10. Uncle John

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing,

so proud to be alive and coarse

and strong and cunning.

--Carl Sandburg

Chicago

o understand my Uncle John--Giovanni Musacchio, my father's brother--you have to remember that his grandfather, Agosto Musacchio (my great grandfather), lost the family lands. That was the major, although not only, motivating factor that caused Uncle John to migrate to America and cause the rest of the family to follow.

     The seven families, who fled Albania for Italy in the fifteenth century, had been motivated by fear, abetted by their Christian beliefs. The original settlers of Falconara both feared their Turkish conquerors and did not want to live under Muslim rule. Motivating Uncle John, and others in his circle of family and friends, twentieth century descendants of those original settlers, was poverty, abetted perhaps by the boredom endemic to a stiflingly small town. And, ironically, disillusionment with the Christian religion, because of several corrupt priests in the village. But mostly, Uncle John wanted a better life than was the lot of his once noble family after more than four centuries in the backwaters of southern Italy.

     Which brings us back to my great grandfather Agosto, the one who lost the family lands, whether by gambling (as some members in the

family suggested) or (according to Uncle Mike) simply because he was a "good-time Charlie." The question of how the family lands were lost remains unsettled. We do know, however, that lands were lost, if not squandered, and that diminished the prospects for Agosto's heirs.

     Agosto and his wife Theresa had four sons: 1.) Raffaele, 2.) Antonio, 3.) Domenic, and 4.) Giuseppe. Consider for a moment the four sons of Agosto. This gets complicated, but there is no easy way to explain our family tree unless you have it in front of you. I’ll use numbers for the first-generation children of Agosto and Theresa and letters for the second-generation grandchildren to help you figure out who is who.

     Agosto and Theresa’s first son, Raffaele (1), had three sons, among them Michele (a), my Uncle Mike mentioned above. Another son of Raffaele was Giuseppe (b), who migrated to the United States. I knew him as “Big Joe.” He was called that to differentiate him from my father, also named Giuseppe, or Joe. The third son of Raffaele was Agosto, who went to work in Brazil and died of malaria (c).

     Moving temporarily past Agosto and Theresa’s second son, Antonio (2), little is known about the third son, Dominic (3). The fourth son, Giuseppe (4), was the one who walked to Rome and died in the army, about 1865.

     It is the second son, Antonio Musacchio (2), who is most important to the continuation of this narrative. Born June 21, 1850, Antonio was my grandfather on my father's side. When Antonio was twenty-five, on July 22, 1875, he married Marianna Lupi, my grandmother. Born September 7, 1852, Marianna was then twenty-two, approximately two years younger than her husband. Antonio and Marianna would have three children, all boys (continuing letters for the next generation): a) Agosto, b) Giovanni, and c) Giuseppe.

     The first son of Antonio and Marianna Musacchio was Agosto (a), named in Italian fashion after his paternal grandfather. Agosto later became known as Gus after he migrated to the United States. My Uncle Gus was born probably around 1877, although Gus's children seem uncertain about the exact date.

     The second son, Giovanni Musacchio (b), my Uncle John, was born September 30, 1885.

     The third and youngest of the three Musacchio boys, Giuseppe (c), or Joe, my father, was born nine years later on November 4, 1894. I usually referred to my father simply as "Pa." My mother called him Giuseppe, which she often shortened, simply, to "Sep."

     Antonio and Marianna Musacchio had other children, but they did not survive childhood. Falconara was a harsh environment in which to raise a young family. Pleasant enough during the long days of summer, the village turned cold and damp during the short days of winter. Midwives attended most births, unschooled women who learned their trade through experience. They were probably as suitable as the town doctor, when there was one. The nearest large hospital was in Cosenza, a day's journey by mule across the mountains.

     On one occasion, according to tales told by those who remembered Nonna (or grandmother) Marianna, she had a miscarriage, twin babies born dead. After the miscarriage, Marianna told the midwife to place the two dead babies in a basket under the bed.

