Finale: At home with the Capobiancos

The culmination of last month's genealogical tour was the town of Fragneto Monforte in the region of Campania. This was where my great-grandmother, Concetta Capobianco, was born. 

An added attraction was that my daughter had found a book written by Fragneto resident Nino Capobianco, a psychiatrist turned historian of the town's folkways and history. When she told him that we were Capobianco descendants and that we'd be coming to visit the town, he was eager to meet. 

Fragneto Monforte is another pretty hill town surrounded by green fields and orchards, framed by the distant Apennines, the kind of place that has visitors fantasizing about living in such a storybook spot. 

But my daughter's research indicates that our Capobiancos weren't leading a storybook life. Concetta's father, Domenico Capobianco, was a construction laborer and her mother, Maria Teresa Sarpi, died in a hospital in Campobasso, a city more than 30 miles away from Fragneto, when Concetta was only 11. It's not clear why Concetta's mother ended up in a hospital so far from home or what she died of. She left behind Concetta and her sister Saveria, who was a year older, and three younger children.  

The family lived on via Cisternone, Cistern Street. Records show that while most of the street's residents owned their houses, the Capobiancos were renters, indicating they may have been even poorer than their neighbors. No street by that name exists any longer, but Nino Capobianco told my daughter that Capobiancos once lived in the house pictured below. She thinks this might have been where Concetta grew up. 

Sometime between 1880 and 1885 the family moved to Forlì del Sannio, 50 miles northwest in the neighboring region of Molise. Once again we don't know why they migrated to a new town; most likely Domenico moved in pursuit of work.

 

And it was in Forlì that Concetta and Vincenzo di Carlo met, married, and had six of their seven children. (The details were in this post.) 

Nino Capobianco was keen to tell us about the Capobiancos of Fragneto Monforte, who used to be thick on the ground there in the 1800s, before so many emigrated to the New World. We wanted to offer to take him to lunch, but when we arrived and called he told us he wasn't able to go out; we'd have to come to his house. The reason, we discovered when we arrived, was that he'd tested positive for COVID--an experience that everyone in my party was extremely eager not to share with him.

He lives with his sister, Maria Pasqualina, in a house near the center of Fragneto, and he begged us to please climb up the stairs to their home and come in. He was obviously a sociable fellow for whom the isolation of quarantine was real torture, and he was itching to talk Fragneto history with a fellow enthusiast, as well as give her the book he'd written about the town, Storia e Tradizioni Popolare a Fragneto Monforte ("History and Folk Traditions of Fragneto Monforte"). In an effort to abide by quarantine rules, Nino stayed outside on the deck, while his sister urged us to come in, proudly waving a piece of paper that showed she herself had tested negative.

My daughter and I looked at each other. She was scared but wanted to risk it--who knew when she'd get to meet these real-life Capobiancos again?--but she was even more scared that I might get infected and it would be her fault. She and her companion masked up and went in, bringing along their dog, while I apologetically stayed out in the fresh air, at what I hoped was a safe distance from Nino, and occupied myself with taking some photos of their deck's spectacular view.

Nino was so excited by the opportunity to talk to someone besides his sister, and particularly a fresh audience for Fragneto lore, that he couldn't bear to keep away. Soon he was talking to his guests from the open door to the living room where our daughter and her entourage were sitting, only nominally outside. Not long afterwards he was irresistibly drawn inside but stationed himself in the kitchen, separated from the sofa where his guests sat by several feet and a large kitchen island.

Nino is out of frame to the left.

I took this photo from the safety of outside the doorway. I think the kids' body language reveals how nervous all of us were about this situation. But since we were in Southern Italy, we could not depart without first eating something, although we probably disappointed Maria by accepting only a coffee for our driver and a piece of candy each for the ladies. My daughter was planning to stay in the area for several weeks after I returned to Fidenza, examining and scanning old records in various churches and town halls in the area, so as we said our good-byes she promised Nino she'd come back to see him again once he tested negative.

Nino and Maria Pasqualina: arrividerci!

None of the rest of us got COVID from our visit that day, I'm happy to report. But poor Nino! Although he didn't feel sick, he kept testing positive for several weeks, which meant he was trapped at home. When he finally got a negative result he urged my daughter to come back to Fragneto for a powwow.

