Europe 24 - A Talk Given in Ruoti

The only time this talk was ever given it was in Italian, but it seems appropriate to post the English-language version just so it exists here. I have edited it slightly, but it's pretty much the talk as given. You have to imagine it on a hot summer day in a small piazza in Basilicata, in front of an audience willing to cut some slack for an American who meant well and was trying his best. They seemed to like it.

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You can always tell when someone is an American.

Americans smile at strangers in the street, which in many places in the world is seen as confusing.

We cannot imagine a beverage of less than 600ml. With free refills.

And since we live in a country where you can travel 4500km in a straight line without hearing another language, most of us only speak English. This is me, by the way. I don’t speak Italian (yet), and I hope that you will excuse my pronunciation.

One of the more interesting ways you can tell someone is an American is that we identify as our heritage. An American will tell you they are Italian even if the last time anyone in their family set foot on Italian soil was in 1907 when they emigrated to the United States.

My great-grandparents left Ruoti for the last time in 1907.

My great-grandfather was Vito Antonio.

He was born here in Ruoti on February 6, 1865, in a house somewhere on Strada Piazza. He was a farmer, and he spent a year in the Italian army. A couple of months after he left the army he married my great-grandmother, on July 24, 1890, here in Ruoti.

Vito emigrated to the United States in 1905, on the ship Roma out of Naples, landing at Ellis Island on June 15.

He went to Philadelphia and found work as a construction laborer. He must have done well because by 1907 he owned a small house at 1214 Latona Street.

Vito returned to Ruoti at least once because he is also recorded as coming through Ellis Island on April 29, 1907, on the ship Sannio out of Naples. He lived in Philadelphia after that, became an American citizen in 1924, and died on June 17, 1945. My mother remembered him as a short, bow-legged man with a rolling gait, piercing blue eyes, a bushy mustache, and bright white hair.

My great-grandmother, Caterina, was born on March 7, 1870 on Vico Picone, off of Via Roma. She came to America on December 23, 1907, on the ship Liguria out of Naples. She traveled with her daughter Maria Giuseppa who was 11 years old at the time and they met Vito at Ellis Island. He took them back to Latona Street in Philadelphia with him.

Caterina was literate, an unusual feature for any Italian immigrant in South Philadelphia at the time and even more so for a woman. People in the neighborhood would bring her letters from home and she would read them to them and then write down what they wanted to say in response.  She had bright red hair and blue eyes, she was by all accounts a very good cook, and she died on Christmas Day, 1925. To this day, my family celebrates on Christmas Eve instead.

Caterina had at least two other relatives who came from Ruoti to Philadelphia

Her brother, Rocco Antonio was born in Ruoti on January 1, 1884, and he came to the US in March 1910 on the ship San Giorgio out of Naples. He was known in the family as Zaduck because Italian immigrants in America tended to cut off the last syllable of words, so when they said Zio Rocco it became Zi’ Roc, which then became Zaduck.

When he was young Zaduck had red hair like his sister and he was known as The Rooster. He never married, and he lived on the first floor of a house on 8th Street in Philadelphia not far from Latona Street. When my mother and uncle were little he would entertain them by singing old Italian songs and teaching them to count in Italian, and he died in 1971 when I was 5 years old. 

 

Zaduck rented the second floor of the 8th Street house to tenants and shared the first floor with his nephew, Gerardo. The son of Caterina’s and Rocco’s sister Vincenza and her husband Domenico, Gerardo was born in Ruoti on March 10, 1891, and came to the US in 1921.

Gerardo died in October 1945, right after the war. Because of the legal situation at the end of WWII it was difficult for the family to get the money from Gerardo’s estate back to his mother Vincenza in Ruoti. The US State Department had to get involved at one point, and the matter dragged on well into 1948 and possibly later. They did eventually send the money, though.

Family lore says that Vito and Caterina had 11 children, only three of whom would survive to adulthood: Maria, who was born in Ruoti in 1896, Giuseppa (Josephine), who was born in Philadelphia in 1909, and my grandfather – Rocco Antonio, who was born in Philadelphia on July 7, 1912.