     Meanwhile, Antonio, unaware of events at home involving his wife, returned, having come in from the farm. Opening the door, he shouted joyfully to Marianna, "I have two lamb's heads we can cook over the fire!"

     "And I have two babies' heads under the bed," Marianna wailed.

     Alas, they said of Nonna Marianna that after that incident, she never was right in the head again. Talking about Marianna, the women of the village would tap fingers against their foreheads and cluck their tongues. Marianna became sick; the illness reportedly left her with spells, convulsions. Some people in the village even suggested Nonna Marianna drank, a shocking statement to make about a woman. Most of the Falconarese (children often included) drank wine with their midday meal, as is the custom in Italian families. But that's not considered “drinking.” Drinking is what you do away from the table, usually with hard liquor, spirits of alcohol. Men were permitted occasional sips from the bottle; women, never! For a woman like Marianna to drink, that was infamia.

     Her granddaughter Marianna Molinaro, would become angry when she heard such talk. "That's not true," she said. "Nonna Marianna would have coffee and add a mixture called miscuglio." (The liquor miscuglio, literally "mixture," is a combination of vermouth, anisette, and rum.) When Nonna Marianna was old, she would tell her granddaughter: "Go to Chec Peppi and get a half liter of miscuglio." Nonna Marianna had no money, so would trade potatoes, grain, wood, or sell them. The half liter she so acquired would last a month. "You can't get drunk at that rate," insisted her granddaughter.

     On one occasion, however, her husband Antonio had purchased a large container of oil. Nonna Marianna took some of the oil and traded it to Chec Peppi to obtain her drink. When her second son, Giovanni, learned about this, he told his father, who naturally became angry. There was shouting, tears, angry words hurled back and forth. Those who knew Giovanni Musacchio, Uncle John, later would cite this incident to demonstrate how Uncle John was always making trouble for people, even his own mother. Uncle John's nickname was Catromboli, meaning he was a clown, maybe even a bit crazy.

     Raffaele Morelli, Uncle Mike's half-nephew, who we visited in Falconara, claimed Uncle John was not crazy, just a person who said what he thought, then forgot it. The nickname Catromboli actually had belonged to a previous Musacchio, and maybe several Musacchios before that. Catromboli, as a badge of identity, had been handed down from generation to generation. In a small village with many bearing the same first and last names, it was one way you told people apart.

     Raffaele recalled Uncle John as being impulsive, moody, strong-willed. "If Giovanni wanted to do something," recalled Raffaele, "he did it, without asking anybody, and without hesitating." When it was pointed out to Raffaele that many people disliked Uncle John, Raffaele scoffed, "Yes, because he said exactly what he thought and didn't care. A lot of people didn't want to hear that."

     My memories of Uncle John were that of an individual who was tough, feisty, yet friendly--almost charismatic in the sense in which that word is used politically in America. (The Italian equivalent word, carisma, means "Holy Spirit," and that definitely was not Uncle John.) John was a little guy, slim, hardly an ounce of fat on him. He had rough, workman's hands. For some reason, Uncle John reminded my husband Hal of Jimminy Cricket, the character in the Walt Disney cartoon version of Pinocchio. He exuded tremendous energy, even into his seventies, but then so did a lot of the Falconarese. They were a hardy lot.

     Uncle John wore plaid, flannel shirts and pants that bagged at the knees and high-topped boots and thick glasses because of failing eyesight; he eventually would have an operation for cataracts. In many respects, my husband found Uncle John the easiest of the Musacchios to get along with, but then he fawned over his brother Joe's three daughters,

including me. As my husband, Hal fell under his blanket of good will toward the girls. Such was his love for them that sometimes Uncle John would set his grandsons to work shoveling snow from the parking lot behind the building he later owned on the south side of Chicago, "just in case Marion, Rose, or Bea decide to come." Understandably, this was not always met with enthusiasm by the grandsons. Uncle John loved work and seemed discontented when he couldn't find something to do--or in his youth--some mischief he could cause.

