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Stolen Figs
And Other Adventures in Calabria
By Mark Rotella North Point Press
Copyright © 2003 Mark Rotella
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6606-1
CHAPTER 1
THE ROAD TO GIMIGLIANO
THE DOORS of the train opened at Naples. Shrill announcements twittered over the station PA system, babies cried, people argued, and beyond the tracks cars honked amid the din of Vespas and motorcycles. The passengers getting off the train squeezed their way past those trying to get on. Train workers, passengers, and merchants communicated with one another as if yelling across bleachers at a football game. The smell of fried zeppole and calzone filled the station. Vendors selling ice cream, water, and wine appeared and roamed the aisles, knocking on the doors of first-class air-conditioned compartments. When no one looked up, they opened the Plexiglas doors themselves. They were followed by Gypsy women begging for change, musicians playing guitars and accordions, and packs of children — many with piercing green eyes.
My father and I, who had boarded in Rome, watched as the mob of people squeezed their way down the aisles, looking for seats. We were finally on our way to Gimigliano, in Calabria, the homeland of my grandparents.
I had been staying with my father in Perugia, where he was sculpting stone, during the month of July. I had heard so many stories about Calabria, where his parents had been poor farmers. I suggested that we visit their village, but he shrugged off the idea. "That was decades ago," he said. "Why go back to the past?"
"Why not?" I asked. "Anyway, what's so bad about the past?"
"Nothing," he said dismissively. Going back, I knew, would remind him of his mother, who had died the year before, and his father, who had died eight years earlier. My father pushed a hand through his full head of hair, a soft mixture of jet black and silver. "I don't even know if we have family there anymore. They've probably all died — or moved to Torino or Milan."
"Well, why not find out? What's it gonna hurt?" I had already decided to go even if he didn't, but I knew the trip would be better — would feel more appropriate — if we went together. "I know you're at least a little curious. Anyway, look at it as the one time you'll be able to take this trip with your son."
My father laughed. "Jesus, you're such a romantic." He, too, is a romantic, but he wouldn't give in just then. He wouldn't admit that he might enjoy it. He fits the Calabrese stereotype of being stubborn, or having a testa dura — a hard head. My parents had taken my sister and me to Italy several times before, but this would be the first trip we had made south of Rome.
He looked at his watch. I knew what he was thinking. Our stomachs were on the same schedule.
"C'mon, let's get some dinner," he said. And with that, we walked to the trattoria up the street from the apartment we were renting.
At fifty-five, my father was fit and strong. Although he's a head shorter than I am, everything about him is grand: his nose, his eyes, his smile. And he eats with purpose and intensity.
By the time we finished dinner and a liter of wine, he had agreed to take a two — day trip south, returning to Perugia on Sunday. Two days seemed like no time. But it didn't really matter how long we stayed: I would finally see Calabria, and I would see it with my father.
The compartments filled. New passengers greeted the old ones and, like next-door neighbors, fell into conversations about the weather — hot even for July — and the recent strike of railroad concession workers. I unbuttoned my shirt and leaned out the window, trying to find a breeze. A man in a light brown suit claimed a seat across from us and joined me at the open window. He turned and greeted me with an exhausted smile, his thick mustache glistening with sweat. The train coasted out of the station. The thunk of windows sliding open sounded throughout the car. Passengers flocked to the windows, letting their shirts fill with air.
As the train, an express, left old Naples, the yellow and pink seventeenth–century buildings of the historic center gave way to shoddy, colorless Mussolini–era tenements, which then yielded to the cinder–block Soviet–style structures of the 1970s, whose facades crumbled beneath their sagging balconies, then to suburbs, the Bay of Naples opening up on the west. Blue-and-white fishing skiffs lined the shore, their nets spread out to dry. To the east, Vesuvius's gaping crater broke through the smog.
This was Campania, and as the train continued south, I saw how the sirocco winds from Africa had dried the soil and left the bushes and trees scrubby and desiccated. Olive trees, fig trees, and grapevines — the only vegetation that can thrive there — lined the hills. The train passed villages and peasant farms, each smaller than the last. All the buildings were simple structures, painted pale yellow, olive green, or burnt red. All the shutters were closed, shading interiors that were most likely, in true Italian form, immaculately clean and organized.
This was the gateway to the south, the passage to Calabria.
Already I saw the difference. Campania's hills are not the rolling hills of Tuscany Absent are wide-eyed pink travelers with their sulking kids. Absent are streets congested with souvenir shops. Absent are packed tour buses. Absent are crowded museums with their endless lines. Absent are English ex-pats and their summer villas. Absent are bilingual waiters and shop ladies. Absent are tourist menus in fourteen languages.
