Next stop: Forlì

For reasons unknown, Vincenzo di Carlo, my great-grandfather, left Rionero Sannitico at some point and moved to another Molisano hill town, Forlì del Sannio. It was nearby, about seven miles away, or a two-and-a-half-hour walk. We assume the prospect of work is probably why he relocated, although what kind of work--farm labor? trading?--we don't know. 

The view from Forlì. 

There Vincenzo encountered a branch of the Capobianco family, who had moved to Forlì from considerably farther away, from Fragneto Monforte, a village a full 52 miles from Forlì, in a whole other region, Campania. Given the intense regional differences back then, Forlì may have seemed downright foreign to them. 

In 1886 Vincenzo married one of the Capobiancos' daughters, Maria Concetta, but the circumstances  are somewhat mysterious. Concetta, as she was known (presumably to distinguish her from her younger sisters, Maria Saveria and Maria Pasqualina), was only 20 years old when they were wed, while Vincenzo was 45. The age difference wasn't unusual in that time and place; given how much work women were responsible for and how often they died in childbirth, men often had to replace expired wives with strong young new ones. But Vincenzo, as far as our daughter has been able to determine, had gotten well into his forties without ever marrying, and bachelors in their forties were a rarity (not, of course, counting priests). 

Had Vincenzo been too picky? That seems unlikely, since choice wasn't a factor in most marriages in rural Italy back then. Perhaps he had health problems or was otherwise regarded as unmarriageable. It appears he was a lodger in the Capobiancos' home, which may explain how he and Concetta met. And what made him now seem an acceptable husband is perhaps revealed by the fact that, a mere four months after the wedding, Concetta gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Here the bare-bones official records of births and marriages are deeply unsatisfying. What exactly happened between Vincenzo and Concetta? Between them and her family? How did the rest of the little community react? We can only imagine.

The couple certainly weren't chased out of town, since we know they remained in Forlì for at least the next nine years. They had another daughter and then a son named Pasquale, who died just a few days after he was born. At that point they formalized their civil marriage with a church wedding. Then two more daughters were born and another son, also named Pasquale. This boy survived, luckily for me, since he eventually became my grandfather. 

I'm not just a tourist--my nonno was born here!

I was glad to see his birthplace.. It is another pretty hill town with lovely views and plenty of charm, albeit with no one taking much advantage of its assets. Like most of these towns, it's probably shrinking its way to extinction.

And like the other hill towns in the area, it's also a steep place with lots and lots of steps. 

But I'm afraid the thing I remember most vividly about our visit was using the servizi in the little bar where we'd stopped for a coffee. The men in the bar sniggered a bit when the barista pointed me to the relevant door. When I got inside I saw why. 

It was a bit of tradition that I didn't much appreciate. 

I don't think this was why Forlì failed to capture my heart, though. The fact is I'd never heard of the place before our daughter started researching the family. The town that my grandfather remembered, and told his children about, was Cantalupo. So visiting Forlì felt more like checking off a data point than experiencing even a mild emotional connection. Cantalupo, on the other hand...but that's a story for the next post. 

The di Carlos of Rionero Sannitico

During our genealogy tour we spent a lot of time in Fornelli because it is so darn cute, but two other villages in the vicinity, Forlì del Sannio and Rionero Sannitico, are more central to my di Carlo family's more recent history. 

Like a lot of small towns in Molise, they had suffixes added to their names after 1861, to distinguish them from towns with the same name elsewhere in newly unified Italy. "Sannio" and "Sannitico" both refer to the Samnites, an ancient warrior civilization that dominated the area hundreds of years before the Christian Era. Although the Samnites were subjugated and absorbed into the Roman Empire by around the time that BC became AD, their name lives on in the area where they once ruled. But that history is even further back than our daughter's most ambitious researches. 

Born in Fornelli from a long line of di Carlos, Giorgio di Carlo moved to Rionero Sannitico for reasons unknown. There his son Vincenzo, my great-grandfather, was born. A coffee-bar encounter led our daughter to Ferdinando Carmosino, a former mayor of Rionero Sannitico who now devotes much of his time to researching and writing about his town's history. 

On a gray, drizzly day we drove over to Rionero and met Ferdinando and Don Tarquino, the local priest, who took us into the back room of St. Bartholomew's in the center of town.

