“FUNGHI-CARCIOFI-FINOCCHI-PISELLI,” echoed a tinny voice amplified by a loudspeaker outside my window. It was seven in the morning. I was tired but pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t hung over from the night before. The fact that the homemade wine was preservative-free saved me from a headache. As a matter of fact, no matter how much wine I drank in Calabria, no matter how drunk I got—and the fortified Calabrese wine is not for lightweights—I was never tight in the head the next morning.“Funghi-carciofi-finocchi-piselli,” droned the voice, which blended all the words together in a single breath, mushrooms-artichokes-fennel-peas.
“Francesco!” a woman’s voice yelled out.
“Ciao, Maria,” the loudspeaker replied.
“Aspett’, aspett’!” the woman said. Wait!
“Don’t rush,” said the loudspeaker.
I pulled the curtains back to see a white Fiat pickup truck parked in the alley outside. The truck bed stood open at the back and on both sides, displaying four rows of cascading shelves full of fruits and
vegetables. The vendor had everything from eggplants, potatoes, artichokes, and bananas to every green in season.
I shaved, got dressed, and started up the steps to the café.
“Marco,” I heard Zia Angela call from above, “prendi un cave.”
Upstairs, Angela’s mother and Marisa, Sabrina and Masino’s daughter, were sitting at the table. Marisa was playing with her Barbie. In front of her was something large, folded in a towel, a typical Gimiglianese handwoven towel. Angela proudly pulled back the towel to reveal an entire skinned lamb.
“A-gnel-lo,” Marisa said in a gleeful voice, pronouncing each syllable of “lamb.”
“For Easter,” Angela said. “It’s from our farm.”
Angela’s mother pointed to her cheek and twisted her hand. “Buona,” she said. “Very tasty”
It was a beautiful, healthy lamb, perfectly skinned and dehoofed. There was not a trace of blood; its pink skin glistened, seeming almost translucent. I could tell that it had been killed only minutes ago; its dark eyes had not yet glazed over.
Most Americans would gasp if they were to see entire animals laid out on their dining room tables. In Calabria, though, there is no mystery as to where dinner comes from. Little Marisa kept playing with her Barbie; for her, this was just as normal as playing in front of newly shelled fava beans.
I drank a cup of coffee and bit into a brioche that came from a plastic bag. Even that tasted fresher than it would have in the States.
The old men in tweed coats and caps walked throughout Gimigliano Superiore in an early-morning stroll. It would be a lazy, quiet Holy Saturday With their hands clasped behind their backs, the men don’t avert their eyes when others pass. They acknowledge each person walking by, happy to offer a greeting. They knew that I was a visitor. They looked me in the eyes, smiled or didn’t smile, and enunciated a “Salve,” a formal hello. They were curious as to who this stranger was and whether he was good or bad. Could he respond, was he mute, or did he have some kind of secret?
“Salve,” I said with a smile and a nod.
Their furrowed brows loosened; their clenched jaws once again fell into a comfortable position. They nodded and continued their conversation. I had passed the test.
I was walking to Lorella Biamonte’s weaving studio. I had met Lorella the previous night at the Caffe Millennium, and she offered to show me her work before lunch. On the top floor of a house down the alley from the Chiesa S.S. Salvatore, she had set up shop with two other weavers, Maria Mangiacasale and Maria Critelli, the founder. I climbed up the stairs, and Lorella, who was short with unruly dark hair, showed me in. Three looms, one of which was antique, filled the front room. On one loom the three women wove throw rugs and place mats made of ginestra, or broom; another loom was for the weaving of wool blankets; the third was designated for finer items, such as silk or linen shawls as well as tablecloths and napkins.
“We all have degrees. I’m an accountant, for instance,” Lorella explained. She was intense, somewhat humorless. “But instead of moving to the north to find work, we insist on living in our hometown, and we insist on making our own money”
Lorella pulled up a few cardboard boxes that had been stacked against the wall, produced some examples of their work, setting them out: two dish towels, one bright red with gold trim, the other cream with green olive branches and yellow birds. She displayed a rug made of ginestra; red-and-green designs jumped out of the white background. Finally, she placed in my hands a delicate, cream-colored tablecloth, tightly folded. I remembered seeing such table linens in my grandmother’s house. Like all the others, it bore the distinctive design of all Calabrese weavers, a repeating pattern of diamonds within diamonds.
“Beautiful,” I told her. “Can you make a living doing this?”
“We do well enough,” she said sternly “We belong to an artisans’ guild, and we go to fairs and festivals all over Italy In our way, by refusing to leave for the north and insisting on making a living here in the south, we are preserving Calabria.”
Lorella was not a typical southern Italian woman. She was
straightforward, not shy, though not gregarious. I wanted to talk to her about so much, to ask her opinions on Calabria, on Gimigliano. But she was set on talking about her work and her collective, not herself.
“Where did you study?” I asked her, trying once more to get to know her.
“Not far, in Cosenza,” she said, then returned at once to the subject at hand. “Now, the process of making ginestra is not complex. Ginestra is tough and strong and, when woven, becomes much softer.”
She nodded to my notepad—a wordless instruction for me to take notes.
The rain began to fall late in the afternoon, and by seven o’clock it was still drizzling. I called my cousin Luisa about Vincenzo’s Passion play.
“Marco, it’s raining,” she said. “They canceled it.”
For some reason I thought that the Passion play would go on in spite of any weather. Instead, I offered to treat my cousins to pizza from the Golden Rabbit in Tiriolo. Masino and I drove the four miles, returning with the pizzas and arancini, stuffed rice balls. While we were eating, I told them about the people I’d met. They were impressed that I had run into the artists of the city. These outcasts, vagabondi, had a kind of celebrity aura about them.
I was able to meet and get along with even the most offbeat that Gimigliano had to offer. And that, oddly, had drawn me closer to my cousins. We sat back, drank homemade wine, and relaxed. Tommaso put on the end of a soccer game.
The rain came down in spikes. The wind whistled through the alleys and gaps in the windowsills. The curtains floated on cold puffs of air. I threw on an extra blanket and crawled into bed. Rain, then hail, sprayed against the window The electricity went off, to return intermittently At midnight the church bells rang for a solid two minutes; when the last chime of bell floated away, the lonely sound of rain pelting my windows returned. It was Easter Sunday.