He was 8kg when he was born, which is pretty impressive for a man who was only 162cm tall as an adult. He used his middle name – Antonio – because Caterina did not like how Americans pronounced Rocco. She thought it sounded like “rags” (“stracci”). He generally went by Tony.

Caterina insisted he stay in school and get his high school diploma despite the criticism of the neighbors, who thought my grandfather was just lazy for not quitting school and going to work. That diploma allowed him to get a job as a civilian machinist in the US Navy Yard in Philadelphia in the early 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression. He started as an apprentice making airplane propellers and moved up the ladder until he retired in the early 1970s as a contract writer. He was very proud that he worked in an office and wore a suit by the end.

My grandmother was Giovanna, whose family came from Rometta and Saponara in Sicily. They were married on February 18, 1939, and they moved in with Vito in the house on Latona Street, where they took care of him until he died.

My grandfather was a patient man and a talented artist who would often make sketches of his grandchildren. He loved dad jokes and the Philadelphia Phillies. When he was young he played a lot of semi-pro baseball, and when his grandchildren were young we could always persuade him to get up a wiffle-ball game on his tiny front yard. He died in 2000, but he got to meet his great-grandson and I’ll always be glad about that.

At a certain point in your life there is a little switch in your head that flips over and you say to yourself, “Huh, genealogy – that sounds like fun!” I hit this point about a decade ago and that is how I found myself in Ruoti last summer.

We parked the car and walked up to the Piazza Mercato and then into the old town.

Our first stop was the Panificio DeCarlo, where we bought a giant loaf of bread that would be most of our dinner later that night. It was very good bread. We walked around the old town, took photographs of Caterina’s home, and eventually found ourselves at the beginning of the walking tour on Via Roma. We decided we’d take the tour and then be on our way.

As we walked up Via Roma, however, we met two friendly ladies who were sitting on their front step (and whose names I never learned, unfortunately) and when we managed to say that my family was from here, this sparked a lovely conversation that eventually expanded to include their neighbors across the street and then Rosario and Sara, who speak English.

Rosario and Sara graciously volunteered to take us on a thorough and fascinating tour of the old town. We saw churches and public art, and Rosario and Sara told us the stories of these things. We went to the B&B where we were warmly greeted. It was a wonderful and welcoming experience. For our last stop before leaving, Rosario took us to meet Felice, who welcomed us, told me about his work on the emigres of Ruoti, and invited us to come back this year for the festival.

It is an extraordinary thing to be standing in a place that has such an important role in your own history.

Americans as a group are not a historically minded people. I am a professional historian. I have been trying to change that for 35 years now. To come here and walk the streets where my ancestors walked, to see where they lived, and to be welcomed – that is an astonishingly lovely thing.

I am not Italian, after all. I am Italian-American.

But I am a descendant of Ruoti.

And I am very proud of that.

Europe 24 - Ruoti, Day 1

When you go on a trip like this you generally try to make a point of seeing beautiful and interesting things. What those are can vary depending on your definitions of beautiful and interesting, but we certainly accomplished this by our own standards. We saw cathedrals, parliaments, ancient ruins and modern neighborhoods. We saw artwork of all descriptions from more than two and a half millennia of human history. We saw rivers and salt water, mountains and valleys. We ate well. Much of it was beautiful, and all of it was interesting.

Sometimes on these trips you can sit with people and get a glimpse into their lives. Most people are friendly no matter where you go, and you can find out a lot about a place if you are able to talk with the people there. Also, if you’re very fortunate you may get a chance to see specific people that you were hoping to see, and even if it is just for fifteen minutes in an airport that can be enough because it is a lovely thing to spend time with friends no matter where or when.

But rarely as a visitor to another country do you find yourself welcomed by an entire community, taken in as a returning family member and made to feel at home in a place you’ve only been to once before for a single afternoon, and when that happens it is something to be remembered. We spent two days in Ruoti, the Italian hilltop town where my great-grandparents were born, and there we were greeted with warmth, folded into the events of the community, and sent away with memories and good wishes. It was a wonderful couple of days.

But first we had to get there.

