Leaving My Adopted Southern Italian Village
My days are numbered in this little Italian hill town, the home of my paternal ancestors.
Summer’s heat has mostly broken and come evening cooler breezes fan these cobblestone streets. You can feel them atop the historic district where castle remnants and old churches brood silently, deserted but not forgotten, guarding their secrets. The figs are ripe and ready to be picked, some to be dried and stuffed with almonds, a delicacy that makes my mouth water just to think of it.
Autumn is on the horizon, school will soon start, and the teenagers who wander the sidewalks will once again have somewhere to go. I’ve yet to winter here, but I can almost feel the wicked bite of February’s wind and the forlornness amid the pathways of the Centro Storico, despite this season’s warmth and cheer.
I’ll be gone long before that. Still, I’m not ready to leave, not quite. I haven’t spent enough time with my cousin, Giovanni, Ciupuddone, the Big Onion. Among his cronies, I’ve learned, he’s also known as Il Biondo, or The Blonde.
The nickname dates to the 1960s when Pomaricans flocked to a tiny movie house near the town hall to watch Italian films and U.S. imports. The place was standing-room-only whenever an American cowboy film was on the bill and the audience particularly loved the so-called spaghetti westerns made by Italian director Sergio Leone, including “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo,” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
Isolated Pomarico identified with the film’s empty expanses, where loners and misfits matched wits and gunfire — one tiny southern Italian town making its own connection with the American West’s rebel cowboy culture. Local men began to impersonate their favorite characters. Giovanni quickly became Blondie, Clint Eastwood’s cool, calm, cigar-chomping character. The name still fits.
In my eyes, my cousin remains a mythical figure, the Glionna family patriarch who worked two jobs as firefighter and a farmer, raised three daughters, risked his life savings to build a towering house in town where they are all still welcome. He has survived several heart attacks. When it is time, everything he owns will be divided between his progeny — the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
How many times have I watched his capable hands do something as simple as cutting bread? Holding a sharp knife, clutching the circular loaf close to his breast, his thumb guides the sharp edge toward him in determined strokes, the blade slicing through the crust with a rough, sawing noise. In Italy, bread-cutting is a ceremonial tradition reserved for the head of the table. In the Glionna clan, that person is Giovanni.
I will miss sitting at his table and, between sips of red table wine, scarfing down his wife Laura’s specialty plate — fried polpetta, or meatballs, with egg and cheese. Each meal Laura prepares is better than the last one.
Time passes slowly in this small town, but still it passes, as surely as the sun crosses the sky and the roosters crow at dawn. You cannot escape that. There is more research to do, more historians to consult. But there is no more time. I have spent it all. Everything still undone will have to wait.
For now, it is time to go.
I’m sitting inside Mayor Francesco Mancini’s office when he asks what I’ll remember most about Pomarico. I’ve been preparing my answer all summer.
I will treasure Pomarico both for its curious sounds and exquisite silence. I’ll cherish the clamor of its streets, the pigeons cooing outside my window, the braying of a lone burro at dawn, the clanging of tower bells in the Largo Chiesa, how men call to one another in guttural rasps. Ahh-ooh! Ehh! Ohh! Oww!
I’ll also remember the stillness within the courtyard of the Palazzo Marchesale amid lengthening afternoon shadows, the hush of the deserted Via Roma after midnight, the streetlights handing off my shadow so it keeps pace by my side. I’ll miss the wordlessness of wandering the winding alleyways in the Centro Storico, amid scampering streets cats and the hushed ghosts of my ancestors.
I’ll remember Pomarico for its simplicity, the way the old men populate the benches scattered around the town. Some are sweet and silent, others unsmiling and brusque, like the cane-toting little rascal who lashed out at perceived enemies by keying their cars or pulling plants out of vases.
Each has a right to be exactly how they want to be. All their lives, they’ve worked hard as farmers, most of them, and can now spend life’s twilight watching boys kick soccer balls in the church yard. They can squint with age-lined faces and pass judgment on this strange new complex world.
I have my favorites. How could I not?
Francesco eases into Bar Madness for coffee each morning, his sweet smile revealing few remaining teeth. He calls me Gianni and I hope he lives forever to best enjoy this rural enclave where he has invested his life.
Solitary Rocco remains inside his apartment, leaning out the window, watching. After I post online a photo I have taken of him, a man playing cards at Bar Centrale, my cousin Giovanni’s hangout, holds out his phone: There is Rocco’s picture.
“I’m Rocco’s son,” he says proudly. It feels good, like I have connected to something here, made a small difference. It’s a sweet feeling of belonging.
In Pomarico, it is not the young who interest me, but the oldest generation ho are fast disappearing and who make this town special. When they are gone, Pomarico will somehow become a lesser place.