Inside was a nondescript metal cabinet full of old record books...a genealogist's delight. The priest pulled out the birth registry covering 1861 and we began looking through the pages. There, among the listings for April of that year, in the spiky writing of the pre-ballpoint era, was my great-grandfather in his first encounter with church and state.

Vincenzo is the listing on the upper left.

In the pretty little church Don Tarquinio and Ferdinando showed us the baptismal font that dates from the early 1600s. This is probably where Vincenzo was baptized. 

We were all being very COVID-conscious.

Ferdinando told us that one of our relatives, Domenico di Carlo, served as Rionero's mayor for 28 years. Although the di Carlos were mostly poor laborers, this di Carlo seems to have been something of a go-getter. His family ended up owning the house across the piazza from the church and built themselves an impressive (though currently somewhat run-down) mausoleum in the town cemetery.

He looks like a prosperous fellow, no?

Domenico di Carlo, RIP.

We're hoping that through Domenico we might have some living relatives, albeit distant ones, in Rionero Sannitico, but our in-house genealogist has been busy tracking down other parts of the family.

On a ridge above the town are what's left of a castle that once housed the ruling Carafa family. Ferdinando told us that there used to be a tunnel running from the castle directly into the church, presumably so that the aristocrats wouldn't have to mingle with the hoi-polloi. 

That's a bit of what's left of the castle at left.

They clearly enjoyed a pretty spectacular view.

Another site we visited was a monument to those who emigrated from Rionero and to the longtime local parish priest who, according to one of the priest's descendants, "kept alive the link between two distinct realities," that of those who stayed and of those who left for elsewhere. 

The inscription on the pedestal is a 1963 quote from John F. Kennedy: "A nation reveals itself by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers." The monument seems to be at least as much about modern-day emigrants, those who have moved to Northern Italy or elsewhere in Europe as well as across the Atlantic in search of the kinds of jobs and opportunities that the shrinking towns of rural Italy can't offer. My daughter found that the town lost half its population to emigration between 1950 and 1980. 

The monument is not in the town's little center but in a meadow on a hill a bit out of the way. A little Googling revealed that there was, and perhaps still is, considerable ill feeling in Rionero about its placement and its purpose. Some emigrants who maintain ties to the town insist that the courage and suffering of those who left for new lands deserve to be celebrated, but some locals don't agree. In an online debate about the question a few years ago, one Rionersi wrote that he had no objections to a monument to Don Antonio, "a man of great importance and valor, whom everyone thinks of when they think of Rionero." He was less enthused about honoring those who left. "I cite the words," he wrote, "of the most intelligent woman I have ever known up until now, my mother: 'Monuments should be for those who had the courage to stay and suffer hunger for love of their own land.'" 

An understandable feeling, I think. But after visiting Rionero and these other little towns, I can't help being grateful that my branch of the di Carlos didn't choose to stick around.

From di Carlo to DeCarlo

Several people have asked why my grandfather decided, when he reached adulthood, to change his name (apparently without going to the trouble of going through legal channels) from Pasquale di Carlo to Charles De Carlo. The short answer is that I don't know, but apparently this kind of name change was very common among Italian arrivals in the United States. 

My nonno, around the time his name changed.

I doubt my grandfather hoped to conceal his Italian origins, since altering one letter in his last name hardly would have accomplished that. But he was ambitious, and he must have felt that changing Pasquale to Charles showed that he was eager to assimilate, unlike old-country paesani who couldn't adjust to American ways.  Adding a capital D to his name also made it look a bit more Anglicized. And to English-speakers the "De" signaled the correct Italian pronunciation, whereas  "di" was easily misconstrued as "di." (Yes, I've heard Americans make that mistake, and others like it.)

I write the name as one word, but my grandfather didn't seem particularly concerned about whether there was a space between De and Carlo. Indeed, the requirement that names be consistently written the same way is pretty recent. My daughter the genealogist tells me that before our computerized data started following us around wherever we went, things like marriage and tax records relied on names entered by typewriter or, earlier, by hand, and no one much cared if someone shed or added a letter or two along the way.

For example, here's an entry my daughter discovered in a 1706 "stato d'anime," a kind of census maintained by the local church, listing the family of my di Carlo great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who lived in Fornelli with lots of other di Carlos. 

