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. 

A taste of tradition

Our first week in Fidenza was unusually hedonistic, since our daughter, the man she refers to variously as her "insignificant other" and "formidable opponent," and their adorable dog were staying with us. In addition to being good company and possibly even more obsessed with food than we are, they have a car. Which meant that we momentarily had easy access to restaurants out in the countryside, where some of the area's best food is to be found. 

As has been noted previously, Italians tend to be very conservative when it comes to what they eat. Most restaurants around here have more or less the same menu, heavy on regional favorites such as salumi (prosciutto, mortadella, and other cured meats) and filled  pastas. Innovation is not much prized, but I confess it isn't something we're looking for when we dine out in Italy, at least not when we first get here. A menu heavy on tradition, a slightly shabby dining room full of Italian families, staff who look like they all might be relatives--these are hallmarks of the sorts of trattorie we dream about when we're in California. I guess in that respect we are conservatives, too.

As has also been noted, the four-course menu offered by most restaurants in these parts--a hearty antipasto, a pasta primo, a meat-dish secondo (usually accompanied by a vegetable contorno or two), and a dolce--is not what Italians usually eat except when they're attending family holiday feasts. Nor do Danny and I have the capacity to eat this way for any length of time. But after months of our own cooking in California, interspersed with Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Pakistani, and Chinese meals from local restaurants there, we become nostalgic for the full Northern Italian dining experience, and suddenly a four-course blow-out seems like a great idea. 

Now we had two young and hungry companions who were eager to indulge in the same thing, and were willing to provide transportation to boot.

So we set off for Trattoria La Frasca, a country bistro Danny and I had gone to years ago with our friends Pam and Romano and that I've been thinking about ever since. They're known for their torta fritta. the bread puffs fried in lard that are a standard, cholesterol-rich accompaniment to a salumi antipasto platter. Therefore we had to have some, accompanied by a variety of pickled and vinegared vegetables and a lovely dry Lambrusco.  

Delicate, delectable, and not at all greasy, the torta fritta lived up to their reputation, and the wine, the salumi, and the vegetables were great, too. 

Next came the primi, the pastas. I chose a dish of potato ravioli sauced with roasted red radicchio and topped with a shower of grated Parmesan. Paradisaical. 
Others at the table had tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms and chicche della nonna (Grandma's goodies), little potato dumplings in a creamy tomato sauce. Sighs of pleasure abounded.

Le chicche--deliziose!

By the time we'd cleaned our plates we were hardly feeling hungry. We often skip the secondi meat courses because they tend to be plain grills or roasts and not very interesting, particularly if you've already ingested several thousand calories of antipasto and pasta. But the dish I remembered most fondly from my previous visit to La Frasca was a rich stew of beans and strips of long-cooked pork skin, and when I saw that it was still on the menu I had to order it. We were also excited to see trippa alla parmigiana, tripe in tomato sauce, so we got an order of that as well, plus some grilled vegetables as a gesture to healthfulness.

Beans and pork skin above, tripe below, and extra cheese in the orange pot.

The tripe was great, if you like tripe, which I do. I've never seen the beans and pork skin on any other menu, and I can't imagine why, since it's indecently good. The beans are creamy, the pork skin is cooked to total silkiness, and the dish is rich but not greasy. I kept having one more bite until I wished I'd stopped a few bites sooner. The young folks topped all this off with tiramisu, but my excesses with the pork skin prevented me from following suit. For which I'm grateful.

The next day we returned to another eatery of blessed memory, Trattoria Campanini in the town of Roncole-Verdi. Some 30 years ago we dined there with Pam and Romano. Danny and I were minor food journalists in those days, but we had no plans to write about what we were eating on our summer vacation. Nevertheless, Romano let Signor Campanini know that we were important American food writers, and as a result our eager host insisted we try virtually everything on the menu. At first we were happy to oblige, since the food was excellent, and back then our gastrointestinal systems were in prime working order. But by the end of the meal we were all feeling dangerously overstuffed. The proprietor insisted we try his homemade grappa, which I was amazed to discover really did work as a kind of digestivo; the shock of the high-proof liquor kicked my liver into action, as if it were a weary horse responding to the whip. 

