Prologue: In Search of Seven Families

 

 

D

ark clouds swirled in menacing patterns to the right of our descending airplane. Below them, shrouded in mist and mystery, lay Albania, one of the world's most closed countries. I was tempted to waken my wife Rose, who had fallen asleep on our early morning flight from Athens, but what could she yet see of the country from which her earliest ancestors had sprung centuries before?

     We were not landing in Albania, but rather in Corfu, a Greek island off Albania's southern coast. Corfu, playground for international jet-setters, would be but an interlude for us between a 1981 trip to Greece and what might be a voyage of discovery to southern Italy, where my wife's Italo-Albanian parents were born.

     Rose's parents were named Musacchio, their first names Giuseppe and Angela, although Giuseppe became "Joe" after he moved to America, and Angela was better known by her nickname, "Ledda." To Rose, they were simply, "Pa" and "Ma." Joe and Ledda migrated to Chicago from an Italian mountain village named Falconara-Albanese. As the name hints, Falconara once had been founded by Albanian settlers around whom a fascinating legend is told. Other villages in the mezzogiorno, Italy's southern half, also have Albanian roots: forty or fifty of them, mostly in the remote and poor mountain areas of Calabria. But, as we later would learn, Falconara was unique among them. For one thing, it is the only Italo-Albanian village on the western slopes of the Appenine mountains that form the spine of Italy. The other villages (except for four in Sicily) are on the eastern slopes, closer to Albania. It was as though those who founded Falconara had to get as far away as possible from their homeland, or what Albanians call, the hearthland.

     My wife's parents, like most of the Falconarese, not only spoke Italian, but also Albanian. Joe and Ledda had four children: one son, Antonio (or Tony) born in Falconara, and three daughters, Marion, Rose, and Beatrice, born in the United States. My wife, whose full name before she married me was Rosaria Lillian Augustina Musacchio, was the second of the three daughters born on Chicago's south side, where most of those who left Falconara for America settled in what was their second great migration.

     There were numerous Falconarese living in Chicago by the middle of the twentieth century. Most of them had first settled in the largely Italian, Grand Crossing neighborhood around 79th and Dobson before spreading into other sections of Chicago and its suburbs. The Falconarese in Chicago included Rose's Uncle John and her Aunt Chiara, brother and sister respectively to Joe and Ledda. They included Uncle Mike and Big Joe and Dom Nesci, who helped in her father's shoe repair store, and a lot of other people named Fionda and Candreva and Manes, whom her parents saw from time to time.

      Rose could converse in Albanian--but not Italian, since her trilingual parents rarely spoke Italian. They either spoke English to the Americans who traded at their store at the corner of 87th and St. Lawrence, or Albanian, which had been the language of their home also in Italy. Until Rose enrolled in kindergarten, she could not speak English well. Even in college, she stumbled occasionally over certain colloquialisms different in her two languages. "Please close the light," she once said to Claire, one of her classmates, who laughed and reminded her that, in English, lights are turned off, not closed. Rose often was amused when her mother would say to her and her two sisters: "Both three of you come here!"

      Joe and Ledda, though comparatively unschooled, were intelligent and hard-working, dedicated to seeing that their children would live easier lives than they had. The dialect Joe and Ledda used in speaking to their children at home was an old, probably mutant, form of the Albanian language. Rose discovered this during our trip when she viewed a television program from Tirane, Albania's capitol, at our Corfu hotel. "I can hardly understand a word," she said sadly.

     Who knew what transformations had occurred to that language during the period Rose's Albanian ancestors spent in Italy? The dialect spoken by the Albanians in Italy actually is referred to as Arberesh, and there are words in that dialect with Italian roots. For example, minestra is used in both Italian and Arberesh. It means soup, an important staple of the diet in Falconara where survival during the cold, damp winter often meant utilizing every scrap for food.      When Rose and I later took Italian lessons, she discovered she understood more of that language than she realized because of cross-over words. Naturally the language spoken by the Albanian settlers would undergo change during what apparently was centuries in Italy.

 

    That was another question: When did the first Albanian migration take place? My mother's name was O'Leary. As a third-generation Irishman, whose ethnic family identity had disintegrated almost without a bubble in the American melting pot, I found it difficult to believe that the Italo-Albanians could have maintained their language and cultural identity for much more than a century, even in Italy's backward south.

    The flight from Albania hardly could have occurred much before the nineteenth century--or could it?