     Uncle John had part of one finger missing, undoubtedly lost in an industrial accident when he worked as a mechanic repairing street cars for the city of the Chicago. When asked about the missing finger, however, he would tell a story of being at a dance and getting fresh with a young woman. "She got mad at me and bit it off!" Uncle John would insist.

     He told the story to me when I was young, and later he would repeat it to the next generation of children. I remember our son David coming to me at an early age, eyes wide open, and saying, "Did you hear how Uncle John lost his finger?"

     I mentioned that he probably had lost it in an industrial accident.

"No," said David, "some terrible woman bit it off."

          I tried to convince David that Uncle John had been teasing him. "No," insisted David. "It's true! He told us!"

     Another version of the fate of Uncle John's finger was that the woman biting it had been Irish, with red hair. So are great legends built.

          When Uncle John was a boy growing up in Falconara at the end of the nineteenth century, he often played with his cousins, Michele and Giuseppe, known to me as Uncle Mike and Uncle Joe, even though they were actually my second cousins, not uncles. Uncle Joe was the one later called "Big Joe," because of his ample waist. Tagging along was John's younger brother, Joe, or Giuseppe, my father. Giuseppe Musacchio also had a nickname inherited from grandfather Agosto. He was called Zifoi, which meant crazy. Since Grandpa Agosto had lost the family lands by his gambling, or partying, the nickname may have been appropriate--assuming Agosto was the first in the family to wear the Zifoi label. According to one of the Falconarese living in Chicago, Nonna Marianna had a sister who actually was crazy, but what might be considered "crazy" behavior in a small Mediterranean village during the nineteenth century would be hard to define.

     At the start of summer, usually by July, the Musacchio family moved to one of the farms outside and below the village, in the valley that sloped down to the sea. There, they cultivated their crops and kept their animals: cows, sheep, chickens. They maintained a second home on the farm land, not much of a house, hardly more than a shelter. But during the warm months, the Musacchios would stay in this "summer home" so as not to have to travel back into the village with the animals each night. They worked long hours, from dawn until dark. Not having to travel home nightly saved them time.

     Life was not without divertissements, even for these hard-working, agricultural people. There were festivals in the village, friends to see. On weekends Antonio and Marianna sometimes would return to Falconara, leaving the children to care for the animals. With that their

only tasks, and with no adults looking over their shoulders, it became time for the children to play.

     Like many young people, John and Joe were somewhat devils, who enjoyed playing pranks. Gus may have been the same, but he was older and fewer people would remember him, particularly from his childhood. A frequent target of the two youngest brothers' pranks were two farmers, who also lived outside the village during the summer. Their name was Rogga. Uncle John and the others would sneak outside the Rogga home and make noises, like goats or sheep, to scare them and make them angry. The boys would steal the Rogga's watermelons for the same reason.

     Papa Antonio kept black powder at the farm for use in blasting rocks from the sides of the mountains. These rocks then could be used to construct walls and buildings. The boys, left alone, sometimes would take the black powder and go to the other side of the valley to explode it, their form of fireworks. One of the neighbor women saw what they did and told their parents. The result was a beating.

     Another neighbor, a farm woman, had a large prickly pear tree. Prickly pears were among the delicacies of the region, the warm summers, the ample precipitation on the lee slopes of the Appenines, providing suitable conditions for the cultivation of such fruit.

     According to Uncle Mike, "Every time this woman looked at the tree, she claimed someone had stolen some pears." My Uncle Mike and my father Joe would explain to Papa Antonio that they didn't take the pears. "We had pears too," Uncle Mike insisted. "Why did we need to steal hers?"

     The neighbor woman's accusations irritated the boys. One night they were sleeping outside the house while the parents slept inside. After

midnight, they went to the neighbor woman's tree, stripped it of a dozen pears, several of which they ate, most which they just threw away.

     The neighbor woman, seeing more pears missing from her tree, marched once more to confront Antonio Musacchio. "Antonio," she cried. "These boys are stealing my pears again!"

