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[franciscretarola]

Amatrice: how the L’Aquila earthquake predicts its future

(Poggio Picenze, near L’Aquila... all photos by Francis Cretarola) (from 2017) The day after the August 24th central Italy earthquake, we received numerous messages from Le Virtù customers, friends from all over North America, and friends in Italy. People on this side wanted to know how to help and those in Italy, especially those around L'Aquila, Abruzzo - which is very close to Amatrice and knows more than it cares to about this type of event - were telling us that, this time, they were okay. As we started to put together our relief efforts, we wondered if Amatrice, Accumoli, the villages in Marchè along the Tronto river, and the other badly damaged towns would ever be rebuilt, if life in them would ever be the same. Our knowledge of L'Aquila and the aftermath of its 2009 earthquake didn't make us very sanguine about the future. 

But on the second day after the quake, I saw a Facebook post made from Amatrice by a friend of ours from Paganica (a small village just outside of L'Aquila). She was in Amatrice volunteering to help the victims. And seeing the post made me think about the last time we'd seen her. It was last summer, in her home village. She had wanted us to see how things were, many years post-earthquake, in Paganica. 

What follows is reconstructed from my notes from and photos of that visit. 

__________

Cathy and I park beneath the church of Santa Maria Assunta, in Piazza della Concezione, just off the main road that snakes through Paganica, a satellite town of L'Aquila. Like many of the villages around Abruzzo's capital city,  Paganica suffered terrible damage during the April 2009 earthquake. It was at the epicenter of the event. Across the road from us, the baroque facade of Santa Maria della Concezione is scarred by fractures. Directly in front of our car, Paganica's monument to "ai caduti," those fallen in Italy's two world wars (a squat, massive rectangle of stone inscribed with the names of the dead), is rotated about 10 degrees counterclockwise on its base. The shaking had been fierce. 

It's July of 2015 - six years after the quake - and our friend Germana Rossi, a native of Paganica, has promised to take us inside the zona rossa, the forbidden "red zone" protected by chain-link fence that's deemed too dangerous for habitation or visit.  

In 2001, we lived up the road in the village of Assergi, also part of the extended city of L'Aquila.  On days when we didn't want to drive the twenty minutes into the city to shop its daily market, we did our food shopping at a little mom-and-pop store in Paganica. We ate often just up the road at the Villa Dragonetti, a fresco-covered, 16th-century palace where the cuisine was as simply elegant as the hospitality was easy and warm. We met Germana later, in 2006 in Philadelphia, when she came over as part of the Abruzzese folk group DisCanto. We gave the group the keys to our row home in South Philly during their stay (and we crashed down the street on my brother's floor). In 2007, Germana returned the favor and offered us the use of her late grandmother's home in the oldest section of Paganica, the part of town now locked behind the fence. 

Few people walk the piazza. The faces of those we do see seem preoccupied and drawn. And a little suspicious of us. In the weeks and months immediately following the quake, L'Aquila and its surrounding areas became destinations for "disaster tourism." Though we know this place well and are here by invitation, it's hard not to feel awkward and inappropriate. 

After a short, uncomfortable wait, Germana arrives. She wears a brightly colored summer dress and greets us happily. Everyone in Paganica knows her and the other Rossi family members,  which puts me at ease. 

Germana wastes no time and we move toward the old town, the entrance to which is blocked by the fence. As though swinging open a garden gate, Germana moves part of the fence and enters the zona rossa. We follow closely behind her.  

We walk up into the oldest part of the town along alley-like medieval streets. Many buildings are braced with wood or steel supports. Cracks web across facades; some interiors are exposed and visible from the street; the early evening sun shines through gaping holes in roofs. Germana points out - almost dispassionately - damaged architectural treasures, broken monuments of the town's ancient culture and history. And I am reminded of the tour she gave us in 2007, when she proudly pointed out some of these same details, the elements that gave Paganica part of its character and specific beauty. Nature has invaded the streets. Weeds rise chest-high, grass bursts from the cobblestones. At one tiny square, a man - also defying the authorities - appears from nowhere. Germana smiles and they exchange brief but warm greetings, speaking in a shorthand understood only by terremotati (earthquake survivors). She introduces us to him. He smiles wanly, but then walks over to a slim fig tree which has taken root in the street in the six years since the quake, plucks two pieces of fruit and gives them to Cathy and me.    

We arrive at Germana's home. She pushes open the narrow wooden door and we enter. I remember the space well, even through its debris-covered chaos. All around us, the broken and dust-covered relics of a family history lie waiting to be reclaimed. We climb the steps to her parents' room. Their bed is exactly as it was immediately after the earthquake. Large chunks of masonry, which at 3:32 in the morning fell onto the sleeping couple, still cover it. It's terrifying. Nothing has been done since the quake. The Rossi family was allowed to return to take whatever articles they could, but no restoration has been attempted. The government has not acted and it will not allow the family to begin its own work.  

It's tough to know what to say. Nothing comes to mind that wouldn't be said merely because I feel like I should say something, anything. Cathy and I returned here shortly after the quake in 2009. We visited all we could of L'Aquila, most of which was and remains cordoned off behind fencing, and met with Germana.  Her parents, who were living in one of the many tent cities inhabited by the survivors, came to meet us at the Villa Dragonetti, which had miraculously escaped severe damage. They sat at our table and apologized for being disheveled, for not being better able to welcome us. The father's face was still scarred from the fallen masonry. We've come back to L'Aquila every year since, but this is our first time behind Paganica’s fencing.  

Germana leads us back to the car and asks us to follow her to Poggio Picenze, another village inside the so-called "L'Aquila crater." It was also terribly hit. Her friend, Stefania Pace, wants to show us her home.  

We pull over at a bar outside Poggio Picenze's fenced-off old town to meet Stefania. She's a blond woman in her mid-forties. It doesn't take long to understand that she's possessed of a strong wit and spirit. She's sad, as Germana’s sad, but not broken. Banked anger flashes in her eyes as she and Germana explain the bureaucracy that prevents action and the corruption and waste that informed then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's original reconstruction efforts.  Berlusconi had treated the earthquake as an opportunity to salvage his scandal-damaged reputation and to funnel money to his supporters. In the mountains around L'Aquila, "new towns," characterless, (as it turns out) often poorly built warrens blight the landscape. Some are positioned in such a way that their inhabitants can stare down into the fenced-off ancient villages to watch centuries of history, tradition and culture slowly rot under the weight of the seasons. The psychological effect on the population, especially the elderly, is profound. Many, like Stefania, are still living in what was supposed to be temporary housing. 

Again, we walk past the fence - no one is guarding any of these places - and into the old town. The devastation is terrible, and the place, centuries old as it is, looks more like an ancient abandoned ruin than a 21st-century town. Only a car, its roof crushed by fallen masonry, reminds of the present day. Stefania's husband Mariano has joined us and leads us to their former home. Stefania can't bear to enter, but we walk in. Part of the house is fairly intact, and he points out many of the improvements he'd made shortly before the quake, restoration projects designed to highlight the home's original rustic character.  He laughs grimly while recounting the plans he'd had for the space. The property immediately next to the theirs has been obliterated. A second-story door opens on a room and floor that no longer exist.  

Everything is overrun by insurgent grass, weeds, and saplings. Mariano bounds up the hill to a small tree, another fig, picks some fruit, and brings it back to Stefania.

When we received word of the L'Aquila earthquake, it was just after 9:30 pm in Philly and we were winding down a pleasant Sunday dinner service at Le Virtù. We spent the next six hours calling friends and relatives in the region. It wasn't until the next day that the scope of the disaster became clear. Much of the city, particularly its medieval center, was destroyed. And some of the towns around L'Aquila - Paganica, Camarda, Fossa, Onna - had fared worse.

It was a gut punch. But our loss had been relative. All our friends and family had survived, though some had lost their homes. In the days that followed, standing in Le Virtù, our paean to Abruzzo decorated in photos, ceramics, and artifacts collected during our travels in the region, suddenly felt absurd and robbed of meaning. The restaurant was dedicated to the entirety of the region, but it simply would never have existed if not for our time spent living in L'Aquila. In a way that we acknowledge to be unearned and shallow, we considered L'Aquila our second home. 

It was surreal also to see and hear L'Aquila and Abruzzo, overlooked places well off Italy's touristed path, be for a time a topic for the local, national, and international press. A place that we'd tried to promote - at Le Virtù, with culinary tours, by producing TV shows for Comcast and PBS, by bringing musicians to the U.S.- was suddenly, albeit briefly, in the public eye. But for all the wrong reasons. Journalists flocked to the city and its environs without knowing anything of what these places had been like before the event, what had been lost, or what was at risk.  And for as long as there was spectacle to report - bodies and survivors pulled from the debris, images of pain and devastation, the occasional uplifting story about the courage of first responders and defiant civilians who'd thrown in immediately following the event - L'Aquila was news. And then, as invariably happens, the world moved on.

But the losses continue and the risk - to a centuries-old culture, ancient ways of life, unheralded architectural and artistic treasures, intrinsic things without calculable price - remain. Things that are soul-nurturing, essential, that have sustained a people and could offer much to the 21st century but have gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, struggle to survive and, in places, diminish. The area around L'Aquila, like much of Abruzzo, contains precious but  undiscovered things: stunning parkland where sheep and goat herding continue, cattle forages free-range, and wolves and bear roam wooded solitudes; small farms producing heirloom vegetables and fruits, ancient grains, the finest saffron in Europe; artisanal cheese and salumi makers; tiny medieval villages with singular culinary customs and vernacular architecture; ancient religious rites that predate the Romans; jewelry making, stone- and wood-carving, and other craft traditions; and obscure artistic masterworks. The culture of shepherds and farmers persists and informs daily life. Most of the world is blithely unaware of what's at stake. 

Le Virtù exists solely because the Abruzzo in its entirety had so inspired and moved us. When we opened, we were true neophytes with no real restaurant experience, ignorant in ways that now seem ridiculous and frightening. But we believed that the region had something important to offer, not only to Philadelphia's culinary discussion, but also - if we honored Abruzzese values of generosity, quality, and humility, and fostered a convivial environment - to the local community. If we've succeeded, it's owed to our commitment to Abruzzo's culture, not to our unique creativity and invention. It's painful to see our roots in L'Aquila in peril.

________

The earthquake that struck Amatrice and surrounding towns (in Lazio, Umbria, Marchè, and Abruzzo) had eerie similarities to the L'Aquila event. It occurred at 3:36 am (L'Aquila shook at 3:32 am), and we again learned of it towards the end of dinner service at Le Virtù. Amatrice was part of Abruzzo until 1927, when Mussolini redefined the region's boundaries with Lazio. It's a mountain village with a pastoral tradition and culture that would be very familiar to anyone who has traveled Abruzzo. It’s best known, however, as the birthplace of spaghetti all'amatriciana, its namesake pasta dish of tomatoes and guanciale (cured pig's cheek). Most people experience that dish in Rome, however, and all'amatriciana is usually lumped in with the capital city's cuisine. It shares this misidentification with pasta alla griscia (from the village of Grisciano, also near Amatrice) and carbonara (most likely from eastern Lazio and western Abruzzo, or possibly Napoli). Amatriciana was also popular in nearby L'Aquila. 

Reports on the earthquake often made reference to the pasta dish or discussed the town as a summertime getaway for Romans. Most of the reporters going to Amatrice and the other affected towns were seeing them for the first time, and had no idea of what they'd been like before the quake. It was understandably hard for them to provide context or even understand the profundity of the event. Amatrice had only just been added to the Borghi Piu Belli d'Italia, a loose association of "the most beautiful villages in Italy." And now much of it was rubble. 

Recent history tells us that the world will probably move on pretty quickly from this disaster, if it hasn't done so already. And, if history stereotypically repeats itself, it will do so without assuring that Amatrice or the other towns are restored to their former state and that their ways of life and culture can survive. In fact, it will probably do the bottom-line calculus and decide that rebuilding isn't a worthwhile use of resources, that there'll be too little return. It did this in the Irpinia region of Campania in 1980 (after a quake which also impacted Molise). And it seems to be doing this in L'Aquila. I fear that they'll be a new "Amatrice," a conglomeration of modern housing with designated shopping malls that doesn't foster community or acknowledge the ancient culture: an Amatrice amputated from its soul.  

But there are some who refuse to accept this. 

When Germana awoke the morning after the Amatrice quake, she drove from her Paganica home (a converted garage) to Amatrice to help with the relief efforts. She came home, slept for four hours, had a shower and drove back. She repeated this for several days. Her ancestral home is still behind chain-link fence. She fights a daily battle against bureaucracy, apathy, resignation, and indifference. And she continues to remind us of what's at stake, what truly matters. 

In the days after the quake, she made many posts from and about Amatrice. The most moving for me was a film of street musicians made before the quake. Young and old musicians play a salterello, an Abruzzese form of dance music similar to a tarantella. The music is played on bagpipes and tambourine. A crowd has gathered around the musicians. One player passes the tambourine to an older man in the crowd who without pause perfectly continues the traditional rhythm.  

It seems unreasonable to me that we would ever allow this music to be silenced.

[franciscretarola]

Matera, the Brigantaggio, Southern Italy’s Mostly Unknown History

There was a lull during our tour of Matera's sassi, the former cave homes of workers, farmers and shepherds carved into the gorge beneath the city's elegant "Civiltà" and "Piano" neighborhoods.  Sasso literally means "stone" in Italian. The homes had been excavated from the calcareous tufo stone and fronted over the centuries by what are often elegant facades. The rest of our tour group, a family from Seattle, was still inside a small sasso that had been turned into a museum.  My wife Cathy and Kateri, a professional photographer and staffer at our Philadelphia Abruzzo-dedicated restaurant, stared out over the densely packed and compelling warren of the Sasso Caveoso, one of two sassi quarters in the city, apparently reflecting on what we'd just seen. The cave home was just slightly larger than my South Philly row house living room but until the 1950s had been shelter for thirteen people, a donkey, pig and chickens.  All the family's possessions - mostly equipment used for farming and raising animals - were stowed on the walls.  There was one table with a large wooden serving board and two chairs.  The home had just one bed which stood high above the floor to separate the sleeping family from their animals and afford the chickens a place beneath to roost.  It was both a sobering look at the desperate circumstances once faced by the common people of Matera and an impressive display of ingenuity: each sasso had an intricate system for water collection - rain is scarce in this part of Basilicata - that was connected to a common cistern shared by its immediate neighbors. When the family's cistern was filled, runoff was channeled to the common container; nothing was wasted.   