    Yet there was the hint offered by one of Rose's former teachers that the migration might have occurred earlier--much earlier. After graduation from high school in 1952, Rose attended Chicago Teacher's College (now Chicago State University). She enrolled in a European history class taught by Joseph Chada, Ph.D. The class came right after lunch, and she sometimes had difficulty staying awake, but Rose received an "A," and Dr. Chada seemed to like her. Maybe, coming from an ethnic background himself, he realized how much of a sacrifice it was for her Italian parents to send one of their children to college.

    "You have a face out of a Renaissance painting," he once told Rose.

    "Actually, I'm Albanian," Rose informed him and mentioned briefly the legend of the family migration she had learned from her mother, that seven families had fled Albania following a war with the Turks.

    "That must have happened in the fifteenth century," Dr. Chada speculated. "That's when the Ottoman Empire conquered the Balkans."

    Rose wondered about her teacher's dating the migration to the fifteenth century. Her mother, of course, never had made any claims concerning the date of Falconara's founding--if she knew it. Dr. Chada's comment, however, piqued Rose's curiosity and made her want to inquire, at some later date, into the origins of the Musacchio family.

 

     It would be much later, unfortunately after both her parents had died. Perhaps most people only become concerned about their family roots when they pass through middle age and feel their own mortality tugging at their coattails. For Rose and I, this had happened a quarter century after her discussion with Dr. Chada, at a time when our three children were simultaneously in college, about to leave the hearth, so to speak, sooner or later to establish their disparate branches of a family that had as its last name Higdon, not Musacchio. We wanted to provide them with more than a legend for their heritage. We wanted them to know more about the Musacchio family origins, plus we were curious ourselves.

     This, as much as anything, prompted our trip to Italy in 1981.

     Following a brief stay on Corfu, we boarded a ferry to Brindisi, on the heel of the Italian boot. Our boat steamed north through a channel between mainland and island so narrow that I probably could have leaped overboard to swim ashore. Indeed, defectors sometimes did swim the channel to escape communist Albania. Smugglers also apparently moved back and forth across the heavily guarded border between Greece and Albania. When I inquired what items were so valuable that a smuggler would risk capture or death, I was told, "Cigarettes." Nobody in Corfu seemed interested in volunteering much information to a curious stranger, but reportedly the smugglers were Italians with Albanian roots. I wondered if there were any named Musacchio involved in the trade.

     The ferry followed the Albanian coastline for several hours. I spent most of this time leaning over the starboard rail, or below, peering out of portholes, eager to see as much of this mysterious country as possible. Our earlier request to the Albanian delegation at the United Nations for information on travel into Albania had been greeted by a stony silence. (This was a decade before the end of the Iron Curtain, of course.) A U.S. State Department representative from whom we sought help responded by saying the American government could not assist us in obtaining a visa to Albania. He discouraged us from going, because there was no diplomatic relations between the two countries, thus we could not easily be protected in case of trouble. A visit to the Albanian embassy in Rome later resulted in a pleasant talk with a friendly undersecretary, but no assurance that Rose and I would ever be allowed into his country. "We have no facilities for tourists," he smiled. A previous passport owned by Rose and me, one used by us on an earlier trip to Italy, even stated it was not valid to travel into certain countries, including Cuba, China, and Albania. I sensed that--barring some change of heart by the Albanian bureaucrats--the closest I might get to Albania during the writing of this book would be leaning over the railing of our Brindisi ferry. Or maybe I should become better acquainted with the smugglers.

     The Albanian coast was mountainous, almost Tibetan in its grandeur. One massive mountain blotted out the horizon, rising to more than 6,000 feet above the Adriatic Sea. Others seemed nearly as high. They were scarred by deep valleys with sheer cliffs looming over the edge of the sea. Only now and then did we see a road, or notice a village clinging to a hillside. It was easy to understand how Albania had jealously maintained its isolation from modern-day society, isolating itself even from the Russians who dominated the rest of Eastern Europe.

 

      As Albania faded astern, I thought of the family legend about seven families, who many generations before had crossed the same Adriatic Sea seeking a new home. Rose often had heard her mother talk of these seven families who had settled Falconara. Rose's mother remembered the names of several of the families, but she could not recall all seven. The Musacchios had been among the seven families, she insisted, also the Toccis. (Tocci was her maiden name.) Rose's mother claimed the families were of noble birth, her husband's family, the Musacchios, higher on the royal totem pole than her own family, the Toccis.

