Friday, June 30, 2017

Montagano real estate

Warning: this is going to be a frustrating post because you're going to want photos and I don't have them. Maybe my kids will come through with some later.

The whole time we were in Montagano we couldn't help thinking about real estate. Hey, we're Californians...it's in our blood. Actually, Laura and Michael (from Connecticut and New York, respectively) were just as interested. Anyone would be. There were "Vendisi" (For sale) signs everywhere, and we'd heard that you could buy a house for as little as $5,000. It was like being a Russian plutocrat or a Chinese billionaire in New York City.

On Saturday morning, June 24, before most of gli americani took off for home or their next port of call, a young couple named Silvia and Nicola offered to take us around and show us a few of the properties for sale. We all wanted to go. Peter missed a bet when he didn't offer a "real estate experience" alongside all the food adventures.

The first place we saw, and by far the most appealing, was Silvia's grandmother's house. Nonna is now in her late 90s and living with Silvia's mom, and from the looks of things the house has been sitting vacant for the past 15 years or so. The house had a big, two-room cantina, twice the size of Lorenzo's, with a big tub for foot-stomping grapes. I think there was even some wine still sitting there in giant jugs. Steven was practically salivating at the thought of what he could do in that cantina in the way of winemaking, ham curing, and entertaining.

Upstairs--and there were plenty of terrifyingly steep stairs--were lots of rooms, including a bedroom with several big black plastic garbage bags filled with wool from Nonna's sheep that she'd never gotten around to making into mattresses. The whole place hadn't been updated since the 1940s. from the looks of things, if not a lot earlier. It was sensationally old and decrepit and attractive. And the price was somewhere in the $10,000-$15,000 range.

The one thing I was moved to take a photo of was the house's sole bathroom, located midway between the cantina on the basement floor and the kitchen on the first floor, well above street level. This is looking down from the kitchen. The stairs are even steeper than they look here. You could scramble up from the cantina to rinse your feet after a winemaking session, or totter down there from an upstairs in the middle of the night to answer a call of nature. Split-level convenience, in other words.

When Silvia's grandmother moved out of this house and into her daughter's, she was in her mid-80s. I kept imagining my own mother crawling up and down those stairs every time she wanted to use the bathroom. And then I pictured myself.

Now obviously this bathroom, and a lot of other things about this house, can be upgraded and updated. From talking to people around town, my guess is that the place could be made livable for about $50,000, and downright glamorous for twice that. But that would mean investing not only the money, but also plenty of time and agita. 

We saw a few other houses, all of them in better states of repair and all of them under $80,000, but they all had lots and lots of stairs, and a shortage of railings, and they all needed work. Much as I love the idea of buying a sweet house reeking of history for small change by California standards, it was borne in on me that I am at least twenty years too old to be entertaining these kinds of daydreams. 

However, I detected a "we could do this!" gleam in the eyes of some of the younger members of the party. And they are probably right. This is an aspect of youth that I don't envy, though. If and when I come back to Montagano, it will be to someplace that someone else has already done all the work on. 

One more party before we go

Having been repeatedly fed and feted by the folks in Montagano, early on we'd started talking about perhaps inviting a few of them over and feeding them for a change. Steven is a great cook and worked for years as a professional chef, so when he declared himself ready and able to put together some kind of feast, the rest of us were enthusiastic about helping.

After much back and forth--at one point it seemed possible we'd be cooking for literally the whole town--we settled on dinner on Friday the 23rd, the last night we'd all be in town, for a select group of friends (our hosts Rita and Fernando and their kids, and Maria and Claudio, and Pino the mayor and Paolo the chief of police, and Michael and Laura, the other American citizenship hopefuls, and their companions and hosts, and a few others). The venue would be the Circolo Unione, the social club that Rita and Fernando run and where we'd been hanging out for some portion of almost every day.

The date settled, we had to figure out the menu. Someone--was it Lina?--suggested that Steven make his famous haggis, since it would be an exotically Scottish offering but similar enough to some of the more offal-centric Italian salumi that the Italians might be willing to at least taste it. (Italy Italians are notoriously reluctant to eat anything but Italian food, which is one reason the food in Italy is so traditional and so good.)

