8. Wanderer

uring our visits to Falconara, my husband Hal, a marathoner,  would frequently run south of the village, down a paved street that soon became a dirt road leading up into the hills. In so doing, Hal later said, he would pass the mill where villagers once ground their grain to make bread. Next to the mill, nearly hidden by overgrowth, was the swiftly rushing stream that served as both source of water for drinking and power for the mill. Past the mill, the road tipped upward, very steeply. Hal commented: “On the road, I frequently encountered villagers leading sheep, cows, goats, and other farm animals. It was all part of the agricultural pattern of existence in Falconara that, as a city dweller, I found difficult to comprehend.

     “Side paths off the road led to various plots of land used for crops,” Hal continued. “Near the top of the hill was a grove of trees so thick they turned day into darkness. Above them, where the hill flattened, I would come finally to a wide, treeless area with tall grass where sheep sometimes grazed. I liked to go there often. It reminded me, ironically, of the Austrian mountain meadow where Julie Andrews was seen spinning and singing at the opening of the movie, The Sound of Music.

     “The meadow was flat on top for barely a hundred meters, then it sloped precipitously downward on three sides. To the north was the valley I had crossed, mostly stripped of trees, cultivated for crops, houses and farm buildings scattered miscellaneously, and above, the village of Falconara. From that distance, Falconara's crowded houses looked as though they had been nailed to the hillside, patches of tan against a verdant green. To the west, far below and seemingly stretching forever, was the sea. To the south was another deep valley, mostly uninhabited, thick with trees. On the fourth side, to the east, the meadowed hill I stood upon dropped briefly into a saddle, then ascended again into a series of higher and higher hills and, beyond them, Cosenza.”

     It was easier, Hal said, for him to imagine Francesco Tocci in that meadow than Julie Andrews. Except he always visualized Chico not spinning, but squatting, as agricultural people often do, chewing perhaps on a blade of grass, scratching the ground with a stick, staring silently out toward the hazy sea. Chico certainly must have looked out toward that sea often, if not from the meadow then from other vantage points around Falconara, because as Francesco Tocci approached the middle years of his life, he felt the urge to wander.

     His wanderings until about the fortieth year of his life probably had not gotten him any further than Cosenza. Cosenza was a commercial center, a big city, where you could obtain clothing, tools, and other goods in exchange for produce such as the figs, which grew so readily in the moist and fertile soil of Falconara. Certainly, as my Uncle Mike did, Chico must have walked to Cosenza beside a mule heavily laden with produce, perhaps to barter dried figs or some other crop for goods.

Perhaps Chico trod the length of the riverfront market in that city, bargaining with shopkeepers until his mule had been stripped of its cargo to be replaced with another. Perhaps he heard people in that market talk of their problems, talk also of another world.

     The southern Italians had begun to grow restless during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. The times were difficult. The southerners were troubled by chronic poverty, unemployment. Politically, the southern Italians had little of what Chicagoans several generations later would refer to as clout. Chico certainly must have heard people in the market talk, because Italians are not ones to keep silent witness and bear their burdens alone. He must have heard people in the market speak about opportunities elsewhere, fathers bragging about their sons who were making big money growing coffee in Brazil, or building railroads in the United States, sending money home to support their families. But until Chico reached middle age, Cosenza and San Lucido marked the far edge of his explorations into the world outside his village, a world that he nevertheless increasingly began to realize extended far beyond what he could see from the hilltop meadow across the valley from Falconara.

     Most days, as seen from the hilltop meadow, the sea has no horizon, blue of the sky above blending with blue of the water below. Because of everpresent haze, it seems to stretch forever. Certainly Chico knew that his ancestors had come from the sea nearly four centuries before. That much he would have learned, either in school or during the cold winter nights when his family gathered around the warm hearth fires to hear the old people tell tales.

