“MY NAME IS GIACOMINO. And this is Jesus Christ,” a large man said, pointing to a thin, unshaven man with blue eyes. These men confirmed my belief that, like my pale-complexioned, blue-eyed aunt Francesca in Danbury, not all southern Italians were short and dark.Three men had just taken seats at the table next to me at Caffe Millennium in Gimigliano Superiore. The thin man actually did resemble the common Jesus Christ of tacky paintings, with his longish light brown hair. The sharpness of his cheekbones and jaw balanced the gentleness of his eyes.
Giacomino, for his part, was a tall, meaty guy, also blue-eyed, with short, wavy blond hair. He wore a leather biker jacket, and his eyes blinked in a nervous tic. Both seemed to be in their late twenties or early thirties. The third man was older, probably in his early forties; he wore a few days’ growth of beard.
Giacomino called over to me, “Excuse me, but who are you?”
“I’m from the United States, here visiting relatives.”
“Come join us.”
“That’s okay, I’ve just finished eating anyway.”
“No, no. Please come have a drink with us.” Giacomino rose, cleared a space for me, then dragged over the extra chair from my table.
Jesus Christ extended a lazy hand. “Vincenzo.”
“And this is Franco.”
The older man turned to me and said, “Call me Gatto.”
“Gatto?”
He let out the cry of a cat whose tail is being stepped on. “Yes, Gatto.”
Earlier that Good Friday morning—before I met Jesus and his apostles—Gimigliano had begun to feel like a village in the clouds, its altitude isolating it from the surrounding region, carrying it off far into the puffs of cumulus. At the bar in Gimigliano Inferiore, I asked Maria for a cappuccino rather than my usual morning brioche and caffè, or espresso, as it’s called in the States. I wanted something more than just a quick espresso. She smelled the container of milk under the counter and declared, “This has turned.”
While no Italian will drink a cappuccino after ten in the morning, I found that even in the south very few people drank frothy milk with their espressos. Mostly, Calabresi prefer their coffee pure and strong with the added spoonful of sugar or, in the afternoon or evening, corretto, corrected, by a liqueur of some sort. Southerners prefer anisette or sambuca to the northerners’ grappa. The liqueur is usually served in a shot glass and can be drunk alongside the coffee or poured in and mixed.
Outside, the market vendors had already set up their booths. Fridays they alternated between Gimigliano Inferiore and Superiore. This Friday was Inferiore’s turn. Trucks with built-in slanted shelves hauled in shirts and underwear and socks and pants, from the kind of thin material sold in Chinatown in New York; the vendors were Moroccan and spoke only enough Italian—or, in this case, dialect—to haggle. The produce man, who usually drives through narrow village alleys in his pickup truck, hawking his fresh produce, had set up his own small, though plentiful, stand.
The real attractions were the food stands. Ordinary delivery trucks concealed self-contained gourmet markets. The truck’s side panel extended out and was supported by poles, forming a shaded shopping area. A blue canopy attached to the metal panel extended another ten feet, lengthening the floor space for boxes of vegetables. Immaculate glass counters stocked with meats and cheeses were backed by shelves displaying choice selections of pasta and canned goods. There was even a cash register, adorned with pieces of stringy cacciocavallo cheese, a kind of provolone, shaped into horses and giraffes—an impulse buy
Even in this driveway-size piazza, the villagers were given a choice. There were two of each of the food vendors. You might like Santoro’s cacciocavallo, which resembled a large pear when hung, but the mozzarella at d’Amici’s, ten steps away, was creamier.
Giuseppe would be busy for the next couple of days with family visiting for the holidays; today I had a few hours to explore my ancestral village before lunch at Zia Angela’s. Leaving my grandmother’s Inferiore, I set out for the Superiore of my grandfather.
The precipice of Superiore loomed above. The walk up was steep and long, and I usually had to stop halfway along the mule path and rest at the abandoned chapel. Not once during my stay in Gimigliano did I encounter a single other person along the mule path between the villages. There was simply no need for people to walk the twenty minutes between the two villages when you could drive there in five. Those who didn’t have a car waited directly outside the piazza for the bus that ran every two or three hours from Inferiore to Superiore. I, too, contemplated the steep walk and decided to wait for the bus.
A mud-splattered Fiat pulled alongside of me.
“Marco, che cosa fai?” the driver asked. He was the thin man who supplied Maria’s bar with his homemade wine.
“Waiting for the bus,” I answered.
“Marco, it’s a holiday. The buses don’t run. Get in, I’m going up.”
“Dove vai?” I asked.
“Back to work, at the farm. But I have to go through Superiore.”
