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. 

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.