     It was probably not the past, however, that intrigued Francesco Tocci, and maybe not even the future, but rather the present. At middle age, gazing out across a blurred horizon, Chico unquestionably cared less what the sea had brought to Falconara than where it might take him. It was not the scent of history that would have fascinated Chico, but rather the suggestion that there was a larger world than that he could see from the top of the hill where sheep grazed. There were lands out there, other continents, Chico would have known this from the rudimentary schooling villagers received. He would have known that somewhere people were different than him, different also from the Italians in surrounding villages. Would he ever see those lands, meet those people, hear their languages? For four hundred years, no Tocci had wandered farther away from the hearth than to the markets of Cosenza. Given that, the prospects seemed unlikely that he would be different.

     Yet the times were now different, and even people as isolated as the Falconarese began to feel the waves of restlessness sweeping through Italy and all over Europe. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, several among the Falconarese began to travel overseas. In doing so, they were following in the footsteps of their Latino neighbors, who, in turn, were following the footsteps of Italians from the north.

     The northern Italians had been the first to migrate to the New World in the middle of the nineteenth century, but by the end of that century the main wave was southerners and in even larger numbers. The reason given for the Italian migration at this time is economic. “In south Italy, the decade had been one of intensified hardship and of a desperate desire to escape,” writes Robert F. Foerster in The Italian Emigration of Our Times. So it would seem that the Falconarese, in traveling abroad, did so to escape the crushing poverty that had become the lot of the people south of Naples. Or so theorized later-day sociologists such as Foerster, not entirely without reason.

     But were the Falconarese reacting only to hard times? Did they want to escape their hearthland? Italy was economically depressed with jobs difficult to obtain, certainly, but this could hardly have troubled Falconara, a largely self-sufficient community with an agricultural base. The fluctuation of the money markets in Rome, or other European communities, would not have been felt in Falconara. The villagers rarely touched money. They traded with each other, using as their means of exchange the fruits of their labor. No matter what the state of the economy around them, Falconara remained much the way it had been since soon after its settling more than four centuries before. We almost need to find some other explanation as to why the Falconarese should want to join the general movement westward across the sea by other southern Italians.

     It may have been partly wanderlust, a desire among certain Falconarese for change from their routine existence. It may have been that after four centuries in southern Italy, the descendents of the warriors of Albania had become bored. When they visited the markets of Cosenza and other cities and heard tales of the riches available overseas, and the chance to see a New World, tales told by Latinos who had traveled abroad and had come home with money in their pockets, they may have decided it was simply time to take a look for themselves. In 1476 it was fear of extinction that prompted the seven families to leave Albania; toward the end of the nineteenth century, it may have been simple curiosity that prompted the descendents of those families to make another move. And a realization that by earning money abroad they could better their condition in life.

     Regardless, the first few Falconarese traveled to South America, not to the United States. There was a sound reason: Brazilian coffee barons were desperate for cheap labor and were willing to pay the ship passage for anyone who signed to work in their fields. Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo were the two main centers for employment for Italians, who in addition to working in agriculture, according to Foerster, sold fish and fowl, vegetables and fruit. They built bridges and laid railroads. These Italians, most of them from Campania, Basilicata, and Calabria, became bootblacks, tramway employees, harbor workmen.

     The migrations to Brazil by the Italians began mostly in the 1880’s, when the price of coffee was high. Word spread that work in Brazil was plentiful, that migrant laborers could earn good money cultivating coffee, more than they could with their subsistence crops at home, enough money not only to support themselves, but also their families left behind. And that they could accumulate enough money so that they could return home higher in status than when they left.

     That was the motivation for most Italians going abroad: to send money home. It was not to settle elsewhere, although many eventually would do that, but rather to amass small fortunes. In the New World, good money could be made even in the most unskilled jobs. Living costs for those jammed in shacks with other migrant workers were cheap. A man could save money and return to his home village wealthy, a signore, to be admired and respected by the less adventuresome.

     Of course, many of these migrant laborers, who sometimes commuted across the ocean in the holds of cheap steamers on almost an annual basis, would become permanent residents of Brazil, or other countries in the New World. But usually that was not their plan upon leaving; or, if it was, they never stated it to those left behind.