Giuseppe had once explained to me the differences between the villagers of Inferiore and those of the larger Superiore. The people of Inferiore tend to be closer and a bit warmer. If a stranger starts a fight with an Inferiorese, others will come to his defense. Not so in Superiore, where Giuseppe is from. During an argument, passersby may shrug their shoulders and simply watch. The people of Inferiore have the reputation, much like Calabresi all over the world, of being stubborn. The people of Superiore take the notion of testa dura one step further, accusing their downslope neighbors of holding a testa di legno on their shoulders—a head of wood, probably referring to the hard chestnut trees that grow in the surrounding forest.
The piazza of Gimigliano Superiore isn’t in the center of the village like most piazzas in Italy; instead, it is at the entrance to the village. A waist-high wall encloses the piazza, with benches encircling the center. I strolled in.
When the Scottish writer Leslie Gardiner passed through Gimigliano in the 1960s, he thought the piazza was the obvious setting for I Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s famous opera about a troupe of performers who travel in the mountain villages of Calabria. Gardiner saw the piazza as a perfect amphitheater, remote, with the Chiesa S.S. Salvatore (which Gardiner found less than pleasing) forming the backdrop.
The story of I Pagliacci, named for a commedia dell’arte troupe headed by a husband-and-wife team, is tragic. During their stay outside one of the villages, the husband realizes that his wife is cuckolding him with one of the villagers. He knows his rightful duty. At the end of the night’s performance—and the opera—as the couple are performing their curtain-dropping comedy skit, he rises and stabs his wife, then faces the audience and announces: “La commedia è finita!” I’ve seen the opera in New York City several times—it is a staple of the Metropolitan Opera repertory—and I’m always reminded of my grandfather shooting a man over my grandmother. I Pagliacci, which premiered in 1892, was realistic theater in a time when this kind of retribution was not only allowed but encouraged.
Now old men sat on a couple of benches, keeping warm beneath their wool coats. A wet breeze blew across the piazza. Ten boys played soccer with a semideflated ball only slightly bigger than a softball, using two opposing benches as goals. A tall, thin boy stood out as the aggressor. He was older than the other boys, maybe fourteen, and his kicks were precise but awkward. I soon realized that he had a limp, that his right leg didn’t quite bend at the knee. It was as if he were swinging a two-by-four from his hip. But he got the ball where he wanted.
The few times the ball went astray and whizzed by the old men, they didn’t even flinch, much less stop their conversation. A brown-and-black dog, sleeping at the far end of the piazza, rose and limped through the playing field, such as it was; the boys played around him.
By the time I got back to Inferiore, the temperature must have dropped to below fifty degrees. As I walked home down the alley, I heard the window to Zia Angela’s open above me. “Marco, it’s time for lunch,” she called.
Sabrina and Masino, Luisa and Tommaso all were at the table; a space was cleared for me. Angela’s mother sat at the same table with her back to the wall—the same spot she seemed to sit in all day, knitting, sewing, or shelling beans or chopping eggplant and zucchini.
Angela placed in front of me a bowl of penne with fava beans and a generous amount of pecorino cheese. I scooped a tiny spoonful of piccante from a clear dish. My body warmed. The meal, as Angela clearly knew, was the perfect comfort food for a cold day.
In Calabria during Easter, a bigger celebration than in the United States, the nuclear family becomes tighter. Here in Gimigliano the celebrations involved the entire village. Back in the States, because my family lived far away from me, I had been celebrating Easter with my wife and her Episcopalian family for the last decade. I felt as if I were truly celebrating Easter for the first time.
I posed the question to my relatives. “Are you walking the procession this evening?” I asked everyone.
“No, not this year,” Luisa said. “We used to all the time, but …”
Angela grimaced. “I wish I could, but I can’t walk for that long.”
“But you should,” they all said at once, encouraging me. “It’s beautiful!”
“Do they have it in America?” Sabrina asked.
“I’m sure they do, somewhere. But I’ve never gone to one.”
“Aah,” they said. They looked at one another the way that Luisa and her friends had looked at me during the Palm Sunday service; the look said, “As we expected. They aren’t religious in America, are they?”
Now Angela put at the center of the table a dish piled high with fried calamari, just out of the pan, along with fried anchovies and sardines baked in salt. Next came salatulu—a mixed pickled salad of peppers, eggplant, fennel, mushrooms (porcini, in this case, since they are abundant in Calabria), and tomatoes.