     But Antonio defended them. "No. This time I was here."

     The neighbor stalked away angrily, and only then did Antonio turn to the boys. "Did you steal those pears?"

      "Yes," they admitted.

     "Why?"

     "Because all the time she says we steal her pears when we don't. This time we did."

     Having once been young himself, Antonio must have admired the logic of their position. But they were children, and as children they had to be disciplined for doing wrong. The plea failed. Italian mothers are noted for spoiling their sons, not fathers. The boys received another beating.

As the nineteenth became the twentieth century, life became harsher than usual for the people of Falconara-Albanese. They had multiplied and, there were more living in the village: 1,982 abitanti according to the census of 1901. More people, but no more land. And no better way to make a living. Other than subsistance agriculture, there was little work. The Albanian-speaking Arberesh of the high hills above Paola and San Lucido could not easily find jobs among the Italian-speaking villagers by the sea. There were few enough jobs even for those villagers, who did not

entirely like or trust these hill people speaking their strange and different language.

     In his doctoral thesis on The Italo-Albanian Villages of Southern Italy, Dr. Nasse repeats a popular saying he heard in Cosenza about the Ghegi, as the Italians called the Arberesh. "If one comes upon a Ghegi and a wolf simultaneously in the woods," so went the saying, "shoot the Ghegi first, because he is more dangerous."

     And the Arberesh did not entirely like or trust their Italian neighbors, the Latinos. Dr. Nasse quotes an Arberesh saying: "If a Latino comes to your door and he is cold and hungry, let him warm himself by your fire and feed him--but do not believe a single word he says." Considering the Italian love of bragadoccio, their ability to make everything seem bigger than it actually is, one can sympathize with the Arberesh point of view.

     Yet while they were more Italian than they might want to admit--their Arberesh dialect being replete with Italian words and expressions--the Falconarese, for more than four centuries, had lived in, at best, an uneasy truce with their Latino neighbors. So in searching for work, they often looked toward other Arberesh villages on the eastern slopes of the Appenine mountain range. Some of the Falconarese would walk to Spezzano-Albanese, two days distant across the mountains. Spezzano was another one of the four dozen villages established in the south of Italy by those who had fought with Scandeberg. Now the descendents of the mighty warrior would cut wheat by hand, getting paid two corone a day, about sixteen or seventeen cents. The Falconarese who traveled to Spezzano would stay a week, or ten days, until the crop was harvested, then return to their village with the little money they had earned. (Uncle Mike's mother was from Spezzano, his father having met her while working in that village.)

     In 1906, an earthquake rocked southern Italy, including Falconara. Fearful for their lives, villagers cowered under beds or rushed into the streets dragging crying children behind them. Even after the land stopped shuddering, people refused to return to their homes, sleeping fitfully outside that night, kept awake by the after-tremors. Several of the older homes crumbled, becoming little more than piles of rubble. Others had their foundations severely weakened requiring extensive repairs. Wooden beams had to be replaced by steel. Among the buildings destroyed was the main church in the center of town, the chiesa della  beata vergine del buonconsiglio, the church of the Blessed Virgin of Good Council. The entire front of the church had collapsed, only the back wall with its religious paintings remaining erect. The church would never again be used.

     For Uncle John, the destruction of the church must have seemed like a symbol. He no longer pretended to practice the Catholic religion, although this was hardly shocking. Most Italian males practice their religion only casually. Perhaps they feel that their wives and mothers attend mass frequently enough and say sufficient rosaries and light enough candles to assure the safety of their immortal souls. It is possible they are correct in this assumption. But they retain enough respect for the benevolent attributes of the church to partake in its ceremonies at proper times: for births, marriages, deaths, and particularly during festivals, which are centered on church holidays.

     Uncle John would not even partake silently in the church's ceremonies. It was less from a dislike of the church than it was a total

distrust of that church's priests, specifically those in Falconara, who ironically were related to him, cousins. His mother's maiden name had been Marianna Lupi. Between the years 1896 and 1952, the parish priest in Falconara was Bernardino Lupi, who was better known in the village as Zotti Nun.