     One of the first Falconarese travelers, according to our Uncle Mike, was Michele Fionda, who traveled to Brazil. He worked in Rio de Janeiro selling fish in the fish market. He made enough money to exist, and put aside some money for savings. Fionda's success encouraged other Falconarese, who followed him. This established a pattern similar to that governing the travels of most Italians overseas. One individual would go abroad and establish a foothold, obtain a job, earn the trust of his employers. Friends and relatives soon would join him, sharing his lodging, using his connections to obtain work. Among those who followed Michele Fionda to Brazil was Francesco Tocci.

     Considering Chico's age when he began his wanderings, it is almost tempting to identify him as having what in America of the late twentieth century might be described as a mid-life crisis, a seven-year itch. Indeed, a man in his forties, he literally seemed to be abandoning his wife and children to embrace a new lifestyle, that of the world traveler. Perhaps that is too pat an analysis, although it appears that the relationship between Francesco Tocci and his wife had changed.

     Not that there was a sudden diminishment of love between Chico and Rosaria. Their marriage had not been founded on love, but rather grew out of an agreement between two families over which they exercised minimal control. Love may have existed, but more important, there was respect for the family traditions. Family tradition was strong in the

Italian communities, and the fact that the roots of the Falconarese were Albanian made little difference. Chico and Rosaria both worked the fields, as did their children. He did the heavy labor; she kept the house. When he decided to travel abroad to enrich the family fortunes, it was understood that she would remain home and raise the children, look after the property, and care for their parents, particularly his. What money he saved, would be sent to her. If Rosaria objected to these arrangements, if angry words were spoken in the home between her and her husband, no record of those words remains.

     Also unclear is how many trips Francesco Tocci made to Brazil near the turn of the century. He made more than one trip to the New World, because family traditions later have him appearing in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps he traveled back and forth between Italy and Brazil more than once too. Uncle Mike, our main source for information on the travels of Chico, was uncertain. Mike, who later briefly traveled to South America himself, remembered that Chico worked selling fruit; he also sold fish in the markets of Rio, as did Michele Fionda. The Italian peddlers would obtain fish from the fishermen, who brought their boats in each morning to the wharf, then push their fish-laden carts through the streets, shouting to announce their presence, pausing when women called down from windows above that they wished to buy. There were no supermarkets back at this time, and many of the people bought food for their table from peddlers with pushcarts.

     Some of the Falconarese worked in the coffee fields, but good jobs there had become difficult to obtain. Many of the better jobs had been claimed by northern Italians, who had preceded them to South America by several decades. The northerners also had purchased the better land that was available for cultivation. Adding to the difficulties of the Falconarese trying to amass fortunes was a slide downward in the price of coffee toward the end of the century caused by the number of coffee plants having tripled in the century's final decade. In 1902, the Brazilian government would suspend the emigration of any Italian subjects not paying their own passage. The government also imposed restrictions on how much money the migrant laborers could send home.

     Still, the Falconarese persevered, and others from the village followed. Chico had a first cousin named Manueli Lupi. The Lupi family had five boys, three of whom became priests, including Manueli. Manueli may have been a priest, but he was not above breaking a few of the commandments. That his religious vows commanded him to a life of celibacy was somehow overlooked by Manueli, who began sleeping with one of the women of the village. Manueli was not the first, nor would he be the last, of the priests of Falconara who would show such an appreciation of women.

     One evening Manueli was playing cards with several of the villagers, including one of the Musacchio family. The name of this particular Musacchio has been forgotten, but he began to chide Manueli about his mistress. The Falconarese, similar to their Italian neighbors, are quickly and easily insulted, sometimes when no insult is intended. Often antagonisms between individuals, and entire families, will simmer for years, even for generations.

     Manueli Lupi was not a person to allow an insult to simmer. He stormed out of where they had been playing cards and returned with a

gun. Manueli shot and killed the Musacchio who had spoken insulting words about his having a mistress.