When we got back to our room in Avigliano the previous night I ended up exchanging messages with Felice, whom we’d met last year in Ruoti and who had invited us back for the Émigré Festival that was to take place the following day. It was an all-day affair and we were looking forward to it, though the first thing on the schedule was a Catholic mass in the big church at the very top of the hill and since none of us are Catholic we figured that wasn’t something we should do. But Felice said we’d be welcome and should come – it was a mass in honor of the guests at the festival, after all – so we agreed we would.

We got into the car and headed across the valley and right away we knew something was different because we got to the first intersection and GoogleMaps told us to turn left, which is not how we’d arrived the previous day and was in fact the direction that the host for our room had told us not to go since there wasn’t much that way and as it turned out he was right about that.

We followed along as the road went steadily down into the valley and gradually switched from pavement to a dirt trail, all the while thinking that perhaps this wasn’t what we should be doing.

When GoogleMaps told us that we needed to make a hard right turn down a sheer drop to a river ford and then back up an equally sheer climb on the other side, we were absolutely 100% positive that it wasn’t what we should be doing. That was in fact a Hard No. Even with the Jeep if we had tried that we’d still be there in the riverbed waiting for a tow truck that could reach us.

Nice try, GoogleMaps! We reject your advice and live to drive another day.

We retraced our route back to the farm and then and worked out a way to force GoogleMaps to take us to Ruoti by the larger roads – the SP6 and the SS7, and it is important to remember that “larger” is a relative term here – and over the next two days GoogleMaps eventually conceded the point and started taking us that way by default. This took some time.

So we were a few minutes late.

Fortunately this was not a major issue as scheduled starting times in Italy seem to be viewed as goals rather than commitments and this worked in our favor. We found a place to park the car and started walking up the steep narrow streets to the church. Along the way we met two other Americans, Marietta and Harriet. They were waiting for someone who was, we later determined, going to take them to the church as well.

Marietta (on the right, above) was from New York City and was also a descendent of someone from Ruoti – her great-grandmother, Cleope, was a foundling there and that story became part of the day’s programming. Her friend and traveling companion Harriet, on the left, was from Philadelphia and we got to trade a few common memories as the day went on. On our first meeting we simply said hello and that we’d meet them at the church, and eventually they found their way there along with their guides.

La Chiesa Madre di San Nicola is a surprisingly pink church located very close to the top of the mountain that Ruoti sits on, and it’s just lovely. We stood in front of the church for a bit as people slowly gathered, enjoying the displays of photographs for the Émigré Festival. The stage for that evening’s events was set up and ready to go.

After a while we were directed inside and there was a brief period of settling in as people found their places. There were about twenty or thirty people there, including three sets of descendants – us, Marietta, and a guy who I never did get to talk with who was from Argentina and who was the only one among us who actually spoke Italian. He spent most of his time with the townspeople, mostly because he could, I suspect. The priest was a gentle old man who seemed rather bemused by the idea of celebrating mass with us – mostly non-Catholic and mostly not speakers of the language – but he did his best and at times we simply passed around our phones with the Google Translate app open and the mic on so we could catch a bit of what he was saying. I was struck by the informality of it, and the sense of welcome that came with it. It was a very nice thing to do for us, and we appreciated it.

Afterward he said we could take pictures of the interior of the church.

This is me and Felice, the architect of the day’s events. Neither of us speaks the other’s language but through the magic of Google Translate we managed to have a wonderful time together and we understood each other well enough. He is a lovely person and he took very good care of us!

After the mass we went back outside to the little piazza in front of the church where there was some time to catch up with folks.

This is Kim with several members of the traditional folk dancing group that would perform later that night. They’re dressed in what would have been the standard outfits from the late 19th century in Ruoti.

Kim also spent a fair amount of time talking with Katya, who is a chemist so they had a lot of common ground.

The plan, as we discovered, was that we would move on from there to lunch. This seemed like an excellent plan as lunch is always in order, but there was a lot of set-up to do for that still so instead we headed back down the hill a bit until we got to one of Felice’s museums.

Felice has a lot of museums kind of scattered around the town, and we’d see several more of them the next day. They’re all small and fascinating, and we enjoyed them. This one was the one he was working on when we met him last year, and we had a good time exploring it. Felice disappeared for a bit while we were looking and then returned with a bottle of prosecco and some cups and we all toasted the day together.