Our guide, Luigi - a trim, dry-witted and instantly likeable guy with thick, professorial glasses and dressed casually in jeans with a flat cap - leaned back against the stone facade of a sasso and stared pensively at the ground.  Before the tour had started we'd talked a bit about the town and local history - this was not my first time in Matera - and I felt we'd had an instant rapport. So, I screwed up my nerve and asked him what I'd been dying - for years, actually - to ask someone from Basilicata. We spoke in Italian to keep our conversation private. 

"So...what do you think of Carlo Levi and Christ Stopped at Eboli?"  Luigi's face first registered a mixture of surprise and fear but resolved into a knowing smile.  "How much time do you have?"   

First published in 1945, Levi's book has come to define much of Italy's south, especially Basilicata.  For most people, it's all they'll ever know of Basilicata, called "Lucania" in antiquity and during the Fascist period (Mussolini was trying to evoke ancient Rome and inspire a renewed imperial spirit), unless they've heard of or been to Matera, whose sassi are now a UNESCO World Heritage site and were used by Mel Gibson to stand in for Palestine in his film "The Passion of the Christ."  Levi was a vocal critic of fascism.  He was arrested and then, like many other left-leaning intellectuals and opponents of fascism, sent into "exile" in the remote south, specifically in his case to the towns of Grassano and Aliano (which he renames Gagliano in the book).  His account of the appalling living conditions, poverty and malevolent neglect (centuries old, by every form of government and of every conceivable kind, from a lack of educational resources and infrastructure to access to medicine) suffered by Aliano's townsfolk and other lucani (citizens of Basilicata) moved postwar Italy to (briefly) countenance the "Southern Question" and seek remedy. It has deeply affected readers all over the world, including me.  

Levi's description of the poverty in the sassi (delivered in Eboli by his sister, who'd had to stop in the town to receive official permission to visit him in "Gagliano") is particulary grim:   

"...Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags.  I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty... I saw children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and the eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids, but the children stayed quite still, without raising a hand to brush them away. They had trachoma. I knew it existed in the South, but to see it against this background of poverty and dirt was something else again. I saw other children with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous dilated stomachs and faces yellow and worn with malaria." 

At one point during her exploration of the sassi, Levi's sister was followed by bands of children begging not for coin, but for quinine. 

Eboli stirs the emotions and Levi's heart was certainly in the right place (his actions as well: his atrophied skills as a trained physician were much needed in malaria-plagued Aliano) and much of what he writes about Italy's neglect of the south was - and is - certainly true, but after much reading and travel I began to believe that, however well-intentioned, the book’s tone is condescending, its view of history distorted by a northern perspective and, to create the desired effect, its depictions of the rural population exaggerated. Luigi agreed. 

"For years we've been living with Levi's book on our shoulders. People come here looking for his lucani, his Matera and his Basilicata. I think they see what they want to see."  Levi's lucani peasants are superstitious creatures (that much was true, and to some extent is still, and not just in Basilicata), immune to or unknowing of logical process, cause and effect.  They seem almost another species, existing beyond the boundaries of time and untouched by the influences of the region's many conquerors, from Greeks and Romans to the Piemontese army of Vittorio Emanuele.  Their physical appearance reminds Levi of depictions of ancient Italic peoples and to him shows no evidence of later ethnic incursions. Their stoicism and desolate world view, bereft of any hope, are born of millenia of futility and neglect.  To hammer home the desperate situation he found, Levi - knowingly or not - created mythical beings beyond our understanding or experience.  This device was effective but Basilicata (and much of southern rural Italy) still suffers the stigma that his book and descriptions, and other less well-intentioned depictions, created.   

"Farmers and villagers then might've been simple, often ignorant, but they are not now and never were stupid.  They certainly understood most of the reasons they suffered, as well as who might carry some of the blame.  Their beliefs weren't all based on emotions and mysticism." 

Levi's bias and prejudice are clearest when he discusses the local peasants' obsession with and  vibrant emotional connection to the Brigantaggio, the guerrilla war fought by southerners from 1861 into the 1870s in opposition to the unification of Italy under Piemontese rule, Italy's fabled and much-celebrated Risorgimento.  He contrasts this persistent and vibrant link to the past with the peasants' apparent indifference to and distrust of Italy's more recent nationalistic adventures: in the First World War two decades before his exile and the expedition to "Abyssinia" then in progress. Unlike some of the town's bourgeois citizens, the very same element who had tended to favor unity over continued Bourbon rule in 1860, the farmers and workers show no nationalistic zeal.  They seem to feel that any expedition designed to capture territory and displace others to allow for Italy's expansion, even if they themselves might profit from access to arable land, is doomed from the start and fundamentally wrong. Though many of them fought, suffered and died in the "Great War," they never discuss it.  But they seem perpetually ready to discuss the briganti and their exploits; every locale seems to have some historic connection to the doomed resistance.   

Levi places the brigantaggio in a context of previous uprisings - to invading Greeks, Romans, etc.  and posits that the briganti reaction couldn't be rationally justified but could be understood as an emotional response.  The peasants, he argues, reacted with an understandable but irrational and hopeless attempt to strike out at the fates and cultures that seemed to persecute them. Maybe Levi actually believed this.  His upbringing in Piemonte occurred during a time when many of the dark and brutal facts about Italy's unification and its effects on the ancestors of these very same peasants had been suppressed, swept under the rug and willfully ignored.  But there were still living briganti during Levi's exile. He even met one of them during his time in Grassano. The brigantaggio was not ancient history to the villagers. Modern study has focused welcome light on the Risorgimento, the Brigantaggio and the Savoiarda reaction.  Eyewitness accounts from both sides and previously ignored scholarship have been revisited, reevaluated and resynthesized, and the resulting picture - of Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele, Cavour and the Savoy military - is not a particularly pleasant or flattering one.  What emerges is less an image of a war of liberation than of a violent and abusive invasion, occupation and systematic exploitation.  Southern Italy, the new scholarship argues, was conquered, occupied and turned into a colony of the North. 

Prominent Italian journalists, politicians, thinkers and historians have been questioning the national narrative for decades.  Novelist and screenwriter Carlo Alianello (one of the modern founders of revisionism and a cinematic collaborator with Visconti and Rossellini),  economist and one-time Italian Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, historian and politician Giustino Fortunato (both from Basilicata) as well as Marxist thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci (a Sardinian) all believed northern development had been achieved, to some extent, at the South‘s expense.  Much of the best known revisionist scholarship on the Risorgimento has been done by non-Italian academics (English historians Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan and Martin Clark have all, to varying degrees, questioned some official accounts and flattering portraits of the movement and its heroes). But the current spear point of reevaluation is probably Pugliese-born journalist Pino Aprile.  During our stay in Matera, I happened to be reading his book "Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure that the Italians of the South Became 'Southerners.'"  (Terroni is a pejorative for southerners still in use in the north which links them to the dirt and land, their "terra"; it insinuates ignorance, filthiness and dark skin).  Aprile clearly has an axe to grind and sometimes has figurative hams for fists (and no dead horse fails to be beaten, repeatedly), but his work seems well researched (his layman's tome does not always provide source attributions, however) and his arguments well supported.  They've gained a lot of traction and currency recently, and I've found few coherent retorts.  Many Italians, including some southerners, would rather not know, but Aprile seems to have dedicated his life to speaking what he feels is the truth, or at least one side of it: the side that has gone mostly unheard.   

The economic story he weaves (mostly using others' scholarship, especially that of researchers Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima) contradicts almost all prevailing conceptions about the Bourbon realm, its wealth and sophistication and the condition of its subjects, particularly in relationship to northern and central Italy, at the time of unification.  He points out the comparative wealth of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the vast monies in its coffers and in circulation and the hale condition of its currency (the Kingdom used gold coins while the Savoy realm had converted to paper money).  The Kingdom of Sardegna (as the Piemontese realm was known) had exhausted its funds in a series of wars, including adventures in the Crimea, and was heavily in debt. "War or bankruptcy," one of Cavour's deputies wrote in 1859. Taxes were low in the South and, contrary to the popular image, the Kingdom had a relatively developed industrial base: it was named the most industrialized state in Italy after the 1855 Paris World's Fair, and third in the world.  Under King Ferdinand II, it began liberal reforms and pioneered antituberculosis campaigns in Italy, as well as public housing and assistance programs (though the kingdom was hardly liberal and Ferdinand’s reactionary nature and narrow-mindedness undermined these efforts and alienated much of the kingdom‘s intelligentsia).  Aprile also notes that, preunification, southern emigration was minimal and significantly less than the diaspora from the North, which stands preconception on its head.  And indeed, I'd been surprised to read years ago in Richard Juliani's "Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians Before Mass Migration," that the founders of the city's Italian quarter in the years before Italian unification had been northerners, especially from Liguria.  The United States’ first dedicated Italian Catholic  parish, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi  in the city's Bella Vista neighborhood, was founded by these northerners in 1852, eight years before the war.   The destruction and economic disruptions caused by the invasion were exacerbated by the newly unified Kingdom's seemingly punitive measures against the South: disproportionate taxes were imposed, ironically to pay for the "liberation"; many southern industrial plants were dismantled and sent north, as was the gold of the Bourbon treasury.  Other plants were closed.  Once vibrant cities, most notably the port of Gaeta, were left in ruins.  The former Bourbon army, tens of thousands of men, was disbanded, leaving scores of (armed, politicized and militarily trained) men unemployed (they would eventually form the core of the brigantaggio). These actions and policies would persist for decades and, Aprile argues, built the North and created the modern South.  But they are not nearly the darkest part of the story.   

The Piemontese response to popular dissent and the brigantaggio was violent, at times sadistic.  Critics of the new regime were jailed, tortured and sometimes killed.  Martial law was imposed on the entire South and the populace forced to endure a brutal occupation that drove many of them, who might have been otherwise indifferent to the regime change, to support or join the briganti.  It was illegal, for example, to be outside town boundaries with certain (vaguely defined) quantities of food or supplies as authorities suspected these were intended to sustain the briganti, who indeed relied on local populations for support (which was offered gladly or obtained by threat and violence).  For a time it was illegal even to have stores in the larder, as this was deemed suspicious. And the penalties were harsh, including jail sentences, corporal punishment and summary execution. Whole villages were razed to the ground, their populations (including women and children) murdered, displaced or forced into concentration camps. Aprile's rage appears most in the chapter discussing the Savoy army's well-documented atrocities in the towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni, in Campania, whose alleged support for the briganti, he maintains, prompted the worst acts of reprisal ever committed on Italian soil (which would include Nazi war crimes during World War II). Individual acts of rape, torture and murder are relayed in excruciating detail, including the names of the victims. Many unarmed and nonresisting villagers were bayoneted, hanged and burned alive in their houses, slaughtered even in the churches where they took refuge.  The diary of one of the northern soldiers present at Pontelandolfo, Carlo Margolfo from Sondrio in Lombardia, is matter-of-fact: "We entered the town; immediately we began to shoot priests, men, however many as it happened, then sacked (the town) and finally we set the town aflame."  He adds, "...it was impossible to stay inside (the town) because of the great heat, and such noise was made by the poor devils whose fate was to die toasted under the ruins of the houses. We, instead, had everything during the fire...bread, wine, capons, nothing lacking."  The general responsible for the slaughter, Enrico Cialdini, enjoyed a long and profitable political career in the service of the newly united Italy.  A piazza in Venezia bore his name until January of 2014, when the controversy surrounding Casalduni and Pontelandolfo forced the town council to make a change.

Of course atrocities are common in wars, especially guerrilla wars, and the briganti were not innocent or blameless. But the scale and systematic nature of the northern repression and reprisal leaves no room for comparison. Tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of southerners were killed, and many more traumatized, injured, displaced, imprisoned and impoverished during the war and brigantaggio, which in some places persisted into the 1870s, more than a decade after the South's fall.  And there are components to the repression and treatment of the "terroni" that stink of racism and a lack of the respect one human being affords another.  The severed heads of executed briganti were routinely displayed on pikes in southern towns to dissuade locals from supporting the resistance. Photos of dead and mutilated briganti were hot commodities in northern cities during the period. Many of these images are easily found on the internet (though one recurrent photo supposedly of severed briganti heads turns out to be from the Boxer Rebellion). Images of both living and dead guerrillas were used by northern social scientist Cesare Lombroso to form his ominous theories about physiology and criminal behavior. Indeed, the Nazis later enthusiastically (and ironically: Lombroso was Jewish) parroted many of Lombroso's theories on the connections between race, ethnicity, handicap and criminality.  The museum of his collection - which is still in operation at the University of Torino in Piemonte - includes the skulls of hundreds of "criminals," including several briganti.  He believed he'd identified a "southern" racial type which was, of course, inferior and more prone to criminality than the "northern" example.  Over 150 years after the brigantaggio, the relatives of the briganti displayed in this "museum" are still fighting for the return of the remains for proper interment. 

A female brigante, or brigantessa, has come for many to symbolize the fate of the South.  Michelina Di Cesare was born in 1841 in the small village of Caspoli, a satellite town of Mignano Monte Lungo, in what today is part of Campania’s Caserta Province. Photos of her alive - posed in traditional village costume, holding a shotgun and pistol and with what looks like a sheathed bayonet in her belt - create the romantic impressions of a beautiful, fire-eyed,  mountain warrior.  She and her husband Francesco Guerra, an ex-Bourbon soldier who’d resisted the draft under the new regime, were part of a band of briganti that operated around Mignano from 1862 until their deaths in 1868.  Michelina was not the only brigantessa.  Many southern women, after seeing their communities suffer and their brothers, husbands and sons punished, jailed or executed as briganti or Bourbon and briganti sympathizers, supported the resistance, even as armed participants. This created quite a stir in mid-19th century Italy.  Northern authorities strove to rob them of their femininity and dignity, and some period reports refer to them as “drude,” or druids, a derogatory term meant to degrade and dehumanize them.  Some sources diminished their role and dismissed them as mere companions to the male insurgents.  But by all accounts, Michelina was a competent and courageous guerilla and her band a feared cell.  In 1868, she and her compatriots were betrayed by local collaborators, trapped and killed by Northern soldiers and Carabinieri under the command of Emilio Pavellicini, who’d used no small amount of coercion to get some locals to turn on the band.  Most authoritative accounts have Michelina dying in a gun battle, falling next to the body of her husband (though some maintain she was taken wounded but alive and then tortured and raped before her execution).  The last photo of Michelina is posthumous; she is nude from the waist up, her face and body a study in torment and already showing the effects of decomposition.  Di Cesare’s corpse was displayed nude, under armed guard, in Mignano’s town center, as a lesson and deterrent to the local population.  It’s said to have had the opposite effect, and the local brigantaggio intensified and persisted for several more years.  

