An Italian life

Shortly before we arrived in September I learned that Marco Rossetti, the father of our friend, Debora, had passed away. Debora and I had talked about arranging for me to meet him, since I am always looking for Italians who are willing to talk to me and he, according to her, was always eager to meet new people and learn more about the world. We never got around to doing arranging that get-together, though, and I was very sad not only for Debora, who loved her father dearly, but also for my own missed opportunity. 

Marco Rossetti and Debora.

When COVID-19 first swept Northern Italy in early 2020, Marco, who was then 90 years old, was one of the thousands of older people who caught the coronavirus. Unlike most of them he survived, but his bout with the disease left him weaker, and Debora believes it hastened his death. In that sense he was one more casualty of the pandemic.

After he died Debora showed me something she wrote based on stories he'd told her about his youth, a childhood that could have taken place hundreds of years ago, so backward was rural Italy --which was most of Italy--well into the 1950s. He grew up the son of poor tenant farmers, in a house that was always dark and often bitterly cold, where there was never enough food, where there was always worry. He said the crayfish he caught in a nearby stream were often the only good things to eat. He went to school only until he was 11 years old, because he was needed at home. He grew up as hungry for learning, for culture, for knowledge of the wider world, as for bread and meat. 

Little Marco already had a big personality. 

Marco worked the fields, pushing the plow behind an old horse, blind in one eye. As a child he also raised silkworms, feeding them mulberry leaves and, when they matured, taking them to sell at the market in the closest town, riding on his bicycle with the basket of silkworms on his back. "He sat waiting for the merchants who came from distant places," Debora wrote. "Their long beards, their tightly closed black coats with collars of precious furs, their wide-brimmed hats, their deep, dark eyes. their strange and marvelous accents. The silk merchants traveled, they were educated, they were wealthy, they ate. The children who sat in their carriages had new shoes, clean shirts, and a beautiful way of speaking, of telling things." 

The silk merchants were of course Jews, and to little Marco their foreignness was something to admire, even to long for, rather than to fear. "My father was very, very curious all his life long," Debora explained. "So even when he was a child of seven or eight he was not ashamed to ask those merchants where they came from and why they had that hairstyle"--their long forelocks, cernecchi in Italian. "He admired them because of their great culture." Moreover, they were happy to talk to him because "they were as talkative as my father was." 

But then came World War II, and the market and the Jewish silk merchants disappeared. After the war so did the rural life of Marco's childhood, as little by little the country modernized. 

Unlike most of his generation, Marco stayed on the land. Women willing to marry farmers were in short supply after the war, and many other men in the Emilia's small farm towns turned to professional matchmakers to find them brides from Southern Italy. Marco wanted to marry someone more local, however. A cattle dealer who moonlighted as a matchmaker put Marco in touch with a farm family elsewhere in Emilia who had a daughter aged nearly 30--in that era almost too old for marriage. They met and within a year were husband and wife. 

Together they raised a family, and the farm did well. His landlord was the Catholic Church, which had received the land Marco worked as part of a a huge tract left to the Church by a wealthy and childless marchesa. Earlier the Church had not been a particularly charitable landlord, demanding that its tenants hand over most of what they raised. But in the postwar era the Church pursued a less feudal policy, allowing the tenants and their farms to prosper.

Down on the farm.

Debora and her brother grew up with cows, chickens, and pigs, with fields of corn and sugar beets, wheat and alfalfa, and also with clothes to wear and food to eat. Marco did not want his children to work on the land as he had. Instead they went to school and became professionals, while their father remained a tenant farmer until he was in his sixties.

In the 1990s the Church needed to sell some of its lands to raise money for an expansion of the Catholic University campus in nearby Piacenza, and Marco was able to at last buy the land he had been farming for decades. (The Catholic hierarchy didn't mind letting go of some of its holdings. Given Italy's low birth rate, chances seemed good that properties the Church sold now it would someday inherit once more. The attitude was, "Go ahead and buy it. In a hundred years we'll probably get it back again.")