      According to legend, the seven families sailed south through the Adriatic, crossing the route our ferry was following. They rounded the tip of the Italian boot and sailed up Italy's western coast. Near the sea village of San Lucido, the seven families beached their boat. (San Lucido is not far from Cosenza, a major inland city in Italy's southernmost land province, Calabria.)

      The seven families began life in this new land, naming their settlement Falconara, because they saw falcons circling over the tall rock. That spire, with an old church atop it, is the Italo-Albanian village's most dominant landmark, the site shown on post cards sold in its stores.

      The family legend came to fascinate me, as it did Rose. It hinted of strange adventures on foreign shores. The life it pictured seemed so different than the life I had known in Chicago. Rose and I had met in a typically American setting: a bowling alley. It was shortly after I had been discharged from the Army in November of 1956. A former classmate of mine asked me to substitute in a church bowling league. Bowling in the next alley was this dark-haired beauty with a trim figure, a winning smile, and a left-handed hook. Her name was Rose Musacchio, a teacher at one of Chicago's inner-city schools.

     One of my favorite Aunts had been Italian, and whether for that reason or not, I was instantly attracted to Rose, although it would be several months before I summoned sufficient courage to ask her for a date. When I went to her house, I felt apprehensive around her obviously foreign parents. They treated me politely, if distrustfully, since I had designs on their daughter--but they spoke this curious language! It would be a while before I realized that it was Albanian, not Italian.

     In April of 1958, Rose and I were married. Within the next four years, our three children were born. Rose quit her teaching position to raise them. I quit an editing job to begin a career as a freelance writer. We moved to a lakefront house in the Indiana dunes. We were only an hour's drive from Rose's family in Chicago, but I think her mother was irritated that we had moved so far from her hearth. Italians place great value in family, perhaps their most endearing trait. Of course, Rose's mother had moved halfway around the world in migrating to America!

     I'm not sure at what point I heard the legend of the seven families, or whether it was from Rose or her mother, but soon I claimed it as my legend too. Yet Rose and I always wondered about her mother's tale, suspecting it owed less to fact than to fiction. Several years after our wedding, we went to Italy for our first visit together to the land of her parents' birth. It was time of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Rose's family had relatives in that city. Her Uncle John's granddaughter, Menica, was married to a Roman doctor, Alfredo Gaetano. During the Olympics, Alfredo and Menica left town to vacation in the south, renting an apartment in San Lucido, not far from the beach.

      Once the Games ended, we took a train south to join the Gaetanos. Accompanying us was Menica's brother, John Molinaro, who had moved from Rome to Chicago as a teenager. Johnny was Rose's second cousin. One day, while staying in San Lucido, the five of us drove up into the mountains to see the village from which my wife's parents had come.

 

      To my youthful eyes, Falconara-Albanese seemed like a dusty, drab, ancient, smelly, and ugly village, typical of many in Italy's poor South, the mezzogiorno. Very much the twentieth-century American, I could understand why people would flee it. Into this village at that time, no cars penetrated. The streets were narrow, twisting, and unpaved. We had to park Aldredo's Lancia beneath the village and trudge upwards on a dirt and rock-strewn path to enter Falconara. Women dressed in black passed us, backs bent, carrying firewood on their heads. There was dung from various animals beneath our feet. Chicken scattered as we approached. Dogs barked. Goats brayed. The houses had grey walls, constructed with rocks scooped from the fields, covered with a cement-like mortar. The roofs were tile, faded orange, almost the only hint of color. The windows all had shutters, thrown open to the morning sun, white bed linen draped over the sills for airing, clothing hung from lines from one building to the next to dry. I had the feeling as we walked beneath those windows that there were eyes in them above, closely monitoring our progress. I felt uncomfortable, very much a stranger in a strange land. The people of Falconara, when I heard them speak, used the same seemingly incomprehensible Slavic language spoken by Rose's parents. It was a scene right out of the movie Zorba the Greek.

     In later years, as I reflected on Falconara, I would always remember it in black and white. In her recounting the legend, Rose's mother had referred to the seven families as being of royal blood, or at least being people of wealth and importance. Could the poor villagers I saw on this first visit to Falconara actually have descended from royalty? At the time, I thought the claim unlikely, even preposterous.