During our visit Nino had told her that digging up genealogical information from previous centuries was arduous, often fruitless work, because records were scattered and difficult to understand. He hadn't reckoned with my daughter's research skills nor her genealogical obsessiveness. 

Some of the records were in a monastery archive in Cassino. 

While he was in quarantine she'd been examining and scanning thousands of pages of records in the various places we'd visited. When they met again she was able to show him our Italian family tree going back to the late 1600s, including the information that one Romoaldo Capobianco, born round 1710, who was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, was also the fifth great-grandfather of Nino and Maria. We're all cousins!

I am really sorry I wasn't able to be there for that conversation, or for what followed. Nino showed my daughter and her compagno around the town, stopping frequently to chat with all the people he hadn't been able to see while he was in lockdown. Then he invited the kids to lunch, which we suspect he would have done even if my daughter wasn't a relative.

Free at last: Nino giving a tour of Fragneto.

 When they arrived at the Capobiancos' house it was clear he'd neglected to tell his sister that there would be company, but she rose to the occasion with characteristic Southern Italian generosity. She whipped together a massive meal of wine, salumi and cheese, a frittata with wild asparagus, several vegetable dishes, and some fried cutlets, "She kept getting nervous and putting more food on the table," my daughter later reported. Pretty much everything she served was homemade or homegrown either by the Capobiancos themselves or their friends. 

This feast concluded with homemade tiramisu she'd pulled out of the freezer and then two "digestive" liqueurs, one lemon flavored and one of pomegranate, both also homemade. On the kids' way out the door Nino and Maria insisted they take a colomba cake for the road. 

One of our hopes when we embarked on this journey was that we'd uncover some living relatives. Now here they were, as charming and hospitable as you could wish, and sharing our interest in the area's history as well. Although I wasn't able to be on hand for that second meeting with our Capobianco cousins, I'm looking forward to having another opportunity when we return to the places our Italian forebears came from. And I'm hoping my daughter will eventually be able to locate some living di Carlo relatives, too.

Morcone: Once in a wheel

Another town we wanted to visit on our genealogy tour was Morcone. It's one more village on a hill, a few miles north of Fragneto Monforte, which was on our itinerary because it's where my great-grandmother, Concetta, was born. Morcone is more tangentially connected to us: it's where Concetta's maternal grandfather, Paolo Sarpi, hailed from. But though that's a pretty distant connection, his story intrigued us enough to add an another stop. 

Morcone: Piazza with a view.

Now Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) is a famous (to Italians) historian, statesman, and scientist based in Venice, a monk who defended the Venetian Republic against the papacy, called for the separation of church and state, and was a supporter of Galileo. The photo shows a monument to him erected in his native city. He sounds like a very admirable man, but he doesn't seem to be anywhere on my family tree.

Not my Paolo Sarpi, not my photo.

The Paolo Sarpi I'm related to was abandoned as a newborn in 1818 and placed in the foundling wheel of the Morcone church. This was a common feature in churches and convents throughout the South, a way for unwed mothers or desperate parents to give up a child anonymously and a measure of the dire poverty and harsh mores of that time and place. (For more details, see this interesting article.) Here's a foundling wheel--no longer in use--that we saw in a convent during our recent trip to Sicily.

One side of the wheel was on the church's exterior, so that someone could deposit a baby without being seen. A turn of the wheel moved the baby inside, where it would be baptized, registered in church and civil records, and in most cases put into a Catholic orphanage. 

So many infants were being "esposito," exposed, that is, abandoned on church steps or in the fields, that these wheels became widespread in the 1700s. They were known as "ruote di proietti," wheels for cast-offs, a term that didn't sugarcoat the situation. When the babies were baptized they were often given surnames reflecting their status as foundlings--Proietti, Esposito, Trovato (found), Bastardo--names that were then passed down to their descendants. 

The record for this particular baby, however, states that he arrived in the wheel wrapped in white linen and wearing a bonnet of red silk, two luxury fabrics, indicating that his mother was likely someone of considerably higher standing than most of those who gave up their children. So whoever received him decided he deserved a less derogatory name. At least, we assume that's why he was named after a famous historical figure. 

The church on the right is where our Paolo Sarpi was given up. 

We couldn't find any trace of where a foundling wheel might have been, although we were very curious about the ominous lump on the back side of the church.

A little big for a foundling wheel. In fact, it looks rather like a pizza oven. One more mystery on this mystery tour.