Afterwards we staggered off to our hotel at one end of the town, while Pam and Romano retired to their apartment, and we all soon feel asleep.  But at three in the morning Danny and I both woke up feeling all kinds of awful. Not knowing what else to do, we got dressed and went out for a walk in the sleeping town. After a few minutes we spotted another couple, also taking a middle-of-the-night constitutional. It was, of course, Pam and Romano.

Emotionally scarred by the consequences of our own gluttony, we'd never gone back to the trattoria, even though the food there had been terrific. Now we decided it was time to return, and we invited Pam and Romano to accompany us--but only after he promised to say nothing to anyone at the restaurant about food writing. 

We ordered torta fritta again, but, chastened by past experience and our dinner the night before, we got a helping for one, meaning just one torta per person, along with a single-serving platter of spalla cotta, a local specialty that's a slightly more refined version of corned beef. 

I let someone else have mine, so I can't say how they compared to La Frasca's. Of course we had to get some pickled onions, giardiniera, and Russian salad to go with. You've got to have your vegetables!

The butter was presumably for those worried about low cholesterol.

For our primi we ordered a tris of filled pastas, a selection of three different kinds of tortelli, the plump, locally hegemonic pasta shape:

Tortelli with goat cheese filling.

Tortelli with porcini.

Green tortelli with ricotta in walnut sauce.

Those last were my favorite, but all three were wonderful--so yielding and satisfying in the mouth, so full of flavor, offering so much pleasure in every bite. 

We decided to share a few secondi: boiled mariola, a local pork sausage; veal cheeks; and swine cheeklets. They were very tasty but rich, and we were running out of stomach space, as well as the energy to take photographs. I don't think anyone had the courage to order dessert. But as far as I know none of us ended up walking the streets at three in the morning, either.

We were saved from another such meal by the fact that the next day was Easter Sunday, a holiday that Italians celebrate by taking the extended family out for a big restaurant meal. There was not a restaurant reservation to be had anywhere in the area, and anyway we were ready for some home cooking. Our daughter made a wonderful lamb ragu to go with some extra-long spaghetti she'd brought us from our ancestral region of Molise, her compagno whipped up a dressing for the salad, I boiled some artichokes from the market and Danny made mayonnaise to go with them, and we finished with fresh strawberries and gelato.

A little health food.

Not exactly spa cuisine, but  at least no torta fritta were involved.

We still had one more restaurant we wanted to go to while we had access to a car, and we'd managed to get a reservation on Monday--which is also a holiday here, known as Pasquetta, or little Easter. The place was a favorite spot of ours, Osteria Ardenga. Although we'd lost the will to gorge, we still started out with a small antipasto of fried cubes of polenta, little anchovy pastries, an array of lightly pickled vegetables, and--once again--a platter of spalla cotta, accompanied by--once again--a dry Lambrusco. 

It was a gorgeous array of flavors and textures. Enzo, our grand-dog, was on hand, too (you can bring dogs to restaurants here), and he was extraordinarily well-behaved, much more so than the baby at the next table, even though he didn't get to eat any of the delicacies the rest of us were enjoying.

Danny followed up with a secondo of roasted baby goat, while the rest of us went for pasta. I couldn't resist the casonsei, a hyperlocal, rather blintz-like pasta shape, stuffed with breadcrumbs and cheese and served with little bits of sausage in a truffle cream sauce. 

Boy, was it good. And boy, was I glad I didn't have anything more to eat before we went home for a nap.

The next day our guests were ready to get on the road, but they wanted to fuel up before departing. By this point we'd had enough of restaurant meals. For a quick lunch we turned to another, albeit more recent, Italian custom: getting takeout from a local kebaberia. I had chicken wings, Danny had a kebab wrap, our daughter had falafel, and her partner chose the most authentically nuovo-Italian lunch of all: a kebab pizza, topped with French fries. 

He said it was delicious and ate every bite. Which perhaps just shows that what seems gross to one generation can become another's cherished tradition. 

Situation report

Yes, we are back in Italy, as we optimistically resume our half-and-half existence shuttling between Fidenza and California. We arrived a week ago, late in the evening, and here's the view that greeted me when I came out onto our balcony early the next morning.

The neighbors are lucky I didn't burst into song.