 

     As the years passed, Rose and I became more interested in the past than we had while younger. We wondered about the identity of the seven original families. Over a period of years, at family gatherings, wakes and weddings, we began asking the people from the old country about the legend.

     We learned that the seven families had not immediately settled in Falconara upon arrival in Italy. Apparently they stopped first on the coastal lowlands, near San Lucido. Then one day they were dancing in a meadow, "dancing a tarantella," so claimed Anna Ristucci, one of the Falconarese living in Chicago. The tarantella, of course, is a Neapolitan dance, popular in southern Italy, not Albania. This seemed a perfect example of how the legend must have been "improved" over the years as it was handed down from one generation to the next.

     Suddenly, so continued the legend, the dancers sighted sails on the horizon. They were horrified. They had been found! The sails were those of their enemies, the Turks--or so the seven families thought. So fearful were they of Turkish vengeance that the seven families immediately fled higher into the hills. They didn't stop until they reached the point, nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, where Falconara is today.

     Were the sails Turkish? Had the Sultan's warriors trailed the seven families all the way around the boot of Italy to their new home? I doubted it. Assuming you accept the fact that there was a dance and the dancers spotted sails, it may merely have been understandable paranoia on the part of an insular people who had fled Albania for their lives. John Molinaro tells a story about the time during World War II when his family, for safety, had moved from Rome back to Falconara. Falconara hardly was of strategic importance to either side, allies or axis, but one day word suddenly spread through the village that the Germans were coming, the Germans were coming. When the people peeked out from behind their shutters, they saw two young men dressed in shorts striding into the main piazza. One of the supposed "Germans" was Alfredo Gaetano, Johnny's future brother-in-law, then a teenager living in San Lucido. There may have been gentler and friendlier people than Alfredo in this world, but you have to search hard to find them.

     So details of the legend bothered me. In addition, none of the Falconarese, who had been part of a general, mostly southern Italian, migration to America in the early twentieth century, could agree on the identity of the seven families when we inquired! Rose's mother had only mentioned the Musacchios and Toccis on the occasions she discussed the legend when Rose was growing up. Others among the Falconarese would recall, at most, four or five names, then their memories would falter. With prodding, they eventually might volunteer one or two more names, although I had the feeling they were guessing.

     Eventually a consensus grew, with "Musacchio" and "Candreva" being the two most frequently cited names. "Tocci" ran a close third--but Rose and I wondered about the legitimacy of our informal survey, since Musacchio had been the name of her father, Tocci that of her mother. I had to caution my wife about volunteering names and prejudicing the survey. When the individual being questioned paused, Rose sometimes would ask: "What about Tocci?" And invariably that person would respond, politely, "Of course, Tocci."

     We did, however, find several old-timers who stated: "No! Toccis were not from the original families. They came later." One also claimed that the Musacchios were originally Italian, not Albanian. John Molinaro refuted that, however. Before migrating to the United States, he recalled meeting a Musacchio from northern Italy, unrelated to us, not from Falconara, yet also with Albanian roots. At least the Musacchios seemed to be legitimately Albanian, whether or not among the founding seven.

     Soon we identified fifteen families as candidates. In addition to the Musacchios, Candrevas, and Toccis, the names with the strongest claims seemed to be: Formosa, Lupo, and Manes. One member of the Manes clan, a pig-farmer from Northern Indiana, insisted not only that his family was of the original seven, but that they too were members of royalty! Rose's mother, of course, had spoken of their ancestors as being of noble blood, although she had hedged her bet to say that maybe they were merely wealthy.

 

     The pig-farmer's self-assurance caused me instantly to doubt his claim, but there was only one way to resolve the question. My wife and I would make another pilgrimage to Falconara-Albanese, this time to question people from the village, to check records in the church, perhaps to poke around in the cemetery to attempt to locate old gravestones. I doubted whether the first families would have left much record of their arrival, probably being more intent on survival in a new environment than in posterity. But you never knew. You never knew. We could find out.

     In the meantime, we received confirmation that the settlement of Albanians in Southern Italy did date back five centuries. While prowling through the card catalogue one afternoon at the Chicago Public Library, I encountered a reference to a doctoral thesis written two decades earlier by George Nicholas Nasse, then a student at the University of Michigan. The dissertation was titled "The Italo-Albanian Villages of Southern Italy." Alas, it had vanished from the library's collection, but I eventually obtained a microfilm copy from Michigan and later tracked Dr. Nasse to California State University in Fresno, where he taught geography. On a visit to the West Coast, I visited him one day in Fresno, where he was kind enough to offer me an original copy of his dissertation, personally autographed with the inscription: Me gezim to madle, with much gratitude.

