That is a part of Motive‘s 2025 summer season journey challenge. Click here to learn the remainder of the problem.
Final 12 months I honeymooned in Rome, which was a protracted day journey from the tiny 2,500-year-old village within the Campania area of Italy that my maternal grandparents left within the 1910s. In fact I needed to go—it was certainly my solely likelihood to see the place that facet of my household had come from.
It is a very American factor to journey to ancestral hometowns, particularly in case your ancestors have been fleeing poverty or political repression. Maybe greater than ever, as America grows much less certain of its exceptionalism, we need to be reminded that we’re fortunate to have grown up within the glittering New World quite than the tarnished outdated one.
However the very best type of journey is that which confounds our expectations quite than confirms our prejudices. And that is what I skilled on a drizzly day in Fragneto Monforte, inhabitants 1,700, recognized for a relic of the third century martyr Saint Faustina, for an historic and revered tiglio tree within the city sq., and, go determine, for a sizzling air balloon competition that began someday across the flip of this century.
I had heard solely fleeting references to this speck of a city all through my childhood, and the tales at all times drove residence how backward, stultifying, and impoverished the place was, even for notoriously poor southern Italy. My mom and her siblings rehearsed a selected narrative about why their mother and father had emigrated; it was persuasive if uncheckable even earlier than my grandparents died within the Nineteen Eighties. (They did not communicate English; I did not communicate Italian.) The story went like this: There was no future in Italy again then, particularly for peasants like my ancestors. Everybody who may depart, did.
Extremely, my spouse had tracked down a relative of mine by way of Fb teams and Google Translate. A part of me apprehensive that we have been being scammed—I’ve seen the second season of White Lotus, the place Italian-People in search of to hook up with their roots within the outdated nation are suckered on a number of ranges. We took a surprisingly environment friendly and well-appointed high-speed prepare from Rome to close by Benevento (post-Mussolini, it appears, the trains nonetheless run on time) after which a cab to Fragneto Monforte, the place Pasqualino, my beforehand unknown second cousin, met us. He was a tall, strapping 50-something development engineer. He met us together with his spouse and daughter, who was coaching in Rome to develop into a physician. Along with his daughter translating, he defined that he was the grandson of my grandmother’s sister and his personal mom was nonetheless alive at 93.
They gave us the grand tour, which took lower than an hour, exhibiting us the homes the place my grandfather and grandmother had grown up. I looked for my grandfather’s initials within the bricks surrounding the tiglio tree. (Household lore had it that he’d scratched them in earlier than he left for America as a young person.)
I used to be keen to satisfy Pasqualino’s mom Anna, a cousin my mom had by no means recognized or spoken of earlier than dying in 1999. She was spry for a nonagenarian—and although she spoke no English, her gestures, expressions, and sounds immediately jogged my memory of my mom and grandmother. She lived in a gorgeous home that had been within the household for generations; fact be instructed, it was far nicer than the home I grew up in, or these of my Italian-American family members, which sometimes veered into plastic-covered couches, mirrored partitions, and gold-foil wallpaper. She introduced us drinks and snacks and confirmed me pictures from the ’70s, when my grandparents had visited.
I instructed her I used to be taught that my grandparents (her uncle and aunt) had left for financial causes and to keep away from conflict. No, mentioned Anna, they have been all doing fairly properly, even throughout World Conflict I and World Conflict II and the rebuilding afterward. They and one different have been the one relations who left, she mentioned, and it was by no means clear why.
Did she ever want her mother and father had gone to America? No, she answered: This was at all times place to dwell.
As I hugged this historic lady with whom I share an actual however tenuous connection and whom I’ll by no means see once more, I felt for a second like I used to be hugging my very own mom one final time. I used to be additionally saying goodbye to household tales that will or might not have ever been true.