In some ways things here don't seem to have changed much. People are still waiting in line to go into stores, to maintain social distancing, and they're still wearing masks indoors and at the big outdoor market. When you enter a restaurant--masked, please--you have to show your "super green pass" proving that you're not only vaccinated but have been boosted at least once. (Luckily everyone we've encountered so far has accepted our U.S. vaccination cards, because we haven't yet gotten our booster shots into the Italian system.) 

Our friend Franca is vaccinated but refuses to get a booster, for reasons I'm not clear on, and I haven't seen her yet so we haven't had a chance to discuss it. Without the booster she can't go into the coffee bars where we usually meet. And after a couple of warm days it's gotten too chilly to meet out of doors, since she's also been suffering from an on-again, off-again fever. Her doctor says it isn't COVID and she's been testing negative. The green-pass rules are scheduled to lighten up at the beginning of May, but I have to say I'm more than a little nervous about getting together with her. 

COVID hospitalizations are still down and the pandemic no longer seems to be top of mind. The mayor's Facebook page instead has a lot of entries about bandages and other aid that the town is sending to Ukraine. 

The war and the energy politics around it are causing some serious disruption. Pam says several local industries have cut back or temporarily closed because energy prices have gotten so high. Gas, always expensive here, is now even more so, despite cuts in gas taxes to lower prices.. Italians have been told to turn off their heat to help conserve fuel, even though so far this has been a rather chilly spring. I don't know if it's because of the war or COVID or other factors, but there are more empty storefronts now, and our usually bustling street seems a little less busy.  

Until a few days ago this was a fancy women's lingerie store.

 Overall, though, things seem much the same. Latteria 55 downstairs still has lots of customers for their hams and Parmesan, the clothing stores put up glamorous new window displays every few days, and the bars have plenty of people drinking coffee in the morning and bright orange Aperol spritzes later in the day. The town recently washed and disinfected parts of the centro storico, the historic center, which is our part of town, so everything looks bright and shiny. And it's spring, when even gray days feel like progress toward better times.  

This is the town's Parco delle Rimembranze, Memorial Park, with its rather Stalinist monument to those who died in the two world wars. (The motto on the pedestal reads, in translation, "We are dead only to those without faith," a sentiment that to me seems both delusional and offensive.) It's a reminder of how huge the cost of war was for Europe in the last century, and how dangerous the current situation is. Yet though there seems little reason for optimism, the new leaves and the budding flowers inspire a flicker of hope nonetheless.

Sweet sorrow

We are on our way back to California, and as always I'm feeling a muddle of happy and sad. California's warmer weather will be a nice change from the 40-something temperatures in Fidenza, even if El Cerrito is hardly tropical, and I'll be glad to see our friends and reconnect with my aqua aerobics pals, my chamber music community, and my zumba posse. And it will be great to again be able to express myself like a functioning adult on pretty much any subject.

But there are many things I'm going to miss while on the other side of the world from Fidenza. For example:

Gelato. Gelato isn't has heavy as fatty "premium" ice cream, but it has more body and vastly more flavor than low-end ice creams. No wonder Italians eat a lot of it. There are three gelaterie on our street, including one just across from us, the Borgo dei Golosi (Village of Gluttons, a great name for a gelato purveyor).  

Eugenia dishing up a coppetta.

Eugenia, the proprietor, seems to be there about 18 hours a day, and we first started dropping in mostly out of a desire to support a hard-working local business. But during our 2021 sojourn I seem to have become addicted.  

Heaven in a cup: fondente and walnut gelato.

In particular, I'm obsessed with Eugenia's super-dark-chocolate fondente, which is almost black, not very sweet, and insanely satisfying, especially when paired with walnut or hazelnut or pistachio or amarena (sour cherry) gelato. And a 2-euro coppetta is only a third of a U.S. cup, so I can indulge without overindulging. I'm going to be thinking about Eugenia a lot over the next few months, I suspect.  

Butchers. Here I mean not Republican anti-vax politicians or rampaging white supremacists, but people in white coats who will cut meat up for you to order. Of course this exists in California, too, but it is mostly very artisanal and very pricey, whereas in Fidenza it's still the way a lot of people buy their meat as a matter of course. At the big supermarket down the street the butchers are working in the back, which isn't the same thing, but it's still exciting to see the meat counter stocked with things like rabbit, veal, guinea fowl, pork hearts, and other delectables rare or impossible to find even in foodie California.

Roast guinea fowl with potatoes at our house.