Within the train compartments and along the hallways, conversations grew comfortably loud; gestures became grander, more ebullient. An older woman (from Cosenza, Calabria, I found out) offered up nuts and fruits. A dapper Neapolitan pensioner talked local politics in a harsh dialect. The mustachioed man in the brown suit stood up to demonstrate the size of the fig trees in his backyard, his hands forming around each imaginary branch. The woman smiled and held up a white fig that she had picked from her sister's garden.
"My God," my father said as if to himself, "I've been all along here. I remember this." He eased back in his seat and stared out the window, mouth open. The right corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.
I went to the carrozza ristorante, the dining car, to get us some bottled water. Outside the open windows, the train hugged the ocean, the slate-blue water crashing against the rocks and boulders. Occasionally the jagged coast receded to an alcove of sandy shores. The sunbathers on these secluded beaches, reachable only by boat, didn't even register the train speeding above, but only stared out to sea, past their anchored motorboats rocking gently on the waves.
"The water is so blue, so light that it appears gray," someone said to me in Sicilian.
I turned to a deeply tanned man who shot me a smile almost as wide as his panama hat. The Sicilian version of a well-off, relaxed Florida retiree, he had unbuttoned his brightly patterned yellow-and-red batik shirt, exposing a bare chest the color of a ripe tomato; two thick gold chains, one with a pendant of a saint, broke the wall of red.
"So does the sky," I responded in Italian.
"The sky is gray," he said, turning to me with an indignant glare. "It's the factories." He waved with one hand; on each finger was a large gold ring, embedded with colored stones that sparkled in the light. His hand floated through the air, then sailed downward like an unfolded tissue.
"The factories?" I knew that there was little industry for hundreds of miles south of Naples; Calabria's economy was especially depressed.
"Yes," he said, squinting as if about to impart a secret. "Up in the north. Those Milanese destroy everything, they're almost like the Germans.
"Did you come from Naples?" he went on.
I told him I planned to stop there on the way back. He rested his large, gentle hand on my shoulder. "È una bella città," he said — it's a beautiful city — and told me that whenever he passes through Naples, if only for a few hours, he ducks into a restaurant called Mimi alle Ferrovie, a block away from the train station. He had just been there, in fact: grilled calamari, mussels in a marinara sauce, and white wine — wine so distinct, he insisted, that you can taste the ashy soil of Vesuvius, where the grapes are grown.
"Ma, io sono Palermitano," he said, making sure that I understood that as a Sicilian from Palermo, he knew what he was talking about. "The marinara could have been a bit spicier, but the mozzarella di bufala ... nowhere else can you find it so fresh!"
He explained what he did in his spare time, which was mostly what he was doing now, traveling and talking with strangers.
As the pensioner spoke, his sh's and ch's clicked between his tongue and teeth in the distinct, forceful Sicilian dialect, barely understandable to any Italian off the great island, much less anyone living north of Naples — let alone me, who had learned Italian growing up in Connecticut and Florida and going to college in New York. Confident that people would work to understand him, he made no effort to slow or regulate his speech.
He glanced at his chunky gold watch and, as if he'd almost missed an appointment, announced, "Allora, it's time for a caffè." We walked back to the bar — he for his coffee, I for bottled water.
Four hours out of Naples, our train crept through a desolate station — no one waiting alongside the tracks, not a single station door open or a window cracked. A blue sign at the edge of the platform read TORTORA. We had entered Calabria. For the next two hours I gazed out the window, the sea to my right, and to my left, far on the horizon, the deep green foothills of Calabria's Sila massif, locally known as the Black Forest.
The heat was suffocating, and I started feeling sleepy. As I was about to doze off, I caught sight of something I had seen in many old pictures of Calabria: ambling down a dirt path was a man riding a mule. Somehow, it fit right in with the landscape. I thought of the writer Carlo Levi, who in the 1930s described the south as a region that had evolved very slowly
Carlo Levi was a doctor and writer from Piedmont, in the northwest of Italy. A vocal anti-Fascist, he was arrested in 1935 and sent as a prisoner to the province of Lucania. This poor, almost completely landlocked region, now called Basilicata, borders Calabria to the north; the train had passed through it during my conversation with the Sicilian pensioner.
For two years Levi was forbidden to leave the village of Gagliano. Italy had just invaded Ethiopia in the Abyssinian War; Mussolini's army had drafted many of the south's doctors (and its able-bodied men generally) and sent them to Africa. Levi offered his medical services in Gagliano, and did so openly, until the mayor, Don Luigi, feeling the political prisoner was becoming too popular, forbade people to visit him.