When we told some of our Italian friends about the haggis plan, their reaction was incredulous laughter. To them haggis ranked right up there with the stories about people in Cambodia eating dogs and crickets, more evidence of the barbarity of the non-Italian world. Yet one of the local dishes they're proudest of is torcinelli, skewers of lamb liver and other organs wrapped in intestine and roasted. I kept hoping to find it on a restaurant menu, but apparently you have to have someone make it for you at home. Maybe when we come back...

Undeterred by the locals' scoffing, we went ahead with the haggis plan. Peter, our guide to all things Molise and ever resourceful, came up with some key ingredients Steven needed, an adult sheep's stomach, tongue, liver, and heart, while Steven hunted down the porridge oats and onions that make up the rest of the recipe. To complete this Scottish antipasto we had the two Scottish cheddars that Steven's mom, Janice, had brought when she came to visit.

We also had all kinds of other little vegetable antipasti that we'd bought and not gotten around to eating--asparagus in oil, olives, artichoke cream to spread on rusks--so we added them to the table.

Lina and I wanted to make a green salad. Italian salads seem pretty one-dimensional to us--just various greens, and maybe a little tomato, served with oil and vinegar. Salad dressing and other embellishments are rarely seen. So, inspired by an article in the New York Times about an old-school Italian restaurant in Queens, we concocted an Italian-American salad of mostly iceberg lettuce garnished with tomatoes, marinated artichokes, and slivers of provolone and salame, topped with the best approximation of a vinaigrette I could come up with in the absence of either mustard or ketchup.

Danny contributed a platter of his delicious chocolate-dipped biscotti. Michael, our fellow citizenship applicant from New York, announced he was making pasta in tomato sauce. And Claudio, who's a retired baker, demanded to make pizza, which we were happy to let him do. So we had a plan, one that would maintain the level of gluttony that we'd been adhering to the whole visit.

By the time we came back from the fountain tour that evening, Steven had assembled the haggis, boiled it, and roasted it in the oven. Lina and I threw our salad together and everyone arranged the other dishes. Then we carried all of it downstairs and down the street to the Circolo, where Rita and Fernando had arranged the furniture into one long banquet table.

Claudio had made five kinds of pizza--onion, anchovy, mushroom, tomato, and tomato and cheese. There was enough for twice as many people as were there. He cut the slices with scissors. All five kinds were all great, but the onion disappeared the fastest.

From left to right: Scottish cheddar, Claudio's pizza, our salad, beer, water, some asparagus sott'olio. Don't you wish you could have been there?


Here's Steven slicing up the haggis. I was thrilled to get to taste this, after hearing about it for so many years. It was delicious, with a lot of onion and pepper balancing out the liver. Despite their trepidations, the Montaganesi liked it, too.

 Here's Claudio, who was one of the big scoffers, having seconds. Maria wasn't quite as enthusiastic, but maybe it was because she'd already eaten dinner by the time the party got underway.
That black pot was full of Michael's pasta before we ate it all. The salad and the biscotti were hits, too. The fact was, everything was really good.

In addition to the pizza, Claudio made "bones" out of pizza dough sprinkled with sugar. He was obviously worried there might not be enough to eat.
By this point even Steven was starting to feel uncomfortably full.











Then with much fanfare, Fernando et al. unveiled a big, gooey cake with "Arrivederci a Montagano" and the town's crest beautifully inscribed in icing. We could hardly refuse to have some, and so have some we did.


















The town has some gifts for us, too--"I heart Montagano" T-shirts for all the visitors. That called for more photographs.


Paolo took these two and put them up on Facebook. Here are "gli americani"...


...and here's the whole gang. I'm not sure who a few of the people are, but they are Circolo regulars and/or family of someone or other. That's Fernando in the green shirt between Max and Steven, and his wife, Rita, in front of him, and their son, Francesco, kneeling in front of her (in the pink shirt); his girlfriend, Sophia, is on his left. His sister, Luciana, is to the left of Jorge. To the right of Jorge is Marco, Claudio and Maria's youngest son, who runs the little market two doors down from the Circolo. Francesca, the vice-mayor, is to the left of Luciana. 

