FOR SIXTY YEARS my grandmother sent money every month to the Madonna di Porto. For sixty years she prayed to the Virgin, whose image she had posted in every room except the bathroom. And the one time she returned to Gimigliano, she took off her shoes and walked barefoot the three miles from the village to the Chiesa della Madonna di Porto.In June, fifty days after Easter, at Pentecost, the population of Gimigliano and the surrounding municipality swells from about thirty-five hundred to more than twenty thousand. Pilgrims come from all over Calabria; they return from their adopted homes in northern Italy, elsewhere in Europe, Canada, and the United States. They come from South America; they come from Australia. They come on their naked feet, they come with prayers, and they come to cry.
The Madonna di Porto arose from a cult of Mary worshipers, specifically of the Madonna di Costantinopoli, a phenomenon of southern Italy that began sometime around A.D. 430. In 1528 the Gimiglianese made their own appeal to the Virgin to spare them from the plague.
Almost a hundred years later earthquakes devastated the area, killing thousands of Calabresi. The Gimiglianesi pleaded once again to the Virgin but realized that their petition needed its own painting, its own icon. In 1626 the region’s archpriest commissioned a painter from the neighboring village of Gagliano, called Marcangione, to paint the Virgin.
Marcangione must have suffered some kind of creative block because for days he couldn’t begin. One morning he awoke to the sun filling his studio. When his eyes had adjusted to the light, he looked over at what he expected to be a blank canvas, the beginning of another fruitless day. But there, illuminated by the sun’s rays, was a portrait of the Madonna in vivid blues and reds, with the baby Jesus at her breast.
The miracle didn’t stop there. Just over another hundred years later, in 1753, a petty thief, Pietro Gatto, fled Gimigliano late one afternoon after having committed a crime. The sun had begun to set. In the failing light he lost the trails. He must have wandered from mountain to mountain into deep forests. The air became colder. He skirted the rocky edge of a mountain, then, seeking a vantage point, decided to climb it. On the way up, his foot slipped into a hole that he soon realized was large enough to enter. It was slightly warmer there, so for shelter he climbed inside. He could stay there until the morning. That night the Virgin appeared to him in a dream.
Pietro awoke knowing just which way to go. When he got out of the wilderness, he visited the local priest to confess his sins and to tell him his dream. He explained that the Virgin had instructed him to build a tiny chapel in her honor at a bend in the Corace River known as the Porto, or port, for its stretch of flat riverbanks. Here the miraculous portrait of the Madonna would be held when it wasn’t at the church in Gimigliano Superiore.
The chapel was built, and every year at Pentecost the painting is carried on the shoulders of a dozen men from the church in Gimigliano Superiore along the winding three miles to the Chiesa della Madonna di Porto along the Corace River, the entire stretch packed with pilgrims. Never mind that the painting was never sanctioned by the Vatican as a true miracle. For the villagers in Calabria,
the Vatican is too far away to pay it any attention. And after all, in 1984 Pope John Paul II did bless the painting.
The Porto holds a small festival the first Tuesday after Easter Sunday Ciccio Paonessa, Maria the café proprietor’s husband, drove me to there in his red Fiat Panda, which he told me he drove only when he went hunting in the mountains. As always, he was well dressed in a light tan cashmere sport coat and pressed gray pants. A handkerchief poked out of his pocket, and his brown shoes shone. He was a manager at the Banco di Napoli in Catanzaro, and it seemed that he held a local political position as well.
“I’d like to show you something,” he said, “a wonderful place to go to clear your head.”
The barely paved road hugged the mountain, and chestnut and pine trees grew right along its edge. A dirty sheep darted out from the trees, followed by another and another. Then a shepherd with his crook walked in front of the car without even glancing at us. On the other side of the road, on a raised mound, two rams faced each other. The shepherd paused to look at them. Then they lowered their heads and struck with an impact that seemed to shudder through their bodies from cranium to bottom. They dug in and attacked again, and again.
An identical Fiat pulled up behind us.
“Aah, il sindaco,” Ciccio said. The mayor.
He motioned for me to get out of the car, and we walked back to the other red Panda. Ciccio introduced me as a Rotella from the United States. The mayor nodded without smiling and extended his hand with a perfunctory benvenuto. He was handsome and stylish, reminding me of an Italian Bryan Ferry. His wife nodded to me from the passenger seat as his young son played with Pokemon figures in the back seat. By then the sheep had crossed the street, and Ciccio said goodbye as we headed back to the car.
When we got above the tree line, Ciccio pulled off the road onto a dirt-packed plateau. We got out and walked to a promontory. The sun had just begun to burn off the clouds.
“Hmm,” he said somewhat disappointedly, and continued looking around. He guided me by the shoulders to my left toward a series of valleys and lower mountains. He pointed to where the mountains stopped.