(Michelina de Cesare) So, if Aprile and the revisionists' studies have any merit, Levi’s notion that the passion and nostalgia Grassano and Aliano’s common folk felt for the brigantaggio was irrational or logically unjustifiable doesn’t hold water.  But he was a product of the schooling and propaganda of his time, especially as a well-educated son of privilege raised in early 20th-century Piemonte.  The history Levi (and most educated Italians, then and until the present day) had been exposed to had been scrubbed and rewritten.  “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians,” remarked nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio (who also famously said that "uniting with the Napolitani was like uniting with lepers") after the war.  A narrative was created to justify the invasion and elevate its purpose.  And, in fairness, there were many, north and south, with purer intentions who had long dreamed of a united Italy, Garibaldi included.  There had also been many actively against it and millions more indifferent to the question of unity (many liberals, including the blond “liberator,” were later disillusioned by post-war governance and policy; Garibaldi eventually resigned from Parliament, disgusted with the use of martial law in Sicily).  Statues of the Risorgimento's heroes were erected throughout the new country and streets and squares named after them, often despite local opposition.  If you find yourself in any major southern town, you’re sure to see places named after Garibaldi, Cavour, Nino Bixio or Vittorio Emanuele.  The southern kingdom and southern Italians were portrayed as backward, uncivilized and in need of the North’s intervention.  And as decades of Savoy economic policy and political repression had their effect, this portrayal was seen to be true, even among some southerners. It was not until decades after unification, Aprile argues, that metrics showed southern farmers and workers to be appreciably worse off than their northern counterparts.  The great southern diasporas that followed further reduced and depopulated the South.  

Italy’s conscience has, from time to time, been awakened and attempts made to redress the inequalities.  In the 1950s La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno sought to build the region’s infrastructure, stimulate economic growth and fill medical and educational gaps in its poorest areas, but these initiatives were mostly short lived, poorly administrated and informed by the idea that southerners were responsible for their condition.  This tendency to judge the South undermined efforts and engendered a prejudice which has, more recently, laid the groundwork for separatist groups like the Lega Nord, whose founder Umberto Bossi was for a time Minister of Federal Reform under Silvio Berlusconi.  Aprile goes to great lengths to compare the relatively few monies sent southward as part of the Cassa with the vast haul pilfered from Bourbon coffers and raised through punitive taxation of the South during the decades after unification. And he tries to connect the racism of men like Lombroso with the politics and words of Bossi and his allies. 

This racism or, if you prefer, virulent ethnocentrism, is real and permeates daily Italian life, and I‘ve had my own small experiences with it. During my first trip to Italy, I stayed with a wealthy family in the town of Vincenza, in the Veneto.  My Italian then was limited, but I vividly remember a car ride with five or six local twenty-somethings to what turned out to be a fairly decadent and enjoyable pool party. They were blasting Bob Marley in the Alfa Romeo and the overloaded car attracted the attention of the local Carabinieri who stopped us and interrogated the driver.  After a brief but tense exchange, we were sent on our way.  The car erupted in laughter and animated conversation.  My host, who spoke perfect English, explained that Carabinieri were invariably stupid guys with few options and from ignorant southern regions.  I think she’d forgotten that my grandfather was from Abruzzo.  Years later, while studying Italian in Firenze, a regular at the bar my new Canadian drinking buddy and I frequented asked us why we were studying the language.  My Canadian friend was studying Florentine history, which pleased our interlocutor, whose name was Alessandro.  When I mentioned my Abruzzese heritage as part of my reason, he was less impressed. Alessandro described himself as the scion of a noble Florentine family, though I’ve no idea if it was true.  He pointedly explained to my friend that the Abruzzesi were just “cafoni,” poor peasants without much going for them. “Cafone” is a term that implies ignorance, lack of couth and culture, and can be a synonym for terrone.  I asked him if he’d like to discuss the issue privately, around the corner, but he declined.  He took off instead to buy cigarettes, and things de-escalated.  The owner of the bar - a fat, loveable and improbably promiscuous Napolitano named Massimo - explained that Alessandro was a bit of a tool and his ornery attitude might be attributed to his wife’s flagrant cheating, which had made him the butt of jokes at the bar (which was in the Oltrarno and strangely named Camelot).  Minor stuff, but illustrative. 

In 2005, while revisiting what was the last Bourbon fortress to surrender to the Piemontesi, Civitella del Tronto in Abruzzo’s Teramo province, I mentioned to my guide Bruno (the fort’s curator) the stickers I’d been seeing on house windows and cars around the town and other places in the region that read “Zona Degaribaldizata” (“De-Garibaldized Zone“).  He said they where part of a recent movement, which was only half joking, calling for the return of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  He then gave me an edition of the movement’s magazine, “Due Sicilie.”  Its cover was a photo of the door of an apartment building in Torino. There was a handwritten sign advertising vacancies but beneath the notice, in smaller script, it read: “Non si acettano meridionali,” southerners not accepted. It was from the 1970s.  

(Civitella del Tronto)

In Philly, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi’s northern parishioners resisted the waves of southerners when they came and newcomers were directed to a second Italian parish founded in 1898 for their use, according to Stefano Luconi’s “From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia.”  Luconi writes that Antonio Isoleri, the Ligurian priest who was pastor at Mary Magdalen from 1870 until 1926, was particularly dedicated to preserving its northern character. This dynamic, Luconi notes, was common throughout North American Italian communities, from St. Louis‘s Hill neighborhood to immigrant settlements in Providence, RI. I’m not sure what kind of mindset all this history (both official and revisionist), discrimination, prejudice, regionalism and economic privation engenders in most southerners, the depth of anger or offense felt, the inferiority complexes and desperation that might exist or the desire for vindication, but I’ve plenty of friends from the South and I can guess.  And the Italian-American community (which is less a community than an identity and far from monolithic), comprised overwhelmingly of the descendants of southern immigrants, bears some of the South’s stigma and suffers its own complexes.  Most Italian-Americans travel to the same spots in Italy as other tourists: Roma, Toscana, Venezia, maybe a visit south to Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast.  And places like Roma and Firenze certainly merit a visit.  They are among the world’s most significant historical and cultural jewels and the first places I went in Italy.  But most Italian-Americans will never explore the regions that produced their ancestors and if they do most will stick to the home town and things specifically connected to family.  Some of this has to do with a loss of language: Southern Italy is less accommodating language-wise than the North to the English-speaking traveler and the loss, which amounts to a loss of one’s roots and a blow to personal identity, can be painful and embarrassing.  But I don’t think that’s the heart of it.  Many Italian-Americans can be almost as dismissive and ignorant of the broader southern culture as any northerner or common tourist, maybe more so (many open-minded northern Italians will admit that life in the South is more rooted in traditions, that it has more soul).  Perhaps there is an embarrassment that attends emigration and engenders a desire to justify your decision by denigrating the place you left (though many early Italian immigrants made multiple trips back and forth and lived a kind of double life, one in America and one Italy).  When I first began traveling extensively in Abruzzo, many of my South Philly neighbors, including those whose families had roots in the region, were baffled.  “Fran, what’s in Abruzzi?” one of them asked.  “My nonno said there was nothing back there. He said all they had were dirt floors.”  There was a kind of shame expressed, though none of them would have ever used that word. Compared to the splendor of Roma, the art of Firenze and romance of Venezia, what could the apparently forsaken places our parents and grandparents had fled - and always seemingly with nothing - offer us?  Who wanted to be reminded of such deprivation, squalor and sadness?  But those of us who do go are incredibly rewarded. And the ignorance of and prejudice we see everywhere directed at the South becomes difficult to bear, even in polite conversation.  We walk around with chips on our shoulders not completely unlike those born by our meridionali friends.  And if one loves Italy - as millions worldwide claim to - one hopes for the resolution of the “Southern Question.”  Ironically for many who’ve posed the question before, no solution seems possible until the entire country, particularly the North, comes to terms with its history. 

At the end of the tour I asked Luigi how he felt about current developments in the sassi, the luxury homes and boutique hotels created from the former homes of the poor, the restaurants and craft shops, the influx of wealthy tourists, including many northern Italians.  We ourselves were staying at one of the new hotels and had mixed feelings about it.  Luigi thought our ambivalence  was misguided.  Obviously, he owed his job to these changes.  “The economy moves here when it isn’t doing so well in a lot of other places in Italy, especially the rest of the south.”  This was true; the week before we’d been in Abruzzo which - though gifted with inspiring, evocative and unspoiled cultures and some of Italy’s most dramatic natural landscapes - has been perennially challenged economically and was now still traumatized from the enduring effects of the economic crisis and the 2009 earthquake.  The vitality we saw in Matera was nowhere in evidence in Abruzzo.  “Our job is to make sure that people know the history of this place, that they understand and respect the people who built it and made their lives here.  But it would be a mistake to keep it as a lifeless museum.”  Luigi explained that he’d left his job as an economist, which must be a pretty depressing job in early 21st-century Italy, and followed his passion. Telling people about the area’s history and patrimony gave him a sense of purpose.  And he was making a living. 

But mostly, Luigi thought our perspective on the sassi and their legacy was too influenced by Levi and based on ignorance. "The conditions in the sassi were not always as Levi described.  For much of their history, the sassi were considered marvels and celebrated in period accounts and literature.  This, I think, is one of the unintended consequences of Christ Stopped at Eboli: the idea that the sassi were always as overcrowded, poor and unsanitary as they were in Levi's time." 

He thought I should read up on the subject and suggested two books: Giardini di Pietra (Gardens of Stone) by Pietro Laureano and Matera: Storia di Una Città (Matera: History of a City) by Lorenzo Rota. We shook hands and parted with plans to meet again later to explore some of the caves in the gorge across from the sassi.  Kateri (naturally, for a twenty-something) vectored away from Cathy and me, and I, gently but sufficiently chastened by Luigi for my lack of historic understanding, dragged Cathy to the nearest bookstore to buy the books he had recommended.  

When you stare out - let's say from your privileged terrace in a cave hotel constructed from a deconsecrated medieval church, a glass of Aglianico del Vulture in hand - across the densely packed, intricate "plan" of the sassi, one predictable effect is to feel yourself taken back to another, ancient time.  The uniform and warm color of the so-called "tufo" stone, the complexity and apparent randomness of the settlement make the sassi seem almost natural formations, part of the gorge's topography. The views of the gorge across from the city, steep rocky walls pocked with unadorned natural and manmade caves where shepherds and monks once sheltered, heighten this impression. Inside the town, the simple sassi and the facades of the small shelters built in front of some caves are all fashioned from the same stone.  The view, for me at least, creates a profoundly peaceful feeling. That and awe. That is, until I imagine poor children in rags lingering in front of every entrance, the stench from human and animal waste, the suffering and disease.  But ancient Matera was not like this.  

(Matera) 

Al Idrisi, an Arab geographer and one of history's most important cartographers, visited Matera while working for Roger II, the 12th-century Norman King of Sicily, on a study of the latter's realm. He found the city "magnificent and stupendous," and Al Idrisi had been around, from Islamic Spain to the Balkans.  Writing in 1595, Eustacchio Verricelli gushed about Matera: "The air is so good that very few people get sick and the inhabitants live very long: many of them live ninety, one hundred years. The men are of average height and clever... The town is made by buildings in white stone and dug caves where rooms, cellars, mule sheds, cisterns, hollows for grain keeping and even hen houses can be seen... When it gets dark, after a trumpet sounds, all the inhabitants place a lamp out of the houses and buildings. Watching the Sasso Barisano from the Cathedral (located on the Cività above the sassi), it looks like a starry sky... the sky and the stars are under the feet and not above the head...". Other written and artistic depictions describe a harmonious, well-organized community integrated with the Cività.  Today, it's possible to visit an enormous cistern located beneath the Piazza Vittorio Veneto (in the so-called Città del Piano quarter, also built above the sassi), with pilasters, fifteen meters tall in places, chiseled from stone (it was one of several such cisterns beneath the upper town). The water it collected fed terraced gardens throughout the sassi. Water descended through intricate channels to nourish walled gardens in front of the homes in the settlement's lower levels. These green plots often sat upon the roofs of the homes below.  Two larger, constantly flowing channels called grabiglioni washed each sasso neighborhood of sewage and waste which in turn was collected, dried and turned into fertilizer and humus. Each home and cluster of homes also collected water. The sassi were self sufficient, self sustaining and verdant, a 21st-century environmentalist's green dream. Nestled in the gorge, carved into or fashioned from the stone, they sheltered their inhabitants from heat and wind. Middle-class townspeople as well as laborers and farmers made their homes in the Caveoso and Barisano neighborhoods, living side-by-side. 

Things began to go downhill in the mid-17th century when the town became the regional capital. Development of the upper Cività and newer Piano neighborhoods followed and the population swelled, stressing and damaging the vernacular infrastructure.  Still, according to Laureano and Rota, some equilibrium seems to have persisted until the 18th century when a decline in the local pastoral economy (due, in part, to the decline of the South's importance in the international wool trade) dealt the peasants a major blow.  The beginning of the next century brought more unrest when Joseph Bonaparte, installed by brother Napoleon as the King of Naples, presided over a division of public lands.  Joseph's reforms favored the landed gentry and new bourgeoisie over ecclesiastical claims but, in effect, broke the peasant economy which depended on working small plots of land (as well as work done for third parties and civic projects). Joseph also moved lucrative regional government offices to Potenza, north of Matera.  The Bourbons eventually returned but the power of the new bourgeoisie grew.  Development of the areas along the rim of the ravine - essential in the water collection and dispersement systems that sustained the settlements and already weakened by construction projects in the previous century - intensified with buildings oriented away from the sassi and toward the expanding Cività and Piano quarters and the trade roads leading from Matera.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, to quote Laureano: "...the pits, granaries, cisterns, vicinati (clusters of houses centered around a well) and gardens on the upper plain, major nerve centers of the systems of the sassi, are buried and hidden beneath the streets and buildings of the new physiognomy of power."  The sassi, gradually cut off from the upper city, their water systems compromised, became poor ghettos.  The decline increased after the fall of the Bourbons in 1860, when ecclesiastical holdings were liquidated and the middle class, much of which had favored unification, gained control of vast tracts which had been previously worked as small plots by local farmers.  The situation of local peasants and workers became dire and, as Rota notes, their options extreme: "il brigantaggio prima e l'emigrazione poi" ("the brigandage first and emigration after"). Those who stayed crowded into the only place available to them, the sassi, exploiting every undeveloped space, converting granaries, stalls and even wells into the single room homes where they lived in filth with their animals and that are now preserved as museums. The vestigial water systems were further degraded and unable to supply the numbers then living in the sassi. Disease, especially malaria, was rampant. The wonder that had been Matera was gone and its previous splendor faded from memory.   