We were also presented with personal membership cards for the Circolo Unione, which means whenever we are in town we can breeze right past the "Forbidden to non-members" sign and hang out as long as we want.

The party finally broke up and we staggered home, carrying bags of leftover pizza that Maria kept insisting would be perfect travel food. 

The whole occasion was very bittersweet. We'd had such a great time in Montagano, and we'd been treated like family by all these people who hadn't ever heard of us until we landed in their midst, and now we were all leaving, for a long time and maybe for good. "We'll see you next year," our Montaganesi friends kept saying. "Next year." I certainly hope so. 

The fountain tour

On Thursday the 22nd, during the wine-and-cookie celebration of our citizenship application, Pino and Paolo had proposed that they give us a tour of a few of Montagano's 50 or so fountains. They decided the best time would be at 6 the next evening, late enough to avoid the midday heat but before our good-bye party at the Circolo started at 8:30. Because of course there had to be a good-bye party.

So on Friday at 6 Max, Lina, Stephany, and I, along with Laura, Jorge, Michael, and a friend of his who'd arrived from Rome, assembled at the town hall for our tour. (Steven was home working on the haggis he was making for the dinner, and Danny was taking a break from trying to listen to people.) We set off with Paolo and Pino in the town's very beat-up van.

Montagano's hills are full of natural springs, and the town's fountains are not decorative waterworks but stone basins, most of them out in the fields around the town, built to provide water to the townspeople, their animals, and their crops. Maria told me that when she was a little girl, people still got their household water by filling large jugs at the fountains and carrying them home on their heads. Today people continue to use them to water their fields, and maybe some of them are still drinking it, too.

Paolo drove us a little way outside of town and dropped us off at the top of a path. The tour involved a beautiful walk through fields and woods, along a trail that has probably existed for centuries and that led us from one fountain to the next. The fountains have recently been restored, so they look very tidy and new. This one is pretty typical.

This lady was working in her garden next to one of the fountains when we came along. She stopped gardening to watch us. A hose led from the fountain to her tomato plants.



Most of the others in the group sampled the water, except at the fountains where Pino warned us the water quality wasn't very good because of upstream farms or cattle. As far as I know, no one got sick.




Along the way, we also revisited the church at Faifoli. It was still locked tight, but Pino and Paolo encouraged us to ring the church bell and hop the fence to the (private) property next door, where we could view the man-made grotto where long ago someone saw a vision of the Virgin Mary enthroned in a tree. Danny and I hadn't dared to do either of these things when we'd visited the church a few days before, but if you're with the mayor and the police chief, who's going to stop you from doing just about anything?


Of course Paolo had to get some photos. Here we are on the church steps--from left to right, Jorge, Laura, Pino, me, Michael, Max, Paolo, Lina, and Stephany.

At one point along the way Paolo hailed a man as we passed by a farm and engaged him in animated conversation. A little while later, while we were stopped at one more fountain, the man arrived bearing three bottles of wine and some biscotti. The wine was his own production--a not-to-sweet muscat wine that Paolo told us is typical of the area, a very floral white, and a nice full-bodied red. No money changed hands; it was just one more expression of Montaganesi hospitality, and readiness to have a party on any pretext.


Here's our benefactor, opening up his wine for us. The bucket is full of cold water from the fountain, to chill the wine.

And here's Paolo, serving up the muscat wine. It was sensational with the biscotti.

But it was now past 8 p.m. and this party was starting to bump up against the next one. I told Paolo we had to be getting home--because we were supposed to be making part of the dinner. 

Thursday, June 29, 2017

The big day (sort of)

On Thursday, June 22, we got the word we'd been waiting for: at 6 p.m. that evening we were to present ourselves at the Montagano city hall to sign citizenship documents, the climax of our two-week "citizenship vacation" in the town.

Peter, our citizenship impresario, had alerted us months before that it would be nice if we'd bring gifts for this occasion, to give to the city officials and staff who were making this all possible. Now the time had come. So that afternoon we had to figure out to whom we'd should give what and how to wrap or package it. These regalini (little presents) aren't bribes, just little mementos that let the people who are helping us with this bureaucratic process, arduous for them as well as for us, how much we appreciate their efforts.