     It was an irreconcilable action, as Manueli certainly knew. Retribution would be due from the family of the slain man. Manueli's priestly robes would not protect him from a vendetta, what in Albania would have been considered a blood feud. Other members of the Musacchio family, needless to say, were outraged at the death of their relative, the insult inflicted upon their family, their tribe, the clan. The Musacchios would not have waited for the law to take action, since the police, the carabinieri, were Italian, and therefore not to be trusted. Sicily with its Mafia tradition was not the only society that operated under a system of vigilante justice. The Musacchios would have done unto Manueli as he had done unto them. Whether they realized it or not, they were responding to what in their previous hearthland had become codified as the Laws of Lek. The avenging family would ambush their blood enemy some evening and kill him, just as Lek Ducaghin had ambushed Lek Zakaria back during the time of Scanderbeg. According to some of the old-timers from Falconara, there were sometimes six or seven murders a year in their village. That seems overstated, but not everybody in Falconara lived to old age, despite their apparent hardiness, all the exercise they did, and their near vegetarian diet. Certainly, the actuarial odds on Manueli had taken a sharp turn downward.

     Manueli Lupi may have been impetuous, but he was not stupid. He fled immediately to South America, since his cousins, Chico and Michael Fionda, were then working in Brazil. They may not have approved of Manueli's actions, but he was family. In the Albanian tradition of blood feuds, it is accepted that uninvolved others offer shelter to someone

threatened in a feud, no matter how heinous his action. Those chasing the individual will seek vengeance only from that person, not those who humanely shelter him. This is because after having completed their vendetta, they would become subject of a new vendetta from their victim's family and probably have to seek shelter themselves.

     Chico and Michele Fionda thus provided Manueli Lupi with lodging. Later, when the Musacchios back in Falconara learned that Manueli was living with Chico, they alerted Brazilian police. With the help of his cousins, Manueli fled to the coffee plantations. After several years, he returned one evening to town. Family historians are fuzzy as to what happened next, but someone shot Manueli Lupi, wounding him in the shoulder. His cousins took Manueli to the doctor. Then he disappeared, never to be seen again.

     The Musacchios living in Falconara apparently never bore any ill will toward Chico for harboring Manueli. It was expected that he would do so, just as it was also expected that they would try to kill Manueli. Blood feuds were not as virulent in Falconara at this period as they were back in Albania under the Law of Lek, but retribution was due. Everybody simply understood that.

     Chico apparently made more than one trip from Italy to Brazil, how many nobody in the family seems to know. On one of those trips, however, a young lady was entrusted to Chico's care. Her name was Serafina, known more familiarly as Sera. Her husband was among the Falconarese working in South America. He decided to stay in that country and sent for his wife. Sera's parents, however, refused to let their daughter go. Sera wrote her husband and told him she couldn't leave her mother and father. He stopped writing her after that.

     This worried Sera, and she finally decided to ignore the dictates of her parents and follow her husband to Brazil. It was agreed that Chico, who was returning to Brazil, would see after the woman's welfare during the long voyage across the ocean. In the meantime, Sera's husband had taken another woman to his bed. After Sera arrived, he went from friend to friend so his Falconarese wife could not find him with his Brazilian wife. Sera found herself in a foreign country with nobody to turn to for help except Chico, who had accompanied her on the boat.

     Another member of the Falconarese community living in Brazil was Francesco Cavato. His wife recently had died. He told Chico: "You make the arrangements. I'll marry this woman."

     Chico scoffed at this suggestion. Apparently he had become enamored of Sera during their trans-Atlantic voyage. Whether the admiration was mutual at that time, nobody can say. Chico told Cavato, “Why should I make arrangements for you? I'll take her myself.”

     And so he did. Sera moved in with Chico. Soon she became pregnant. According to the story told us by a female member of the family, “She would give birth, give the baby away. Give birth, give the baby away. Nobody knows how many babies she had. She sewed to earn them money enough to eat. While she worked, he went gambling.”

     Details of the life led by Chico and Sera in Rio may have become exaggerated over the years, but eventually news of Chico's indiscretion was relayed back to his wife in Falconara, who may have become suspicious that little money had been sent her recently. Rosaria wrote to Chico, stating firmly, “Either you come back, or I'm going to leave

your mother and father and the children and come to South America after you!”