(Cistern beneath Matera)

By Levi's time the sassi had become the fetid, diseased hell described in Eboli.  Fascism brought ineffective, poorly considered projects to improve the lives of their denizens.  The two grabiglioni drainage channels were buried and paved over to create carriage roads to ease entry into and connection between Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano.  Many of the bottegas found today in the sassi exploit these relatively new corridors. But this was a mortal blow to what remained of the sassi infrastructure and left the inhabitants to rely on what insufficient modern systems existed. Conditions only got worse. Levi and other reformers' protests eventually spurred the government to act. In 1952, evacuation of the sassi began.  New settlements were built on Matera's periphery to house the displaced.  There, they'd have running water and toilets, modern gas and electric service.  Luigi took Kateri and me on a drive through one of the new sections.  Viewed from the car window they seemed like smart, moderately-sized homes. They were generally built on two levels and organized into compact units. There was plenty of green space and, in all honesty, they didn't seem entirely unpleasant. Luigi thought so as well, but told us that many former sassi inhabitants had been traumatized by the move. Some of them didn't understand how to use the modern amenities they found in the new apartments. Some resisted relocation and most agreed that essential aspects of their lives in the sassi - traditions, daily rhythms, a sense of community - were lost in the transition.  But modern Italy, which had largely forgotten the remarkable past of the sassi, looked forward and not back, misinterpreted Matera's legacy and encouraged modernization. The postwar economy, writes Laureano, needed "new houses, new ways of living, new products... necessary to the consumer economy." The sassi were abandoned and each individual property sealed.  Without maintenance, some began to crumble. The first collapses stirred conversation about the sassi, whether they could be saved and to what end. Enter, yet again, Carlo Levi (and a little irony).  At the end of the sixties, he lent his voice to the cause of conservation: "The sassi are not of minor importance among the most celebrated and important things that exist in our country, Europe and the world... (the example of the sassi) is of a very great value and unique in the study of urban planning, architecture, agrarian culture and world culture." Film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who set his Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel of Matthew) in the sassi (starting a trend for biblical epics set in Matera), also called for intervention. An international debate began on the future of the sassi and in the 1980s national laws were passed to encourage restoration and investment. Things began to move. In 1993 Matera's sassi were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site; their unique history and contributions would be celebrated. 

But many (maybe most?) visitors still focus on the Lucani, Matera and sassi described in Eboli, the sassi and inhabitants preserved in modern accounts and photographs: the sassi as a former vergogna nazionale, a national shame. The accomplishments of the people who built and for centuries maintained the sassi, and the potential lessons the historical sassi might offer a resource-challenged 21st century seem largely obscured and unknown. 

In truth, I'd known a little bit about the more positive past of the sassi before Luigi and Messrs. Laureano and Rota took me to school.  I remember reading some of Verricelli when we'd been in Matera the first time ten years before, especially his description of the lights of the sassi as stars under his feet. During that visit we'd stayed in one of the first hotels to locate in the caves. An older gentleman, maybe the owner, saw me reading a history of Matera at breakfast on the hotel's terrace and invited me on a tour of the complex.  He focused especially on the complicated system for collecting water, explained how it was connected to others in the surrounding caves.  He was cheerful, effusive and proud of the ingenuity the network displayed. Despite his obvious familiarity with the sassi - he told me he'd been among those forced to relocate - he smiled broadly when discussing his former life in the caves. His face expressed wonderment. But I was also reading Eboli at that time, as well as other depictions - some written by former sassi inhabitants - that described overwhelming poverty, sadness and stoic perseverence.  The idea of the caves as wonderous or even sometimes happy places wouldn't stick. They were undeniably beautiful to look at, exhilarating to walk through, but their legacy was a sad one: poverty, inequality, neglect. 

That night, after our tour with Luigi, we navigated the alleys down through the Sasso Barisano to a trattoria recommended to us by him and located on the neighborhood's former grabiglione.  The cucina was simple but elegant - whipped sheep's-milk ricotta with honey, local salumi, purèe of fava with olive oil and bitter cicoria greens, a rustic, coarse-ground pork sausage and a potent Aglianico del Vulture, all capped off with several shots of the local Amaro Lucano.  Kateri left us after dinner to explore the nightlife on the Cività and Piano and Cathy and I returned to the hotel.  I stepped from our spacious cave room out on to the terrace overlooking the sassi.  A light rain was falling and I was a little drunk. The sassi reclined in the gorge below me, bathed in the warm glow of the street lights.  The rain and wine gave the view a kind of Impressionist aspect. I rested my arms on the terrace wall and saw, really, for the first time, the stars beneath my feet. 

The next morning we drove out of Matera on a day trip to see the ruins of Craco, an abandoned medieval village in Basilicata that had gained some fame as a kind of ghost town.  The first glimpse of the place, towering above a narrow crag and silhouetted against a pewter sky, was truly spooky.  There seemed to be no human presence. Olive groves were scattered in the valley beneath the road. Goats grazed silently among them, apparently unattended.   

(Craco)

We drove to a spot just beneath the village, which was cordoned off with barb wire-topped chain link.  On the other side of the road, across from the fence, another herd of goats grazed beneath a soft pine canopy.  A light rain fell. Kateri got out to take some photos of the goats, and Cathy and I looked for some way to get behind the fence.  A young shepherd appeared from below the pines, dressed in a toque and heavy jacket.  He seemed a little bemused at the attention Kateri gave him.  Just then a old man crested the hill on the road above us. Nearly toothless and apparently agitated, he asked- mostly in an impenetrable dialect - what we were doing there, what we wanted.  I said we wanted to see the town.  “Ma non c’è nessuno (But there’s nobody)!” he yelled, and then launched into a passionate but - for me - indecipherable rant from which I could only make out the refrain: “Non c’è nessuno.”  The shepherd smiled at him and waved.  We located a sign on the fence which explained that tours could be arranged at an office a short drive beyond the ruins. 

A young man - short, stocky and dressed in the somber, worn but clean clothes I associate in Italy with farmers - sat behind the counter at the office. We’d have to fill out a waiver if we wanted to tour the ruins.  “Where are you from?” he asked.  When I said Philadelphia his eyes lit up. “Il paese di "Rocky" (The town of ‘Rocky‘).”  I smiled and said yes and then told him that they’d filmed a lot of the most recent “Rocky” near our house.  “’Rocky 6,’” he responded, without hesitation.  His name was Vincenzo and he’d be our guide.  He gave us all hairnets and hardhats and told us to drive to the gate beneath the ruins.  He met us there after ten minutes. 

Vincenzo explained that the first damage from slides had occurred in 1963. As Levi explains in Eboli, the earth in this part of Basilicata is comprised mainly of a slippery clay.  Slides are commonplace.  Part of Aliano, including most of its mother church, had simply fallen into a depression beneath the town, gone in an instant.  Vincenzo pointed to an area of debris beneath the main ruins.  This had once been the lower part of the town and contained a piazza, a cinema and pastry shop.  A long street, lined with shops, would’ve wound down the hill to where we were standing.  Now there were just piles of brick, wood and plaster.  Vincenzo didn’t attribute the disaster solely to clay soil.  Instead, he spoke of neglect.  The retaining walls that had terraced the hill and provided support had not been maintained.  The medieval tower that crowned the town and provided its most dramatic visual point had been hollowed out during Fascism and an enormous municipal water tank installed. But the system had degraded over time. Water was not contained and leeched into the hill.  Vincenzo’s presentation was calm, authoritative and delivered in a matter-of-fact tone.  Contrary to the information I’d found online, the village had not been completely evacuated after the first incident.  Parts of the town remained occupied until the 70s and some individual paesani even held out into the 80s and 90s.  The people of Craco had had to be pried from their homes. We continued up the hill to the beginning of the ruins.  A solitary donkey stood next to a detached, ruined house beneath us, near where Vincenzo had begun his talk.  Vincenzo explained that one of the last holdouts had remained in the home, defying authorities to demolish his house with him still in it.  He opened another gate and we entered the ruins of Craco.   

It’s difficult and probably unnecessary here to describe the feeling of walking through such a complex, strange and painfully beautiful dead place. There’s a presence to formerly vibrant abandoned places that defies explanation.  The town, like many Italian villages, was a captivating collection of winding and descending alleys.  The buildings were constructed with honey-colored bricks made from the clay soil. Grass and wildflowers tufted from wall cracks and on terracotta roof tiles.  Frail wooden doors swung open to reveal spartan, furnitureless interiors. Vincenzo continued his narrative, stopping from place to place to show us a compelling vantage or point out a crumbling, treasured artifact, or where one had once been.  The town had been evacuated without much care given to the security of its artistic and cultural patrimony.  The bells, altars and pipe organ had been stolen from its mother church. The ceiling above the church’s main altar had caved in due to goats grazing on the roof.  Vincenzo pointed out the space beneath where once had been an altar. It had once been decorated with frescoes.  Local boys, he said, had used the frescoed niche as a soccer goal. 

We reached the summit of the town, just beneath the main tower and entered a home whose windows afforded panoramic views of the surrounding countryside, misty hills of green and brown which rippled to the horizon.  Vincenzo offered some stories of village life, of how his grandfather had resoled shoes in the town and also been the street cleaner, of annual festivals, especially the procession for San Vincenzo, his namesake and the town’s patron saint. He spoke of daily rhythms, town life, social etiquette and funeral customs and how, on at least one occasion involving the death of an unpopular woman known (for her colorful language, ornery demeanor and mistreatment of her husband) as “the devil’s mother-in-law,” those customs were ignored.   

I sheepishly asked him about briganti and he enthusiastically launched into a series of local stories and myths.  Vincenzo was in his twenties, but the connection to the brigantaggio Levi lamented is still strong.  He said that Piemontesi authorities had liked to display the severed heads of briganti at the entrance to the local towns, and that Craco was no exception.  Levi himself references this intimidation tactic. The most famous local brigante, Giuseppe Padovano (called Cappuccino and from Craco), was an ex-Bourbon soldier and sometimes fought under the command of the most feared of all brigante leaders, Carmine Crocco.  From our window overlook, Vincenzo pointed to a place at the foot of the town where there’d been a skirmish between Cappuccino’s band and northern forces.  A little over twenty briganti were taken prisoner.  They were brought to a place beneath the town in front of the church honoring San Vincenzo and lined up for summary execution.  Craco’s most prominent noble family, the Cammarota clan, who had supported the Risorgimento and opposed the brigantaggio, assembled to watch the execution, cheering on the northern soldiers.  Town mythology holds that the briganti turned toward the Cammarota and damned the family to a barren, heirless future.  And according the Vincenzo, this came to pass.  The last of Craco’s Cammarota, an old woman, died poor and alone in the family palazzo. Though most said she’d been a kind and decent person, she’d been ostracized by the local community.  The wounds and divisions were deep and her family’s sins never forgiven. Levi notes this divide between the working class and gentry in Eboli.   

As we descended the hill and again moved into the rubble field, Vincenzo explained his hopes for the town.  In 2010 Craco had been placed on the list of the World Monuments Fund, an international non-profit dedicated to preserving endangered architectural and cultural treasures.  But the monies amounted to little more than a trickle.  Vincenzo, who’d done his research on his own using the few books he could find, the internet and testimony of Craco’s older population, hoped to create a group of volunteers dedicated to the town’s preservation. They would work independently of the outside organizations and government agencies in which he had no faith. Craco’s population had numbered more than 2000 in the 60s but had declined since the evacuation to around 700 souls.  Most of them were moved into a new settlement, Craco Peschiera, a forlorn cement development a few kilometers from the old town.  The young people raised there, he lamented, had no idea of the town’s cultural and artistic treasures or traditions.  They saw only pale shadows of these and grew up with little or no pride in or connection to the town.  Most longed to escape.   

Vincenzo pointed to where the pastry shop had once been.  His face brightened as he told stories his father had told him about his life in Craco as a very young boy.  He’d go to the shop and choose several treats and then run to find Vincenzo’s grandfather, who was usually sweeping up in the piazza.  “Dad, I took three!” His grandfather would smile, reach in his pocket and pull out the money needed to pay.  “And where we’re standing, this was the piazza where everyone assembled each night. The theater was just over there.  There was music and fireworks on festival days...”. 

We stood alone on crumbled brick, surrounded by silence.        

[franciscretarola]

South Philly: A Love Story

(Photos by Francis Cretarola) The names of some (but not all) of the people in this otherwise truthful account have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent, as well as my own ass.

As Cathy and I rounded the corner on Morris and turned onto our block of 13th (the “Miracle” stretch that, from the day after Thanksgiving through New Year’s, becomes a tourist destination that can be seen from space), I noticed the ambulance parked midway up the street. And my heart sank. They’d already loaded in whomever it was they came for, but I saw that it was stopped pretty much in front of Joey’s house. Joey is what I call an “original,” one of the people who were here when we first arrived more than twenty-three years ago, the mostly Italian-American neighbors who’d created this neighborhood and for generations defined it. Most of my block is still comprised of originals and their spawn, but it would be accurate to say that their impact on the character of the neighborhood is growing ever more muted.