The wine was poured, and conversation continued. The dialect, a language that hinted of Greek and Arabic, was challenging no matter how much I heard it spoken throughout Calabria. When I took Italian in college, the dialect had been taught out of me. Now I kept hearing without understanding sounds and words that my father and grandparents spoke. Only slowly, and often with Giuseppe’s help, could I decipher the linguistic tics of Gimiglianese.
For example, the f in fava is pronounced as h. So fava becomes hava. Funghi, spoken with a hard g in Italian, is said with a soft g in dialect. So funghi becomes hunjee. When a word ends in an o, the vowel turns into a u. Even the town’s name, Gimigliano (pronounced “ji-mi-li-an-o”) is pronounced “yi-ini-yi-an-o.” So an Italian phrase as basic as Io ho mangiato (I ate) becomes Ai umanyatu in Gimiglianese.
Sometimes I understood; sometimes I didn’t. Most times I just let the wine carry me off as I listened to the words glide by in a smooth legato.
After a long lunch, followed by a quiet siesta, and a caffè at Maria’s, I made my way back to Superiore for the six-thirty Good Friday
mass. I sat in the second to last pew, on the end, in order to get the best view of the beginning of the procession, which would follow the service. Carved in stone above the altar was “Ave Maria.” Below, a human-size statue of Jesus was nailed to the cross. The veins and muscles bulged and seemed to pump from the light-colored flesh. Blood trickled from his feet, hands, and forehead, where the thorns dug in.
As usual, the pews of S.S. Salvatore in Gimigliano Superiore were filled only with women and children; the men stood at the back. The women and children rose as the priest started down the center aisle. I turned to the priest, half expecting him to be the same priest I’d met a decade earlier with my father, but this was a younger man, with large glasses. It wasn’t until the reading of the first Gospel, about fifteen minutes into the mass, that the older boys and men slid into the pews.
Just as communion was given toward the end of the service, the church swelled with last-minute participants: Italians don’t want to waste time with the prelude when they can take part in the main event. Four life-size statues appeared behind me: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, and an angel.
Two men approached the altar, genuflected, then retrieved Christ. A line formed to bow and kiss His feet. Only women formed the line, it seemed. Southern Italian men, as Luigi Barzini noted in The Italians, refuse to drop to their knees at the feet of another man, and therefore they petition their prayers through the Virgin Mary. When the last woman bent at Christ’s feet, the priest carried the statue of Him to the quartet of equally lifelike statues, then out the door. A chant rose from what must have been three or four hundred people.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my uncle Mimmo’s brother Gino, whom I had met earlier in the bar. He taught music to high school students in Catanzaro.
“Please, walk the procession with my wife and met.”
I was happy not to have to walk the procession alone. Giuseppe’s wife, Elena, wasn’t feeling well that evening, and they had both decided to stay home.
Gino introduced me to his wife and his son, an eight-year-old with neatly combed hair, who, he proudly noted, was named Marco.
We followed the statues out the door, through the piazza, and down the only road connecting Superiore with Inferiore. The villagers turned into civilian police, wearing dark blue vests with silver reflective lining and carrying standard-issue flashlights. Although they had closed off the streets for the procession, a line of traffic had already begun to form on this main road, which was also the only road that led to Catanzaro, ten mountain miles away.
Gino, his family, and I fell in toward the end of the procession, along with about fifteen other people. The procession stopped; there was silence, then prayer led by the priest. It was the first station of the cross. By seven-thirty the sun had fallen behind the mountains, the last light beginning to dim.
There was a commotion behind us. One of the newly minted polizia was yelling at a man driving a small old commercial truck. The driver waved the guard away and pulled up behind us. His engine rumbled, overpowering the prayers. His lights lit up everyone’s backs. The intimate magical spell was broken, but the procession crept on.
“Do you do this in New York?” Gino asked me.
“No. I’m sure it happens somewhere, but I’ve never done it:” I remembered I had said the same thing to my relatives earlier this morning. I felt as if I were denying something and that after the next time someone asked me the same question, I would hear the crow of a rooster.
Gino thought for a moment. “But you are Catholic?”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not quite our custom in the United States to have such a big celebration for Easter.”
Gino nodded his head, reaffirming some long-held belief he had about Americans. It may not have been the case with Gino, but many Italians, who’ve lived so long with a monolithic church that they confuse religion with nationality, have trouble understanding other religions in the world—or understanding that Catholics elsewhere in the world might not have the same ceremonies.
We stopped again. Far up front the prayers began. The truck continued to roar. The driver thumped his steering wheel and craned his neck to see how far ahead he had to go before he could turn off. Meanwhile, a Fiat Cinquecento lined up behind him. The older couple looked at us apologetically from behind the windshield. They realized that they had timed their ride badly
“Are you eating at Angela and Mimmo’s tonight?” Gino asked. “If not, you are more than welcome at our place.”