The elegant woman in black, who quietly mourns her lost husband and sons, emerges from her home to water her plants and glimpse the world. Another woman, perhaps not of sound mind, stops me along the Via Roma, speaking in rapid-fire Italian. She comments about the weather and then walks on, smiling, gesturing, without ever waiting for my reply.
And Il Postino, the postman, the moniker a reference to one of my favorite Italian films, made in 1994, starring Massimo Troisi. It’s a fictional tale about a simple mailman on a small southern Italian island who meets real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and learns to love poetry, which he uses to woo the woman of his dreams.
But in Pomarico, Il Postino is something of a tragic figure. Bulky and red-faced, he floats furtively along town streets. I turn and suddenly he’s there. I ask my cousin Giovanni about him and he tips his hand up to his mouth as though taking a drink.
For years, he hand-delivered the mail to grateful housewives. “Can I offer you something, some coffee, perhaps something stronger?” they asked.
“Perhaps a bit of Amaro (Lucano),” Il Postino said, referring to a potent local alcohol.
Soon, he was drinking the Amaro without delivering any letters.
Now retired, Il Postino still walks, like he’s back on his old route, no longer delivering, but pausing to pick up discarded cigarette butts he brings to his lips. Once he follows me up a narrow street and motions me close, holding out his hand, panhandling. After I slip him a one-Euro coin he raises his finger to his lips. “This is our secret.”
I donate whenever I see him, hoping against hope he will find his own poetry.
I will never forget Cosimo, the fruit and flower vendor, a lightning bolt of spirit and energy. Cosimo was also enthralled by the drama and cool of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western characters. After the opening of “Per Qualche Dollaro in Piú,” For a Few Dollars More, he grew a mustache to impersonate the gruff Colonel Douglas Mortimer, played by Lee Van Cleef. People still call him “Il Colonnello,” the Colonel.
Cosimo tells me his cousin once met filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who opened the lavish five-star hotel in nearby Bernalda, his grandfather’s birthplace. He shows me a photo taken of the two. I tell him I’m a huge Coppola fan.
“He’s a bum!” he says. “He’s done nothing for Bernalda but make money off its back.” For southern Italians like Cosimo, it’s not enough for American cousins to reconnect with the home country: you have to give back as well.
For weeks, Cosimo invites me to join his predawn rounds selling his wares in nearby towns, Bernalda included. It means rising at an hour that is both too early and too late. Nothing good ever happens at 3 a.m.
I explain that I’m not sleeping well, which is true. What I don’t tell him is that a neighborhood dog keeps me awake at night. In my second apartment, with its grand countryside views, I keep the large bedroom windows open, seeking respite in the slight breezes that break the grip of the heat. Like clockwork, the barking starts at midnight, with a shrill timbre that suggests a small anxious animal. A muffled voice or rustle of the wind has set off its defense mechanism.
Yap. Yap. Yap.
Some nights, the yipping provokes the baleful yowls of a larger dog out in the darkness, and the two converse until the other dog wearies of the incessant badgering and curls up for some sleep. Lucky him.
One day, I spot the suspect leaping about a third-floor the porch, its little head popping up over the railing. I recognize the blasted bark. Now I know where my enemy lurks.
Days later, I run into Cosimo outside my apartment. He unsuspectingly points to his place — that same apartment — and as my feeble, sleep-addled brain connects the dots, the frisky four-legged little suspect runs to his side.
That fleabag, my tormentor. “Il cane cattivo.” The bad dog. It belongs to Cosimo.
In Italy, vengeful neighbors have even laced an offending dog’s food with poison. Of course, I am aghast at such barbarity. Dogs are man’s best friends, happy-go-lucky creatures. There must be another way to solve a noise dispute, even with Cosimo’s godforsaken critter. Yet one sleepless night, my head aching, I consult a word on my English-Italian dictionary: “Veleno.” Poison.
Then I know that it’s truly time to go. Cosimo is cool, even if his dog is not, and I do not want to see the inside of Pomarico’s little jailhouse. A neurotic dog and some sleepless nights are a fair price for friendship.
In my last days, I make a final visit La Bottega del Gusto, the Taste Shop, this small slice of rural Italy run by my cousin Irene and her adult son, Nico. I touch the framed photo of my late cousin Vincenzo, Giovanni’s younger brother, that sits atop one counter, a shrine to the shop’s founder. I watch Nico halve a huge wheel of pecorino cheese on the counter, spinning it like a slab of fresh pizza dough to find the right perch from which to drive in his knife.