I’d not seen Joey much recently. Just the odd sighting of him doing his constitutional walk around the block, moving a lot slower than he once did, and seeming a bit preoccupied. When we first arrived in the neighborhood Joey was already in his sixties, but a force of nature. Just over five feet tall, thin but solidly built, looking exactly like men of that age I’ve seen all over southern Italy, Joey’s physical stature belied the massive impact of his personality. He was generous, quick to offer a hand, free with his opinions. We never dove into politics, but we might not have been on the same page. At block parties he danced (to doo-wop, the “Grease” soundtrack, dance hits from the ‘70’s), in Cathy’s words, “as if no one was watching,” his arms punching the air in front of him, his legs pistons that fired in place. In these moments his face always revealed angelic contentment. Joey was a hell of a lot more comfortable in his own skin than I’ll ever be. His voice, again out of proportion to his diminutive size, boomed. From the inside of our house, I always knew when he was on the street.

His voice boomed in disconcerting ways when he harangued my brother and me for our ineptitude at bocce. Though completely inexperienced, we’d joined the street’s team playing in a league at the Guerin Rec Center (sponsored by a chiropractor, our team was called The Backbreakers). One of the teams we played was made up some of the guys from Danny and the Juniors. When they’d win, they’d sometimes break into a verse of “At the Hop.” It chapped our asses. It was meant to chap our asses. Breaking balls in South Philly is an honored and cherished tradition.

It was before one of these games that I learned something else about Joey. We were huddled outside, waiting for the doors to open and whining about the winter cold when he, out of nowhere and offhandedly, told us a story that stopped our bitching in its tracks:

“When I was in the army in Korea, it was so fucking cold our rifles froze. Couldn’t load ‘em. Couldn’t shoot ‘em. We had to piss on the works to get them working again.”  

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that an old guy from South Philly had dealt with stuff that would’ve put me in a fetal position. These are tough people. And this was a good reminder.

Cathy and I arrived in this neighborhood in 1996. Coming here changed everything for us. Without exaggeration, I can say that had we never settled here I’d never have become proficient in Italian, we’d never have lived in Abruzzo, and certainly never opened Le Virtú (our neighborhood trattoria dedicated to the cuisine of Abruzzo). We owe South Philly everything. And we’ve seen and been a major part of the changes to the neighborhood and East Passyunk Avenue, changes that have been breathlessly celebrated and discussed in local media. The demise of old South Philly has been frequently, enthusiastically, and prematurely reported in stories that have ranged from sensitive, thoughtful treatments to obnoxious, oblivious hit pieces. It’d be disingenuous for us to say we’re not happy about some of the changes. But it’s equally true that we miss a lot of what’s been lost, have mixed feelings about what’s filled the void (including our own roles in that), and would miss what’s left were it to vanish. When old South Philly goes, the country will have lost one its last original and truly great places. Were it to go during our lifetimes, we’d probably pull up stakes. There’d be no “here” here. We came to South Philly because of what it was, not what we thought it could become.        

Rowhome life is familiar to me. I was born and raised up the Schuylkill in Reading, PA, in a blue-collar, predominantly Polish and Slavic neighborhood on the city’s southeast side. My mom’s parents, who also lived in our neighborhood, were “shitkickers” from rural North Carolina who’d moved to Reading for jobs in the textile mills. My dad was Italian-American. When I was a boy his father, from Abruzzo, lived in the house with us. Six of us - including my brother and one of my sisters - lived in a rowhome that would fit inside the one Cathy and I now occupy alone on 13th Street. Reading’s Italian section was gone by the time I was born, but my dad’s friends from that old neighborhood, a tightly knit group of half a dozen guys - partners since grade school in activities both benevolent and (mildly) nefarious - were more a part of our lives than blood relatives. We referred to them as “uncles.” From my grandfather, I got stories about the old country and about being an Italian immigrant when nobody here wanted Italians (he arrived in 1909, one of over 183,000 paesani to make the voyage that year). He explained why he changed his name (from Alfonso Cretarola to Francis Cratil) to avoid prejudice, warned about the KKK who hated Catholics and immigrants like him, spoke reverently of FDR, and taught me and my father before me to root for the underdog. From my dad’s friends I learned a lot, too: how to argue passionately without forgetting you loved the person you were arguing with; how to instantly forgive and when to hold a grudge; how to relentlessly and inventively break balls (the pedestrian insult can boomerang, resulting in a loss of status); numerous mannerisms and off-color Italian expressions and hand gestures; that morality ran deeper than legality; and - above all else - how to show up when a friend was in need.

They had a pinochle game that rotated from house to house. Games would often go on into the early morning. These were raucous, intensely competitive affairs, and master classes in Italian-American culture: music (Sinatra, Prima, and Martin); language (I heard “minchia” so often that I took to using it in conversations with school friends, not knowing it meant “cock,” often playing the role “fuck” does in English); casual volatility, sudden explosions of anger and joy; and food (platters of sausages, meatballs, provolone, capocollo, sopressata). Once, during a game at our house, the doorbell rang, and I went to answer. (I was in about 6th grade). I opened the door to a cop. He asked if the local district justice, one of my dad’s friends, was in the house. I led him to the game in the dining room. He approached the table, hand on his holster, and yelled that the game was busted. For a beat or two, the men at the table looked up at him in silence. Then the judge exploded with a “Vaffa…” and the room erupted in laughter. The cop sat down, had a bite to eat, and left after a few minutes. He’d just wanted to break balls.

So I felt prepared for South Philly. But it still surprised and (usually) delighted me.

We moved into our house in November of 1996. Coming from the paesano-deprived wastelands of Washington, DC, where we’d been living and working, the neighborhood was a paradise. Everywhere I turned were ingredients and foods that could then only be found in specialty stores in the District. There were six bread bakeries within a five-minute walk of my house - good bread, too - and three pasticcerias. There were three butchers inside that radius, including Sam Meloni’s a half a block away on Tasker. We had the Avenue Cheese Shop, Cellini’s, and Phil Mancuso’s as provisioners and, for rarer stuff, DiBruno’s and Claudio’s not too far away on 9th. The hoagie options were overwhelming. Fresh fish was a block away at Ippolito’s. And I’m just talking about the east side of Broad. Ritner Street west of Broad was, and remains, an oasis for anyone seeking Italian flavors. Dad’s Stuffings, Potito’s, and Cacia’s bakery (the tomato pie, but not just) are regional treasures. Cannuli’s Sausages is a full-service butcher shop, where they make a liver sausage taught to them years ago by women from Abruzzo. North of Ritner, on the 1500 block of South 15th, there’s Calabria Imports: sopressata sott’olio, provolone and pecorino cheeses, condiments from Calabria. I gained ten pounds the first few months in the house. And I didn’t care.

But South Philly’s more than a colorful, urban food court. There were/are rhythms, ways of being, and a specific sense of community. Oft-disparaged, stereotyped, and dismissed, the originals in the neighborhood made - and still make - it singular. They’ve provided some of my favorite memories.

My first night out drinking in the neighborhood, I went to La Caffe (now defunct, even the building’s gone) at 12th and Tasker. It was a typical, no-frills corner joint. There were three guys at the bar, all of whom gave me the side-eye as I bellied up. This was long before dedicated hipster ironists started mining the neighborhood for material. My hair was halfway to my ass then, and Italian American wouldn’t be the first, second, or third ethnicity you’d guess when taking in my mug. I wore a vintage Phillies jacket to at least establish some bona fides. I ordered a double Stoli. The guy closest to me gave in and asked what my story was, and a pleasant conversation ensued. We’d reached the point - which used to be a thing - of doing shots of anisette (a practice that, while amicable, often turned a pleasant night’s buzz into a pitiless banshee of a hangover), when the door opened, and a hulking guy, already in his cups, came in clutching a big paper bag under his arm like a football. He was warmly greeted, so, I construed, a regular. He set the grease-soaked bag on the bar, pulled it open and announced: “I got pork sandwiches for everybody!”.A round of roast pork with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe, Philly’s true classic sandwich (the cheesesteak is a pretender to the throne). Welcome to the neighborhood.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving, decorations start to go up: lights; inflatable Santas, snowmen, and Grinches; lights; wreaths; candy canes; nativities; Christmas balls; more lights; plastic holly; tinsel; real and fake evergreen trim; ribbon; additional lights; a giant Snoopy; some elves; and then, finally, the serious lights. This was all pretty much spontaneous, nothing like the organized/enforced effort that now creates the so-called “Miracle on 13th Street.” On Christmas Eve, we were more or less forced at the ends of loaded cannoli into the homes of neighbors to drink wine, anisette, sambuca, rum, and whiskey, and to make our own “plates” from vast spreads of Italian comfort foods. The warmth and good feeling were contagious. And the desire – a need, actually - to share, the humbling generosity, was something I’d only experience again when we began traveling in Abruzzo. My neighborhood in Reading had been close, but nothing like this. The New Year rang in with neighbors returning from dinners and parties in time to bang pots and pans in the middle of the block. The next day, houses up and down 13th and on the cross streets were open, offering neighbors and sometimes complete strangers hot drinks, food, and a bathroom as the Mummers strutted up Broad. It’s never been the same since they changed the parade route.

Our first spring in the house, I was in the kitchen making dinner - roast pork, spaghetti and meatballs - and looking longingly out the window. It was the first real beautiful day of the season. Clear blue skies, about 70 degrees, no humidity. I stepped out into our yard to soak it in. We’ve got the typical tiny South Philly concrete pad; nice for a garden if you’re game, maybe a fig tree (a few of our neighbors still have them). We’d yet to buy yard furniture, and I was regretting it. Cathy stepped out, and I mentioned that, but for the lack of a table and chairs, we could eat outside. “Next time,” she said, and we went back in. Minutes later we heard banging at the metal backyard gate. We opened it to find the old woman who lived in the house behind ours standing in the narrow alleyway. Born in the “Abruzzi” and always dressed in black, she stood less than five feet tall. In heavily accented English, she said “I give you table and two chairs.” She’d been pruning her rose bushes and heard us talking. She led Cathy through her yard and into her kitchen where she had a plain, white plastic table with matching chairs. We were speechless. “I no use anymore. Take,” she said.  

The neighborhood landscape was a lot different then. Its mien, too. Before there was the East Passyunk “Singing Fountain” at the 11th Street triangle, the spot was occupied by an old gas station turned hoagie shop, Cipolloni’s Home Plate. Joe Cipolloni was a neighborhood kid who’d been a catcher in the Phillies’ farm system. We hit Joe’s for a medley of hoagies one of the first nights we crashed in the house. Franca Di Renzo’s venerable Tre Scalini was then across from the triangle on 11th. The Di Renzo family’s been serving food on the Avenue almost three decades now. Their departure (announced as I was writing this), is a dagger to the heart. Frankie’s Seafood Italiano (which memorably used the “Mambo Italiano” melody in its radio advertisements) was catty-corner from Franca on Tasker. On East Passyunk there was also Ozzie’s Trattoria and Rosalena’s; Mr. Martino’s Trattoria, Mamma Maria’s, and Marra’s  were  where they still are today. Walking into a joint meant being warmly greeted with a “Hon,” “Cuz,” or some other friendly moniker. Service was always personable, attentive, and familiar, like you were an old friend. For the life of me, I don’t know what the objection - frequently voiced in amateur and professional reviews - is to this style. Why come to one of the country’s most unique places and ask them to conform to your expectations, change character? Or mock them for who they are? You’re a guest in their neighborhood. Let them be who they are. Roll with it. How self-important, fragile, or far up your own lower digestive tract must you be to be traumatized or offended by “Hon” or the like? What kind of bloodless, sterile, frigid, suppressed, affection-deprived “family” environments produce such specimens? ‘Merigan!

Transactions at restaurants and stores in South Philly weren’t solely financial in nature. They involved human exchanges, real conversation beyond any purchase, interactions that formed some of the neighborhood’s connective tissue. I know that some of the new arrivals in the neighborhood regarded this as a time suck: “Why am I waiting behind this ambulatory fossil while she recounts, for the fifth time, her late husband’s illness, her son’s family’s impending and unapproved move to Jersey, and her plans for the Padre Pio festival? I just want to buy my damned provolone and go!” While an understandable complaint, it was also oblivious. These conversations created and maintained community. Walking into Sam Meloni’s butcher shop was, for me, as much for social reasons as it was to buy meat. The family shop had been at the corner of Iseminger and Tasker since 1938. Sam - in his late sixties and more alive than I’d ever been in my twenties - held court behind the counter, Jeff cap rakishly turned backwards, his expressive faccia usually wearing a wry smile. Entering the store meant immersion in the perpetual, playful, multi-subject argument between Sam and his nephew Bobby - a big, imposing, but sweet dude - and their straight-man assistant, both damn good butchers themselves. You were brought into the fray, asked to weigh in and choose sides, and then identified as an ally or unreasonable bastard. I would go in for some chicken cutlets and walk out nearly an hour later with the chicken, veal scallopini, chicken meatballs, and, most importantly, renewed faith in humanity. Sam’s family was from the town of Campli in Abruzzo’s Teramo province. My family’s also from Teramo. So, we talked a lot about the old country.  Once, during my first bought with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, I walked over to Sam’s for some cutlets and Italian water, the Lurisia stuff Cathy loved. He was alone in the shop that day. He knew what was going on – I’d had my involuntary “chemo haircut” (much of it had fallen out) and my skin had turned an alluring shade of gray. He rang me up then asked how I was getting home. I lived less than a block away.

“I’m walking, Sam.”

“No. No you ain’t,” he snapped.

He washed his hands, brushed himself off, grabbed my stuff, and locked up the shop. And he drove me home.

We were in Italy when Sam passed. It was an aggressive cancer. Friends of ours, who’d recently moved to the ‘hood and fallen in love with him and his place, went to the memorial. They said that there were photos of Sam from all through his life. A lot of shots from parties. One taken “down the shore” showed him carousing with his friends on the beach, their towels surrounded by “dead soldiers,” empty bottles of booze. Sam had fun. Our friends also mentioned the score of unescorted older women at the memorial. Sam had been a committed bachelor until the end. His nephew Bobby died, also of cancer, only a few months later. The shop closed.