It reads: "Cecilia de Vecio, widow, age 34,  Berardina de Carolo, age 10, Ambrosius de Carolo, age 8, Roccus de Carolo, age 6, her sons." Roccus (a Latinized rendering of Rocco, which was probably his actual name) is my direct ancestor, part of a long line of di Carlos,  but for some reason the priest who wrote this entry rendered the name as de Carolo. This variation didn't stick, though, and the family went back to spelling it the more standard way. 

Creative orthography was extremely common everywhere in the old days, which gives neophyte genealogists plenty to tear their hair over. In the early years of the 20th century my grandfather doubtless thought it was no big deal to update his name, suiting it to his new life in a new country 

Watch your step

The Molisano hamlet of Fornelli lives up to its claim of being "one of the most beautiful villages in Italy," but it is a tough town for the not-so-able-bodied. Most of the historic center was built centuries before there were such things as building codes or handicapped access, or automobiles, for that matter. It's wonderful that so much of the center is pedestrian-only, but even without cars to worry about those on foot, particularly on older feet,  had better proceed carefully. 

Here's a chiseled stone staircase from the top of the old city wall down to the street below. Kudos to Fornelli for adding a sturdy handrail.

Inside the centro storico there are steps everywhere. 

They just keep going and going.

A relatively easy ascent through one of the city gates.

Note this staircase's artisanal (i.e., irregular) charm.

This is another portal through the city wall.

The alternatives are cobblestone ramps of varying steepness and, in wet weather, slickness.  

Going up.

I first encountered this ramp and staircase (above and below), which leads through yet another of the old city gates, as we made our way to the lovely B&B we stayed in during the Fornelli part of our trip. 

Going down.

Neither photograph captures how alarmingly steep it is. And when the cobbles were wet with rain, it seemed more like a waterslide than a sidewalk. 

Inside the tunnel is a small niche (upper left, next to the portal, in the photo above) housing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Below it is a plaque explaining that back in the day children passing through on their way to the church below (where, as it happens, the records of all my di Carlo family's early births, marriages, and deaths are reportedly stored) would stop to offer up a simple prayer: Bless me, Madonna, and let me live to adulthood. In those days there probably wasn't even a handrail. Atheist though I am, I couldn't help feeling a bit prayerful every time I went up and down. 

My worry that I might fall and ruin the trip for all of us, and my daughter's evident worry about the same ("Mom, hold on to the railing!") was not lessened by the fate of our hostess. My companions had stayed at the same very nice Fornelli B&B some months before, and the woman who runs the place had been very friendly and extremely kind. They were looking forward to introducing us to each other. But the day before our arrival, when she was readying our rooms, she tripped on the stairs leading up to our door. 

The stairs in question.

When we arrived the next day she was in the hospital with a broken leg, and I never got to meet her.  Last we heard, though, she was healing well.

Although we saw plenty of spry oldsters toiling up and down, I couldn't help wondering what becomes of residents who were no longer able to scramble up and down. The gentleman with the small Fornelli museum told us that according to an old legend, people who reached the then ripe old age of 60 were taken to the top of a local mountain and pushed off the edge.

That is clearly no longer true. Pretty much everyone in our breakfast bar looked to be well past that dispose-by date. Moreover, the little market in town sells birthday cards that run all the way to age 89. 

I don't mean to sound critical of Fornelli. I'd hate to see the town razed and rebuilt to ADA standards, and it's actually more navigable than many of these old hill towns, since their staircases are mostly fitted with sturdy railings and mostly in good repair. Some of the other towns we visited had even more alarming climbs. 

Our daughter's sure-footed compagno and their dog.

Here is one we scrambled up and down in Fragneto Monforte, in the neighboring region of Campania, the next region over, where my Italian great-grandmother was born. But that is a story for another blog post. 

Land of my father's father's fathers

I'm just back from a tour of the rural portion of southern Italy where my Italian grandfather was born and whence stems my claim to Italian citizenship. Our daughter, who originally spearheaded the Italian citizenship initiative, has become a demon genealogist, harnessing her formidable research skills to the task of figuring out who all of her ancestors are, stretching across the world and deep into the past.

