7. Survival

ife was not easy for the newly married couple, Chico and Rosaria Tocci, or for any of the villagers in Falconara. Although the Toccis were landowners, they were not wealthy by any means. Even when a family had others working the land for them, they often labored by the side of their sharecroppers. The women spent long hours in the kitchen, not only feeding members of the family, but sometimes also people outside the family. When Rosaria was not cooking, there was water to gather from the fountain in the town piazza, clothes to wash, rooms to clean, and eventually children to mind. Each day at the time of the midday meal, Rosaria would carry food to the fields: a bucket of hot soup, a bowl of pasta, loaves of coarse bread, a jug of wine. She would spread a blanket on the ground and her husband and the others working the fields would gather around. They would not use dishes, but instead would simply dip their spoons and forks into the common pot. After this all too brief break, the workers picked up their hoes and shovels and resumed their labors with no further break until the sun faded in the west and eventually merged with the sea.

     At the end of a day's labor, Chico and the others working the land gathered their tools and trudged back to the village, often driving their animals before them. The villagers typically lived in three-story dwellings. The kitchen and dining area, perhaps a terrace, often occupied the uppermost floor. Bedrooms were on the second, or mid, floor with the lower level reserved for the animals. For the wealthier families, this might mean a mule or a work horse, a cow, some chickens. Usually there were two pigs: one mature pig, being fattened for slaughter this year; the other younger, being fattened for slaughter the year following.

     For someone raised during the twentieth century in a modern American city, it was not easy for either Hal or myself to imagine what life must have been like in a nineteenth century Italian mountain village, particularly one such as Falconara with its almost clannish Albanian culture. But many of the older Falconarese living in Chicago, whom we interviewed, had grown up in that village, their lives stretching far back into the nineteenth century, or at least into the first half of the twentieth century when things still had not yet changed. For them, the memories of their childhood in Falconara remained vivid.

     "The main occupation was farming," my cousin John Molinaro told us. "And sheepherding. It was to supply winter needs rather than to sell for profit. Each family owned a plot of land, some bigger than others. Those who owned more land were the better-to-do families. Because the country was hilly around Falconara, the land was not always as productive as in the valleys below."

     Theresa Musashe said: "We lived in town and went to work on the farm. We'd go with pick and shovel and plant our crops. We had small

plots of land all over, and we would go back and forth between them. After the crop was harvested, we would walk to Paola or San Lucido to sell potatoes, peas, corn, and beans. When I was ten years old, I remember pulling the weeds out of the wheat on my family's farm. We'd go from daylight in the morning to darkness. We'd wash our face and hands in the nearest creek. We wore no shoes."

     Anna Ristucci remembered: "I lived on the farm and would go into the village only once a month to go to church and to get groceries, salt, petrol for our lamps. I helped Ma in the kitchen. I'd crochet, knit shirts for my brothers, socks. I worked in the yard getting potatoes, peaches, pears. I'd cut the grass to feed the cows. Ma had a cow for milk for the kids and to make a little cheese. We didn't sell much of anything. It was just for the house. We'd use the manure from the cow. We had four pigs. We raised them to kill each year. Sometimes we would go down to San Lucido or Paola to sell horses, goats, cows, sheep, or pigs. You made a little money just to get some soap or something for the house."

     "Nobody retired at age sixty-five," said John Molinaro. "The working day began early in the morning: 4:00 or 5:00. They took their equipment and walked to their land." The plots of land they farmed might be as small as half an acre, the largest five acres, about the size of a city block. Often plots of land farmed by the same family were scattered throughout the surrounding area. They plowed by hand with a square-ended hoe, la zappa. They also used rakes with teeth. They prepared their land, and they plowed, and they fertilized. No chemicals, manure from the cows or from the pigs. Or fresh grass left in compost piles to rot and ferment."

     After one of our visits to Italy, we flew home on Alitalia and were seated next to a businessman from Milan. During the flight we began to converse. His company had plants in the south, said the Milanese businessman, where (similar to the United States) labor costs were much lower. But labor was also much less reliable, he thought: "The people don't want to work." The Milanese businessman suggested that southern Italians were lazy. But then he had never stood beside them in the fields.