Immersed in this Italian-American bubble, I felt waves of nostalgia, yearnings for the sense of belonging my dad and his friends clearly had in their boyhood enclave (as much as I loved it, I would never be from South Philly, and we’d been transplants to the Polish/Slavic quarter in Reading), and a desire to connect with my roots. Everywhere around me I’d see older, Italian-born guys – hair (or what was left of it) closely cropped; face shaved but casting a shadow by mid-afternoon; height a little over five feet; build thin to stocky, but solid; pants belted and hiked to the midsection; shirt tucked and buttoned to the neck; handkerchief in the back pocket; shoes plain, of leather; sartorial mien somber – who reminded me of my grandfather. These guys and their wives are usually quiet, reserved.  They keep to themselves, cook and eat at home. Which is maybe why the newcomers moving in and journalists perfunctorily writing about South Philly often don’t seem to notice them. A lot of them used to congregate at the now-defunct Caffe Italia west of Broad on Snyder. But they’re still around, hiding in plain sight. Many of them, I’d discover, were from villages near where Alfonso had been born. Listening to them speak a language familiar but, really, impenetrable to me became intolerable. I wanted to understand where all this stuff around me had come from, the place that’d shaped Alfonso and, to a lesser extent, my father and myself. So, with Cathy’s permission (she’s a mensch), I quit my job writing and copyediting for a publisher out of Maryland and made the first of my extended trips to Italy to study the language, first in Florence, but later and more intensely in Rome. My studies provided me the key to exploring and understanding Abruzzo - a wild, beautiful, mostly untraveled region, and the point of origin for many of South Philly’s denizens - and penetrating, just a little (the community can be justifiably suspicious and guarded), the native Italian component of my adopted neighborhood.

It wasn’t too long after our return from an extended stay, with our two Jack Russells, in Abruzzo that we met, befriended, and – in a move that determined our future road and made Le Virtú possible but which for a short while caused us crippling anxiety and provided a window to hell – started working with a chef from Napoli operating on the west side of Broad. This guy – let’s call him Gennaro – prepared the real-deal cucina napolitana. No compromises, nothing elaborate, just the genuine article. Working with him was our intro to the biz. Luciana, our opening chef at Le Virtú, was a frequent dining guest and then, after Gennaro ominously disappeared one weekend, his sometime substitute in the kitchen. Gennaro, who we discovered too late had a history with illicit substances and a taste for expensive wine that someone else had paid for (chefs, the little dears! It’s always the Aglianico, Amarone or Barolo, and never the Nero di Troia), gradually went off the rails, slipping into legitimate mental illness. When out of paranoia he asked a busboy to frisk a customer because the guy was speaking in Neapolitan dialect (your guess is as good as ours), we cut bait. My last sight of Gennaro was on my stoop around midnight, asking for the phone number of a former server, a young girl he’d become convinced was the Madonna (not the singer, but Christ’s mom, of immaculate conception fame). When I denied his request, he produced a knife, and I a baseball bat (what else is a vestibule for?). I was chasing him up the street, bat in hand, when I locked eyes with an incredulous cop in his cruiser (not the first time this had happened, by the way). I flagged down the cop and he took Gennaro away. The whole thing was our first restaurant “cash-ectomy,” but my brother and Cathy had developed a taste for the biz. So, we were in, just not with Gennaro.

But before it all turned to merda, Gennaro provided – and subsequently burned – bridges into South Philly’s discrete, native-born community. We frequented expatriate clubs, visited in homes, met, dined with, and came to know many of our Italian neighbors. Language was crucial to that. And it proved crucial to repairing the damage Gennaro’s erratic behavior was continuing to cause in the neighborhood after our breakup. As part of the reconciliation with the neighbors, we were invited for dinner at the home of a family from Basilicata, the soulful, beautiful, but economically and historically screwed region at the instep of The Boot (between Puglia to the east and Calabria and Campania to the west). The head of the household – let’s call him Domenico - had been a semi-regular at Gennaro’s place and had watched his gradual decline. It was Domenico who’d come to us with stories of Gennaro’s increasing madness and how it impacted the street as, in our absence, it all went off the rails. We did all we could to clean up the messes, settling Gennaro’s accounts with purveyors, apologizing to neighbors. In the meanwhile, Gennaro escaped, first to Jersey and the employ of a well-known, native-born restaurateur, and then permanently back to Napoli. Once returned home, his old habits and illnesses caught up with him. He didn’t make it. Domenico’s mother - short, whippet-thin, in her seventies, and a non-English speaker – cooked for us and his family. It ranks among the best and most authentic Italian dining experiences I’ve ever had in the US. The décor of the rowhome was completely old-world, the lighting soft, the house immaculate in the way only immigrant homes are, a purposeful demonstration of work ethic and pride. Nothing she made was remotely elaborate, just all beautifully done. Beyond the perfection of the homemade pasta, the simplicity and delicacy of the grilled and fried antipasti, the generous portions of wine and digestivi, I most remember the image of this woman, visible from our table, relentlessly at work for hours at the kitchen stove, a culinary machine. She produced course after course, never sat down with us, never stopped moving. It had to be nearly midnight when she reluctantly emerged from the kitchen to accept our thanks and unconditional surrender.

By the time we opened Le Virtú in October of 2007, the demographic changes already at work when we arrived had greatly accelerated. Fresh diasporas from Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere filled the gaps (and storefronts) left by Italian Americans. The sons and grandchildren of Italian immigrants often didn’t want to carry on family businesses or wanted to pursue a suburban style of life (that I’ll never understand, and the idea of which gives me the fantods). These new arrivals brought with them the energy and entrepreneurial impulse that generally attends immigrant waves. Family-oriented, hardworking, and driven to succeed, they’ve greatly benefited the neighborhood. From my vantage, they remind me of my grandfather and his peers. Others arriving were generally more affluent, white, and college educated. It was in the late 90’s that we began to see folks, obviously from outside the neighborhood, walking around and looking at houses. Browsers. Handwritten notes asking if we’d consider selling our home were shoved through our mail slot. It was hard to know how to feel about it. Priced out of more expensive areas or newly arrived in the city, these folks were attracted by the neighborhood’s amenities, housing stock, proximity to the subway, and convenience to Center City. Prices on our own block increased eight- to tenfold between 1996 and today, providing a windfall for some neighbors with an itch to leave but also pretty much making it certain that their children couldn’t buy in the vicinity if they wanted to stay.

By the mid- to late-aughts, swarms of hipsters, ironic deep divers, beer geeks, gourmands, and self-appointed food critics were descending on the neighborhood as the infrastructure to satisfy them all had developed. Bars began offering vast selections of national and local craft and Belgian beers. Even corner bars started carrying a few crafts and a couple of Chimays. The harbinger for all of this, however, was Ristorante Paradiso, the dream of Lynn Rinaldi, a proud product of the neighborhood. Paradiso departed from the familiar Italian-American narrative and bravely introduced Italian regional themes to East Passyunk. Heartened by Lynn’s success, we opened Le Virtú, digging deep into la cucina Abruzzese and proffering dishes that would have been familiar to the grandparents and great grandparents of our neighbors. And, of course, a diverse host of restaurants and other eateries – most of them astonishingly good – followed. It’s now possible to figuratively eat your way across much of the globe and never leave East Passyunk.

We’d imagined Le Virtú as a love letter to Abruzzo, where we’d lived after my first occurrence of Hodgkin’s and where we returned to annually and, perhaps naively, a gift of gratitude to the neighborhood. Our first menus, created by Luciana from Abruzzo, were straight out of tradition, without any “cheffy” interpretation. And still we’d have guests, some of them locals and neighbors, who were baffled by our fare. One guy, seated at the bar and looking over our offerings, his face a map of confusion, remarked: “Not for nothing, but is there anything Italian on this menu?” So, a little (hopefully unpedantic) explanation often proved necessary. Using ingredients from specific local farms, importing rare ingredients from Abruzzo (buying our saffron involved going to the village of Civitaretenga in Abruzzo and knocking on a farmer’s door; we filled suitcases with rare cheeses from organic farms in the region), and trying to proffer quality wines and digestives made our prices above what had been the neighborhood norm. Without doubt, we alienated some locals. And the people most familiar with our dishes, the native-born Italians living in the neighborhood, never went out to eat Italian. The idea of going out and paying for what you could make at home was, to them, obscene. Only ‘merigan did that. But we gradually found our clientele, or they found us. And watching, as has happened many times. family shedding nostalgic tears over a simple bowl of scrippelle ‘mbusse - pecorino-filled crepes in chicken broth – and remembering the grandmothers from Abruzzo, now most likely departed, who used to make it for special occasions…you can’t put a price on that.

The Italian South Philly that persists is deceptively large, especially if you’re just judging by a count of storefronts and businesses. Philly’s population of Italian Americans is still the second largest in the US, after New York’s, and a lot of that’s attributable to South Philly. Most blocks in the old enclave are still partly or majority Italian-American, even if some - not most, but a sizable number - of the newcomers tend to pretend the originals don’t exist. Or maybe just wish that they didn’t. This disrespect is often palpable and felt among the long-time residents. They talk about it. Early on during East Passyunk’s so-called “renaissance,” a new store owner catering to more recent neighborhood arrivals and visitors to the Avenue remarked to a journalist that his block had three Italian eateries but that there was no way that could last. He sounded hopeful. I can’t count the episodes in which, drinking or dining at a local joint or just walking along the street, I’ve heard visitors or newcomers condescendingly discussing the long-time residents, the Italian Americans, like Margaret Mead describing the subjects of some anthropological expedition. They say these things blithely, indifferent to or unaware of the fact that the locals hear them. A professor at a city university once asked me where I lived. When I responded, she grimaced then asked: “How do you like living down there with them?” Again, I don’t look Italian American. I informed her of my background and ended the conversation.        

I won’t whitewash any of my neighborhood’s shortcomings. Except maybe to say that they seem to be painfully evident everywhere in America. We’ve drawn the ire of some of South Philly’s less-accepting citizens for the causes we’ve supported at Le Virtú, the fundraisers for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. But many, maybe even most of our strongest supporters have also been Italian American and folks from the neighborhood. They’ve shown up when we’ve asked for help. We’re indebted to them. But the easy stereotypes often used to describe Italian South Philly and Italian Americans in general are tired, lazy, and profoundly ironic. They also have a long history. Most Italian Americans can trace their provenance to somewhere in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the southern realm that lasted until most of the peninsula was unified at bayonet point in 1861. In Italy, southerners were often disparaged, labeled terroni for their connection to the earth and the dark color of their skin. Into the 1970’s, some landlords in northern cities openly refused to rent to southerners. Crackpot theories about their inferiority and tendency toward criminality began in northern Italy in the 19th century and followed them to the U.S. Nativist propaganda and even the editorial sections of papers as reputable as The New York Times attacked their character and lamented their arrival in America. During an earlier, xenophobic freakout in the 1920’s, we changed our immigration laws, in part, to stop the waves from southern Italy breaking on our shores. It’s painful to see how durable and apparently socially acceptable these stereotypes are. Just as it’s painful and shameful when some Italian Americans forget this story and mimic their ancestors’ tormentors.

What the future is for the Italian enclave in South Philly, I can’t say. I’m trying to enjoy as much of it that remains as I can, to savor it. The new immigrant communities, vibrant and essential to the neighborhood’s future as they may be, are understandably insular. And it’s unclear how committed the other newcomers are to the neighborhood, the young families, couples, and affluent professionals making their homes here. Will they stay or, as many do, move on when their kids reach school age? Some have had a real positive impact. Participation in school and neighborhood associations is important and has for sure contributed to the area’s betterment. But those types of organizations aren’t deeply organic. They can and do strengthen a community, but I don’t think that they often create the profound sense of belonging that palpably existed here when we arrived, and that persists among long-time residents. Many of the newcomers turn their eyes from and backs to the street. Their lives occur inside their homes, and they don’t actively participate in their block’s daily social exchanges and rhythms. Is this a suburban mode of being?  I wouldn’t know. Since we opened our restaurant, we are also guilty of often hiding behind our door, preoccupied and occasionally overwhelmed as we are (we’ve nobody but ourselves to blame for this; no one held a gun to our heads and forced us to open a restaurant). It seems clear to me and to Cathy that the originals provide much of the social glue that makes our part of South Philly an actual neighborhood. Their emotional attachment to the place, their pride, their events still inform the place’s identity. Without them, this is just an amorphous cluster of streets and homes, meaningless real estate designations. They provide much of the framework that whatever’s to come will be built on.

And, again, the community is stronger than some reports might indicate. If you’re ever lucky enough to happen upon a serenade, you’ll see and feel how strong. Before a wedding, the bride’s street is blocked off, and her and the groom’s families, as well as neighbors, gather in front of the rowhome.  The groom “serenades” her from the street. There’s music, wine, food, laughter, an epic party. It’s something brought here from the old country. My brother Fred got to participate in one in Abruzzo, in the mountain village of Pacentro. He held the groom’s ladder as he climbed to knock on his bride’s window. Once arrived at the window, the groom, a musician of note but, by his own admission, not much of a singer, had to belt out an appropriate tune while all his friends and half the town looked on. His musician friends then joined in. They’re more to the letter of the law in Abruzzo. In South Philly there’s often a DJ instead. The couple in Pacentro, dear friends of ours who’ve hosted us in their own homes, reluctantly left Abruzzo after their marriage to realize their dreams. They now live happily in our South Philly neighborhood.

Oh, and by the way, Joey made it. He’s okay.

[franciscretarola]

Abruzzo: Turn off the phone

(Photos by Kateri Likoudis Connolly)

Cathy and I stood at the edge of the piazza, a stone-paved square overlooking the San Leonardo pass between the Majella and Morrone mountains. The sun was setting behind us and the Morrone, giving the valley beneath an amber glow. Above the tree line across from us, the rocky face of the Majella turned magenta. We were in Roccacaramanico, a quasi-abandoned medieval town in Abruzzo's Majella national park. Riding a spur on the Morrone's eastern slope, the town is a cluster of stone houses built along and above one main street. Beyond the cars parked at the entrance to the village, where there are also some collection points for recyclables, there's little in the town that breaks the spell of being in the 13th century. Few people live here year-round. Shepherding and farming are not the prevalent activities they once were. Most villagers have moved elsewhere, many to America. Restored homes offer shelter to hikers and other park tourists. From spring to fall, there're almost always visitors.   

The late June day had been hot, but the air was clear and cooled as the sun retreated. It was just before dinner, and the tavern that opened onto the square was preparing for business. A large, white Abruzzese sheepdog dozed next to us. A few older women sat at a table, laughing and exchanging stories in the local dialect. The woman who ran the tavern set their table. Happy voices and the clink of silverware. Rosemary and mountain grasses perfumed the air. 