One morning soon after my arrival, my brain thrumming with caffeine, I join Irene as she shops for vegetables. At one vendor, she introduces me as a Big Onion, an American Ciupuddone. As I pay for some spring onions, I announce in Italian that this Big Onion is buying little onions. People laugh. I can even be a wise guy in another language.
Irene then guides me around her store, selecting ingredients for a homemade pasta dish. We pass dried spaghetti, fusilli, fettuccini and farfalle, settling on some fresh maccheroncini stored in a small cooler. She adds some pecorino cheese and finely-grated Parmesan. I also leave with a bottle of tomato sauce, completing my beginner’s cooking set, pledging to one day make my own salsa di pomodoro, like the locals do.
Days later, I try to make a passable pasta Italiana. Talk about a fool’s errand. In the summer heat, the ingredients aren’t getting any fresher. I can almost hear the ticking of their little biological clocks. My kitchen features only a toy-sized refrigerator and a portable metal cooker with two burners.
I flick away the ants that scavenge my porcelain sink top, rifle up two pots — one filled with water to boil the pasta, the other to heat the bottled sauce. I slice up mushrooms, cured sausage, a tomato, onions and grate some cheese.
Then the roof caves in on my kitchen experiment. The day before, I had forgotten to replace the top on a vinegar bottle, which is now swimming with the little corpses of countless fruit flies. Without a colander, I scoop out the tube-shaped noodles with a small ladle. But they’re still soggy, so I lay a paper towel over the warm shells to soak up the water. Big mistake.
The paper sticks to the pasta and I trash the first batch. I’m a culinary cretin, a wanna-be Walter White cooking up a meth batch inside some rural desert trailer, bungling it all, looking over my shoulder for the police.
Finally, I serve myself a bowl of steaming hot maccheroncini with red sauce. I call it “Pasta alla Brutta Americana.” Ugly American Pasta. Then I throw in the kitchen towel and leave the cooking to the professionals. I am in Italy, after all.
One day, I’m cruising in town with Mike and his wife, Maria when the car slowly eases past a man standing alone on the sidewalk, lost in thought, enjoying an apple. He takes a crisp bite and looks satisfied as he chews. It’s a private moment.
“Buon Appetito,” Maria says to the stranger. Good Eating.
Italians say this before every meal, a tradition that signifies a passion for food and the culture of gathering around a table for another sumptuous repast, which in this case is an apple eaten by a solitary figure standing on the street.
It’s just one of the magical things about a place that brims with a simple beauty transported from another age. Like the view of the Centro Storico from a distance. Perched on a hill, it’s like a fairy-tale town, ancient and Medieval, its churches and castle ramparts baked an off-white from the collective warmth of a million sunny days.
While most American cities ravish only from a distance, Pomarico’s allure slowly unfolds the closer you get. You see the rich colors of the roof tops — pale apricot, ruby red and lentil purple — and alley cobblestones that glimmer after a rain. Walking the Via Roma, between buildings, I glimpse a vast agrarian landscape that consumes this little settlement with its enormity. It’s like staring from a ship’s cabin at a vast open sea.
From my favorite table outside Bar Madness, I watch the jackdaws flit between perches above the Chiesa Madre. I’m curious about this bell tower, where generations ago restless boys slipped away to smoke cigarettes and share secrets. I want to peer down onto the square like a winged bird, but it’s off-limits. I am never able to convince Dom Roberto to unlock the door and escort me up there. Perhaps one day …
Slowly, over long summer days, Pomarico has revealed its magic.
One night I awaken to a seething storm that descends from nowhere with the stealth of an invading army villagers here have so long dreaded. I bolt from a deep sleep to feel rain pelting my face. The large windows are open and the wind sweeps in unchecked. On the wings of such gusts, it’s raining sideways. I jump from my bed and twice slip on the slick tile floor, a soldier under attack, cursing myself as a worthless sentry who has fallen asleep. I grit my teeth, under bombardment from the rain, closing windows, only to have them spring back open. Then, as suddenly as they came, the winds cease and the rain stops.
Now it is silent. I lay back in bed, drenched, and wonder whether it’s all just been a dream. The only sound is Cosimo’s dog, barking at phantoms in the distance.
The next morning, Mike and I are visiting a relative named Giovanni Glionna, a younger namesake cousin of Il Biondo’s, to discuss his genealogical research. As he lists one distant ancestor or another, Mike pauses from his translation.
He turns to me and says softly, “I think we’re related.”
Apparently, somewhere back in time, Mike’s clan married into mine. As with Bruno, we’re aging fruit on distant branches of the same family tree. Does this make me feel closer to Mike? Not really. We were friends first, distant relatives second. But it just proves a point that I have learned so often in this little hill town.
