Root-Bound
Tangled in a web of roots, she is undone by Italian hospitality.
My first visit to Sicily was with my mother, when I was fourteen—we were there to look up her Sicilian relatives on the outskirts of Palazzolo Acreide. Although my mother was born in New York, her older brother had lived in Sicily until he was sixteen, so it was through his recollections that she pieced together the location of her ancestral home and the distant cousins who still lived there.
Palazzolo, located well off the tourist track southeast of Siracusa, did not lend itself to casual visitors. At the time of our visit there were no tourist offices or large hotels, just a small square surrounded by a crumbling baroque church, a bakery, and a few cafés. Women in black sat on benches, and groups of men wearing vests and Borsalino hats strolled around the square’s perimeter. It appeared no one under the age of fifty-five lived there.
Up to that point, everything I knew about Sicily I learned from reading The Godfather. The book was making the rounds at my junior high school—not for its literary merits of course, but for the violence and raunchy sex scenes. An ambitious reader before me had created a Cliff’s Notes version of the book by highlighting all the graphic sections, such as the one in which Sonny Corleone bangs Lucy Mancini (a bridesmaid) on his wedding day. The Godfather was set mostly in New York, but the Sicily scenes shaped my expectations of what I might find there.
Standing in the square, it felt like we were living a page right out the book.
My mother was a travel writer for our local paper back home, and this wasn’t the first time I’d been dragged along on one of her crazy international escapades. As a ten-year-old I’d been smuggled into a nightclub in the Bahamas while she interviewed Peanuts Taylor, the famous bongo drummer, for an article about the maiden voyage of Carnival’s first cruise ship, “the Mardi Gras” (although the real story was that shortly after pulling away from the dock, the ship ran aground on a sandbar just outside the Port of Miami). I’d been with her to Haiti, where we visited the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince and learned about Vodou symbolism in the colorful paintings. And when I was twelve, I accompanied her to Cartagena, Colombia, where we toured a plantation that made “vitamins” from coca leaves.
Now it was the 1970s, and Alex Haley’s miniseries Roots had turned everyone into amateur genealogists.
“We will go to the old country,” she declared, “and find our Sicilian roots.” She pitched the story to her editor, and off we went in search of—as she put it—“our Italian Kunta Kinte.”
“Mi scusi,” she said, trying to ask one of the men if he knew the location of the Rizza family farm outside of town. He refused to talk to her, and the women uniformly glared at us. For once, my mother’s reporter charm wasn’t getting us very far. It seemed we were up against a deeply ingrained suspicion of strangers and might not possess the linguistic skills to bridge the gap. Finally, a woman came out of a bakery and looked at the documents we held. As she drew a crude map and gave it to my mother, I felt like the whole town was watching.
“Should we stay here for lunch?” my mother asked.
“Are you kidding? Let’s get going before they shoot us or something.” I was half expecting a black sedan to come screeching around the corner and start firing bullets into the square.
She rolled her eyes and we got back in the car.
The directions led us out of town down several miles of un-maintained roads, past acres of cactus and then olive trees. After about twenty minutes, the road petered out, and my mother stopped the car in front of a modest stone farmhouse. She knocked on the door, clutching the yellowed family photos and the map. A slender young man about nineteen opened the door, and my mother thrust the documents into his face as if he were a customs agent.
“We’re here from America!” she shouted.
He immediately shut the door. A minute later, a much older man in a threadbare undershirt who looked like he’d just woken from a nap emerged from the house along with a woman wearing rubber gloves and an apron splotched with red stains. They looked like Italian hillbillies, the Ma and Pa Kettle of Sicily, only more frightening. I imagined dueling banjos playing the theme from Deliverance in the background. For a few anxious moments we all just stared at each other. Then my mother pointed out the house in the photo she held. Aside from the trees, which had grown considerably, the house was relatively unchanged. That clinched the deal.
We were ushered into the house and despite our unexpected arrival, put up for the next three days. Their son was banished to the couch, “Ma and Pa” took his room, and we were given their bedroom.