Paolo Sarpi grew up to become a tailor, moved to Fragneto Monforte, married a girl named Maria Nicolina, and fathered ten children, including six girls. All six had Maria as a first name, not uncommon in Italy then or now, including three Maria Filomenas (the first two Maria Filomenas died as young children). Maria Teresa Sarpi, Paolo's oldest child, grew up to marry Domenico Capobianco and had six children between the time she married in her early twenties and her death at age 35. All her girls had the first name Maria as well, including my great-grandmother, Maria Concetta, and her sister, Maria Saveria, known, not surprisingly, as Concetta and Saveria. (One of the boys was Nicola Maria as well.) 

By the time we got to Morcone I was becoming a bit blase about Southern Italian hill towns, so there were probably plenty of charms about the place that I overlooked. One thing I was struck by was the display of magazines in front of a tabaccheria near the church. 

I'd never noticed gun culture in Italy before, but here was evidence that at least some Italians are not only hunters but lovers of guns for guns' sake. Starting at top left, the titles roughly translate as "Hares, Dogs and Hunting," "Dogs," "Weapons and Shooting," "Weapons Showcase: Used and Antique," "Reload," and (my favorite) "Woodcocks: What a Passion!"

Even before the orgy of gun violence that broke out a few weeks later back in the United States, this display seemed both innocent and ominous. 

And Cantalupo one more time

We returned to Cantalupo a few days later. This time the sun was out and the town looked much prettier, if still not very lively. 

These steps up to the church piazza are just across from Bar Centrale.

The church was open that afternoon and the bells were ringing. 

And we found the site of another photo, this one of my father and grandfather in front of a distinctive pillared gate.

It turned out to be the entrance to the town cemetery, about a half mile up the road from the church piazza. 

Camera technology has improved.

 

The little cemetery had rows and rows of pint-sized mausoleums, and in the way of Italian cemeteries isn't particularly charming. These are condos of the dead, not gardens. I wonder why my grandfather wanted to have his picture taken in front of that gate. Presumably someone important to him is interred there, but who it was, friend or relative, is lost to us now. 

The meeting Nico the barista tried to arrange with the fellow with the photo collection fell through, and I am now doubtful about just what it is he has collected anyway. The more we talked with Nico, the more we realized that we hadn't been communicating with each other as effectively as we'd thought. He was sure that my father and grandfather had visited during the annual festa of Sant'Anna, which I knew wasn't the case. (The story of their visit is in that earlier blog post.) Reviving the festa, which had had to be canceled during the pandemic, seemed to be Nico's main concern, and who could blame him? But while we wished him luck with that project, we weren't interested in being part of it.

Nevertheless, I'm grateful to Nico for showing us his dog-eared copy of a beautiful book, The Women of Molise by Frank Monaco. Born in Brooklyn in 1917 to emigrants from Cantalupo, Monaco returned to the town in the 1950s and made stunning photographs of its day-to-day life, which he published in 2001. Although his pictures were taken a half-century after my grandfather left Cantalupo, the world they show could as easily have been that of the 1890s, if not the 1850s. The women still modestly covered their hair with headscarves whenever they were in public and worked in the fields with the same animals and tools their ancestors used. 

It was a town of women. More and more of the village's men had left to find work elsewhere, usually somewhere in the Americas. The women often waited with their children to join their absent husbands, or were married by arrangement to a man who'd already left. They  prayed to Sant'Anna, Christ's nonna, who watches over pregnant women, but too often had to bury their children. 

I apologize for the poor quality of these reproductions, which come from the web site of Jaggedart, a London gallery that showed a selection of Monaco's work in 2006, not long before he died. I haven't been able to find a copy of Monaco's book for less than $170, but you can see some less fuzzy (albeit lightly watermarked) examples of his photos on Shutterstock. (I wasn't willing to pay $170 to use one of those in this blog, either.)

Much of the book's text concerns Monaco's Aunt Vicenza, with whom he while in Cantalupo. She was so named because her parents hoped that, after six girls, she would finally be a son they could name Vincenzo. When she turned out to be yet another girl they adjusted the name with a feminizing "a." But their next child was the long-awaited boy, another Cantalupeso named Vincenzo. 