     Among the few joys of life for the Falconarese was homemade wine, red, made from concord grapes. Wine was not a luxury, but rather a staple of everyday life. The Toccis ran what might be called the wine concession at least for their immediate neighborhood. Rosaria supervised the wine-making equipment, and each fall after the grape harvest villagers would bring their grapes to the Tocci home. The grapes were placed in large concrete vats and stomped by foot. Most people wore heavy boots that came as high as their hips, but others used their bare feet. Those borrowing the equipment paid by whatever means they had, usually bartering food.

     Wine-making would continue in the family well into the twentieth century, my parents making wine in their basement, although the family wine-making eventually fell to my Uncle John. While Uncle John grew some grapes in his backyard, he usually had to supplement these with others purchased at the store. Eventually the family stopped making wine. We have the family wine press, but we now use the slatted wooden tub to hold firewood and the machinery as a piece of decorative sculpture on our back deck. On each of our trips to Italy, we would bring several bottles of wine back in our luggage. One Calabrian wine had on its label a picture of Scanderbeg. It is not a good wine, many of the wines from the south being harsher than those from the north, but we drank them with zest.

     "Two things happened concerning the wine," remembers John Molinaro. "Either it was good, or it wasn't. Either way you drank it. If it was good and you had extra, you sold it. Or you made vinegar to pickle peppers and onions.

     "It was survival," John Molinaro continues. "I feel that if I were forced to survive these days, I could go out in the forests by myself. Organic living: that's what the old-timers taught us. I can still remember the wild asparagus we got in Falconara. We went out in the woods and picked all we wanted."

     Figs were an important supplement, being used for snacks during the winter. The fig was left on the plant until ripening time, then dried, laid out in large trays or on the ground. During one of our visits to Falconara, we passed a batch of figs, rows of them, laid out on a concrete apron, drying in the sun. It was all my husband Hal could do to restrain himself from reaching down and snatching a handful. The only thing that stopped him was that he felt paranoically certain that every move we made in that little village was being watched by unseen eyes. Had he evidenced his interest in the figs, whoever owned them certainly would have offered some to us, but he would not have appreciated their being stolen.

     On another occasion, Hal and I spent a month living in Fiuggi, a resort community one hour south of Rome, famous for its mineral springs. The Roman emperors bathed there, using the warm springs to soak away the effects of their debaucheries. We visited Fiuggi in April, when there were no tourists evident, no emperors either, mainly to get away from the telephone eroding our concentration back at home, and to work on this book. Hal would rise early to write, scribbling on long legal pads instead of the computer he used at home. (The touchy electrical system in our apartment would barely support the current necessary to run a toaster without blowing a fuse, much less an electronic device designed by the devil.)

     While in Fiuggi, we went for long walks in the hills with a retired Swedish couple, Lars and Margareta Stenstrom, who lived in an upstairs apartment. On our hikes up rocky paths, we passed shepherds herding their sheep, and sheep dogs that eyed us suspiciously. These were people like those we also saw in Falconara, roughly and plainly dressed, wearing parkas to keep the rains off their shoulders, caps to keep the sun from their eyes, carrying staffs to support their treks across uneven ground. Hardy is the best word I can use to describe the shepherds whose paths crossed ours, or rather, on whose paths we trod. If you survived the first few years in a rough environment such as the hills of Italy, you tended to be very hardy. Many of the Falconarese who came to live on the south side of Chicago seemed to live on forever. With the exception of having a propensity toward diabetes, a hereditary disease, most of the Falconarese we knew seemed uncommonly healthy without most of the stress-induced ailments of those in more prosperous countries.

     We tried as much as possible to absorb the culture and atmosphere of the Italian people, particularly those of the hills. What was it like to be a shepherd, either in Fiuggi or Falconara, and spend most of your life outdoors battling the elements, or even indoors where it was not much warmer? Even though it was April, at Fiuggi we were in the mountains, and it was constantly chilly. On a visit down to Falconara that same trip in April, we arrived in the village to find it shrouded with fog, cold, damp, the people bundled against the chill which even the fires of the hearth could not cut. One of our other neighbors in Fiuggi was a Roman banker, whose name eludes me. We usually referred to him as il dottore, the doctor, because he was an educated man. He also would accompany us sometimes on walks. The banker spoke no English, and certainly no Albanian, but we managed to communicate. The banker told us that when an Italian goes outdoors, he layers himself with several sweaters for warmth. When he goes indoors, he puts on his overcoat.

