A VIEW OF HOME

GIUSEPPE STOOD AT THE DOOR wearing a down jacket. I invited him in. He looked inside and shrugged his shoulders.

“No, no, no. Elena and Alessio are waiting outside in the car. Come, let’s go for a little drive.” He looked over his shoulder as if he didn’t want anyone to see him. “Get a jacket. It’s cold.” He smiled, showing his two silver teeth, and turned to walk up the alley to the car. I put on my leather jacket, but as I stepped outside and saw clouds of breath form under my nose, I told myself that I would buy a sweater in Catanzaro.

Elena rolled down her window to greet me with a kiss. “Fa freddo,” she said; she wrapped her arms around herself and gave off a shiver. No sooner had I climbed in than we took off out of the small piazza that was Gimigliano Inferiore as if we were undercover.

Giuseppe drove up steep, winding mule roads, barely one car wide. Fifteen or twenty minutes beyond Gimigliano, we entered a dense wood of chestnut trees, large and gray with bare branches that wouldn’t bud for yet another month.

Now Giuseppe pulled over, seemingly at a random point; we got out of the car and walked along a dirt path farther up a hill. Giuseppe looked at the sky above us. It was still misting. Giuseppe and Elena bent down every once in a while to pick up chicory. These flat herbs that reached out to cover the ground would roll up into a ball when cut from their stems.

I was reminded of a folktale retold by Italo Calvino, “The Three Chicory Gatherers,” in which three poor Calabrese sisters meet their fate while picking chicory. When the eldest sister, separated in the fields from her other siblings, tugs at a chicory plant, she unearths a hole. Staring up at her is a dragon, who pulls her down and makes her an offer she can’t refuse. He proffers a human hand and says, “You can either eat this hand and marry me, or I will lop off your head and eat you.”

Then the dragon goes off to hunt, leaving the girl to dine alone. In his absence, she throws the hand into a washbasin. When the dragon returns, she tells him that she ate it. To be sure, the dragon calls out to the hand asking where it is. The hand replies, “I’m in the washbasin.” The dragon takes her to a room of headless corpses and cuts her head off.

After the second sister fails the same test and meets her sister’s fate, the youngest girl, Mariuzza, sets out in search of the other two. She, too, picks up a chicory plant and greets the dragon eye to eye. The dragon presents her with a foot and offers the same deal. The dragon leaves, and Mariuzza, desperately trying to cover up the foot, wraps it in the front of her dress. The dragon returns and calls out to the foot, asking its whereabouts. The foot replies, “On Mariuzza’s stomach.” The dragon, believing that the foot is “in” her stomach, marries Mariuzza. In celebration the dragon gets drunk and reveals the secret of his power.

Mariuzza offers the dragon more wine and follows his secret instructions. She cuts off the head of a canary, where she finds an egg, which she cracks over the dragon’s head, killing him. Instantly her sisters joyously return to life, as do all the other people, who turn out to be kings, princes, and noblemen.

Each of the sisters marries royally, and from that point on, they are no longer poor. They never have to pick chicory again.

We passed small stone buildings, which had to be at least two hundred years old. The sides were standing, but all the roofs had collapsed. In these chestnut houses, or caselle, which were made of stone and marble, cemented with clay, families smoked chestnuts in the fall and winter. Each family built one deep in the woods. Now Giuseppe climbed on top of one and explained how such a house functioned. He pointed out the holes in the stone walls, where slats once formed the floor of the second story. The fire burned below, and the smoke seeped through the slats and roasted the chestnuts. The terra-cotta roofs contained the smoke and heat within the entire structure. The family would roast the chestnuts for about twenty days, then pick through them. The large chestnuts would be eaten or turned into farina; the smaller ones would be fed to the pigs.

“That is why the pork is so flavorful here,” Giuseppe said.

 

 

I’m sure if he had had the space—and if chestnuts hadn’t been killed by disease in the eastern United States—my grandfather would have built a cabin to roast chestnuts. In his small urban backyard, he had a garden, a rabbit hutch, and a smokehouse. It was the food and the connection to the land that my grandfather brought to America.

From him and my father I learned the art of picking mushrooms. We picked our way through woods in Danbury. My grandfather would test for poisonous mushrooms by putting each one in a sack with a silver dollar or a clove of garlic. If either the garlic or the coin turned color, he knew the mushroom was poisonous. Several times my father would catch Grandpa eating those same mushrooms we had been warned against.

I would later ask my father how Grandpa was able to eat the poisonous mushrooms.

“It’s his Calabrese body,” my father said.

Along with his knowledge of nature, my grandfather also brought to America his Calabrese skepticism toward modern medicine. My father remembers as a child hearing groans coming from the smokehouse in the back late one night. He peered out of his bedroom window and saw that the smokehouse light was on. He walked out barefoot and peeked in the window to see his father sitting on a chair with a bottle of whiskey in front of him. His father had wrapped a piece of leather around a tooth way in the back of his mouth and was clenching it with a pair of pliers. My grandfather saw my father in the window.

“Vai via, Giusepp’!” my grandfather roared. Get out of here!

My father ducked back into the night. Halfway back to the house, he heard a bloodcurdling howl. He ran back to see the pliers lying on the table, still holding on to the molar. His father tossed back the whiskey, swished it around in his mouth, then spat out a long stream of dark blood. He took another swig to kill the pain. He then bit off the nub of his cigar and pressed it against the pocket in his gum to cauterize the wound. My father ran off in tears.

 

 

Giuseppe eyed the sky again and urged Elena, Alessio, and me onward. We passed through a field of chestnut trees that had been cut down. From within the stumps, new trees had begun to shoot up. The higher we went, the fewer trees there were. I could tell we were getting close to the top. Giuseppe stopped, studied the sky one last time, and smiled at me. “Close your eyes,” he said.

I closed them. He grabbed one arm, and Elena grabbed the other while Alessio darted in and out of my legs. With each step my foot fell on harder ground, from clay to rock. The wet wind whipped my face. Slowly they led me several feet forward, then stopped.

“Open your eyes,” Giuseppe said.

I did so. I stood on a piece of rock jutting out of the edge of the cliff. My knees buckled. Before me the valley opened wide. Below me the terra-cotta rooftops of Gimigliano clung to the ledges. The water on the rooftops glistened when a ray of sun poked through the clouds and shot to the mountains across from us.

Dark green mountains undulated and rolled into the horizon, to Reggio, to Sicily, to America. Beyond the mountains was another world, but down below was a world you could understand. The view was small enough to keep a photographic image in your mind, an image you could take with you. I wondered if my grandfather had ever come up here to take one last look at his village.

Walking back to the car, we collected handfuls of chicory. Holding the herbs close to my nose, I breathed in the damp, woody smell.

 

 

Back at his house that night after dinner, Giuseppe and I spread out a map and planned our tour of Calabria. I circled all the cities I wanted to visit. Because Calabria is long and narrow, the most efficient way to see her, Giuseppe announced, was to explore her in quarters—and, by doing so, divide Calabria pretty much by regional capitals.

“We’ll start with the north Ionian, the area around Crotone,” Giuseppe said as he brought his finger down the center of Calabria through her spine. “Then we’ll do the south Ionian, Catanzaro and south.”

I looked at the west coast, the Tyrrhenian Sea. The distances between places weren’t great, but I knew that a map, in this mountainous region, could be deceptive. “We’ll do Cosenza and north,” Giuseppe said. He took a deep breath and continued. “And by the end of your trip, we’ll go down to Reggio.” I was ready to venture beyond the only Calabria my grandparents ever knew.