At about this point the police drove by. Some of the group was still in the museum, but others of us were outside just kind of hanging out when a tiny police car – the only kind that could make it through those narrow streets – slowly cruised by to ask if anyone knew whose Jeep was parked on down the street. It turned out to be ours, of course, and we weren’t supposed to park there. So Katya and her husband volunteered to get in the car with me and direct me to a place where we could in fact leave the car for the day – a lot that was just a bit further down the street in a straight line but significantly lower down the hill. But it was open and legal, so I was happy to park there.

When we got back the group was ready to go back up the hill, past the church to the Piazza Ponte where lunch was being served.

It was quite a lunch.

For one thing, there were about two hundred people there – a significant percentage of Ruoti’s population – including all of the descendants, Felice, Lucy (who was there as a translator), and the mayor of the town.

And for another thing, it took about four hours and involved at least six different courses. One does not rush Sunday lunch in Italy. It is a serious and very tasty business. It started with an antipasto of locally made cured meats and buffalo mozzarella, and a potato and onion frittata. Then came a homemade pasta dish, a lamb stew of some kind, a fruit cup, and two different desserts. Each course was fairly small and spaced out so you never felt uncomfortable or too full for the next thing that arrived. There was water to drink – and if you finished yours, which I did several times on that hot day, you could just go over to the fountain and refill your bottle – and a keg of red wine on tap. We had a very good time.

In between courses there were all sorts of activities. There was live music the whole time – a fascinating mix of traditional Italian folk music and modern pop tunes (and you haven’t really lived until you’ve sung Only Fools Rush In on a piazza in an Italian hilltop village, have you?). Through the judicious use of her hand-fan Kim made friends with the saxophone player on a sun-bleached summer day.

There was dancing of many kinds, from polkas to traditional Italian dances to a conga line led by the mayor.

There were also games, all of which were conducted in Italian so I didn’t follow along very closely though I was intrigued by the one that asked the locals to translate old-fashioned Ruotese dialect terms into modern Italian. Even they found it difficult.

They gave us paper leis in Italian colors to get into the spirit of the thing, and I got a nice t-shirt as well to commemorate the day.

And in between things you could wander over to the edge of the piazza and look east out over the valley. In the second photo below you can see Avigliano across the way. It’s kind of crescent-shaped, and our B&B was somewhere toward the end of the lower crescent.

At one point I needed to take a short break and was given directions to go further up the hill, and it was just gorgeous up there as well, both the town and the view to the south.

Eventually lunch came to an end, and Oliver accompanied me all the way back down the hill to the car so I could get my nice shirt and my folder for the evening’s events. On the way down we stopped by my great-grandmother’s house just to see it again. There’s a family living there now and we could hear them inside just living their lives and there is something reassuring about this that is hard to specify but is there nonetheless.

The main event of the day as far as I was involved took place back at the piazza in front of La Chiesa Madre di San Nicolo. We got there a bit early – everything was running on Italian time, which, as noted, is about goals – and had time to get set up and situated. There would be music at this event and they were getting ready when we arrived. The guy in the green-striped shirt is Rosario, who was one of the people who graciously gave us the tour around the old part of town last year.

I knew that I would be giving a talk – that’s why Felice had invited me back, so I could do that for this event – but I hadn’t realized that I would be up on stage the whole time. I’d thought I’d walk up, do my thing, and then fade gently back into the audience, but in the end I was right there up front for much of the evening. It went surprisingly well. I never did get the name of the guy on the keyboards, but you can see below that Rosario has changed into his Traditional Folk Dancing Group outfit. The moderator with the microphone was Maria and she kept things moving along pretty well. The guy seated at the left was an anthropologist who spoke at some length about immigration and tourism and how small towns like Ruoti could find ways to honor their past while still living in the present and preparing for their future. The man in the red, white, and green sash is the mayor, a kind and gracious person. When I gave my talk I had it printed out on multiple sheets of paper and juggling those plus the folder plus a microphone turned out to be tricky so he would reach over and take the sheets as I finished them. The guy with the yellow pants was a chef who owns a restaurant in the Washington DC area and I don’t know what his connection to Ruoti was other than he seemed to know a lot of people and got along well with them. The guy on the right was the Argentinian, a fellow descendent of someone who had emigrated out of Ruoti.