I had stopped eating dinner at Angela and Mimmo’s because they usually went to bed early, so this was a nice gesture on Gino’s part. I realized he hated the idea of someone’s eating by himself, but I decided to let him have the rest of this evening with his family
“No, not tonight. I think I’ll grab a quick pizza, then go home and read a little.”
We had stopped again, and so had the truck. Several people turned toward the driver. He finally realized that he should cut the lights and turn off the engine. Silence, finally. Darkness. Dogs howled in the valley, and the driver, a large mustachioed bald man, looked out his window, picking his nose. As the praying emerged from the silence, people behind me and to my side began to move forward. Something brushed against my leg. It was the gimpy dog from the piazza. He nosed his way through my legs and cut his way through the crowd to the front, where all the action was.
After proceeding for almost an hour down the tight, winding road, we stopped at a curve. Directly above us, tucked in a cliffside cove, rose three crosses. Just as the priest walked up the hill, lights from the ground illuminated them. Now the truck driver, realizing that this was the widest, most convenient place to pass, started inching through the crowd.
The priest spoke to the crowd. An old retired man with his guard vest insisted that the truck driver turn off his engine. The driver yelled back. The priest stopped the service and frowned at the trucker, who relented. A moment after the silent standoff the priest, with a slight wave, instructed us to let the truck through. Eight cars followed; the priest stood impassively The old couple passed us, and
from inside closed windows, you could here a soft woman’s voice saying, “I’m sorry,” as the car, with its engine cut, rolled through the crowd and down the hill.
Italian men—and women, for that matter—hang out in groups. And in Calabria especially, this hanging out is an art form. You rarely see a person standing, let alone walking, by himself. Standing together, Italians unintentionally position themselves so that they can talk and watch the piazza at the same time. Everyone gets a view When you’re walking by yourself, all you see is a group quietly talking and staring at you. It’s easy to feel intimidated. But once you engage the group in conversation, their unified wall breaks. One person will lean toward you or visibly bend his head. You feel yourself moving to one side, listening and talking, but also looking out, as the girls and women and old men walk by. You’ve become a part of the group, if only for those few minutes.
After the procession I strolled back up the hill, eager to get out of the cold and fill my stomach. I went into the Caffe Millennium, the only place to eat in Superiore. The first floor contained the coffee bar (two steps down was another room with a pinball machine and video game); a staircase led up to the dining room.
I greeted the bartender.
“You must be Marco,” he said.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Giuseppe said that you’d be stopping in tonight. I’m a Rotella, too,” he said, “Domenico. Go on upstairs and have a seat.” Even in his absence, Giuseppe was taking care of me.
The dining room was completely empty. I sat at a two-person table on the balcony overlooking the front door and above it, the TV Domenico brought over his house wine, a light but intense red that was surprisingly smooth. A woman came out of the kitchen behind me. I ordered a caprese—sliced fresh mozzarella and tomato—then a pizza quattro stagione and a mixed green salad.
“Are sure you want the quattro stagione?” she asked.
“Sure, I think so,” I said with a smile.
Two women and a man arrived and took a table behind me. One was a short dark-haired woman; the other had bleached blond hair. The man was tall, thin, and graying. Domenico stopped off at the table on his way into the kitchen and said something.
“Ciao, Marco,” the blond woman said. “My name is Mirella. I’m Domenico’s sister.”
She urged me to stop by her house, then introduced me to the dark-haired woman next to her, Loretta, a weaver in town. Just then my pizza arrived.
“Mangia, mangia, Marco,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
I thanked her and cut into the pizza. The crust was thin, and there was just enough cheese to cover the pizza without turning into goop. The artichokes were fresh; whole olives had been tossed about. With the first bite the flavor of the porcini mushrooms and the spicy Calabrese soppressata burst in my mouth. It was deliciously spicy and salty. I sipped the wine and felt satisfied. Then I realized why the waitress had made sure I wanted the quattro stagione: I was eating meat on Good Friday
It was at this point that Giacomino, Gatto, and Jesus Christ walked into the restaurant and asked me to join them. Even sitting, Giacomino towered over the scruffy Gatto and the bearded Vincenzo.
Two beautiful women in their mid-twenties joined us at the table, and everyone exchanged a barrage of ciaos.
One of the women had full lips and dark brown hair with blond highlights. The other had dark hair that fell below her shoulders. Both wore big smiles. Giacomino and Vincenzo introduced them as Francesca and Rosanna. I remember Norman Douglas praising Gimiglianese women: “it would be difficult to find anywhere an equal number of handsome women on such a restricted space.”
