I HAD JUST DOWNED TWO BRIOCHES and a cappuccino at the breakfast buffet in the hotel bar when Nino approached me. “Signore Rotella,” he said, formally, “tomorrow morning Roccaforte is good for you?”“Sure,” I said.
“Pino will take you.”
“Who’s Pino?”
“Pino’s Pino. Don’t worry. He knows all the roads. Meet him out front at about eleven. Actually, he’ll be parked down the street at the corner.”
“How will I know who he is?”
“You’ll know”
On Corso Garibaldi I tried hard to find the bus to Gambarie. I wanted to stop off at Santo Stefano, hometown of Giuseppe Musolino, the Calabrese Robin Hood.
Their history had taught the Calabresi to trust no one. Since the time of the Bruttians, the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, English, French,
and Spaniards all took bites out of Calabria until, eventually, they left her to fend for herself. As a result, the Calabrese peasantry became secretive, especially toward anyone new, and they learned to turn to those who would fight for their needs. Criminals to others, brigands were their sustenance.
During times of war, between France and Spain, for instance, brigands formed guerrilla armies that assisted any group they thought would benefit their countrymen best. In any history book about Calabria, the story of brigandage is told; its spirit evolved into what is now the mafia.
The mafia took root in Calabria as the expression of peasant law, even though its members were officially considered criminals. It continues to exist partly because the Calabresi fear the criminal element into which it has evolved, which has long since stopped representing the people, but also because some of them don’t want to disrespect the body that has governed them for centuries.
One name that every Calabrese mentions with pride is that of Giuseppe Musolino, a brigand of the early twentieth century who was as beloved by the Calabrese people as he was feared and abhorred by the government and military.
I walked the length of Corso Garibaldi, trying to find out where and when the bus to Gambarie stopped. Everyone had an answer, none of which was the same. I asked the owner of an outdoor edicola, a newsstand, in front of which was supposed to be a bus stop.
“I think it’s every hour,” he said. “It should be coming soon.”
“I’ve been waiting for about forty-five minutes,” I responded.
“Hmm,” he said, “that’s odd.” He called out to an old man standing on the other side of the store. “Nino, the bus to Gambarie. When does it stop here?”
The old man shook his head. “Does it stop here? I thought they changed that two years ago.”
The shop owner turned back to me. “Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen it,” he said apologetically. “I don’t think it stops here anymore.”
A man walked into the shop. “Ciao, Luigi.” The store owner addressed him. “Tell me, do you know where this gentleman can get the bus to Gambarie?”
“Ah, Gambarie’s beautiful. Nice views, good day hikes in the mountains.”
“I’m not really going as far as Gambarie,” I said. “I want to go to Santo Stefano.”
“What’s in Santo Stefano?”
“The birthplace of Musolino,” I said, fearing that this new information would create further confusion.
“Oh, yes, of course. He died here in Reggio. Did you know that? In a hospital. It’s pathetic that they let him die like that.”
“Yes, well, that’s where I’m trying to go,” I said, looking at my watch. I had already lost an hour, and I knew that the last bus returned at three. “The hotel said that I could catch the bus here.” How was it that no one here knew how to get to a point only an hour away that was not only the birthplace of a Calabrese hero but a ski resort to boot?
“Aah, that’s the problem,” the old man said. “The people at the hotel don’t take the bus. You have to go to the train station to get the bus.”
By the time I got to the train station, I had lost almost another hour. Again I asked around, and again no one knew which bus went to Gambarie. The little clock sign in the bus information booth indicated that the staff was on its break and wouldn’t be back until eleven; it was already a quarter after.
A bus pulled into the station. I walked over to the driver. “Can you tell me the bus to Gambarie?”
“It’s this one,” the driver said.
On Italian noncity buses, there are always two men working. One drives, while the other accepts payment and gives out receipts.
I asked the ticket man if he could let me off at Santo Stefano and when the next bus could pick me up.
He looked up at me. “But this is the last bus for the day The last one going up and the last one returning.”
“Can I get a taxi from there back?” I asked.
“It would be hard, and anyway, it would cost too much,” he said. “But we’ll figure something out.”
He walked up to the front of the bus to begin his ticket collecting.
“Scusa, signore,” he called out to me. “Sit here.” He pointed to the front two seats, usually reserved for the ticket collector. When he finished collecting tickets, from a nearly full bus, he sat down and pulled out a map. I explained that I had two more days in Reggio before I had to go back to Catanzaro.
“Then you could come back tomorrow?”
“I can’t. I’m going to Roccaforte.”
The ticket man leaned back in his seat, but said only, “That’s a distance. Deep in the Aspromonte.”
The driver, who had a larger build and wore dark sunglasses, turned to me and said, “Do you like jazz?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Big band?”
“It’s one of my favorite kinds of music,” I said.
“Good. I love the American pop standard,” he said, enunciating the words in heavily accented English.
We drove through the suburbs of Reggio, gradually gaining altitude, until the paved streets and cramped apartments gave way to steep slopes with valleys dropping far below Orange and lemon trees grew on the mountainsides. I had seen olive trees grown on such steep mountains, but never orange trees. Well outside Reggio, the bus driver flicked on his portable tape player. I could just barely hear a trumpet calling out over a slow, measured rhythm.