By then Marco was getting too old for the hard work of farming. He leased most of the land for someone else to cultivate. Still hungry for learning, for knowledge, Marco read books, wrote poetry, eagerly sought out debate and discussion. In his later years he was a fixture at a couple of local bars, the kind of places where Italians, especially older men, like to congregate to play cards, gossip, and keep an eye on the life of the town.

Old men are as much a feature of Italian bars as espresso and spritzes.

Marco called his bar friends the "cenacolo literario." Cenacolo is a word meaning a place where people gather to drink and eat and discuss serious things (Leonardo da Vinci's famous Last Supper is known in Italy as Il Cenacolo), and it was typical of Marco's sense of humor that he liked referring to his crew of retired farmers as a "literary salon." 

The nonprofit group that sponsors one of my qi gong classes has a poem hanging on its door that made my think of Marco Rossetti and his generation of Italians, so many of whom died in the COVID pandemic's first wave. Versions of this poem are all over the internet, and it's not clear who wrote it and which is the original version. Here's my rather free translation:

The greatest generation is dying,

The ones who, without any education, educated their children.

Who, deprived of everything, taught them the most important value: dignity.

Those who suffered the most are dying.

The ones who worked like beasts,

Who were resigned to having nothing,

Are dying, after having suffered so much. 

 

After a lifetime of sacrifice and hardship 

They wanted only to grow old with dignity.

Now they are dying alone and afraid.

They are leaving without bother, 

Without a good-bye.

Marco Rossetti survived that terrible first wave of COVID-19 and did not die alone. In his last days his children were with him. Debora was holding his hand when he died. And before he passed away he was able to tell her his last wishes in detail. 

The nuns who had been cruel to him and other poor children during his few years in school, the corrupt priest who long dominated the local parish, and the Church's earlier treatment of him and other tenant farmers had long ago soured him on institutional Catholicism. So he specified: no posting of his death notice, his necrologio, at the church, no mass or saying of the rosary, no church funeral.

Necrologi are a part the Italian townscape. (Note defibrillator in background.)

Instead he wanted to be cremated and his ashes strewn at a favorite fishing spot out in the woods. And he asked that after his death Debora go to his two favorite bars and buy everyone a drink. 

His ashes did indeed end up where he wanted them. But first, on the day he died, Debora went to the two bars and gave the barista at each one 100 euros to buy a round (or two) for all Marco's friends. One put up a sign saying "FREE DRINKS TO CELEBRATE MARCO ROSSETTI'S DEPARTURE." This was how Marco wanted his friends to learn that he was gone. It was the memorial he asked for, and his daughter was happy to give it to him. 

The story of Marco Rossetti's life and his passing says so much about what Italy was and is, about the country's strengths and failings, its deep ties to tradition but also its creativity, its sorrow and its joy.

Marco with his Aunt Imelde, left, and his mother, whose name was Ballerina.

I will close with a poem that Marco wrote in 2002. He was very proud when it was published in a local newspaper. Its grammar is, shall we say, original, like the writer himself, and like him it is full of feeling. Here is my attempt at a rather free translation. 

Remembering my mother (the Devil’s Field)

by Marco Rossetti

Strange name that,

they used to say there were goblins there or something.

Lost in the woods

I almost didn't find it.

The soil is barren,

working it was hard 

when she was young, oh my mother!

All my life, being her son,

I’ve been obsessed with this memory 

when I’m absorbed and alone, 

that damned field. 

I see her lost in thought

with the curls and braids

gathered on her neck,

the sweat trickling down her forehead

her dress crumpled by so much poverty.

A knot of tears chokes me,

A cool evening breeze

feels like her caress. 

I like to think Marco would be pleased that his words, rendered in a new language (however imperfectly), are being read by people (even if only a few) all across the world. I'm grateful to Marco for the life he led and to Debora for sharing a little of him with me, and with you. 

Marco Rossetti, 1930-2021.