Zia Vicenza was a font of folk wisdom about how to protect against witches (stand a broom by the door before you go to sleep) and the evil eye (trace a cross on your forehead) and of salty proverbs. Seeing a young couple walking hand in hand, she told her nephew, "Prim'anno, mano a mano. Second'anno, cullo a cullo. Terz'anno, calcio a cullo." (First year, hand in hand. Second year, ass to ass. Third year, kick in the ass.) 

When Monaco visited Cantalupo the population had sunk to about 1,900 people. Today it's less than 750. The emigrants who return for the festa di Sant'Anna must have mixed feelings about what's happened to their hometown. One of them, Angelo Marsillo, now a Canadian citizen, was moved to write a poem titled "My town, little, poor, and smiling," which Nico showed us. 

"I have never forgotten you," Marsillo wrote in part, 

and after 37 years 

I have returned, but my smiling village, 

you are very changed.

Your countryside almost all abandoned,

and those who stayed 

are doing well,

far better than when 

I left you. In those days

we didn't have many streets but they were much appreciated,

clean and unpaved.

But today what is paved

is all dirty and ruined.

My little town, it's not your fault that you've been ruined

but the fault of those who stayed

who have abandoned you.

During holidays there's a little nostalgia

but as soon as the holidays are over

I see you abandoned once more.

But autumn arrives and not even a dog

strolls your streets, and then of the fruit trees that I left

Nothing remains but brambles

and tangled thorns.

Dear little town, don't take it badly

if I dedicate this poem to you.

 

Maybe the sorrow that change provokes in so many of us, the wrench we feel when we notice how quickly our past is falling away, was part of what made my grandfather so sad when his son brought him back to Cantalupo as an old man. 

Between our first visit with Nico and this one my daughter's genealogical research had unearthed two more pieces of Cantalupo data. She found one in the online civil birth record of my grandfather's younger brother, Armando. Born in Cantalupo in 1899, less than a year before the family emigrated, Armando apparently survived the journey to the New World but disappeared from public records thereafter. Presumably he was one of many immigrant children who didn't manage to survive long enough to appear in the U.S. census. His birth record included the family's Cantalupo address, which wasn't the Bar Centrale building but via Piazza Mercato, 20.   

The name of the piazza has changed, but my daughter's best guess is that the blue door at the left end of the row of houses was where our di Carlos lived. It's hard to believe that these tidy-looking buildings are at least 150 years old.

A second interesting tidbit is what while Vincenzo and Concetta's marriage record listed them both as weavers, in Armando's birth record he has become a "negoziante." That could mean anything from an itinerant trader to a well-to-do merchant. Nothing about the family history indicates Vincenzo was ever better off than poor, and "negoziante" could have been either a step up or a step down from being a weaver. Perhaps he'd worked in some kind of shop in the space that is now Bar Centrale. Perhaps that's why my grandfather had his picture taken there. 

Being back in Cantalupo made me think again what a huge leap my Italian family's trip to America was, something it's easy to forget when I'm jetting here and there as a matter of course. What must it have been like to leave behind this landscape, this little corner of a very small world... 

Back then, minus the electric wires

....for the noise and hustle and "dark Satanic Mills" of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as captured in John Stobart's painting of the city in 1900, the year the di Carlos arrived?

A different world, a different universe, really. Yet millions made voyages like that and millions more are still doing it now. 

Cantalupo five years later

When our daughter planned our genealogical tour of Molise, Cantalupo nel Sannio didn't play much of a role. Although I'd grown up with the vague idea that this was my Italian grandfather's hometown, in fact he'd been born not there but in Forlì, and his family had lived in Cantalupo for only a few years, when he was between the ages of about five and nine. So there wasn't much family-tree information to be gleaned from local church or municipal records, compared to what she hoped to find in the other towns on our itinerary. 

Moreover, we'd already visited Cantalupo five years ago, during the summer when we started the process of getting Italian citizenship for me, our daughter, and her brother, and we'd found it a poky little place, not particularly pretty or friendly or interesting. And I'd already blogged about it some length. There didn't seem to be much reason to go back.