One day, as I walk along the Villa Roma, doing some food shopping, carrying some lettuce, a big purple onion and some fruit in a sack over my shoulder, I run into Beatrice, a town hall official.
“Giovanni, please come with me,” she says.
As it turns out, there are two other Americans in town. They’re from Chicago on an venture to track down ancestors. Neither speaks Italian and their eyes light up when I am introduced as their translator. I suddenly feel like a more integral part of this place. No longer an outsider, more like a local. The feeling is as delicious as the large sweet purple onion I carry in my backpack.
The world really is small, and Pomarico even smaller, this place where life follows its own curious, wondrously-unpredictable, extraordinary path from one place to another, and finally folding in on itself as if there is no other place to go.
On the morning of my departure, I arrive at Giovanni’s apartment to find him leaning out the kitchen window with the same whiskered face that has defined my days.
Laura gives me a bag of fresh figs and warns me not to leave them on some public bench in my haste. For months now, I have lost things, only to find them later, most of the time. I have also located something that I did not know I had lost or perhaps never had: A newfound sense of Italianitá, a version of myself I never before knew and never missed.
Then Mike and Bruno, my two stalwart cousins, make the drive to deliver me to the train station in Bari. Together, we three. It is fitting. We have been a journalistic team, driving Basilicata’s backroads, cementing our close bond along the way.
Outside the train station, as Mike helps me with my bags, Bruno’s 20-year-old daughter, along for the ride, lightly kisses both cheeks of this strange departing visitor, gestures of respect borne from a culture where such things still exist.
Bruno accompanies me into the crowded station and we embrace. And then they are gone. And with them goes a small but important part of myself.
Not long ago, I did a DNA test to determine my exact bloodlines. Am I truly as Italian as I now feel, after so much time in southern Italy, among distant cousins who no longer seem so distant? Am I a true Italiano-Americano?
As it turns out, 41% of my heritage is Italian, with 34% of that tracing directly to Basilicata. Another 39% tracks to England with smatterings from Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Albania, the Aegean Islands and even Egypt.
I am somewhat of a European mutt. Yet the main ingredients of my genetic makeup hail from “Il bel paese,” the beautiful country. In the end, the numbers don’t lie. Deep down inside, I actually am predominantly Italian, even if only by the slightest of margins.
Decades ago, long before my journey of self-discovery, identifying with my ancestral culture would not have been as meaningful. Yet mysteries remain. I came to investigate my grandfather, yet this elusive man remains something of a sphinx I yearn to say: “Grandpa, I tried my hardest to find you, but you left so few clues. Yet here on the land that produced you, I feel closer to you. And I feel closer to myself.”
Pomarico has taught me this: My Italian identity is rooted here, in this specific place. I do not claim affinity to coveted northern Italy, share no connection with Michelangelo’s hands, or with those of Roman emperors or great Renaissance artists or composers. My connection lies within the grasp of farmers, whose gnarled fingers have taken from this stubborn land as much as it would give.
I am from Basilicata. I am a Lucanian.
I seek out northern Italy to play tourist. I come to Pomarico to find home.
My ancestral digging has also revealed much about my father, the man who produced me and who shaped me, who instilled the traits of which I am most proud. This epiphany did not come abruptly, like that overnight summer storm, but slowly, like the fruit that grows on Giovanni’s trees or the old men who move about these streets.
While my grandfather might still lurk on the periphery, my father has taken center stage.
Across Pomarico, I feel his spirit by my side. This land, this town and these people are an integral part of us both. I now see how this ancient culture that prizes family and loyalty colored the decisions he made throughout his life. My self-discovery has helped me better fathom the most important man in my life, “il mio padre.” My father.
I once believed that if I could have dinner with anyone on the planet, living or dead, I would choose Abraham Lincoln, that humble 19th Century liberator of oppressed souls. Yet today I would undoubtedly choose my grandfather and my father. Together, we three, sitting at a table with good wine, where I can ask both of my life’s most important figures all the questions I once did not know to ask. Even contemplating such a scene brings tears to my eyes.
I want to make them both, my grandfather and my father, proud of the grandson of Italy I have become. That’s enough for now. It has to be. My time here is gone. Pomarico will go on without me. Men will crowd bars and cafes, play cards, shout on the street. Old women will sit coquettishly at their door stoops, hands on their laps.
A few might mention me in conversation, perhaps even fondly, the Americano who came and went and came back again so many years later, like his grandfather and father before him, the Ciupuddone.
But I will not stay a memory for long. The strong emotional bonds I have made here remain, now deeply rooted once again, and this time I know I will be back.
And I will not wait 25 years. On my grandfather’s honor, my father’s and my own, I make this promise.