     But the figs. Once a week, on Wednesday morning, Hal and I shopped at an open market in the old part of Fiuggi, up atop a high hill where there was a church, a piazza, one or two passable restaurants, and a marvelous view of the surrounding countryside, which included snow-tipped mountains. Farmers would come with their products, merchants with their goods, each Wednesday morning. Other days of the week, I'm sure they moved their stalls to other nearby towns. There was row after row of every conceivable foodstuff. We would buy cheeses and fruits and vegetables and sausage and breads baked fresh that morning, and Hal would purchase a week's supply of fici, dried figs. The figs were large, as big as tangerines, incredibly sweet, their golden brown skins covered by a fine white powder. Usually, this week's supply of fici would last until the following day, and we would spend the remainder of the week eagerly anticipating the next Wednesday's market.

     On our last week in town, the woman who ordinarily sold us fici, and remembered us from week to week, probably as the crazy Americans who liked figs, had none for sale. Apparently we had helped exhaust her supply. We were devastated by the loss of this weekly delicacy. There were other packaged figs imported from Greece for sale in the stores, but they were not the same. Those you can buy in Chicago. But it was not so much the figs as the experience of buying fici at an open market that gave them an extra taste. It was easy to look at the woman selling fici, her face weathered, her hands coarse, and imagine the villagers of Falconara, my ancestors, coming down to the markets of Paola and San Lucido to sell their figs, or trade various products grown in the terraced plots surrounding Falconara for other goods not available in their mountain village. One such item was olive oil, there being no olive trees in Falconara. The villagers also obtained utensils and fabrics. The people of San Lucido were not as adept farmers as the people of Falconara, our cousin John claimed, so usually were willing to trade.

     John Molinaro described how the Falconarese extracted grain from wheat after it had been harvested from the fields: "They took the wheat to a flat area no bigger than forty by fifty feet, which had been hardened by mixing clay with water. They would lay the wheat on this surface, allowing it to dry for several days. They then brought two cows to the area and connected them with a yoke to a central pole. The cows walked in circles, dragging a rock connected to the yoke by rope, around and round until the grain was squashed. When the cows were finished, they would take the hay and throw it into the air. The wind would separate the chaff from the grain." This also was done manually, the wheat being gathered into bundles big enough to be grasped with one hand, so it could be struck with a wooden spatula, the fine grain falling through a sieve. There was also a mill, utilizing the flow from a stream that cascaded past the village, the one from which the seven families had drunk in the area they called colaringut. The mill was where the corn also was ground by large, hand-hewn stone wheels. "You waited for your turn," recalled John Molinaro. "The flour was put in a sack and you took it back home to be made into bread. They preserved their own yeast. Part of the bread dough was kept sour-mashed until the next month, or you did not bake bread. Every home had its own oven."

      They had no wagons, so all the fertilizer and equipment had to be carried by hand, or on a donkey. Or they carried it atop their heads. The women would tie a scarf around their head to make a crown, positioning whatever load they wanted to carry on that crown. They were accustomed to hauling thirty- or forty-pound loads in this manner.

      Heating was by fire, the hearth. One corner of the house had a chimney and a fireplace where wood could be burned. For heat elsewhere in the home, they utilized a long box about twelve inches high with a hole in the middle and a container about size of a breadbox. Charcoal would be placed inside and lit. "We kept warm with homemade wool sweaters," remembers John Molinaro. Cooking was done on a stove built of stone, or brick, comparable to an outside barbecue, with an iron grate on which could be placed a pot.

      Falconara remained isolated from the surrounding Italian towns because of its language, but also because of the desire of the Albanians to be left alone to live life the way they wanted without interference from others, no matter how well-meaning. The only transportation into Falconara was by foot, although eventually a single-tracked railroad spur would be built between Paola on the coast and Cosenza inland, which would include a stop named Falconara-Albanese, though still a long walk from the village. The locomotive would switch from back to front of the

train at this station, the railroad spur across the mountains being very steep.

     Animals such as pigs were an essential part of the diet. They were allowed to run loose in town, as were chickens and other animals. The pig was considered an important possession, usually obtained as a piglet in the fall at the time of the annual festival and fattened until the following year, just before the start of the cold season. The pig was kept in the basement with the people living on the floors above. "You didn't see this in other nearby towns such as San Lucido, or Longobardi, or San Fili," says John Molinaro. "There, the animals were kept outside city limits."