Thereafter Levi performed his work at night and in secret. During the day he painted pictures of the landscape and wrote about the villagers and southern life. His memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, was the first modern book to describe the people of the south, who, it seemed to him, still lived in the Middle Ages, practicing a blend of Christianity and pre-Christian paganism and fearing dragons, gnomes, and spirits that lurked in the forests.
According to Levi, the peasants with ancient Italic features, the natives of Basilicata, thought they were worthless people from a godforsaken place. They were not Christians, not even humans, but beasts. "Christ never came this far," Levi wrote, "nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history."
Levi famously characterized Basilicata and Calabria as "that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow ... where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death." To this day, many northerners see these regions this way: bereft of culture and economy, a burden to the rest of Italy.
In any case, the harshness of life in the south led many Calabresi to emigrate, especially to the United States. In 1936, the year Carlo Levi's sentence ended and he was allowed to leave Gagliano for Piedmont, my grandmother, at the age of nineteen, left Calabria for America.
Now the train approached the toe of the "boot" that is Italy Out the window, I could see one, two, three more sets of tracks in each direction. Some tracks simply ended in mounds of dirt. We passed a freight train of two engines and seven boxcars, their open doors revealing their emptiness. There were several World War II — vintage locomotives and boxcars rusted to the rails.
This was Lamezia. Here train passengers can continue south to Reggio, where the entire train is pulled onto a ferry that continues the journey to Sicily, or they can take a train that cuts eastward across the peninsula, the narrowest point in all of Italy, to Calabria's capital, Catanzaro, and the Ionian Sea. And it was here where the train and the Sicilian pensioner continued to Palermo, while my father and I disembarked and boarded a small diesel train to Catanzaro. We stuffed our knapsacks on the narrow wooden racks above the window and passed a bottle of water between us.
Because it's located on one of the few plains in all of Calabria, Lamezia supports the region's largest airport. A half mile from the train station, small houses and condos lined the crowded coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
"I can't believe you've dragged me all the way down here," my dad said.
"You had a choice," I said. "I was happy to come by myself."
He rolled his eyes, but I knew he, too, was happy he had come.
The train veered across hilly, mostly barren land, past factories, tracts of plain new houses, foundations in cleared land. In time the hills grew to mountains. The train slowed to a walking pace. To one side, a field of orange trees bore rotting fruit that had not been picked; to the other, a Gypsy camp pushed up against the track bed: shacks made of wood and corrugated metal, with smoke from working fires rising from within.
A thud on the window bounced my head up; the juice from an orange trickled down the dust-covered glass. I looked out expecting to find kids running and ducking behind a tree, but I saw nothing except the sunlit grove of orange trees.
Finally, the train passed through a long mountain tunnel and emerged at Catanzaro. The station was at the bottom of a cliff. The walled city of Catanzaro crowned its top like a daunting fortress. We stepped off into the open-air station. It was four in the afternoon, almost the end of the siesta; outside a shuttered trattoria hung a sign that read CHIUSO, closed. An adjoining bar's door had been wedged open, and the entrance to the lightless room was covered only by a curtain of multicolored beads.
We still had one more train to take. We walked over to the local station to check the schedule of the Calabro–Lucano train to Gimigliano.
In Calabria and Basilicata there are two rail systems: one is the Ferrovie dello Stato, or the state railroad, which cuts through the low-lying valleys and skirts the coast; the other is the Calabro–Lucano Railroad, which traverses the mountain ridges, connecting the cliffside villages.
The train official at the ticket window motioned that he would come out from behind the window and talk to us. A short man who reached me just at chest level (and I'm an average five feet ten), he spoke in a voice both booming and raspy. He seemed to be missing every other tooth.
He explained that there were two more trains to Gimigliano, but that we would probably miss the last train back to Catanzaro and that we should stay in Catanzaro and visit the next day. We would have only a single afternoon to explore Gimigliano. In a display of what I would come to recognize as Calabrese hospitality, he walked us back to the state train station, where three cabdrivers stood talking by their cars under the shade of a portico. We took one of the cabs up to the city.
Catanzaro and its maze of streets are set on a plateau between two mountain gorges. The city can be reached from only two directions: one a narrow, spiraling ridge, the other a four-lane suspended highway, built in the 1960s. The cab cut alongside the mountain, climbed up a bit, then took the highway, which protruded from the cliff. I felt as if we were taking off in flight; the land dropped below us, the sea loomed ahead. At one point we stopped at an intersection — seemingly in midair over one of the gorges — to let other cars cross. With a final loop, we descended to a narrow cliffside road, where the buildings were packed tightly together in a discordant architectural mix of the nineteenth century and the 1970s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stolen Figs by Mark Rotella. Copyright © 2003 Mark Rotella. Excerpted by permission of North Point Press.
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