We'd packed in some tote bags with vintage California fruit-box labels printed on them, a CD of sacred music from the California missions, and a California-poppy key ring. Lina contributed some beautiful scarves from Cambodia, packets of organic Cambodian pepper, and some other little handicraft items. Max had gotten a stars-and-stripes fidget spinner. So we showed up at the appointed time with five little gift bags, one each for Pino the mayor, Paolo the chief of police, Francesca the vice-mayor, and Anna and Lucia, the two staff responsible for transcribing and processing our applications.

At Peter's direction we also brought a tray of cookies from a bakery in Campobasso, and Laura, one of the other two citizenship aspirants in our group, had purchased five bottles of prosecco. Because this was no mere bureaucratic procedure--like so much else in Montagano, it was going to be a party.

Laura, Michael, Max, Lina, and I get ready to sign
At the town hall we all sat down in our appointed places and signed the papers that were put in front of us, while everyone else took dozens of photos. (These were snapped by Danny. I'm looking forward to seeing the ones from Peter and Paolo, who's a real shutterbug.)

Listening to Peter explain, again, what we were signing
Even though Peter repeatedly explained the whole citizenship process to us, I now discover that I'm still a bit foggy about exactly what we were signing that day. I think we'd already signed an application to be recognized as citizens a week earlier, in a much less ceremonial visit to the town hall, and that at this final signing what we were endorsing was a request that our consulates in the U.S. certify that none of us had ever renounced our Italian citizenship.

Which means that nothing all that dramatic actually happened that day. Official recognition that we're Italian citizens won't come through for a while, and the tangible evidence of citizenship--an Italian passport or identification card--is even further off. But this marked one more milestone on that road.

Anyway, next the mayor signed some more papers, and then we posed for a few more photos.
That's Pino, the mayor, in the middle
Business concluded, the wine was opened, the cookies were unveiled, and the gifts were handed out. As the oldest in the group of applicants, I took it upon myself to make a brief speech expressing our gratitude to the town for their help and our appreciation for the beauty of the place and the friendship and warmth of the people. For another hour or so we all stood around drinking wine, eating cookies, and talking in a mix of English and Italian.

I'm not sure exactly how similar kinds of bureaucratic processes are handled in the United States, but my guess is that the gifts-and-wine aspect is lacking.


Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Stephany arrives

Max's girlfriend had just started a new job so she couldn't spend the whole two weeks in Montagano with us, but she did get one week off and joined us on Wednesday the 21st. We celebrated her arrival by having dinner that night at Zia Concetta in Campobasso. 
I tried to take a photo of the occasion but my son is camera-shy. You get a sense of Steph's spirit, though.

She is delightful in her own right. But for me the best thing about her joining the group was how much her presence cheered Max up. There is a smile behind that great big hand. That makes me like her even more.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Return to Cantalupo

When I was growing up I didn't know much about my Italian grandfather's story, only that he'd come from somewhere in Italy as a child. Later, my father talked about the tiny village his father, whom we called Poppop, had come from. Its name, Cantalupo, stayed with me, perhaps because of the sad and puzzling story that went with it.

Sometime in the late 1960s my dad, who was then with IBM, was invited to teach a week-long seminar in Salzburg. He convinced my grandfather to come along so that afterwards they could travel together to Italy and visit my grandfather's old village. I'm pretty sure it was the first time Poppop had been back to Italy since he came to the U.S. I can imagine how excited my father must have been to be able to give this gift to his father and share the experience with him.

Like so many well-intentioned family projects, this one did not go well. As the time to travel from Austria to Cantalupo drew near, my grandfather became increasingly anxious and gloomy. Once they arrived in his old hometown, all Poppop wanted to do was go home to Pittsburgh. The town welcomed him with open arms and put on a big festa in his honor, but that only seemed to make him feel worse. My poor father couldn't understand why his loving gesture had backfired so badly, and felt both frustrated by his father's strange reaction and guilty that he had somehow caused him so much pain.

What upset Poppop so much my father never figured out. At the time my grandmother was ill with the cancer that would eventually kill her, which perhaps made contemplation of the past and his own future difficult for my grandfather. He was in any case a man prone to serious despair; he eventually killed himself when he was 89 years old.