     Zotti was the Arberesh word for priest, or in Bernardino's case a monsignor, since he was head of a parish. Nun was also Arberesh, a title given to people of high esteem, the equivalent of the Italian signore. Zotti Nun thus literally meant "Monsignor Sir," but it was the name by which everyone in the village knew Bernardino Lupi, remembering him by that title even today. When they speak of Zotti Nun, it is of Bernardino Lupi, although seemingly other priests before or since could similarly have been identified as Monsignor Sir. Zotti Nun was one among several members of the Lupi family who had become priests. (Another was Manueli, who earlier had killed a member of the Musacchio family during an argument.)

     Although Catholic priests take vows of celibacy, Zotti Nun found it convenient to ignore his when it suited him. He had a mistress, her name Maria Coraggio. But more important to the Musacchio family chronicle is Maria Coraggio's sister, whose name was Vincensina. Vincensina Coraggio's birthday was June 14, 1879; this much we know from her tombstone in the Falconara cemetery. She would die in 1955 at the age of seventy-six.

     As a young man, my Uncle Gus fell in love with Vincensina Coraggio and wanted to marry her. But in Falconara, marriages are not arranged because of love. Vincensina's father, while working in the United States, arranged for her to marry another man with the last name of Disantis. Uncle Gus's great love appeared lost, but within two years Vincensina's husband died, making her an eligible widow. Gus was then abroad working. When Gus heard of Disantis's death, he returned to Falconara and married Vincensina.

     They soon had a son, whose name was Totoni, a gentle man my husband and I would meet during our first visit to Falconara in 1960. Totoni's more formal name, as we later discovered from his tombstone, was Antongildo Musacchio, and he was born June 13, 1903. Totoni would die in 1977 at the age of seventy-four. A minor, but nagging, problem in putting together this chronicle has been keeping family names straight, so many people throughout different generations having the same, or similar, names. Technically, Totoni Musacchio had the same name as my older brother, Tony Musacchio, who had the same name as their grandfather, Antonio. To keep Totoni straight in our minds, both Hal and I had different nicknames for him. I thought of him as "Tony from Cosenza," because that's where he lived during his adult life. Hal remembered him as, "the man in the white suit," because that's what Totoni had been wearing when we first met him. To further complicate matters, Totoni's wife's name was Totina! We never got these people confused while meeting them in person; it was only later, while working with them on paper.

     But there was only one Vincensina. Vincensina Musacchio did not remain faithful to her second husband, according to tales told within the family. One of the priests named Lupi, apparently Zutti Nun's brother, became enamored of Vincensina and started sleeping with her on the sly. Zutti Nun's mistress, of course, was Vincensina's sister, Maria Coraggio. The family legend has Gus returning unexpectedly one night and knocking on the door of his home. There was a sound of bustling inside,

but nobody came to the door, so Gus knocked again. Finally his wife appeared, flustered, surprised to see her husband home so soon.

     Gus said to her, "Vincensina, why are you red, and late in opening the door?"

     "I was afraid," she told him, "so I didn't open it."

     As the story went, she was letting the priest out another door. Uncle John spotted this untrustworthy priest leaving and told Gus, who eventually left his wife. When Gus left for the United States, or possibly later, he asked Totoni to come with him. Totoni declined, probably because his mother would not let him go. Totoni was being educated by Zotti Nun.

     Vincensina also had a second son, Davide, although there would remain controversy within the family over whether the father was: 1.) Gus, 2.) the priest, or 3.) someone else. To Davide Musacchio, there is no question as to who was his father. When he talked with us, he showed us a photograph of himself and his brother, saying: "Look at this picture of Totoni and me. The faces are the same. If I was somebody else's son, I would not look like him." Davide, who was born in 1911, told us that he was two years old when Gus left for the United States.