“That’s the Ionian Sea,” he said. The haze slightly obscured the ocean. Then he turned me 180 degrees and had me look out. Here I could see an expanse of blue. “That’s the Tyrrhenian Sea.”
From this point, with a turn of my head, I could see both oceans: one in front of me, one behind. Here at the narrowest point of the entire boot, the center of Calabria, the land is only about twenty-five miles across. To get from Gimigliano to Naples by train, you have to backtrack to Catanzaro on the Ionian Sea, cut through the mountains and valleys to Lamezia on the Tyrrhenian Sea, then head north to Naples. I imagined the trek my grandparents must have made to get to their ship at Naples. They left their village in a carriage or by mule to Catanzaro, where they took a series of trains to Naples, then a ship to New York. The trip to Naples alone was such a long journey that by the time they boarded the ship, they must have known they were leaving their village forever.
Vendors at the Porto had set up rows of booths in front of the church, offering underwear, shirts, salami, cheeses, and music cassettes. African vendors set out elephants and lions sculpted from wood on colorful blankets. Ciccio stopped a dozen times to shake hands with people he knew from Gimigliano. One of the salami vendors offered us hot espresso.
Behind the church, Ciccio introduced me to the monsignor, a tall, thin gray-haired man who wore dark-framed glasses. When Ciccio explained who I was, the monsignor took me into the chapel, which was filling with pilgrims, and from a table handed me a pamphlet about the miracle. A stream of water flowed up from some underground source into the chapel, surrounding a small altar. Pilgrims bent down, filled vials with the holy water, and kissed them as they popped the lids on.
“If you write anything,” the monsignor said, “the Madonna di Porto will be the most important part of your book.”
On the way out Ciccio stopped to talk to a friend, and I stopped
at a stand selling cassettes. Along with pop music from the sixties and seventies, there was Italian folk music recorded in the forties and fifties.
I reached for a tape of tarantellas. If any one music defines Calabria, it’s the tarantella, literally a dance to rid oneself of a spider’s venom. The high-pitched drone of the zampogne, or bagpipes, wails in the foreground as drums thump out a rhythm, the music gradually picking up momentum as the dancer goes into a euphoric state.
Calabrese folk songs dominated the rest of the shelves, half of the tapes featuring versions of “Calabresella Mia,” the popular folk song Tommaso had drunkenly sung the night before. A section was devoted to the songs of Otello Profazio, Calabria’s famous high-voiced bard who sings Calabria’s story as he strums mournful chords on his guitar. There was also a section labeled “Musica della mafia,” generic pink, blue, and yellow cassette cases with labels that must have come out of a typewriter or someone’s home computer.
I asked the vendor, a middle-aged man with smoke-stained fingers and large glasses, what kind of music this was. “Oh, just another style of folk music,” he said, shrugging. “Sung about mafiosi.”
This music was performed by musicians hired to play for mafiosi bosses throughout Calabria. Songs of revenge and pledges of faith to the ’ndrangheta, they are sung in the style of stornelli, or narrative tales—a style very similar to that of Otello Profazio. Many of these songs were also sung by Calabrese contadini working their fields. The line between folk music and mafia songs was often blurred. The only difference now is that the musica della mafia—or at least public performances of the music—is officially banned in Italy.
We ended the trip with a coffee back at Maria’s bar, where Maria’s sister was serving. Outside, a man passed by with his mule laden with firewood.
“Aah, the last mule in Gimigliano,” Ciccio said.
One of the regulars, a short old man with no teeth and a nose that looked as if it had been partially sheared off in some sort of accident, came up to me and muttered something in dialect that I understood: “Are you married?”
“Yes,” I said.
He said something in return—this time I caught only “donkey” and “wife”—then let loose a hearty laugh. I looked to Maria for help. She was flushed red, as was her sister.
“I can’t understand him,” she said, averting her eyes. “He’s crazy and a bit drunk.”
The old man ignored Maria and repeated what he’d said, this time with gestures. I turned to Maria, who nervously served my coffee. When he repeated himself a third time, she scolded him. By then I finally understood what he was saying: “I’ll give you a day with my mule if you give me a night with your wife.”
I called Giuseppe just as he was closing the shop. I was worried about Elena and concerned because I hadn’t heard from him. I had missed seeing him and his family over the Easter holidays.
“Marco, come va?” Giuseppe asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “How is Elena?”
“She’s doing much better now We actually had to bring her to the hospital. But she was fine by Easter.” He paused, then added, “We didn’t hear from you.”
“I thought I’d let you have some time with your family”
“Aah,” Giuseppe said, and with that mere sound let me know that I could have, should have, called. “So, Marco, are you ready for a short trip?”
“Yes,” I said, barely able to conceal my excitement.
“I’ll meet you in the piazza in twenty minutes,” Giuseppe said. “Let’s go to Maida, the village of your writer, Talese.”