Years later my father wrote a story based on that trip, which my sister Elisa recently unearthed. It is very sad, and gets sadder each time I read it. It also includes a detailed description of the town as it was when they made their trip. Knowing we would be heading to Cantalupo at some point during our own sojourn in Italy, I hoped to use my dad's story as a kind of guide to what we'd see. (It's long, and about a lot more than the visit to Cantalupo, but if you want you can read the story here.)

Either the town has changed a lot in the last 50 years, or that aspect of my father's story was more fictional than I'd hoped, because the town we visited a few days ago and the one he described did not match up very well. 

It's a pretty enough little village, though not especially picturesque or trying to be so. There's a recently restored church in what I guess is the central piazza.

This is a view of the piazza.
For some reason all my photos of Cantalupo look a bit dreary. It's not gorgeous, but it's cuter than these make it out to be.



During our first week in Molise Danny and I went to Cantalupo by ourselves one day, after lunch in a restaurant nearby. The church was open but deserted, and there was no one on the streets. When we went back again a few days later with the kids, there were a few more people about but the church was locked. Lina and Max took a lot of pictures of the rest of the town, which are no doubt better than mine. Here is one of Lina's that certainly is.


My dad's story describes the graveyard next to the church, and how his father recognized some of the names there. But in real-life Cantalupo there's no graveyard anywhere near the big church or the other smaller church nearby. On our second visit we went in search of the cemetery, asking the locals for directions and hiking about half a mile out into the countryside to find it. We ascertained that it's the only cemetery in town. 

Italians like to bury their dead in above-ground tombs that look like little houses, some of them quite ornate. The more recent ones display photos of the deceased. (This is a tradition I approve of. Detailed life stories would be even better.) We wandered around and saw a lot of the same family names, but none of them were ours. 


Almost all the deceased had died after 1950; we couldn't find any that dated from my grandfather's childhood in the 1890s.  

Claudio later told me that Italian cemeteries exhume the old bones every 30 years or so and pile them up in the church basement to make room for new arrivals. Therefore old graves are a rarity. I'm not sure how precisely accurate this is, given the gaps in his English and my Italian. However, in several of the Cantalupo sepulchers we could see grates over a lower level full of crumbling coffins. Perhaps families just build over whoever was already there, figuring that the longtime dead no longer need so much remembering. 

Anyway, we know that my grandfather's family came from a different village in Molise, so we probably wouldn't have seen any di Carlo graves even if the cemetery had been frozen in time.


Afterwards we had lunch at the town's one restaurant, a perfectly fine but not thrilling meal of proscuitto, provolone with jam, and ravioli filled with nettles and ricotta, Again, Lina captured the moment:

Before we left town, we looked at the photograph that someone had taken of my dad, my grandfather, the town priest, and another fellow who looks like a waiter in a horror movie but was probably some sort of local bigwig. 

We are pretty sure that it was taken in front of the little shrine on the side of the church. So we lined up for a photo in the same spot.


The railing has been changed but the wall below it looks the same. I can't understand, though, why the ground seems to be lower now than it was 50 years ago. Max looks like he's only as tall as my grandfather was, when in fact he's as tall as my dad. Another Catholic mystery...

It's strange to realize that when that earlier photo was taken, my grandfather was just a bit older than I am now, and that my father was in his mid-40s, closer to my childrens' age than to mine. The visit to Cantalupo didn't plunge me into a black pit of grief, but I did feel, more acutely than usual, how quickly my life is going by, and how finite it is.

I was not very close to Poppop when he was alive, because we didn't see our grandparents very often, but he was a charming man and this Italian adventure makes me feel very connected to him. I remember the faint Italian lilt in his voice. I wish I had been more interested in learning about his life while he was around to tell me about it. (When I was young only the future seemed interesting; the past, I figured, would take care of itself. Now more and more it seems the other way around.)

