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.