Not much else was happening. Or was likely to happen. The dying sun painted the mountains and the valley below. Breeze played in the beech trees. In the piazza, an ancient hospitality unfolded without fanfare or fuss at a single table.  And it was perfection. Cathy and I shared a moment of comfortable silence, a privilege of a quarter-century of cohabitation. No need for words. Just our senses taking it all in. It helped that our sole link to the outside world (and often a conduit to hell), Cathy's smartphone, had died a day earlier. There was no way for anyone to disturb us. No way for us to try to capture the moment, Instagram it, frame it for the appreciation and approval of others. There was only the moment. And that’s the point of Abruzzo. If you just shut up, kill the internal narrative that constantly rates and tries to validate your experiences, allow yourself to be present in the moment, it might be just what you need. You can’t capture, package, or sell its gift. There's just its intrinsic value. Which is why it’s so difficult to explain the region's allure. Why marketing it is difficult and can lead to something like sin. 

In the last few years, Abruzzo’s been pegged in outlets as the “next place in Italy to discover.” It seems to be taking a long time. But I’m all for the right people discovering my favorite part of the world. Abruzzo and our friends there need the right type of tourism, and, so, the right type of tourist. Which means how word gets out, what gets told, and who does the telling are critical. About these parts of the discovery process, I’m not all that sanguine. We’re not good at subtleties, nuance, or depth. We don’t even seem to want to be. So far, most reportage has been spotty, often perfunctory, and woefully incomplete. I fear it will create unrealistic and unreasonable expectations. Americans and other first worlders expecting some quaintly rustic but gussied-up Tuscan-style idyll will be disappointed and angry. That would be tragic. Abruzzo welcomes visitors warmly and sincerely, in generous ways that can humble, but makes very few concessions to them. It remains, mostly, for now, its raw, sometimes ramshackle, but (in my mind) best self.  It’s kind of important to report its complex truths, as much as that’s possible, and to approach it without preconceptions.   

We've been traveling in Abruzzo for over twenty years. We lived for a short time in the village of Assergi, part of the Comune of L'Aquila, Abruzzo's capital, beneath the Gran Sasso massif. We started out to find my paternal family, then to write a travel book on the region. The latter never happened. Instead, we opened Le Virtù, our Abruzzo-themed restaurant in South Philly, a neighborhood that was a landing point for part of the region's diaspora. Largely undisturbed in its core by major highways until the 1970's, one of Italy's most mountainous and rugged territories with over thirty percent of its whole dedicated parkland (there are four major parks- three national and one regional - and several wildlife reserves), Abruzzo’s kind of a sanctuary for traditions and ways of life that have elsewhere vanished. Ancient pagan rituals and celebrations, now under the guise of Catholicism, persist. Shepherds still roam the mountains with flocks of goats and sheep. Agriculture continues to be defined by small family farms and cooperatives. Local cuisine resists homogenization and profits from an ingredient pool that would be the boast of better known, more traveled destinations in Italy. The region, once the northernmost part of various southern kingdoms (ruled by, among others, Normans, Swabians, French from Anjou, Spanish from Aragon), represents a bridge between south and central Italy. Though culturally and historically tied to the kingdoms of Naples and the Two Sicilies, its geographic position means that, especially at the table, it shares a lot with its central neighbors. Saffron, truffle (black and white varieties), porcini, game, tomatoes, red garlic, mozzarella, pecorino, and peperoncino – ingredients spanning central and southern Italy - are all major players in the Abruzzese kitchen.   Before we opened Le Virtù, Cathy and I organized small culinary tours - fifteen people maximum - of the region. We went to every type of eatery, from roadside, mountain arrosticini (lamb skewers) stands, mom-and-pop menu-less trattorie, and centuries-old, repurposed wooden fishing platforms to gastronomic temples of decadent excess. I've consulted with journalists working on pieces about Abruzzo for The New York Times, Food & Wine, Elle, and Saveur. We did a blow-by-blow account of one of our restaurant research trips for Food Republic. We could write up a Best-of tour of Abruzzo. Nature. Culture. Food. And you would have a spectacular trip. My problem is that you might not have really experienced Abruzzo. 

A few years ago, a food writer friend of ours who also knows Abruzzo floated the idea of us putting together and following a comprehensive itinerary in the region for a major magazine. It would allow for the necessary time (Abruzzo's topography and challenging road networks make traveling in it time consuming and complicated) and include the "essential" places. From the mountains to the sea, we'd do the region right - or as close to right as was possible in a magazine feature. From the outset, we were aware of the limitations of the medium and any itinerary. But we knew and loved the region. We were the right people for the job. 

At the outset, the magazine was gaga over the idea. Abruzzo was just then entering the “next place” conversation. We submitted our proposal. The magazine expressed its enthusiasm. And then everything went radio silent. 

Several months later I received an email from a journalist who was working on an assignment about Abruzzo. He needed help lining up the right people to interview about the region's culture and history and wanted some additional info on a couple of its core traditions. I asked which magazine had hired him. It was, of course, the one we'd given our itinerary. He was cagey about giving up details of his own trip, but eventually had to reveal enough to allow me to arrange things for him. His tour would be abbreviated, but it included spots from our itinerary. Was I angry? Yeah. But he seemed a nice enough guy, maybe with no idea about what'd transpired, so I - with the blessing of our friend - opted to help. He'd no knowledge of the region, the distances he'd be traveling, or the nature of the topography and roads. He needed a translator. The trip our friend and I'd planned had been honed to seven days (and we were still uncomfortably conscious of all the things we'd be leaving out). He’d allowed for less than half that time. The article came out, and to some fanfare. And it missed the point. Entirely. Truth is, most likely, ours would've too. Though we'd have gotten closer to the genuine article. It's somehow important to know enough to know what you're leaving out, what can't be adequately expressed or described. Even just to know what you don't know. One of the things that formed the core of this guy's piece, and that I'd set up for him, an interview with an aristocratic academic, an expert on the region's history, culture, and cuisine, was especially illustrative of the issues confronting any travel writer visiting Abruzzo for the first time. The professor made for great copy. Eccentric visually and personality-wise, he could wax for ages with unquestioned authority about the region. He was spectacular. But in a lot of ways, one would get a better read on Abruzzo's character and (sometimes grim) realities by talking to some laconic guy on a tractor, a woman wielding a sickle in a field, an old man carrying a bundle of kindling for his fireplace, or a sun-beaten dude tending his flock. Maybe even just a woman taking the orders AND cooking the food at her little trattoria. 

The problem is, it's difficult to make the real stuff not sound a little sad. Because, in a way, it is. Anything truly complex and beautiful will contain melancholy elements. Adults should know this.  Every beautiful thing - past, present, and future - is imbued with a kind of nostalgia or knowledge of its (or our) ephemerality. What you experience in Abruzzo, regardless of its very real vitality and beauty, is something that is endangered by the 21st century, something that is - in part - in decline or dying. The stuff that persists is kind of magical and occult in a century that seems bereft of meaning or values. But it’s in peril. Over its history, Abruzzo has endured earthquakes, war, endemic poverty, mass emigration. They’ve all left a mark. To be in one of Abruzzo's villages or in any of its parks offers exposure to things - rhythms, ways of life, connections to nature, a sense of community - that are essential, sustaining, deeply human. The sadness of history, the cruelty of commerce and nature, are also everywhere evident. It does the soul good to experience this totality. A visitor realizes that her very presence could be part of the problem. But also - if she’s open to experience and treats the region with respect and doesn’t impose ridiculous and shallow expectations - possibly part of the solution.   It's nearly impossible to capture this in a genre at least in part focused on first-impression narratives and/or glossy hyperbole. Abruzzo can’t be truly presented in an Instagram feed or its journalistic equivalent. But maybe that type of wide-eyed "discovery" is just what most magazines want. Maybe these well-meaning, ignorant, gob-smacked purveyors of “WOW” are the right people for the job and this age. They won't bore you with the complexity, the multifaceted, unvarnished, and not all-bright-and-smiley truth. They will fill you with the need to have (purchase?) "experiences," to validate your existence. I don’t think that serves Abruzzo. Or the reader, for that matter.  It won’t prepare her for the real experience or give her an idea of what essential things she might find there, and how to discover them. It’ll just create unrealistic and kind of rote expectations. Reportage and promotion of Italy suffer in general from shallow, romantic portrayals. Abruzzo’s impressive, moving, and - I think for what ails us - important.  But it’s not particularly romantic. And I’m guilty of advancing some of this horseshit. 

Somewhere along our 20-year timeline - for a short time, but still - I started "seeing" Abruzzo in terms of "wow factor." When we decided to marry our fortunes to Abruzzo - first with a never-produced book, then with small culinary tours, and finally with Le Virtù - it was inevitable that, to some extent, I'd commodify the region and its beauty. In the selling of something, regardless of how earnest the seller and heartfelt the sell, there's some reduction, some packaging that simplifies the truth. A gloss gets applied. I've played up Abruzzo's natural and man-made beauty and waxed poetic about meals and the people we've met - to attract journalists, to sell tours, to draw customers to our restaurant. I created an attractive, pleasant veneer. This was partly a product of the industries we’ve worked in and how they’re marketed and portrayed. TV shows, social media discussion, and journalism about travel, food, and restaurants have long been plagued by an obsession with "wow," presentation, and romantic imagery - the winemaker pensively walking among his vines, the chef intensely inspecting produce at the local market, the choreographed dance in the suggestively lit dining room. As opposed to a window on culture, a soulful gift, and congress with an actual community (things Abruzzo and southern Italy offer in spades), restaurant culture, in particular, and our expectations of it have too often veered toward the performative, the attempt to "blow the mind," present a seamless, theatrical experience. I find it all kind of empty, regardless of how impressive the show. Eating in Abruzzo very often affords you the chance to have real contact with the culture, to meet and talk to the people making and serving your food, and to really get to know who they are, what makes them tick. It’s a window on what life’s like, what these people value, deal with, do. Asking questions - or being asked questions- that break down the wall between diner and restaurateur is how we came to truly know the region. Some of the frankest, most revealing discussions I’ve had about life in Abruzzo - not just restaurant-related stuff, but the day-to-day struggles, cultural values, and current events - have happened at tables in the region’s trattorie and ristoranti. Being open to this kind of exchange is essential to knowing the place.  If that’s what you’re about. These days, you can eat well almost anywhere. Travel’s about something deeper. But some travelers, including some journalists, refuse to go there. And, so, their experiences and impressions lack depth. We were sitting at a little place in San Vito Chietino, along Abruzzo’s southern coast, as guests of our olive oil rep. The trattoria, built into a centuries-old, vaulted, brick, ground-floor space, was just steps off a pebble beach. From our table, we could hear the waves break and retract through the clicking stones. The food was simple but perfectly prepared. An array of lightly battered fried fish to begin, followed by a soup of tacconcini - small squares of pasta - in a tomato and red pepper broth flavored with the local granchi, tiny crabs cooked whole. Too small really to break open for their meat, they infused the broth with a sweet, rich flavor. 

After the pasta course and before the arrival of our secondi, the restaurant owner, a short, solidly built woman in her mid-50's, approached the table to check on our progress. The rep, a sharp-witted guy who'd traveled the world from this area to sell his olive oil, asked her about business. And she told him. No filter. She let loose a restaurateur's laundry list of laments. It was an uncensored exchange between members of a closely linked community. Hand gestures, facial expressions, modulations in volume, angry in parts, wickedly funny in others. Fishermen, winemakers, farmers, all her purveyors (remember she was saying this to someone who is also HER olive oil rep), and customers were unreliable, unreasonable, obtuse, and getting on her last nerve. When she walked away, he looked at us sheepishly. He hoped our host hadn't been too familiar, honest, free with her words. But after traveling in Abruzzo for decades this was nothing new for us. He was relieved. A few weeks before, he told us, he'd been escorting a New York Times journalist around the region. The writer was put off by the regional lack of filter, the informality and familiarity of many restaurateurs and servers. Sophisticated, professional detachment was apparently an essential part of how he judged a dining experience. It was what he expected. 

I can’t express how far up his own ass this Times guy was, and how tragically wrong for this assignment.  Why travel at all if your mellow gets harshed when the local character doesn’t conform with your staid and, frankly, ignorant expectations? Is this the kind of intrepid correspondent that will bring us any true picture of the world beyond our experiences? This was a guy who maybe should never roam beyond small sections of Manhattan. He sure as hell wouldn’t cut it in most of South Philly. It’s important who gets to tell us these stories. Over ten years ago, we took a friend of ours, Toronto-based, early modernist historian and author Mark Jurdjevic, to a tiny trattoria in the village of Ofena, just under the Campo Imperatore high-mountain plain in the Gran Sasso National Park. The woman who ran the place was a friend of ours. The trattoria was in what had been her childhood home. Her cucina was simple but elegant, using the best of the local ingredients - the potent saffron from the nearby Navelli plain, black truffles and wild herbs from the surrounding mountains, Santo Stefano di Sessanio lentils (small, dark, and for my money more flavorful than their counterparts from Castelluccio in Umbria), porcini, red and black ceci, and cicerchie (kind of misshapen, meaty, ceci-sized beans). Six or seven years earlier, Cathy and I’d stumbled on the place while exploring the village. The dining room walls had been painted by our friend’s artist husband in a riot of swirling greens, golds, and earthy reds. It was like dining inside a Van Gogh or Monet.  Our first meal there included an antipasto della casa that might not have ever ended if we’d not cried “uncle.” Local pecorino cheeses, salumi, bitter greens sautéed in garlic and hot pepper, frittata, coratella (bits of lamb and lamb offal fried and browned in oil with garlic, white wine, salt, pepper, and some herbs), and grilled vegetables all arrived in turn. The most unusual item was a plate of lightly battered and fried lamb’s brains. They were creamy, almost like custard, with a mildly sweet, subtle, and elusive flavor. Not like anything I’ve had before or since. This visit with Mark, who’d used his genius for writing proposals to earn two years of study in Firenze, was my attempt to give him an authentic taste of Abruzzo, a change of pace from what he’d been daily experiencing in Tuscany. In so many ways, the meal delivered. Its events are apparently seared into his memory. I emailed Mark to tell him I’d be writing about this.  And he responded in seconds: “Precise memory: fresh pasta alla chitarra (bright yellow - brighter than I've ever seen - the eggs, right?), saffron, slightly roasted cherry tomatoes, with a basket of chilies on the side. I think we grated some pecorino on it. It was one of, if not the, most satisfying pastas I've ever had. I came home (to Firenze, where he was then living with his wife and daughter) with a bag of saffron and tried to re-create it about ten times. It seemed so simple that it should be easy. Every pasta I made was certainly enjoyable, but not the same. 