Most of all, I am sad that my dad, who died in 2004, is not around to tell us more about what happened during the trip to Poppop's old hometown and to hear about our visit to Cantalupo, and our tie in Molise, and our whole citizenship project. I think he'd be tickled that we're doing this. How Poppop would feel about it I am not at all sure.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Haircut

On Tuesday, June 20, Danny and I went over to the neighboring town of Petrella because Danny needed a haircut and our friend Rita introduced us to Fabio, who has a shop over there. One the way out of town I stopped off at the Comune (city hall) to sign some papers for my application to be recognized as an Italian. Fabio did a nice job, so nice that I now question whether Danny shouldn't give up on cutting his hair himself.

Fabio, who's a young guy, told us that it's very hard to live in these little towns because all the other young people have left, to go north or elsewhere in Europe in search of work. "I only have three friends in this whole town," he said.

A walk to Faifoli

One day Danny and I set off on foot to see another 12th-century church just outside of town, Santa Maria di Faifoli (pronounced fa-EEF-oh-li). It's only four kilometers from the main square, so five miles round trip, which seemed easily doable.

Faifoli was a pre-Roman village and then a significamt Molisani town, but now there's not much there besides the church. Maria says the whole place was swallowed by an earthquake, but I haven't found any evidence of that via Google.

It was a beautiful walk on little country roads lined with sweet-smelling trees and wildflowers, where each turn revealed another gorgeous vista.

This is Montagano. It really is a city on a hill. Well, a village.

An olive orchard. There are olives, fruit trees, and gardens everywhere.


Little stone houses like this are all over the place. They are empty, often abandoned. And many of them, like this one, have a "Vendisi" (for sale) sign on the door. We hear you can get some of the smaller, more decrepit ones for a few thousand dollars, or just for back taxes. But they need a lot of work, including earthquake-proofing. I realize I have gotten too old for that particular fantasy.

As the walk wore on, we realized that we'd failed to reckon with the cumulative effects of the hilly terrain and the heat. It's been in the high 80s just about every day since we arrived, and the sun up here is intense.

We finally reached the church. It was locked up...maybe we'll get a chance to see the inside if we try again on Sunday. The building was restored in the 1990s so it doesn't look as venerable as it is.
The severity of the architecture suits the church's association with Pope Celestine, who became a monk here in 1232. He is famous for quitting the job of pope after less than six months so that he could return to a life of solitary prayer, fasting, and severe penance. His successor was afraid he might change his mind and locked him up in a dungeon, where Celestine, who was in his 80s, passed on to his reward a few months later. Perhaps he died feeling he'd gotten what he wanted.



This is a well across from the church entrance. It has a storybook quality that makes me think of magic frogs and dangerous wishes.



After all the steep ups and downs getting there, we dreaded the walk back, the beautiful scenery notwithstanding. We stopped at this shrine to rest and texted the kids, asking if someone would be willing to come pick us up.

Unfortunately for us, their phones were either not on or in another room. After waiting a bit, we decided to soldier on. Danny figured out a route that was quite a bit less up-and-down, and shadier.




We were very glad to see Montagano coming closer.

By the time the kids noticed our message, we were only 10 minutes from our front door.

We felt very pleased with ourselves--not only had we gotten plenty of exercise, but we'd managed to guilt-trip our children as a bonus.











In the cantina

I'm almost a week behind, so today I'm going to try to do some catching up.

Our group here in Montagano is not only made up of the DeCarlo-Goldberg party, which has varied between five and six people (plus and then minus Steven's mom, who left Sunday, and then plus Max's girlfriend, Stephany, when she arrived on Wednesday).There are also two other clients of the citizenship service, Michael, who hails from New York City, and Laura, who lives in Spain and came with her friend Jorge. From what I've overheard I'm pretty sure we are known collectively as "gli americani."

On Monday, June 19, a young fellow named Lorenzo, who'd gotten to know some of the younger members of our crew at one of the local bars, invited us all to his cantina for a party. Many of the old houses in Montagano have a cantina in the bottom, what we'd call a basement, a cool, dark place where traditionally wine is made, cheeses and hams are cured, and olive oil and all these other products are stored. A lot of people here have cantinas and use them, including Lorenzo. His is a shrine to wine.



"He makes a lot of wine and he drinks a lot of wine," said Maria, my inside source on all things Montaganesi.