A more one-on-one experience is offered by the halal butcher near our place. We went in on a Tuesday looking for lamb, but the butcher apologized; he only gets lamb in on Friday. When we returned on Friday morning I was disappointed to see no lamb in the case. But when we asked, the butcher said, "I'll get it" and returned a moment later bearing a full lamb carcass. From which he obligingly cut up some shoulder for a stew and then ground us a couple of pounds of leg for meatballs. 

Got agnello?

That seemed almost as satisfying as raising and slaughtering the lamb myself. And the meat was very lamb-y and delicious.  

Compostable bags. Italy, like other civilized countries, is trying to cut down on plastic waste. In California the solution is to have people bring their own shopping bags, but there are still plenty of situations--takeout food, for instance--where we end up with plastic bags we wish we didn't have to deal with.

Guilt-free baggery.

In Italy, many grocery stores and takeout eateries now put your purchases in compostable bags that you can then use to collect your umido--compostable food waste--and drop into the bin. This isn't universal, but it's much more widespread than in California. I hope we in the U.S. catch up to this trend and that this will soon be something I no longer have to wax nostalgic about. 

Italian bars  Bars in America have a louche appeal. Whether they're dives or fancy watering-holes, they are all about alcohol. Because they're sinful, American bars are hidden behind darkened windows. Bars in Italy, on the other hand, are out in the open--particularly in the pandemic era, when many have moved outdoors--and people go there to meet their friends for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, or a quick pasta lunch, as well as for wine, beer, or a cocktail. The vibe is social and relaxed and you only have to show up a few times to become a regular. 

Bar breakfast.

The prices are low for the quality offered. This morning two excellent cappuccini, a croissant, and a brioche (also excellent) came to a total of about $6.00. And in the evening, a beer, a spritz, or a glass of wine that costs $5 or $6 often comes with a free plate of little sandwiches, potato chips, or other snacks

Bar dinner.

True, the Fidenza bar scene became significantly less appealing when the weather turned cold and COVID limitations on indoor seating often meant gulping down your coffee in a plastic tent that gave only minimal protection from the icy rain outside. But I will still be sorry to go back to making my own coffee rather than strolling across the street for a cappuccino with a heart etched in the foam.

Pasta. After three months in Fidenza, Danny says he's sick of pasta. I'm not. If anything, the opposite.  Spaghetti, penne, lasagna, and so on are hardly rarities in the United States, but the omnipresence of pasta in Italy delights me on a daily basis.

Pretty much every restaurant except the kebab places serves it (the kebaberies offer pizza but not noodles), and when I walk around town I see one menu board after another offering tagliatelle with mushrooms, gnocchi with gorgonzola, and dozens of other variations on this lovely theme. In the supermarket, the pasta aisle is three times as long as it is in the U.S., with dozens of additional shapes.

Cavatelli with tomatoes and beans, Trattoria San Giorgio

Not that the pasta in Italy is always that great. Ristorante Ugolini's pasta salad of a couple summers ago (the first photo in this series), which included corn kernels and hot dogs, was an unfortunate experiment, and elsewhere I've had my share of pasta that was underdone, oversalted, or indifferently sauced. 

Orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, Bar Teatro.

But still, it's pasta. And when it's good, as it often is, it's divine. When I'm in Italy, just knowing that most of the people around me eat some form of pasta every day makes me happy. 

Italian fashion. In Northern California's East Bay people are serious about dressing casually. Keen waterproof sandals, "performance" hiking pants, and fleece jackets are dress-up gear. Dirty sweatpants and dirty hair that in other settings might be symptoms of emotional breakdown are, in Berkeley and environs, proud snoot-cocking at bourgeois convention. But in Italy, or at least in Fidenza, a lot of people embrace fashion with gusto. Our street boasts more than a dozen clothing stores, including three for men, and they all change their window displays every week or so, vying with each other to come up with eye-catching combinations of colors and styles. But they are regularly outdone by the people strolling by. I cannot really do justice to this subject because I'm too much of a pussy to take people's pictures head on, but here are a few folks I've captured on the fly over the past couple of years.

Italian men are the bomb.

So are Italian women.

Especially older Italian women.

New arrivals are making the mix even more fascinating.

I spotted this pair at the San Donnino festa. I hope they'll turn up again.

This lady at the festa also caught my eye.

Her sneakers say it all.

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.