     In the United States, however, Uncle Gus would begin a new family with another woman from the village, named Theresa. I later knew Uncle Gus's second wife, whom I referred to as Zia Zin.

     Zia Zin was the daughter of Uncle Gus's maternal aunt. Marianna Lupi, the wife of Antonio Musacchio, had two sisters: Viola and Serafina. Serafina's first husband died, and she remarried a man who may have  been named DiBartola. (Our sources within the family were not certain.) It was their daughter Theresa who Uncle Gus now took to his

bed. Reportedly Uncle John, furious at Vincensina's infidelity, was the one who arranged this new union for his older brother with their cousin. Although in Italian families, it is usually the oldest male that becomes patriarch, Uncle John, the second oldest, seems to have been the dominant personality among the three Musacchio brothers.

     Gus and Theresa, of course, were first cousins, but this didn't bother Uncle John. While marriages between anyone closer than third cousins was frowned upon in certain societies, and forbidden by the Roman Catholic church, it was not unique in Falconara and certainly not back in Albania, as long as the relationship was on the side of the mother. That was an important distinction to the Albanians, and apparently also for the Arberesh. Albania was a society dominated by males, who gave less importance to the female halves of their families. Albanian tribal law held that it was unacceptable for first or second cousins to marry if the relationship was on the paternal side. If the relationship was maternal, however, no offense was committed.

     Falconara, of course, was a small village, very small, whose people continued to intermarry with each other rather than seek Italian spouses from neighboring villages. The customs of the Italians remained foreign to them, or Arberesh from other Italo-Albanian villages, who lived far away on the other side of the Appenine mountains. Falconara was almost a closed society with its own customs. In Falconara, it was not unique for cousins to marry. One woman who married her first cousin was Anna Ristucci, who later moved to the United States. "The priest said he couldn't marry us," she admitted freely to us, "but if we said we had been together already, he then would have to marry us. So that's what we did. We pretended we had to get married."

     In Uncle Gus's case, whether or not the church would approve his marrying a first cousin was irrelevant. For better or for worse, Gus was married once to Vincensina and the Catholic church would sanction neither divorce nor a second marriage, unless a dispensation was granted by the pope. (The Falconarese did not have a good pipeline to the Vatican.) So Uncle Gus did what many other people have done when faced with a similar situation: he abandoned the formal rites of the Roman Catholic church. Whether or not their union was sanctified, he and Zia Zin would have six children. Although, for reasons that will become apparent later, we do not have the exact dates, the first child of Gus and Theresa was born in 1909, the sixth child two years before Gus's death, in 1929.

     Gus's two younger brothers also would become estranged from the traditional Italian church, although not only because of Vincensina. John and Joe were outraged because she apparently had been having an affair with a priest, but that was not the first time that had happened in Falconara, nor the first time it had happened within their family. In an earlier generation, another priest slept with the mother of Uncle Mike and Big Joe. Her name before marriage had been Rosa Battuci. She became Rosa Musacchio when she married Uncle Mike's father, Raffaele Musacchio. According to tales told in the village, Rosa gave her husband papiyon, a form of opium, so that he would fall into a drugged sleep. While Raffaele dozed, the priest would sneak in the door and climb in bed with Rosa, the Italo-Albanian version of "Three is Company."

     (Another version of the tale, probably more accurate, has Raffaele working in South America at the time his wife was consorting with the priest.)

     After that, it almost takes a trained genealogist to keep the relationships straight. Rosa eventually left for Brazil. Her former husband, Raffaele Musacchio, moved in with a widow, Rosaria Morelli. They had a son named Agostino who, since the union had not been blessed by the church, took the name of his mother, becoming Agostino Morelli. He married the sister of Marietta, Uncle Mike's wife. On our trips to Falconara, we would stop to visit their son Raffaele Morelli, a friendly and cheerful individual, who continued to keep contact with his half-aunt and half-uncle, Mike and Marietta in Chicago. On one visit, Raffaele and his wife Nelda gave us several homemade sausages for them, which we dutifully (but illegally) sneaked through customs.