Until a few years ago the only thing I knew about my grandfather's origins was that he and his family came from Cantalupo nel Sannio, a little town in Italy's smallest and least developed region, Molise.  Because of my daughter's efforts, I now know that Cantalupo actually plays only a walk-on part in my Italian ancestors' history. 

Many Italian families have lived in the same place for generations but, for reasons my daughter has not yet uncovered, my Italian forebears seem to have been afflicted with wanderlust, or perhaps an inability to keep up with the rent. My grandfather was born in 1892 not in Cantalupo but in another small Molisano town, Forli nel Sannio. His father had migrated there from a different Molisano town, Rionero Sannitico, where he'd been born in 1841. And my great-grandfather's dad, Giorgio di Carlo, was born in 1792 in still another Molisano hill town, Fornelli.  (The family name was di Carlo until my assimilationist grandfather Americanized it.)

Fornelli, it turns out, is a hotbed of di Carlos. In our genealogical conversations with locals in neighboring towns, as soon as they heard the name di Carlo the response was always, "Your family must be from Fornelli." And indeed in Fornelli di Carlos were everywhere; it's the second-most common name in town. My daughter got a haircut at Mariangela di Carlo's beauty salon and we bought a loaf of bread and some cookies at the di Carlo Brothers bakery. 

I have to admit the bread wasn't that great.

The pretty church near the B&B where we were staying had been nicely restored. 

A plaque on the wall credited the generosity of two widows for the restoration, one being Giulia di Carlo.  

Down the way from our B&B, two local men had set up a little diorama and museum of the town in the cantina at the bottom of an old house. The display included a collection of old wedding photos. 

Note the model of the city walls and towers at right.

There were a lot of di Carlos in the lineup, including this pair of newlyweds. 

The bride's surname, Ucci, is the fourth-most common name in town.

Coincidentally, these two were the grandparents of Giuseppina, the friendly woman whose bar we breakfasted in every morning during our stay in Fornelli. 

We were discussing why her grandparents, and all the other couples in those old photographs, looked so grim. "In those days marriages were always arranged by the parents," Giuseppina told us. "It wasn't love. It was about land." One of the customers enjoying a morning beer chimed in that anyway the photos weren't taken at the wedding, but a week or two later, evidently to make sure that the marriage took. By then both parties knew what they were in for, until death did them part. 

Which it eventually did. And there are legions of di Carlos in the local cemetery, too. 

In some ultimate sense all these di Carlos are probably my relatives. But not close enough that my daughter has found any living Fornellesi that she can show we are directly related to...yet.

Currently Fornelli is home to only about 1,900 people. My great-grandfather wasn't the only one to pull up roots and leave town during the last century and a half. Like every place in the region, Fornelli contributed to Italians' great migration to the Americas. For some reason a large portion of Fornelli's population moved to one place, Warwick, Rhode Island. (When people in Fornelli heard we were DeCarlos from America, they inevitably asked if that's where we'd come from.)

Twin cities.

Numbers of former residents, or their descendants, return to Fornelli every year, and while we were there we met several who go back and forth regularly. I suspect that this is one reason Fornelli seems more prosperous than many other towns in the area.

It's also extremely charming, credibly advertising itself as "one of the most beautiful villages in Italy." Its centro storico is pedestrian only (thanks to its narrow alleys and steep stairs) and surrounded by very well-preserved medieval city walls and towers. From the battlements you look out over a beautiful landscape of fields and woods surrounded by the Apennine mountains.

Many of the houses are a thousand years old, but even the ones that are a bit dilapidated look cared for, and most residents decorate their front porches, balconies, and little piazzas with plants and flowers. 

The town is a bit of a fantasy--the Italian village of everyone's dreams--but it's a very sweet fantasy. I suspect the people there are equally friendly to strangers who aren't di Carlos. It made me a little sad that my genealogical connection to this lovely place is a pretty attenuated one. 

Bollito blowout

While we enjoyed a string of great restaurant meals the visit from our daughter and her little dog-centric entourage, the one treat we were unable to provide for them was a bollito misto, a classic preparation of all kinds of meats boiled up together. This is not a dish you make for just two or three people, since its whole point is a gut-stretching abundance of various kinds of flesh. Presumably that's why it's a popular restaurant offering for Sunday lunch, when families here like to recreate the huge family meals of their grandparents' era by going out to dine en masse. Unfortunately for us, the first Sunday we were here was Easter, and therefore any place that did a good bollito misto had been booked solid for ages. 