What really fascinated me was how casual the whole thing was. You can see the woman on the balcony over our heads, for example. She lives in that house, and at various points she and her children just were out there watching. Dogs would wander through the crowd aimlessly, and flocks of swallows would wheel not far overhead. It was a pretty low-key affair, and I appreciated that.

The speakers were not the first thing on the agenda, though. The mayor welcomed us all, and then the Traditional Folk Dancing Group came out and performed. They were a lot of fun to watch, which was good because they returned many times during the evening. After their initial performance the adults in the group faded back into the crowd but the children sat on the lip of the stage where everyone could see them and be happy with their adorableness and this seemed fair.

Afterward Maria introduced the me and I had the rather unusual experience of giving a fifteen-minute talk in a language I do not speak to an audience of people who do.

I knew this was coming. Felice had asked me to talk about my family’s history in Ruoti and what happened to them after they emigrated to the United States, and then perhaps talk about my experience last summer when we first visited. I put the talk together and found someone who would translate it for me and then spent much of the summer practicing to try to at least sound like I spoke Italian. I’m not good at learning languages but I am pretty good at accents and intonations, and in the end Lucy the Translator said she could understand it all and the audience laughed and applauded in the places I’d hoped they would. I think they were just pleased that someone would make the effort and were therefore willing to forgive whatever mistakes and mispronunciations I made. I think they liked the slide show as well – the images from last year had people they knew, and most people enjoy that sort of thing. I was happy with how it went, and both Felice and the mayor seemed happy as well. So, a win all around, I say.

The children on the stage, however, were not impressed, as young children tend not to be when grown-ups natter on like that. Every so often during my talk the mayor would lean down and gently say, “Bambini! Shush!” As someone who once had two small children about that age, I thought it was pretty good that they managed to sit through it at all.

Afterward the other speakers did their things, and the dancers came back for more performances, and it was a wonderful time.

And somewhere in there they had an entire award ceremony for teenage photographers. This went on for quite some time but the winners seemed very happy so good for them.

While all this was going on there was a cooking demonstration offstage left, where a group of women were making pasta and then serving it in a fresh tomato sauce. At some point in the program there was a bit of an intermission so the speakers could leave the stage and go back to the audience and as I walked by one of the women handed me a bowl of pasta and even though the lunch had pretty much guaranteed that I would not be hungry until breakfast the next day I ate it anyway and it was marvelous.

The event continued well into the evening. Italian culture places a strong emphasis on speaking skills and when you hand a group of Italians a microphone you are going to be there for a while, but everyone seemed to be enjoying it and really what else are events like this for? Other than more dancing, of course.

The final performance of the evening – at least the final bit that we saw, since by the time it ended it was after 10pm and there was a whole concert yet to come but we were tired and needed to drive back in the dark to Avigliano and after the off-roading adventures of the morning we didn’t want to wait too long to do that – was a one-woman play about Marietta’s great-grandmother Cleope. It was interesting from a theater perspective. There was someone behind the white canvas and behind the bright light that was on the stage back there so you couldn’t see them, but they had a big paint brush and a can of black paint and as the actress went through her story in front of the canvas the artist behind it would paint random bits and pieces of things until at the very end it all came together in a coherent drawing. I didn’t understand any of the play of course but it was fascinating watching the artwork come together. Marietta was very happy to see her great-grandmother’s story dramatized that way.

When the play ended there was a short break and we took this as an opportunity to say our goodbyes, at least until we returned the next day. Maria gave me two books that she had written and she was kind enough to autograph them for me! Books are heavy and I hadn’t planned on taking any home on the plane, but when someone gives you something out of kindness, you accept and are glad. I have them on my desk now. They are in Italian, but someday I will learn the language and then I will read them.

We drove back to Avigliano along a road populated by a surprising number of foxes and made it back to our room without incident.

It was a long day. It was a good day. It was a day to remember.