IT WAS Unto the Sons, written by Gay Talese, that offered me my first glimpse of Calabria and of Italian-Americans of Calabrese descent. It gave me the tools to begin to understand my grandparents and the choices they made, as well as the Italian-American culture in which my father had grown up. It is not an exaggeration to say that the book spurred my exploration of my Italian self.Forty-five minutes from Gimigliano—fifteen as the crow flies—is the town of Maida, Talese’s ancestral village. Maida was the last holdout of the French during their brief rule of the Two Sicilies. In 1806 the Spanish Bourbons had asked the British to assist them in reclaiming their land from the French. The British, heavily outnumbered by the French, landed and defeated the French at the Battle of Maida. That battle proved that Napoleon’s army could be defeated, and it is after this battle that the London district Maida Vale was named.
I was envious that Talese could trace his ancestors’ participation in any battle. He had spent months researching his book in Maida, and as a first-generation immigrant he had access to first cousins still
living in Italy who could tell him stories of their family’s past. By the time I arrived in Gimigliano, as a second-generation Italian-American, most of the people who remembered my grandparents, and especially their parents, had long since died. I could continue to dream that these immigrants, who were looked down upon by many Americans, had performed important deeds, lived celebrated lives back in Italy, but I could never prove it.
The valley of Lamezia opened up as Giuseppe and I headed into the descending sun. There, along the gentle slopes of olive trees, the sand-colored city of Maida quietly rested, its once-mighty Norman castle now a worn cap on top of sagging shoulders. Newer buildings filled the valley, through which a bumpy old mule path road led us uphill, through a narrow opening in the castle wall. Dwellings had been carved into the thick sandstone walls.
We drove to a brightly lit tabaccheria, a kind of cigarette and candy store, that opened onto an empty large piazza. I asked the owner, whom Giuseppe had known for years, about the city’s Italian-American biographer. “Ah, Signore Talese. Yes, that was about twenty years ago, I was just a kid then. But I remember Signore Talese writing here. He lived … you know, I can’t quite remember where he lived. But he was respected here.”
The talk returned to business, and he and Giuseppe caught each other up on the events of their lives. Then the owner’s wife came down from their upstairs apartment to say that dinner was almost ready
“Aah, Giuseppe. I had no idea you were here,” she said politely The owner sighed and said that he should close.
“Well, Marco, we should probably head out ourselves,” Giuseppe said. “Time for dinner.”
The sun had long since set, and lights from villages across the valley sparkled like those of ships at sea.
“Marco,” Giuseppe began, “you went to college, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What did you study?”
“I studied Russian literature.”
Giuseppe turned to me, startled.
“But why?”
I explained to him that it was the first literature that I loved, when I was in high school. After that I had studied acting and dance, and ballet dancing had made me want to study Russian.
“Just like my son Luigi,” Giuseppe said. “I mean, he’s involved in theater and dance. I’m paying all this money for him to study something that he will never make a living at.”
I told Giuseppe I was sure my father had felt as he did and reassured him that it is possible to make a living in dance, albeit a small one. I was sure everything would work out.
Giuseppe glanced at me. It didn’t seem that I had convinced him.
The road back to Gimigliano took us through Tiriolo, Gimigliano’s wealthier sister city It lies on the other side of the Strada dei Due Mari, the Road of the Two Seas, which connects the Ionian Sea with the Tyrrhenian. With about three thousand people, Tiriolo is slightly smaller than Gimigliano but has many times the amenities. The village’s passeggiata runs along a breathtaking promontory overlooking the distant city of Catanzaro and the Ionian Sea. Unlike Gimigliano, the streets are lined with cafés, jewelry stores, restaurants, and cell phone outlets. The sidewalks are cleaner, and the stores have lighted windows and marquees.
In both Gimigliano and Tiriolo, silk weavers make a living, but Tiriolo has successfully marketed itself as the place to go for silk shawls and table linens. Both villages are known for their octogenarian women in traditional dress, but the difference in costume is indicative of everything else: while the Gimiglianese costume is beautiful in its austerity (a black dress with black embroidery on the bodice, worn over a white blouse), the Tiriolese costume has bright red and green colors woven in.
But what truly casts Gimigliano in shadow is Tiriolo’s stature as a city of antiquity. Many classicist scholars placed Odysseus’s marriage to Nausicaa there. After his ship is destroyed at sea, Odysseus is washed ashore at what is now the Gulf of Sant’Eufemia, where the Lamezia airport now stands. He awakes to find three “fair-braided”
girls washing clothes. One light-complexioned maiden, Nausicaa, catches his attention. “I am at your knees, mistress,” Odysseus says. “Are you some god or a mortal?”
Sometime in the early 1990s the people of Tiriolo cleverly decided to erect in the village square a statue depicting the meeting of the two lovers. From this point, the highest in Tiriolo, you can see the beaches of Lamezia, where the mythical sailor washed ashore. From the square, the street curves away from the buildings to a promenade lined with benches overlooking the valley. Giuseppe slowed the car and pointed to Catanzaro in the distance, and the Ionian Sea just beyond, where Nausicaa’s father set Odysseus back on his course home. Looking out that way, I was struck by the parallel between Nausicaa’s father’s allowing her husband to leave for a better place and Calabria’s allowing her sons to leave for work, for food she couldn’t provide.
That night Elena showed me how to make the simple dish of sauteed chicory, the green we had pulled from the ground during my first days in Gimigliano. She had gathered it in the woods above Gimigliano.
“I like picking chicory,” she said. “I like the walk, and it’s so peaceful.”
After she had cleaned and scrubbed the chicory, she boiled it in salted water until it was tender, then sauteed it with garlic and oil and mixed in some grated pecorino and bread crumbs to make a delicious contorno that brought together crunch, tenderness, and bitter richness.
It brought to mind the fairy tale of the three sisters and the dragon. I wondered if those three sisters ever missed gathering the chicory, which seemed to me to be an integral part of enjoying the dish. I wondered if they missed the comforting, smoky taste.