La Mia Famiglia in Italia

Cinzia and Zio Saverio

at Vesuvio

at pompeii

30100003

For some reason, I've been thinking lately about the first time I went to Italy, back in the 1980s.  It was the joyful culmination of a search for the relatives of my paternal grandfather, who had been born near the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius in a town called Boscoreale about 15 miles southeast of Naples.  I started with telephone directories in the research room of the public library and sent out inquiries to all the Carbones listed in the Napoli book.

A month or so later I received two beautifully handwritten letters via airmail by the very ones I was seeking.I was welcomed there with a kind of warmth and love I did not even dare to imagine,  accompanied by rounds of introductions, a flurry of excursions, and a raucous ongoing orchestra of loud conversation I could seldom understand. There were meals that went on for hours (at one of them, we drank wine that my great-grandfather had bottled), private tours of archaeological sites, and visits to crumbling houses and an ancestral parcel of land whose title was the source of some dispute. (My grandfather, the eldest of three brothers and a sister, had emigrated to the United States in 1905 and never returned to sort this out, a concern discussed with such intense emotion, you'd think he had left the room just hours earlier.)

The first image above is  me with Zio Saverio, the eldest son of my grandfather's brother Giovanni, and a very gentle, generous soul. He happened to have the same first and last name as my own beloved father, and he wore it well.

To the left in the second picture above is Saverio's eldest daughter Luisa, along with Monte, Nello, Luisa's then-fiancee (now husband), and her uncle, Vittorio, who translated for us. (Vittorio usually kept his shirt on, but it was a warm day, and we had just traipsed up to the top of Mt. Vesuvius.)Oh, what fun we had -- la dolce vita! I remember driving along the narrow, winding road of the Amalfi coast in a little Fiat with the windows open, all of us impossibly young, laughing and singing along to a song they were playing just for me: No, Cinzia, No Cry sung by Antonello Venditti. It was a cheesy song if ever there was one–80s spaghetti music, and a Bob Marley rip-off –but it was our soundtrack, and I was Cinzia, Italian to my soul, and everything sad was faraway.

The next picture was taken at Scavi Pompei. The elegant gentleman in the impeccable suit, white shirt, and dark tie was Natale, a family friend and one of the most revered and knowledgable of all guides at that amazing archaeological site. He was so well-known, people nodded to him respectfully as we passed. Buon giorno, maestro. Sadly, most of what he said was lost on me, the linguistically-limited American that I was and still am, but we certainly had an exhaustive tour. The boy is my cousin Luca, looking bored to the point of agony, and his mother, Zia Titina, whom I adore.

I don't even know why I like the next photo. It could be the guy with the cigarette, who seems so nonchalantly Neapolitan, and whether he is making deals or fatalistic proclamations, there is definitely some kind of discussion or commentary going on here that I so don't get, which is a feeling I often had. As I recall, we went to look at a couple of old houses damaged by the recent terremoto, and I was never clear on the significance of these particular dwellings, but there was a lot of standing around at each stop. I can see that I am clasping my Italian-English dictionary here, which by and large proved useless in the face of rapid-fire dialect, but I never  did stop trying. (And I never imagined how appalled I would someday be by those high-waisted jeans and the hair-do. What can I say? It was the 1980s.)

The next photo shows another inexplicable gathering at a ruined building, but what I like about it is that I appear to be fully engaged in the conversation. Trust me, it's an illusion, despite the fact that the man in the suit (left) is Francesco, another of my uncle-cousins, who spoke pretty good English and spent a lot of time helping me to diagram the family tree.

I've decided to post this picture, too, because it includes my dear Zio Pinuccio (third from left) and Zia Anna (far right) and her husband, whose name I have since forgotten. I note that I am wearing a t-shirt from the '84 Olympics, another embarrassing pair of jeans, and a coral necklace from Titina and Pinuccio, which I have since given to my daughter.It's a long-ago past that links me to these good people, but they perceived that past as meaningful and real, and they welcomed me as their own. I've  returned several times to Boscoreale in the ensuing decades, and I've written about subsequent visits, here, for example, and here, but this first trip was the moment of reconnection for me to so much story and heritage and unclaimed love.