto. The Gimiglianese revere this church, even those who have long since emigrated.
Even to me Gimigliano was a single painting. Copies of it hung throughout my grandparents’ house: a pursed-lipped, Anglo-faced Madonna covered in a blue robe, with two hovering angels placing a crown over her haloed head. The baby Jesus, also with a crown and halo, sits on her lap grasping the Virgin’s breast exposed through an opening in her red blouse. Gazing out, they share a similar contented expression. She is an Italian woman breast-feeding in public.
Christ may have stopped at Eboli, but for Italians, Mary is with them at birth, all through life, and more important, Mother Dolorosa is present at death. My grandmother prayed to the Virgin and took comfort in the images of the nursing Madonna throughout her house. In my grandmother’s village, the townspeople honor Mary once a year by forming a candlelit procession and carrying a statue of her from the countryside church of the Madonna di Porto to Gimigliano a few miles away. Some make the journey barefoot, some on their knees. Three days of celebration follow.
Nearly every year my grandmother sent money to the Madonna di Porto. When people came to her door—salesmen, plumbers, Jehovah’s Witnesses—she would ask in broken English if they could
make a contribution to the church, her sad eyes refusing a “no.” She was the one who kept the ties to Italy through her siblings and through the Virgin Mary. She was devoted to this distant place, the country and the village she and my grandfather had come from.
The more I spent time with my aunt Angela, the more she reminded me of my grandmother, who was also named Angela. She has a round face like my grandmother, and the same smooth skin that defied wrinkles. Maybe she, too, rubbed excess olive oil into her skin while standing over the stove.
In her kitchen, above the refrigerator, was the same portrait of the Virgin Mary that hung in my grandmother’s house. I knew Zia Angela could show me something about this painting of the Virgin Mary I wouldn’t forget.
When Martha and I visited in the summer of our first anniversary, Angela and Mimmo took us to the Madonna di Porto. Leaving the house, we walked through the steep and narrow streets of Gimigliano Inferiore. Angela stopped by her mother-in-law’s house to show us the local costume worn since the eighteenth century. Well into her eighties, her mother-in-law stepped out of her apartment, proudly displaying the thick ankle-length black wool dress with a hint of white trim and a white cotton blouse underneath, all of which she had made herself. Angela lifted the bottom to show us the intricate stitching, pulled at the seams to prove how strong the material was. “No one wears them anymore,” she said, “except widowed grandmothers.”
Driving along the gently winding road, we passed several white stone arches. In each of these three-foot-high roofed arches was the painting of a saint. Angela explained that these were prayer temples for travelers. This is the road the procession follows from the Madonna di Porto to Gimigliano, and it’s at these sites that the devotees stop to pray along the way. Flanking one display of five saints, two upturned ends of sewer pipes acted as flower planters.
We arrived at the Madonna di Porto, where the original painting of my grandmother’s Madonna hangs. The church, constructed a few miles from Gimigliano, seemed almost intentionally hidden from the main roadway. It was built precisely where Mary appeared
to a lost youth, Pietro Gatto, who in 1753 had found refuge from the cold in a cave. Mary helped Pietro find his way home. Every Pentecost the local townspeople celebrate the miracle.
Angela took us into a tiny chapel connected to the church apse. Inside the chapel, the Madonna icon rested on a stand. We walked around it on an elevated wooden pathway, below which flowed a small stream. Beyond the stream the altar loomed in the nave. On the apse behind the altar, in place of the crucifix, was the large painting of the Madonna and the nursing Jesus. The painting dwarfed the small, freestanding gold crucifix that was placed, seemingly as an afterthought, to the right of the altar.
A few older ladies prayed there, and a family about three pews back, talking slightly above a whisper, sprawled as if lounging on a living room couch. Intricate designs covered the tile floors, and the marble gleamed in the rays of sunshine filtering through the stained-glass windows. It was to this church that my grandmother had sent her money; it was probably to the memory of this church that my grandmother had prayed.
Angela handed me a camera and insisted that I take a picture to bring back to my family. I hesitated, concerned about the flash. She tossed up her hands. “This is a family church, no?” She smiled and turned me back toward the altar. I took one last look at the painting before focusing the camera and noticed that this original painting was different from the replicas everyone had in her house. Though both Mary and Jesus had golden-brown hair, their skin was sallow, and their faces looked weary and sad. They had the faces of southern Italians. I realized that Mary, too, was a peasant.