     While we were still in Italy, we learned from Menica Gaetano in Rome that Uncle Mike was dead. When Mike's mother, Rosa, became old and infirm, Uncle Mike had invited her to move from Brazil to join he and Marietta. This displeased some in the family, but Uncle Mike had compassion for the woman, despite her sins.

     When Rosa arrived in Chicago, Marietta was astounded that her mother-in-law was wearing black. "Who died?" Marietta asked. Mike's mother said she was in mourning for her former husband, Raffaele, even though she had left him to go to Brazil and he had remarried. Marietta took the old women's black clothes and threw them in the garbage can.

     There is more. When Big Joe was young, he had gone to church and in the confessional booth told about the activities of his mother, that she was sleeping with one of the priests. His confessor reportedly became angry at Big Joe and made him lick every step of the church for penance. After licking the steps, Big Joe never returned to church again. Uncle Mike also had little respect for the priests of Falconara, saying of one, "During the day, he would say mass. At night, he would get a gun, put it under his coat, and go to another town and sleep with the women." Uncle Mike added a final epitaph for the priests of Falconara, "They were rotten!"

     Yet exactly how rotten remains another question. When we spoke with Davide Musacchio, he suggested that people within the village who disliked the priests attempted to trap them. Girls would entice the priests into their house so everyone would think something had happened,

even though nothing had. Marianna Molinaro said that the priest who had been caught with Vincensina supposedly had other women, yet none of them ever became pregnant, which suggested he was either impotent or wasn't doing what everybody assumed he was. Who do you believe? It was a small village and, before television antennas started sprouting years later, talking was the main recreation. Falconara had its own ongoing soap opera, which may have contained as much fiction as All My Children.

     Regardless, there was deep antagonism between the Musacchios and Vincensina. When Marianna Molinaro was growing up in Falconara, she was not permitted to talk to Gus's former wife or Vincensina second son, Davide. When they passed each other in the narrow alleys of the village, she had to look away. That the family should ostracize Vincensina seems understandable; that the young boy Davide should have to share this ostracism now seems unfortunate.

     Another story involving the church told by my mother involved a young girl who, during a religious ceremony, knelt beside her in the church. Pews and padded kneelers are a luxury more common in America than in Europe, where people often stand to attend mass. When they kneel, they kneel on the floor, usually cold marble, sometimes dirt. In the story told in the village, the young girl was meant to kneel a long time, whether for punishment or as part of a religious ceremony, I was unsure. Several days later, the girl contracted pneumonia and died. The feeling among some in the village was that the pneumonia was a result of kneeling on the cold floor of the church, apparently another black mark against the priests of the village. It is possible that the pneumonia stemmed from time spent in a cold and drafty church. Then again, my mother had an expression that the Falconarese used when confronted with some fact that they didn't entirely believe. They would smile and say, Sa lavia. In English that means, "Such nonsense." In dealing with the legends of Falconara, we sometimes would have difficulty separating truth from sa lavia.

     Zotti Nun lived in a two-story home, high in the village, with a magnificent view looking down the valley toward the sea. He was a well educated man and apparently spoke several languages. His tombstone would identify Don Bernardino Lupi as dottore in lettere e teologia, although Zotti Nun did not always favor education for others. Anna Ristucci told us that Zotti Nun convinced her father that it was a waste of time to send her to school, because she was female.

     About the time of World War I, according to tales we heard, Zotti Nun clashed with another strong-willed individual in the village, a man who apparently was known as Dr. Pietro Riggio. Dr. Riggio was not a medical doctor, but a dottore, a title that in Italy often is given to any well-educated individual with a university degree. It is possible that Riggio was a teacher in the village; it is possible that he was a communist. One tale has the followers of Riggio wearing a special type of footwear, unique sandals. Reportedly the clash between the priest and the doctor shook the village, causing great divisions, which years later remained unhealed. This would seem to be one of the great dramatic legends of Falconara. During several of our trips to the village, we tried to learn more about the priest and the doctor, but nobody knew anything about the clash, or was willing to talk about it. When we raised questions about the followers of one group wearing special sandals, the people we talked to laughed: "All the farmers wore those sandals!" So we shrugged and went on to discuss other matters, not entirely convinced that we had learned everything there was to know about the priest and the doctor. Sa lavia.