“Vague memory: Cathy had talked about an endless appetizer parade. The parade was considerably smaller than she had experienced the previous time, which we attributed to the fact that she (our friend) was with us in the dining room weeping and venting, rather than in the kitchen where such parades start. I remember some fried polenta with braised mushrooms and a stewed pepper dish, slightly spicy. Pretty sure secondi were grilled, split salsicce. 

“Most I remember the outpouring of pure, unmitigated grief, combined with my shame and guilt that every ten minutes or so I would wonder if she was going to get her shit together and cook me some more food.” During the previous winter, then just ended, our friend’s father had fallen gravely ill - I don’t remember the malady, but the situation was hopeless. Winters in Abruzzo’s hinterlands can be extreme, Jack London-level stuff. Meters of snow. Howling winds. Wolves. The trifecta (though the third element never actually hurts anyone). The condition caused the father terrible pain. But the town’s remoteness and the snowfalls that sometimes blocked the roads made caring for him impossible. The travelling doctor couldn’t get there. So, there were no pain killers to lessen his suffering. His wails filled the house for days before he died. In Mark’s words, “…she was grabbing your forearm with both hands as she wept-spoke the details.” In the summer of 2011, several years later, Cathy and I dropped by the village of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, in the Gran Sasso National Park.  It was two years after the April 2009 earthquake that’d nearly destroyed L’Aquila, Abruzzo’s capital city, and damaged and traumatized the surrounding towns that were part of the “crater” around the epicenter. Santo Stefano was one of these. Last time we’d visited, three months after the quake, most of the town - a fairytale-like, medieval jewel located, like Ofena, just beneath the Campo Imperatore - had been inaccessible.  We were anxious about what we’d find.  

An enormous crane hovered above the space where the town’s signature central tower, a crenulated lookout built by the Medici, had stood.  It had toppled during an aftershock. Metal and wooden bracing secured many of the buildings in town, but some of the shops and eateries were open.  We passed one of our favorites, Tra Le Braccia di Morfeo, and were happy to find it ready for business. Looking in from the street, I could see the owner/operator, Francesca, seated at her bar reading a newspaper. We’d not seen her since the quake.   We’d known Francesca for over five years. During our many visits (including stops on our tours), she’d always been welcoming, but kind of reserved, professional. Not this time. We entered, and her face beamed with delight. She embraced each of us in turn. “Volete mangiare? Spero di si!” (You want to eat?  I hope yes).  A familiar and welcome meal of rustic specialties followed. First salame aquilano - firm, tightly packed and flattened, and spiced with salt and pepper. Then liver sausage, house-cured, thick-cut, mountain-style prosciutto, capocollo, pickled zucchini, and local aged canestrato pecorino. For my primo, I went with the zuppa di lenticchie, made with the town’s prized lentils. Cathy devoured a robust casareccia pasta served with tomato, shaved pecorino, and fresh peperoncini (chilies), which she cut over the dish at the table with scissors. We washed it down with a bottle of local cerasuolo, Abruzzo’s deeply-hued, full-bodied rose’ made with the Montepulciano grape.     It was all almost normal. Sated, content, and ready to nap, I still wanted to talk to Francesca, hear how it was going. So, I asked. And Francesca, who understood that I wasn’t expecting bullshit, opened a can of verbal whoop-ass.  "Male, molto male," she began, then launched into a blistering oratory that, though economical, took no prisoners, and built in intensity:   

“Besides the first few days, they've done nothing. And they won't allow us to do anything ourselves. Have you seen L'Aquila? It's almost as it was right after the earthquake. Two years.  Two goddamn years, and they've done nothing and are doing nothing. Where did all the money go? They brought the G8 here, the idiots-” Berlusconi, who unsurprisingly botched the recovery, had moved the 2009 conference from Sardegna to L’Aquila to highlight the damage for world leaders – “for a show. A show for whom? Lots of talk and promises. And now? How do we survive in the park with L'Aquila left in ruins? They don't give a damn about us, we who live by the park, work with nature. How are we supposed to survive?” 

Francesca - blond, sharp-featured, slight of stature, but as solid as a foot soldier - seemed about to splinter into a thousand pieces, her body unable to contain her rage. She seemed indifferent to the effect of her rant on the other two couples, both Italian, in the dining room. Cathy and I sat in silence and listened. It's all we could do. She finished and apologized, but this is what I’d asked to hear: the truth. Her goodbye was as warm as the welcome. She grabbed my hands, kissed me on each cheek, and we walked out nourished but without illusions. 

While I might be able to paint a soft-focus, alluring picture of experiences in Abruzzo, I’m permitted no easy fantasies about an idyllic life nestled in the very real, spectacular beauty of Abruzzo’s mountains. Under certain circumstances, the scenery can kill you.   For each one of these moments (and others) of unvarnished and uncomfortable truth, I can name hundreds of unmitigated joy: family dinners gathered around a table covered in steaming polenta and ragu’; eating grilled lamb and drinking wine on the Gran Sasso mountain under a canopy of stars; restaurant meals ending with uncounted rounds of house-made digestivi brought to the table by the chef/cook, who then sits down with us; sharing a table under a pergola overlooking grapevines and olive groves with winemakers who drove up to the meal on their tractors; gargantuan feasts lasting hours with course after course in gastronomic temples helmed by master chefs. All these episodes unspool in my mind in a gilded light, like childhood memories. But all of them are also informed, made more special and precious, by an understanding of how delicate and precarious the whole thing is, how bad things can go, and how hard life in these mountains can be. Because Abruzzo and its people aren’t just battling the natural elements, the ageless challenges of mountain living, farming, and shepherding. They’re fighting the 21st century, it’s suicidal indifference toward the ways of life that still survive in Abruzzo. To incompetent and often malfeasant government and a dysfunctional national economy, add the relentless drive of mindless development, the dingbat unconscionable belief in unending capitalist expansion. The lucre-worshiping swine driving this discredited idea of progress have pushed to drill for oil along the region’s pristine southern coast, risking to forever destroy a stretch of the Adriatic where the beaches are “Bandiera Blu” (“Blue Flag,” judged perfect and clean for swimming and, obviously, marine life). They’ve tried to build biomass centers in the Comune of L’Aquila, near the very epicenter of the 2009 quake.  Others, with the support of corrupt governments, have tried to open the region to fracking. Fracking. In Abruzzo. One of the most infamously seismic regions on a peninsula prone to earthquakes. Where the capital city and its surrounding towns all still bear the scars of recent quakes. And yet the desperate desire for profit has some suggesting an activity that exacerbates the issue. It’s madness. And, of course, we have the fools who think that paving over parts of the national parks is the path to economic viability. To create what? Office parks? Industrial zones? Take Abruzzo’s greatest asset, the element that’s earned the region the title as Europe’s greenest, the very thing that - for the health of the planet, for our own survival- we need more of, and bury it in macadam and reinforced cement. The bloody punishments I’d like to mete out to these greedy, soulless bastards are beyond my powers of description. But that they are criminals, much worse than common thieves, I’ve no doubt. So what the hell am I trying to say? Well, with certain caveats, I urge you to go. Again, Abruzzo needs – desperately - a discreet tourism comprised of people capable of appreciating its unpolished treasures. The salumi, cheese, olive oil, and wine producers, farmers, artisans, medieval borghi, towns holding on passionately to traditions, and national and regional parks need an infusion of dollars and euro to survive. We might be in late-stage capitalism, but commerce still - unfortunately, in my opinion - feeds the sheepdog. Just don’t expect or exclusively seek out destinations that have cracked the code regarding what it is Americans and other high-end travelers want. Go with an open mind, a desire to experience rhythms and activities outside your normal comfort zone. Driving, staying in small towns, hiking, just looking out of your fucking hotel window will expose you to scenery of indescribable beauty, but - as much as you can - don’t experience it all through the 3x6-inch aperture of your phone. You won’t capture it, and in the trying you’ll miss really seeing and being present for it. This also goes for village life. Try to slow down and adopt the local pace. Turn the damn device off and be in the moment. Listen. Sit quietly in the piazza. Sta zitt’! You’ll be enormously rewarded. Abruzzo’s quiet can fill your head and heart in surprising, ineffable ways. As far as dining goes, by all means - if you’ve the urge and requisite scratch - go to Reale, Niko Romito’s 3-Michelin Star restaurant in Castel di Sangro, his hometown. It’s a remarkable place highlighting some of the region’s best ingredients. Located in a re-imagined and augmented farmhouse with vast, white, spartan interiors, nothing distracts from the food. And the cooking’s ballsy as hell. His spaghetti cooked only in the liquid drained from local tomatoes is revelatory.  So simple, like much of his cuisine, it leaves nowhere for a chef to hide. It’s a worthwhile experience. But not a typically Abruzzese one. For that, you’re more on target at a tiny, menu-less trattoria being served by the cook’s adolescent daughter or at a roadside arrosticini shack. Hole-in-the-wall joints and simple family trattorie are probably the most illustrative of the regional character. Abruzzo, after all, is a region of working people, farmers, and shepherds. You will eat well in these unheralded places, too. And if, by some fortuitous twist of fate, you find yourself in some grandmother’s kitchen watching her prepare a simple, mid-day pranzo, you’re as close to the regional soul as you’ll ever be. You’re in fucking heaven, in my opinion. But if chef-driven stuff is what floats your boat, there’s more than just Romito’s joint. For just a few examples, try Daniele Zunica’s place in Civitella del Tronto, the Moscardi’s Elodia in Camarda, Villa Maiella (1 Michelin Star) in Guardiagrele, L’Angolino da Filippo in San Vito Chietino, La Bandiera in Civitella Casanova (1 Michelin Star), La Corniola in Pescocostanzo, and the relatively new Anima in Introdacqua. All these places (and some others) offer varying degrees of the high-end dining experience some people seek. More importantly, they’re all deeply rooted in the region and their communities, and usually the products of generations of family tradition. 

And then there are the less formal places, where Cathy and I most often satisfy our jones for the real deal, where we find the rustic stuff, prepared with understanding, imagination, high skill, but little fuss: Clemente Maiorano’s eponymous restaurant (Michelin Bib Gourmand) in Sulmona; the simple elegance of Sapori di Campagna, just outside of Ofena; Zenobi, in Colonnella, in Teramo province’s Controguerra wine country (where you’ll also find Emidio Pepe’s famous winery); La Sosta in Torano Nuovo, also in the Controguerra zone;  Convivio Girasole and La Bilancia in Loreto Aprutino; La Font’Artana in Picciano; La Taverna de li Caldora in Pacentro; and too many others to list here.  It’s harder to eat poorly in Abruzzo than it is to eat well.          

There are also places where a tourist can book a room, embed, and drink and eat up some actual familial experience. For example, Nunzio Marcelli’s La Porta dei Parchi (which has an “adopt a sheep” program, in which your money pays for the upkeep of a sheep through the year and, in return, you receive cheese and other products) and Gregorio Rotolo’s Valle Scannese, the farms from which we source most of the cheeses used at our restaurant and situated at opposite ends of the Sagittario gorge WWF Reserve. Both are family concerns continuing centuries-old farming and pastoral traditions and producing artisanal products to boot. They ain’t pretty in a postcard way (the farms, that is…the surrounding countryside is crazy beautiful), but they’re real, and they’re doing things the right way. You can even volunteer at La Porta, helping them tend the fields and learning how to make cheese. There’s Pietrantica, on the Majella in the tiny village of Decontra, where Marisa will cook you the true cucina povera (often employing rare indigenous grains like solina). Her husband Camillo, an expert mountain guide, can take you into the mysterious and beautiful Orfento canyon where you’ll visit the caves of brigands, shepherds, and medieval hermits, including hollows used by Pietro da Morrone, who became Celestino V, Abruzzo’s only Pope. If you’re lucky, Camillo’s dad Paolino, who lived his life on the Majella, survived German occupation during WWII, and wrote a book of his experiences as a farmer and shepherd, will sit down at dinner with you and tell stories from a past that, in Decontra, doesn’t seem all that long ago.

Finally, if you’re a tourist or a journalist, give Abruzzo the time it deserves (especially if you’re the latter). Or at least as much time as you can give. Speed-dating the region, as many seem to do, driving in from Rome for or a few hours or a day, can make for missed opportunities and shallow observations. You can have a great experience spending a day in Abruzzo. You’ll eat and drink very well, see some extraordinary countryside and wilderness (at least from your car), and maybe encounter some singular, artisanal products. But you won’t have “discovered” or understood the place, allowed it to penetrate your consciousness. It’s only a couple of hours from Rome, but often seems a world away. Abruzzo, particularly - but not exclusively - in its mountains, offers lessons about community (no one survives without working together), hospitality (warm, heartfelt, often unguarded), and living or trying to live in harmony with nature. And that last one is, I think, pretty damn important. A lot of us talk a great game about doing the right things, supporting sustainable farming and the natural and humane production of our meats, reducing our footprints, etc. We are conscious of climate change and advocate for policies to ameliorate the (possibly already hopeless) situation. In Abruzzo’s parks – where there are still wolves, Italy’s largest bear population, chamois, and dozens of other species hard to find elsewhere on The Boot – humanity’s attempts to live in concert with nature are very much on display. It’s also a battleground, because not everyone’s on board and some territory’s in danger or already lost. But the lesson you learn - if you bother to look and take the time to talk to the people courageously engaged in the fight – is that doing the right thing is rewarding but also fucking hard. Life in Abruzzo’s mountains can seem beautiful. But it’s not luxurious, idyllic, or comfortable. It’s a daily struggle, and maybe a window on how we’re all going to have to attack the problems and forces threatening our survival. No, we don’t all live in the Apennines dealing with limited and shitty roads, crazy weather, the gifts but also indifferent cruelty of nature, and the constant plotting of avaricious, malfeasant agents of “progress.” But, if we’re going to try to turn around and right this badly listing ship, we’ll have to make sacrifices, bite bullets, do without, bloody some noses, and work our asses off. It’s an uncomfortable fact. And a scary one, if you really consider it. Abruzzo is a place that shows us – vividly, vibrantly, and without gloss – that doing the hard work is worthwhile, that the intrinsic values of seeking harmony with our surroundings far outweigh any shallow luxury. Learning that lesson is worth your time.