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.