     Tulio Calabria recalled Zotti Nun, "He feared nothing. He would go on the altar and make remarks, speak quite freely. For that reason, he had more enemies than followers. If there was something going on in town that he didn't like, he would not hesitate to say something about it." Tulio Calabria felt that Zotti Nun never had a hold on the population. "The church was there, but people were too busy working fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, to care much about it except on holidays."

     He recalled Zotti Nun as being so fat that, when he died, they had to use a horse and buggy to transport this man who had seen after the spiritual needs of the village for fifty-six years to the cemetery. He weighed too much for people to carry him in a casket. Also, there were not many willing to walk behind even the buggy. Zotti Nun had offended too many people, claimed Tulio Calabria. "His tongue was too long," added Marianna Molinaro.

     But that was long after the Musacchios had begun to migrate from Falconara, motivated by other than religious reasons. By the time of the earthquake that crumbled at least the structure of the church, many of the Falconarese began to look further than to neighboring villages, or across the mountains, for work. They looked across the ocean to the United States of America. In 1905, Giovanni Musacchio, Uncle John, then aged twenty, decided to seek work in the United States of America. John was not the first of the Musacchio family to travel to America. His older brother Gus apparently had preceded him by several years. Uncle John had no intentions of abandoning his village forever; his grand plan, already established at this early age, was to go to America and

make a fortune, then return home to reacquire the family lands, which his grandfather Agosto had squandered.

     Uncle John undoubtedly believed that he would be back, and certainly he told people he would, and they expected it of him. When the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Irish, and other immigrants from northern Europe had migrated to America earlier--and many other refugees from eastern Europe later--it was with a knowledge that they would not return, that their roots had been uprooted permanently. Their desire was to become Americans, their only hope for survival in a hostile world. The Italians, bound by strong family traditions, did not board boats bound for America from Naples and Genoa with this point of view. They considered themselves temporary migrants and had no plans to become Americans. They expected only to spend a few months, a few years, enough time to earn money, un uovo finto, a "nest egg" they called it, so they could return to their homeland with wealth and the status it brought. But a more literal translation of uovo finto is "false egg," and many, if not most, would never return to their homeland.

     The Italo-Albanians, the Arberesh, were no less family- and home-centered than their Italian neighbors. A clannish people, they may, if anything, have sunken even stronger roots into the ground of the hilly land they had occupied since being forced out of their Albanian homeland by the Turks. The "hearth," the home fire, is the symbol of Albanian family unity, and it was no less so among the Arberesh of southern Italy. From the hearth, they gathered warmth. To the hearth, they returned each evening. Uncle John may not have been able to verbalize his feelings about the hearth, even if he was aware of its symbolic meaning to Albanians elsewhere in the world, but the hearth, its warmth, its comfort, tugged at him as he gathered his documents to travel to Naples where he would board the S.S. Republic bound for New York. Before leaving, Uncle John asked one of the village girls to wait for him. "When I return, we will get married," John promised.

     The girl's name was Chiara Tocci, the oldest daughter of Francesco Tocci. Chico too had traveled abroad, to South and North America, but his migration was not permanent. Chico chose not to abandon the hearth. Chico returned to live the last decades of his life in Italy.

     John too would return, but Chico's daughter, Chiara, would need to wait four years for that return. And then, it would not be permanent. Like many of the Falconarese, Uncle John had chosen the life of a transient, becoming an inter-ocean commuter, torn between one land and another. There were no Turks that would prevent his return to the land of his birth, but there were other factors. The hold of the hearth was fading by the twentieth century. Although none of the Musacchios then realized it, their family had begun its second great migration across a body of water into a new country.

Chapter 11 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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