However, a few months ago my brother cleared out the storage unit where a heap of our late mother's odds and ends had been stashed. Among the old tablecloths, less-than-stellar ceramics, and paintings no one wanted were some photos I'd never seen before of the trip my father and my grandfather took to Cantalupo sometime in the late 1960s. Up until then I'd only seen one photo, of the two of them standing with the local priest and some other town worthy in front of a shrine on the side of the village church. But here were six or seven additional pictures of them posing in front of various sites in the little town. The pictures were small, black-and-white, and out of focus the way photographs used to be in the pre-digital age, but we were excited to discover them. I'd copied them (worsening the quality still more) and sent the copies to the rest of the family. Then I sort of forgot about them.

Now here we were, driving down a rainy highway on our way from Fornelli to Benevento, when we spotted two signs. One pointed to the town of Bojano, on the outskirts of which was a restaurant we'd loved when we went there in 2017. The other, in the same direction, showed the way to Cantalupo. It seemed foolish not to make a reservation for lunch at the restaurant and then say a brief hello to my grandfather's old hometown. And then I realized that, thanks to Google magic, I had those old photos of Cantalupo on my phone. 

The restaurant was just as I'd remembered it, and the food was still great. 

We ordered a light lunch: hand-cut spaghetti in a rich tomato sauce that meat had simmered in, and cavatelli in tomato sauce for my daughter...

 ...and then three contorni: asparagus, tomatoes, and an insalata mista. 

Perfetto! (Although I think the gentleman in our party felt a little deprived by the absence of animal protein.)

The rain had momentarily let up when we pulled into the parking lot next to the slope leading up to Cantalupo's church. I got out my phone and scrolled to the photos of my grandfather's long-ago trip. In front of us was a monument to the town's war dead, a feature of every Italian town, no matter how small. And there on my phone was a photo of my father and grandfather posing in front of the same monument almost a half-century earlier. 

Of course we had to pose in front of it, too.

The rain started up again, so we left man and dog in the car with a video game and each other and, carrying our umbrellas, walked up to the church piazza to see if we could spot any other landmarks.

We quickly found the site of a second photo, which turned out to show that very piazza. 

The bar was long gone, renovated into modern apartments, and the piazza seems to have been repaved. But the building on the left is still there.  

The photo whose location we were most keen to identify was one of my grandfather standing by himself in front of a door that must have had some special significance. We walked all around but couldn't see any door that looked at all similar. Maybe the building was long gone. 

My daughter suggested we stop into a bar, get a coffee, and see if by any chance the barista might be able to help us. There seemed to be only two bars in town, so we went into the one we were closer to, Bar Centrale.  

We were almost the only customers that afternoon, so I hoped the barista wouldn't mind being chatted up in bad Italian. I explained that my grandfather had lived in Cantalupo as a child and had come back for a visit sixty or so years later and that now, fifty-plus years on, we were trying to figure out where some photos had been taken. He looked at the photo of my grandfather in front of the door and his eyes widened.  

"That's my door!' he exclaimed. (In Italian, of course.) 

It turned out to be true. When he'd moved from Bojano to Cantalupo thirty years ago to take over the bar, he'd added colorful metal shutters around the front door. Behind the shutters and the awning, we could see that it was, in fact, the door in the photo. The balcony above the door, no longer covered with laundry (or rags or whatever those things are), looked to be the same, too. 

I couldn't figure out how to photograph behind those shutters, but take my word for it: it was the same door.

Why that photo of my grandfather was taken remains a mystery. Nico, the friendly barista, told us that decades before this had been a store that sold cloth. But he is a newcomer to the town (a newcomer by Italian small-town standards), and he didn't know what had gone on there in the 1890s. 

He was very excited to meet us, though, and volubly told us that he knew the family that used to own the bar in the old picture of the piazza, and about all the other former residents who returned to Cantalupo every year for the feast day of Sant'Anna, the town's patron saint, and how someone else in town was collecting their old photographs, or had collected them, or wanted to collect them, I"m not sure which. Confronted with this firehose of rapid Italian, my daughter and I resorted to nodding and smiling while we tried to pick out a word here or there. 

Soon more than an hour had passed, and we couldn't in good conscience leave the other members of our party stranded in the car any longer. Nico wouldn't let us go until I took a photo with him and promised that we'd come back in a few days, hopefully in better weather.

That evening, as we enjoyed our spritzes in a bar in Benevento, my daughter and I congratulated ourselves on our detective work and our good luck. Nico had promised to introduce us to the person with the photo collection, or at least that's what we thought he said. We agreed it might be worth it to return to Cantalupo yet again.