     Chico might have scoffed had such a threat been received from an opponent in a blood feud; an angry woman, however, was something else. There was also the threat that his wife might abandon his mother, something no good Italian son could ignore. When Chico received that letter from Rosaria, he realized the good times were over: he had best return to Falconara and fulfill his obligations as a family man. Besides, economic conditions had deteriorated in Brazil. Not only was it difficult to make money, but government regulations, coupled with inflation, made it increasingly difficult to send that money back to Italy. Sera had no future in Brazil without Chico, so she decided to return also. Despite tales told later of Chico's gambling, the two of them had saved enough so that, after their sea passage, they still had 3,000 lire. At the railroad station in Paola, before boarding the train that would take them to Falconara, they divided this money between them.

     Whether or not the tales of Sera's giving her babies away in Brazil were true, Chico's mistress did return to Falconara pregnant. Sera's parents refused to take her back into their house. Chico arranged for Sera to live in a small cabin in the farmland outside town. Soon the baby was born. Sera named the child Maria and did not give her away.

     Rosaria had good reason to feel resentment against the woman who had been living with her husband in Brazil, but she also felt sympathy, if not for her, then certainly for the child, Maria, who certainly had not bargained to come into this world branded as esposito. They were all, after all women, the three of them: wife, mistress, and illegitimate child. It is too often woman's lot to be wronged by man, and perhaps Rosaria--long before the era of women's liberation--believed that women should aid each other. Or maybe it was simply the good manners of a humble lady of good breeding. When Maria was born, Rosaria filled a basket with pasta, flour, bread, and pork and sent it to Sera.

     “Rosaria had the choice of either accepting this woman or disrupting her marriage,” John Molinaro would reflect on the arrangement many years later. “She chose not to accept the woman, but she accepted the daughter as part of the near family.”

     And soon there was a second daughter, named Irene. Although Chico was back under the same roof with his wife, he knew the way to Sera's heart as well as cabin and, as the women in the family would put it, “he had his ways with her.”

     Rosaria knew that Chico visited Sera. Falconara was always a small village with eyes in all the windows. “Her bed shakes more than mine,” Rosaria grumbled to her neighbors. Nevertheless, none of her anger was visited upon the children, Maria and Irene, the half-sisters of her own four children. When, at the beginning of winter, the Tocci family killed the pig, and there was fresh meat for dinner, Maria and Irene were often first to arrive. They came in the evenings also to sit around the hearth fire to listen to the tales and stories told to other members of their near family. Rosaria sometimes sent food home with the girls, knowing of course that she was giving it to her husband's mistress. Sera, however, never would come to Rosaria's home. She knew her position in the family.

     Rosaria came to be known in the village as Non Pindi. Non came from the word for grandmother, nonna. Pindi was a type of chicken with bright, red feathers. Rosaria was known for her bright, rosy cheeks, thus the nickname.

     Non Pindi entertained her grandchildren whenever they came to visit, usually in the summer. The Molinaros, actually her great grandchildren, recall Non Pindi much later in life telling them stories in the evening: Pinocchio, Snow White, tales about cops and robbers that she made up herself. And the legend of the seven families.

     John Molinaro remembers Non Pindi's house as being spotless. “She had cleanaphobia,” he recalls. “Everything was in its place. In the morning, she shook out rugs, blankets, sheets, hanging them outside.”

     Raffaeli Morelli, a fellow villager later would say of Rosaria Tocci: “Non Sara Pindi was a wonderful woman. A beautiful woman too. She had those rosy cheeks. Even as an old woman she was beautiful, and good.”

     As Rosaria aged and her own children left, three going to America, one dying before her, only the two daughters of her husband's mistress remained in the village to care for her. Maria and Irene washed their Non Pindi's clothes and cooked for the old lady, repaying their surrogate mother for the kindness she could have denied them when they were growing up. When, eventually they married, Rosaria attended the girls' weddings, being very careful and proper in her relationship with their mother, Sera. Eventually, Maria and Irene moved to Argentina, although one of Irene's daughters lives in Falconara today. And it is because of the kindness of Rosaria Tocci to her mother, and aunt, that Carolina Gnisci welcomes Hal and me so graciously when we, her distant cousins, come to visit.

Chapter 9 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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