As they both sat down, Francesca kissed Vincenzo.
“Why do they call you Jesus Christ?” I asked Vincenzo, who was only slightly younger than I was.
Everyone laughed. Francesca giggled. She seemed to be picking her nose as she talked to Vincenzo. “He just becomes Jesus Christ this week,” she said. When Francesca moved her hand from her face,
I realized that she was adjusting a nose ring. It must have been new, for the amount of attention she was paying it.
“For the Passion play,” Vincenzo said. “You should come see it tomorrow night.”
I’d heard about the Passion play, but I hadn’t expected the leading actors to be this crew, for they were clearly the village punks. They dressed down when all the other villagers paid meticulous attention to clothing and grooming. They swaggered in and out of shops and cafés like this one, indifferent to formalities. They didn’t look rough so much as bored. I couldn’t help thinking that had I grown up here—had my grandparents never moved—I would have been one of them.
“Are you in the Passion play too?” I asked Giacomino.
Gatto leaned over to me. “Yes, he’s one of the lambs.”
Everyone at the table roared with laughter, and Giacomino ordered another liter of wine—and two more pizzas.
“So you’re actually a practicing Catholic?” I asked Vincenzo. I was surprised that a relatively young man like him would be devout.
“No, I just look like Christ. I’ve been playing the part for years. Culturally, I guess, I’m Catholic, but I don’t believe in the church. I’m more spiritual. I believe more in the beliefs of the American Indian. I want to go to the desert there. I believe in the earth. In nature,” he continued. “You should see my art.”
“You’re an artist?”
“Yes, that’s what I do. Come on,” Vincenzo said, announcing that he and I were going to his studio and that we should all meet later in the piazza.
I took out my wallet to pay. Giacomino frowned. “No, no, no. Please. Marco.” He put his hand on mine and directed my wallet back to my pocket.
As I left, another woman walked in. Large-boned with an ivory white face, she looked Irish. She waved hello and sat close to Giacomino.
Vincenzo led me down the main road, along a row of buildings, and directed me to an alleyway, then to a stairway in the back of a
building, one in a row constructed of weathered stone, that looked to be at least a couple centuries old.
Vincenzo flicked on the light switch, and two naked bulbs illuminated the room. There was a cot and a small stove. Paintings hung on the wall. He seemed to work with maps. They had been cut and repasted, and the cities and countries and bodies of water were named in Italian. Some maps were replicas of nineteenth-century maps of Africa and China. There was a sculpture made of olive wood, and one of part of a shoe.
He had fashioned a chair of driftwood, adapting a German map of North and South America as a seat cover. A torn black umbrella hung from the back. Clearly Vincenzo was obsessed with places other than Gimigliano.
“Marco, what do you think?” He looked at me for a reaction; he was obviously pleased with his work. I was always wary of people too enthusiastic about their own art, as if their own praise made up for quality. But his work was much better than I thought it would be. I explained that I liked the desire to go to a place other than where you happened to be.
“But it’s the desert in America where I most want to go,” Vincenzo replied emphatically.
Back in the Pagliacci piazza, a group of boys was playing soccer. Gatto, Vincenzo, and Giacomino joined in, thrilling the boys. I stood with the women.
“To judge by his work, Vincenzo likes to travel,” I said to Francesca.
“Yes, but he hasn’t really been much out of Italy,” Francesca said. “And wherever he goes, he always comes right back here to Gimigliano.”
“It’s pretty boring here, isn’t it?” asked Rosanna, the dark-haired woman. “Not like in New York?”
“New York can wear you down,” I said. “Here I can take in a village at a slow pace. I can appreciate it. And for me that’s exciting.”
“But for how long?”
The game continued. It began to rain. “O, dio mio,” Francesca said. “Do you want a ride home?”
I told her I’d stick around, and the two women took off without saying goodbye to the others. I stood beneath an arch that led to the main pedestrian road. Out in the piazza, the laid-back, self-conscious Vincenzo broke loose with the ball and scored a goal. He was much better than I had thought he would be, but then again he was playing against kids less than half his age. Gatto tended the other goal while smoking a cigarette.
The rain came down harder. A figure slumped its way across the stone; it was the gimpy brown-and-black dog from the procession, hobbling out of the rain.
Now it poured, and the players headed for cover under the arch. The kids dispersed.
Giacomino placed his hand on my shoulder: “We’ll see you tomorrow night for the Passion play, yes?”
I said they would, and the four of us walked out of the piazza and down a street called Corso America.