“When we get to Santo Stefano,” the ticket collector said, “you and I will get out and Napoleone”—pointing to the bus driver—“will head off for Gambarie—you don’t want to see Gambarie, do you?”
“No, not this trip.”
“Good. Next trip, when you come back to Reggio, you’ll go to Gambarie.”
“Okay,” I said. It seemed that almost everyone I talked to, once they knew that I was of Calabrese descent, assumed that I would return. Or perhaps this was the Calabrese idea of time in play: if I didn’t return next year or the year after, surely I’d come back within ten or twenty
“Va bene. We will find out what we can about Musolino.”
We drove in front of a town that looked as if it was accessible only by mule. A steep drop to a trickling ravine separated the road from the village on the other side of the gorge.
“This is Podargoni,” Napoleone, the music man, said. “Do you know … aah, come si dice … Tonio Bennett’,” he said, with an accent on the last syllable as if to say “Benetto.”
“Yes, of course, Tony Bennett!”
“Yes, I think he comes from there,” he said. “Or maybe somewhere around here. Yes, yes, it is Podargoni.”
I could hear my father proudly crowing, “ … and Tony Bennett, now he’s Calabrese!”
Within these deep crevices and deceiving plateaus, Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army of Red Shirts encountered their toughest battle in the struggle to liberate Italy from Bourbon rule. In every Italian city, major streets and piazzas have been named for him and for other men responsible for uniting Italy: Giuseppe Garibaldi, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, and King Vittorio Emmanuelle. (However, some Italians in the north may be heard cursing below their breath, “Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy. He divided Africa!”)
It was here at the Battle of Aspromonte in September 1862 that Garibaldi suffered a setback. He was shot in the heel, but he survived and marched north to continue the Risorgimento, or resurrection, of Italy. In 1991 part of the battle site was turned into a national park, with Gambarie as a ski resort at its edges. The area also boasts the Museo di Garibaldi.
About an hour later the bus stopped at the municipal offices of Santo Stefano, which served as the records office, mayor’s office, and police station. The ticket man took my arm. Two women and a tall blond young man got off, too. The ticket man greeted everyone as we walked up the stairs together until we came to the records office. The tall blond man turned out to be a carabiniere from Rome who had been stationed in the Gambarie area for a year. The carabinieri were never from the cities in which they worked, a policy designed to thwart corruption.
A woman with bleached hair rolled into a bun greeted us at the records office. She knew the ticket man, who introduced me, saying, “We are looking for records about Musolino, Giuseppe.”
“Giuseppe Musolino?” the woman said. “Why?”
“This gentleman is visiting from New York and wants to know more about him.”
“Va bene. When was he born?”
The ticket man looked at me.
I shrugged. “Sometime at the end of the nineteenth century?” I didn’t remember the exact date.
“Last century,” the woman said. “Then we have to look in these files.” She opened a closet and pulled out a book two feet wide by three feet high. She opened it and placed it in front of us. Everything was handwritten and documented by family name.
The ticket man, very patient, asked her, “You know who we’re talking about, don’t you?”
“No,” the woman said innocently
“He’s famous, he’s a brigante.” A brigand.
“Oh, I see, Giuseppe … Musolino … Brigante …”
“No, no,” the carabiniere interjected from behind us. “Dio mio, he’s a brigand—famous!” He looked at me and rolled his eyes.
She pulled out another record. “Oh, here it is! Giuseppe Musolino, born November 21, 1892.” I was pleased to hear that it was the same year my grandfather was born.
“Where did he die?” the ticket man asked.
“It doesn’t say In Reggio, maybe?”
“That could be it,” the ticket man said.
“I thought the birth date was earlier than that,” I said. The carabiniere nodded in agreement.
Time had run out, and the three of us went outside to wait for the bus. As we walked out, a woman walked in. She had dark brown eyes and curly dark brown hair and a gap between her front teeth. She reminded me of a Greek woman I had dated my first year in New York. The carabiniere invited the ticket man and me to stop in the local bar for a drink. Inside, we met three other officers. The
carabiniere ordered beer; everyone else had a coffee. The ticket man started up a conversation with the other carabinieri, whom he seemed to know
“I like American women,” the Roman said to me.
“Why is that?”
“They’re not shy,” he said. “They’re fun. Easy to talk to.”
“How have you found the women here?” I asked.
“My God, they’re afraid to talk to any man.”
This I found to be true. I was hardly able to engage any woman in conversation. Even when they were with their husbands or boyfriends, they seemed guarded.
“Here in the south everyone is watching. Everyone will talk about them afterward.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, all they want is to get married,” the Roman said, “and that’s no fun.”
A horn blew outside.
“Mi dispiace,” the driver said. “Back to work.”
We got on the bus, and the ticket man and bus driver traded places.
“So, was it worth it?” the jazz man asked.
“I need to spend more time here one day,” I said.
“You should spend time at Gambarie,” the jazz man repeated as he opened the change purse strapped to his waist and took out a stack of tickets. “Come in the winter and go skiing. Then, when you’re tired, relax on the sunny beaches in Reggio.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You should also visit Musolino’s grave next time.”
I turned to find the dark woman sitting behind me. She smiled and blinked slowly, as if embarrassed to initiate a conversation with me. “His grave is across the street from the commune, just up the hill. But that’s when you return.”
And I believed I would.