The Other Yesterday: A grandson explores his roots in a Southern Italian hill town.
Years ago, when my father was still alive, he often talked about how he wanted to spend his last days.
His romantic vision was to move to Rome, rent an apartment in the city’s centro storico, or historic district, and while away the hours drinking strong coffee, perhaps with a splash of whisky or grappa — caffe correto, as the Italians call it — watching the world pass from the seat of an outdoor cafe in the heart of some historic piazza.
Alas, my Dad’s dream of spending his last retrospective months among the ruins was a tad impractical. My mother, his longtime caregiver, had died years before and he lived with one of my sisters, who catered to his every need.
Still, his desire was strong, almost primal, to return to the land which fostered his roots, and learn more about his father as a young man before he embarked upon his life's grand adventure to emigrate to the United States.
My father never realized his Roman interlude, but nearly a decade after his death in 2014, I am following up on his personal passion for self-discovery. Three weeks from today, with my Dad's spirit held close, I will leave for a summer in Italy. I plan to spend time lounging at outdoor cafes and restaurants in Rome, trying to recreate his vision, his connection to the timeless place known as the Eternal City.
But most of my three months will be spent in Southern Italy, in an ancient town called Pomarico, located on the heel of Italy's boot, the place where my grandfather was born. I plan to explore the lives of distant relatives, my parenti lontani, as I try to piece together the earliest days of my grandfather, the man who gave life to my father, and therefore to me.
In the end, I hope to find the answer to an intriguing personal question:
Who was Antonio Glionna?
My grandfather was born in 1888 in the province of Basilicata, still among the country’s poorest, most inaccessible places, a land of jagged sandstone mountains, dizzying backroads and high unemployment, where generations of peasant farmers have used burros to til the soil, growing tomatoes, onions and grapes forged into a signature homemade wine served at the table in large plastic soda bottles.
Pomarico was established in 850 AD by the Byzantines, after the fall of the Roman Empire, but an earlier nearby version was founded six hundred years before that. Today, with its 4,500 residents, Pomarico’s centro storico sits atop the crown of a hill with breathtaking views in all directions, replete with a warren of cobblestone streets, whitewashed buildings, bars, restaurants and centuries-old churches.
Traditions hold fast here. Most evenings, residents still take part in the passeggiata, a ritual where women walk on one sidewalk, men the other, a parade of hand-holding and gossiping and being seen that has gone on unchanged for generations, projecting what the Italians call La Bella Figura, that beautiful figure, the essence of style and grace.
This is what my grandfather left behind. Shortly after 1900, when he was still a teenager, he joined the first wave of his fellow Italians, mostly from the south, a region ravaged by poverty, famine and malaria, who emigrated to the United States and elsewhere. That first wave was followed by a second after the end of World War Two.
In all, between the late 1800s and 1970, some 27 million Italians — equaling nearly half the number of its 60 million residents today — emigrated to Argentina and the U.S. in search of economic opportunities they could not find back home.
My grandfather played a small part in that great surge of humanity. He crowded aboard a passenger ship among hundreds of other wide-eyed immigrants, an exhausting trip that was known back home as “un viaggio della speranza,” a voyage of hope. Did his family beg him not to go, warning that life in America would be “non é tutto rose e fiori,” not all roses and flowers, and might prove far more difficult than he'd ever imagined?
Still, he went. He left behind the places and the people he knew. Why did he decide to go? How could he afford a ticket? Did he worry about being shipwrecked, lost at sea, joining the fate of the Italian liner Sirio, which in 1906 sank amid foul weather in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain while en route to Argentina, becoming Italy’s version of the Titanic? Did he make friends on the voyage, among all those other young dreamers like himself?
I can only imagine what he felt on that boat, and as he passed through Ellis Island among that sea of immigrant humanity. Was he afraid? Did he know what he was looking for? Could he speak even a word of English upon his arrival? What was my grandfather’s version of the American Dream?