She and our other new friends, including Lorenzo and his mother, brought all kinds of food for the celebration--meats, breads, cheeses, a traditional bean-and-farro soup of the area. This was the occasion for which Maria made a big tray of her delicious gratinato of wild greens. Another standout was the caciocavallo, a kind of provolone. Several were dangling from the ceiling above us. That and the ricotta were served with rum-spiked honey. So good!

More and more of his friends appeared. After quite a bit of Lorenzo's wine had been consumed, Pietro (on the left) brought out his guitar and another fellow played an instrument they called a buffo. (Or maybe bufo? I still have trouble hearing the difference between single and doppio consonants.) It looks like a combination bongo drum and butter churn. The musician holds the stick with a cloth and moves it rapidly up and down to produce deep groaning noises of varying pitches. It sounds like a jug, only deeper, and this guy really knew how to play it to give Pietro a driving bass accompaniment. It's very strenuous work, though; after they sang a few songs together, the bufo-ist gave out. 

Then Pietro favored us with a very long, very scatological ditty about the taxonomy of bowel movements that I was hoping to find on line and reproduce here, but apparently no one has thought to put it up on Youtube yet.

By that point those of us elders who hadn't already left were saying our good-byes and thank-yous and making for home. I gather the party continued for quite a while thereafter. At least one member of our group admitted to a bit of a hangover the next day. A great party, in other words. And once again an amazing demonstration of the kind of open-hearted hospitality that is apparently just how they do things here in Molise.

Friday, June 23, 2017

One more festa

Life is a mystery, as Madonna tells us, and so is the meaning of some of the odder (to me) aspects of Italian ritual. Everyone in Montagano was very excited that we would be around for the Feast of the Mysteries in Campobasso on Sunday, June 18, and urged us to get into town to see this famous procession. Danny had already put it high on his to-do list after seeing videos online of this only-in-Campobasso procession.

Dating from the early 18th century, the festa celebrates the feast of Corpus Domini and centers on a procession of thirteen floats, each depicting one of the "mysteries" of the church, though what exactly constitutes a mystery is itself a bit mysterious. Where most festa processions include statues of the saints carried aloft, what makes the Festa dei Misteri so special is that here the "statues" are living people, mostly children, strapped to iron structures two stories high and dressed as angels, saints, and devils.

To the right is the mystery of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. I think the little boy in the beard up top is supposed to be God.

Danny says these floats remind him of the Laguna Art Festival and its tableau-vivants of famous paintings.


The Campobasso festa's elaborately decorated, and no doubt terrifically heavy, structures are carried by teams of a dozen or more sturdy men in white tunics, who march along to a rhythm that makes the little angels and saints jump and judder in a most alarming way.










The fact that it was pretty windy on Sunday probably didn't help matters.
In the older parts of the city, where the streets are narrow, people lean out of windows and balconies on the upper stories and give the children in the floats candy and drinks of water to keep them going. Later, Maria told us that they have "rehearsals" throughout the year to get the kids used to being bounced around. The ones that cry or get scared are cut from the cast.

The most popular part of the procession is, no question, the devils. Children and young women lined up to have some of the devils' black paint smeared on their own faces, perhaps for luck. Why Satan is the best-loved character in this array is yet another mystery.

This float is about San Antonio. The devil is trying to get the young lady at the bottom to smile; if she does, she'll go to hell. No one could explain to me what exactly that has to do with either Catholic theology or St. Anthony, though.













When we got back to Montagano, we discovered that our little town was celebrating Corpus Domini in its own, much less spectacular way. I heard the sound of voices singing a hymn and when I looked out the window, I saw a modest procession heading up the street to the church. Evidently quite a few of the faithful decided to skip the parking problems and the crowds and celebrate the occasion here at home.

Later that day Maria asked if we'd gone to the "Misteri" and was pleased that we had. "Isn't it beautiful?" she said. "It's...beautiful and strange," I answered. "Were you there?"

Well, no. The only time she'd ever gone to the Misteri was many years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child. She'd hated the crowds and felt sick, so she'd left and gone back to Montagano. Ever since then, she told me, she stays home and watches the procession on TV.

Arriverderci!

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