Although my mother knew some Italian, the relatives spoke only in Sicilian dialect. I sat by silently as they struggled to communicate with each other, feeling as if I was watching a foreign film without subtitles. When we arrived, “Ma” had been in the middle of roasting and canning tomatoes, and the house smelled sweet and savory. I couldn’t understand her words, but I could interpret that rich wonderful scent in any language.
I still remember the food we ate that weekend. In addition to being a travel writer, my mother also wrote a weekly food column, so I grew up eating what would have been considered exotic at the time—borscht, tagines and curries. Our family dinners were often results of research for her food column, straight out of the test kitchen and onto our plates. Admittedly, the majority of the tests proved unsuccessful.
But here, there was pasta with sardines, fennel, and pine nuts; fried eggplant with ricotta and basil; and arancini, the deep-fried rice balls stuffed with tomato ragu, ground beef, mozzarella, and peas—exactly the way my grandmother made them. There was wine drawn from a big glass jug that looked like an office water cooler, and I had my very first taste of grappa.
On Saturday morning I helped Ma finish putting up the tomatoes and later, in the fading afternoon light, we gathered lemons and she showed us how to make limoncello. My mother shadowed Ma in the kitchen and took careful notes, thrilled that our trip would yield not just a travel story, but a few food articles too.
On Sunday we all drove to town for Mass at the crumbling church off the square where we’d asked for directions. Just days before we were outsiders—strangers—but now we were celebrities. Famiglia! From America!
After Mass I walked in the olive groves with the son. He showed me how they spread out nets to gather the olives, and in broken English asked if he could “scratch my beautiful hair.” I figured he meant touch, not scratch, but my mother and Ma were following close behind, leaving us little opportunity for further cultural exchange under the olive trees.
On the day of our departure, we stood outside the stone house, loaded down with jars of blood orange marmalade, tomato sauce, and bottles of olive oil. As a teenager, it was my job to be sullen and maintain an air of detached boredom, but as we hugged goodbye, my carefully constructed posture of aloofness began to crumble. Their hospitality had pierced me, and I was close to tears.
My mother started writing her “Roots” article immediately after we returned home, but it took two weeks before the film from her camera was developed and we could share our photos with my uncle. When the prints arrived, my uncle studied them carefully. He reached the last one, then slowly flipped though them again.
“Mary,” he finally said to my mother, “Who are these people?”
“That’s Maria and her husband and son.”
“Who?”
“Cousin Maria!”
“This is not Maria,” he said, shaking his head.
“But this is the house,” said my mother. “Don’t you recognize it?”
“I remember this house, I played there as a boy. But our house was farther down the road, past a creek.”
The color drained out of my mother’s face. Had we stayed with complete strangers? As she tried to recall the exact conversation with “Cousin Maria” at the door, she realized we’d never really exchanged names. Ma and Pa called each other Mario and Mama, and since she never revealed her real name, we called her Mama too. We’d just been swept up into their home and their lives, no questions asked. Our status as blood relatives was based solely on a dog-eared photo.
I found all of this completely hilarious, but my mother was horrified that the roots she thought were hers belonged to some other tree. We later discovered that cousin Maria and her family had moved to Catania twelve years earlier. Even if we had found the “right” house, our real relatives would have been long gone.
Thirty years later, when my mother was in her seventies, we returned to Sicily to connect with our genuine blood relations in Catania. This time, we were veramente la famiglia. True family. Once again we were plied with copious amounts of food and drink, and once again we were given the master bedroom. The experience varied little from our first trip.
Maybe I hadn’t been so far off, learning about Sicily by reading the Godfather. If only I’d paid more attention to the plot, I would have realized it was actually a story about the enduring bonds of family—regardless of whether you were related by blood. If you presented yourself as loyal to the family, you were accepted as family. Our first trip to Sicily was evidence of that. This time we were connected by blood, but I would always be connected to Ma and Pa by love.
Marcy Gordon’s narrative travel writing has appeared online for World Hum and in many Travelers’ Tales anthologies including More Sand in My Bra, 30 Days in Italy and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 and 2010. She is the editor of Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana: Funny Travel Stories from the Road (Travelers’ Tales, 2012). She also writes Come for the Wine, a popular blog that features wine tourism destinations around the world. Visit www.comeforthewine.com for more information.