As family history tells it, Antonio eventually found work in rural Upstate New York, in the era’s teeming railroad yards, later returning to fulfill his military duty as an Italian citizen.
But for Antonio the lure of America proved too much. He eventually returned to the U.S., this time taking along two of his sisters. He married my grandmother, Susannah Amoriello, and settled down in the rural village of East Worcester, N.Y. to raise eight children, five boys and three girls, my father among them.
Over the years, after a few hand-scrawled letters, his contact with the old country ended altogether. After all, he had his own adventure to live out, his own family to raise.
What did he write about? Were his letters filled with a mix of broken English and diminished Italian? Many newly-arrived Italians fused together their own mode of speech, from what they knew back home and what they’d learned in their new land. “Hurry up!” became “orioppo” and Brooklyn became Broccolino.”
What were Antonio’s impressions of this new country, this new life? Did he ever regret leaving home? Did he play the good older brother to his younger sisters whom he had encouraged to venture into the unknown? Did he encourage his cousins in Pomarico to join him there in America?
Decades later, in the early 1970s, by then in his mid-80s, Antonio would finally return to Pomarico, escorted by my Aunt Pauline, the wife of his oldest son, Joe. With few of his original teeth, he was small and balding, diminished, stoop-shouldered from the years spent in his own garden growing corn, onions, melons, carrots, tomatoes and rhubarb.
He was known in town for that garden, which featured wooden planks as walkways through its rows and his grandchildren feared his wrath if we stepped off them to leave little footprints in the well-tilled soil.
By then, Antonio was a man without a language or culture. His English had never been good and as a boy I remember him railing from the living room of his tiny home, the New York Post sitting on the circular green ottoman at his feet, using heavily-accented words like “Goddam and Sumbitch,” spitting streams of tobacco juice into a coffee can kept by his side.
By the time he set foot back in Pomarico, Antonio had long ago discarded the dialect he’d learned as a boy. By then, he’d become part American, part Italian, but sadly, not enough of either. Had he simply forgotten who he once was?
Still, just like my father, at the end of his long life, he had longed to revisit Italy and this town of his youth, where as family legend has it, as a boy he had planted a tree outside in a growing field that now towers over the land, offering both luxurious shade and a legacy to the once rambunctious boy who’d developed a nickname among his fellow villagers.
Cippodone, the little onion, so-named because his grandfather had once been an onion grower. But when I hear the term, I think of a young rascal, impetuous, anxious to live out his dream.
My Dad got to see Pomarico before he died. In 1993, with my brother and I in tow, my father, whose first name was also John, traveled back to see the place where his own father played out his boyhood.
Now I'm following in his footsteps. I’m renting an apartment in the historic district, which will be my base as I explore life in this Italian hill town and revisit cousins and I first met more than thirty-five years ago.
While we remain separated by language and national origin, not to mention an entire ocean, these members of Pomarico’s Glionna family bear a striking resemblance to my own — the eyes, the flourish of a smile, the bridge of the nose. We are family.
I look forward to spending time with my oldest surviving relative, my namesake, Giovanni Glionna, now in his 80s, a gregarious man-about-town whose black book of friends, cronies and acquaintances, in my eyes, qualifies him as Pomarico’s de-facto mayor, or sindaco.
With his shock of white hair and easy smile, he resembles the comedian Johnny Carson. In past years, he has served as town tour guide not only to my father, but to both me and my brother Frank, who lived in Italy a few decades ago.
Giovanni’s family tree has grown like the one my grandfather planted ages ago. He’s a great grandfather now, a bisnonno, and his descendants — three daughters, grandkids and great grandchildren — have flourished here in the place my grandfather left so long ago.
Why did Antonio leave, when others did not?
It’s all part of what I hope of find out in my own summer among the ruins. I want to explore the early life of my grandfather, who left, and that of those who stayed behind.
So, tune in for a continuing story of how a grandson from the new world returns to relish and appreciate the old, the place that helped shape his grandfather and in a way even himself.
For now, Arrivederci.