The kids were back for a few days this past weekend, and this time, too, Sunday fell on a holiday. In Italy May 1 is the Festa del Lavoro, or Labor Day, a national event and therefore also a day when everyone wants to go out to eat. (Italians have a lot of public holidays, bless them.) 

But we were spared having to scramble for a restaurant reservation by Pam, who invited the four of us to her place for a home-cooked bollito lunch. She wouldn't let us bring much beyond a few vegetable sides. "The big job you'll have will be eating all this stuff," she told me. "I'm counting on you." Luckily we proved fully up to the task.

After some appetite-stimulating prosecco, Pam presented us with bowls of creamy risotto made with the broth from the bollito and porcini mushrooms. Then came the main event: a platter of beef, beef tongue, beef ribs, and a local pork specialty called Cappello del Prete, or Priest's Hat (or just prete, priest, for short), with a second platter of chicken. Alongside were traditional accompaniments--red and green vegetable salsas, pickled onions, and frutta di mostarda, candied fruit seasoned with hot mustard oil--plus a horseradish salsa that Danny made (so that we'd have a green, white, and red array of salsas in honor of the holiday) and asparagus and a giardiniera-like cauliflower-and-romaesco salad prepared by our daughter's talented compagno. 

Camera shy: the platter of chicken

As always, Pam's cooking proved to be stellar. The various meats were tender and flavorful and nicely complemented by the salsas, while the vegetable dishes allowed us to feel that we were eating a somewhat balanced meal.

First helping (I hadn't gotten to the chicken yet).

What a gorgeous plateful of food. And it tasted even better than it looked. (The thing at 12 o'clock is not an egg yolk but a whole candied-and-mostardo'd apricot.) After all, these traditional dishes became traditional because they are so damn good. 

Pam observed that a bollito, like most of restaurant secondi, is a simple preparation that's actually better when cooked at home. Great handmade pasta requires a lot of experience, and most of the best pasta we've had has been at old-fashioned eateries where Nonna, or someone who has learned at her elbow, is rolling and shaping the dough. So pasta is worth going out for, since there are still quite a few restaurants that do pasta much better than even Pam can hope to. But the nonnas don't seem to have passed along as much wisdom when it comes to secondi, which are often pretty lackluster. Maybe they're too tired after churning out hundreds of tortelli for the first course. 

A word about the prete, which I'd never tasted before. It's the skin of a pig's ankle, stuffed with salted shredded muscle fibers and cold cured, then boiled for several hours before serving. It looks like something you'd find in the hideout of a serial killer, but it's very tasty--sort of like corned beef, but pork--and according to some is an essential flavor element of a bollito. 

A prete in the raw.

Its name comes from the fact that its triangular shape vaguely resembles the hats that once distinguished Catholic clergy, presumably something along the lines of the topper worn by 17th-century cardinal and nepotism beneficiary Francesco Barberini. 

Maybe picturing such worthies with a gross-looking meat parcel on their heads gave the peasantry of old a subversive thrill. Not that most Italian peasants back in the day had many opportunities to eat prete, or meat of any kind, since the church and nobility gobbled up most of the pig and of everything else.

We felt rather like those swinish patricians by the time we'd worked our way through most of the meats and quite a bit of the chicken. A shot of espresso girded us for the finale, a prune crostata.  

How could anyone resist, no matter how full they were?

Northern Italy's desserts are, like its secondi, usually not all that exciting. The British and the French both make more delicious sweets, and to my mind there's nothing better than an American layer cake. But this crostata, a classic of Emiliana cuisine, is among the best dolce that Italy has to offer, straightforward yet complex in flavor. Moreover it too is not hard to make, as long as you can get your hands on a jar of the local, almost black prune jam for the filling. The jam is plenty sweet but also quite tart, and Pam's version of the crust, which included a little buckwheat flour, is a subtle but excellent change rung on the traditional recipe. Despite having, it seemed, no more room in my gullet, I easily consumed a big helping of crostata and picked at the crumbs.

After almost four hours at the table, we waddled home full not only of food but of gratitude for our friends, our family, and our Italian life. And that evening, I had a little more crostata for my supper.