Letter from Pomarico: Scenes from a southern Italian hill town
The richly layered sounds of this isolated hill town roll over me each morning like a symphony of foreign music.
I keep my bedroom window ajar the entire day, and opening the front door creates a gentle cross breeze on hot days that I find luxuriating.
It also gives me a prime vantage point to the aural charm of Italian life.
Whether I’m lounging in bed on a humid afternoon or writing each morning at my dining room table, I can hear the unmistakable musical language of this ancient town where my grandfather was born.
Children, seemingly more innocent here than their American brethren, call to their mothers in high-pitched warbles. Men shout to one another in the local dialect, greetings punctuated by an exclamation that’s distinctively Italian.
Ahh-ooh!
There are variations, of course, like the locals are working their way through the Italian vowels.
Eh!
Oh!
Ow!
And don't get me started on the hand gestures.
The meaning of these phrase escapes me. Maybe it’s a form of guttural male acknowledgment or perhaps just a verbal tic. Talk to me, they seem to say. Whatta ya want?
Once, sitting in a courtyard having a beer with my cousin, I try to replicate the sound.
I take a breath and call out.
Ahh-ooh!
Within moments, I hear a response from some stranger from across the vast stone yard, as though a return call from a member of some secret fraternity or brotherhood, in a vernacular that only men here can seemingly comprehend.
Ahh-ooh!
There are gentler, wordless sounds as well.
Within hours after my arrival weeks ago, I hear the cooing of pigeons from just outside my bedroom window and peer out to see a nest perched just above.
At first slightly disquieting, the constant murmur of these birds has become a comforting metronome to my days, and I miss them when they go quiet.
Another measure to my time here are the regular chimes of the tower bells from atop St. Michael’s Catholic Church, just down a few sets of stone steps from my apartment.
This is not a symphony, but a brass band.
I notice the bells most in the evening, marking the quarter, half and full hours. The brassy sound resonates throughout the entire historic district. It's something ancient, not doubt heard here centuries ago, back when the streets of this town were made of dirt and men traveled by donkey, not car.
Today, it remains a call to faith, if not something to set your watch by.
But by far the most precious sensation here is the silence. On my evening walks through the warren of narrow cobblestone alleyways that lead up to the ancient hill top castle, I pass through sections of domiciles long abandoned.
Without access by automobile, these footpaths and the residences they connect, have been left behind by modern life.
Often I stop and relish in the quiet, marked only by the scamper of a passing street cat.
And then the church bell tolls.
****
Talk about a fool’s errand.
It has already been a few days since I first went food shopping for locally-grown ingredients and that soft packaged maccheroncini in my refrigerator isn’t getting any fresher.
I can almost hear the ticking of its biological clock.
An American friend who owns a house in the nearby town of Ferrandina warned me not to overstock my fridge because you never know when you’ll have time to cook and the shelf-life of most of what you buy here is measured in days.
So it’s now or never to dive in and cook my first homemade bowl of pasta Italiana.
I have the perfect bachelor’s kitchen in my tiny two-room apartment located off an alleyway open only to foot traffic — a toy-sized refrigerator, no microwave, and a portable metal contraption that features two burners to use as my stove.
But honestly, anything more would be wasted on my less-than meager Gomer Pyle kitchen talents.
So I flick away the few ants that scavenge along my porcelain sink top and get to work. I rifle up two pots and fill one with water to boil the pasta and the other to slow-heat the tomato sauce, which comes out of a bottle, of course.
Hustled out of the fridge are mushrooms, cured sausage, a tomato, chopped onions and grated cheese.
I’m cooking with gas now, folks (actually, on electric coils).
Italian-style, baby.
Then the roof caves in on my rudimentary kitchen experiment.
The day before, I had already blundered, forgetting to replace the top on the vinegar bottle, only to find it the next morning swimming with dozens of now-pickled fruit flies.
Without a proper colander, I scoop out the cooked pasta with a small hand-held ladle. But too much water comes with the bounty, so I lay a paper towel over the warm noodles to soak up the excess.
Big mistake.
The paper sticks to the shells and I have to throw much of the first batch into the trash.
I feel like an ex-con cooking up a batch of meth inside some rural Arizona trailer, having little clue what I am doing, looking over my shoulder for the police to arrive.
But they never do.
Instead, alongside my salad, I serve myself a bowl of steaming hot macaroni with red sauce. And it’s not bad, if I do say so myself. My fork works furiously.
A few slurps and a burp and I am one happy camper.
I call it Pasta alla Brutta Americana.
Ugly American Pasta.
Be sure to follow me for more original recipes of homemade Italian specialties.
****
I am inside my cousin Irena’s market, La Bottega del Gusto, the Taste Shop, for my usual evening visit.
I love her warm smile and like to gaze behind the main counter and imagine that her late husband, my cousin Vincenzo Glionna, is still there, laughing, holding court with his customers.
Irena has an assistant to help handle the evening rush and both wait patiently as I struggle down the potholed dirt road of my broken Italian to express even the most simple of concepts.
Finally, I tell them that I will soon be joined by a photographer colleague to help record the daily life of my distant family and the rhythm of this place where they live.
They smile.
A man, right?
No, I say, a woman. Her name is Randi Lynn.
Both women nearly gasp in unison, suddenly eyeing me with suspicion. In a matter of a few moments I have gone from a bumbling American cousin to the worst kind of Lothario, Stanley Kowalski in a wife-beater white undershirt.
A woman?
But does your wife know about this? Where will she stay? Not with you, of course. This is highly unusual, highly unusual. You could never trust an Italian man under such circumstances!
Smiling, I explain that all is well. I’m only half Italian, after all.
Randi is actually an old friend of both me and my wife. I know her husband and son. We have worked together for decades. We’re a team.
I also tell them Randi will have her own apartment while she is here.
They are not convinced.
Show us her picture. Do you have one?
I go on Randi’s Instagram site and find a selfie taken in Paris, I think. Randi has blonde hair, the Italian ideal of beauty, and has Ukrainian roots.
Che bella! they say.
I am shoveling my hole deeper with each thing I say. So I show them a picture of my wife, Lily, who is from Beijing. Actually, Irena met her many years before.
They coo over her beauty and for a moment I believe all is well.
And yet when I walk out, I feel them eye me with suspicion. I promise to bring Randi by the store for an official greeting. They still don’t seem convinced.
Now I’m afraid I have created my first bit of pettegolezzo, or local gossip.
Ahh-ooh!