     Of course, this made them easier prey for the gangs, the briganti, or bandits, some of them operating for profit, some of them only for sport. The briganti would move by night, robbing people, stealing sheep and goats, generally making themselves a nuisance. Muggery and thievery is not a twentyfirst century invention. On one occasion a group of thieves, attempting to move some stolen livestock through Falconara without anyone realizing what was happening, placed white sheets over the animals. The superstitious people, who saw the thieves passing with the livestock so covered, thought they were seeing ghosts.

     Uncle Mike remembered the pilfering that went on from one village to the other: "People in our town would steal from other towns, and they would steal from us. What we were doing was just exchanging."

     The relationship between the people of San Lucido and Falconara was, at best, strained. The Lucitanos looked upon the Falconarese as inferior, calling them Ghegi, because they were Albanian, and not with affection. They would mimick the Albanian language. They considered the

Falconarese backward, stupid. Sometimes when the Lucitanos, or other villagers, came up to Falconara to buy potatoes and figs, fights would break out. The Falconarese did not trust their Latino neighbors. There was a cross on the western outskirts of the village, and usually also someone sitting by the cross, club in hand, to make certain that people from other villages did not enter town carrying anything, such as a cane, that might be used as a weapon.

     "At one time strangers could not enter our village," recalls John Molinaro. "They even told the carabinieri, the Italian police, they couldn't come in. Anyone who said anything, or looked too long at the girls, the Albanesi would go after them with rocks and knives."

     Of course, there were no taverns, dance halls, or any other places of amusement in Falconara where people of differing views normally might get into trouble, particularly after having had too much to drink. The Italians, despite their predilection for wine with their meals, perhaps because of it, do not become alcoholics, certainly nowhere near the degree that the Irish or the Scandinavians do. Entertainment in Falconara was centered around the home, the hearth.

     Dominic Nesci recalls an old lady whose house they would visit every evening during the winter, when nights were long, to sit around the fireplace while she told the children stories until nearly 10:00, when she would serve coffee and burned bread, toasted over the fire. "She would tell stories about lions and monks," says Dominic, "and we would be scared to death to walk home, because there were no lights in town." You can understand why someone seeing a herd of cattle passing with sheets over their heads might think they were ghosts.

     John Molinaro also recalls the stories told by the fire: "Sometimes they were fairy tales, and sometimes they were real stories about events that happened even hundreds of years before the settling of our village. They had stories about the briganti who used to hide in the woods,

waiting for people who would pass by, robbing them, killing them. The true stories were repeated over and over again until they became like fairy tales."

     Among the stories frequently told was one about seven families, who fled across the sea to settle in Falconara, and it was so long ago that nobody could remember exactly when it happened, or even why it happened. It was just another tale told by old ladies by the fire, but one everyone in the village remembered.

     When someone died, the relatives would go to the family of the dead person's home at night, and they would bring wine and drink coffee. For more than a week, someone would bring food to the house of the dead, so that the family would not have to bother itself with its normal duties, but could attend to the proper ceremonies of mourning, which included wearing black clothes for what people in another culture might consider an excessive period of time afterwards. When a child was born, people would also visit the family, bringing food.

     And so it was that Chico and Rosaria soon stood at the door to welcome friends and relatives into their home to see their first new child, a girl. The child came a little more than a year after their marriage. There had been no question about Chico's potency. The housekeeper named Lucci, wherever she may have gone, had served as evidence of his manhood. But finally now, Rosaria also bore the fruits of Chico's affection.

     Their first child was born on November 4, 1885. Her name was Chiara, a woman I would know later on the south side of Chicago in her old age as "See-uh," actually Zia (pronounced more properly "Tsee-yuh" in Italian). Zia meant aunt. That was my Aunt Chiara.

     The second child was a boy, undoubtedly cause for much celebration in the Tocci family, since he would carry the family name on for one more generation. In fact, he would be the only one to do so. His name was Michele, named after Chico's father, as was the custom. Michele's birthday: March 15, 1890.

     The third child was another girl, Angela, born May 29, 1894. This was my mother, who though her baptized name was Angela, properly Italian, properly Christian, she would be called more often by her Arberesh nickname, Ledda.

     The final child that Rosaria gave birth to was another boy, Angelo, born August 18, 1902, when his father was forty-six, his mother thirty-six. A fifth child died young; his name, Domenico.

     But even including the esposita from the housewife Lucci, those weren't the only children that Francesco Tocci would father.

Chapter 8 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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