     Dr. Nasse was of direct Albanian descent, not Italian, but had become interested in Italo-Albanians and their villages while studying in Perugia, Italy. Since his principal field was geography, Dr. Nasse's dissertation focused on the mountainous regions in Italy where the Albanians settled. One interesting fact was that the Albanians selected geographical situations for their new villages quite similar to that of their old villages. They settled above the 1000-foot level on the sides of mountains. Thus, they escaped the malarial mosquitoes infecting the lowlands. The climb of the seven families into the hills above San Lucido may have been more to avoid insects than the Turks.

     The historical information Dr. Nasse included to support his geographical data proved fascinating. He described an Albanian noble named George Castriota, also known as Scanderbeg.

     Scanderbeg! It is a name few Americans would recognize. Several history professors to whom I mentioned Scanderbeg could tell me nothing about him. "Who is Scanderbeg?" soon became my favorite trivia question, except as I explored documents dating back to the sixteenth century, his impact on European history was hardly trivial. Indeed, the point could be made that the boundaries between East and West that existed during the Cold War were a result of Scanderbeg's both successful and inevitably disastrous defense of his native Albania against the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror, eventually did overrun tiny Albania, as he overran the entire Balkan peninsula, but Mehmed never succeeded in his plans to claim Rome and the rest of Western Europe. The Iron Curtain, in one sense, marked the imprint of Mehmed's most western footstep.

     That step was taken in the fifteenth century. Scanderbeg's battle against the Turkish invaders began in 1443 and ended a quarter century later with his death in 1468, although Albanian nobles continued to struggle for nearly another decade.

     Dr. Nasse pinpointed this period as the time of the Albanian migration to Italy, confirming Dr. Chada's assumption. In 1448, the King of Naples, Alfonso I, requested that Scanderbeg provide him with mercenary soldiers to suppress a rebellion in one of his provinces. Italy is separated from Albania by the Adriatic Sea, less than 100 miles across. Even in the fifteenth century, the journey by sailing boat took at most only a day or two. After the 1448 campaign, many of the Albanian mercenaries accepted land from King Alfonso, remaining in Italy, forming the first Albanian settlements. In 1459, Alfonso's bastard son Ferrante also requested Albanian mercenary help, resulting in a second migratory wave. Finally, in 1476, with Scanderbeg dead and the Sultan on the verge of crushing Albania, a third wave of refugee immigrants headed toward Southern Italy.

     I suspected that Falconara must have been settled during this period, but Dr. Nasse offered no more clues. In fact, although he personally had visited most of the forty-six Italo-Albanian villages identified in his dissertation, he did not visit Falconara-Albanese!

    "One reason," he explained, "was that Falconara was so isolated from the other Albanian settlements." Later, his dissertation finished, Dr. Nasse did visit Falconara during a later trip to Italy. He noted that Falconara was one of only two Italo-Albanian villages whose houses had been constructed in the old Albanian style displaying bare rocks for walls. Falconara, he felt, was unique even among the already unique villages he had studied.

     Meanwhile, we uncovered another snippet of information linking my wife's family with Albania. One afternoon Rose was at the library in Michigan City obtaining some books. She mentioned our quest to one of the reference librarians, Jerry Gustafson, who over the years had taken interest in my many writing projects. Jerry reached for the library's 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and began scanning the section on Albania. I have a similar set, one I inherited from my father. The 1910 edition was the last "great edition" of the Encyclopedia  Britannica, before a policy of continuous revision began. Though

obviously dated, its articles tended to be longer, more authoritative, than those found in that encyclopedia today.

     When Rose returned from the library, she descended to our basement and brought up two volumes: "A" for Albania, "S" for Scanderbeg. Rose skimmed the two articles under those listings rapidly and suggested I also read them. Buried in the columns of fine print was a reference missed by my wife. When Scanderbeg enlisted support from other Albanian nobles for his war against the Sultan, one of the tribal families he approached was the Muzaki!

     A sudden chill swept over me when I spotted that name in the old reference work. Eureka, I could have cried! In America, my wife's family pronounced their name Moo-sa-shee-oh. But in Italy, the "ch" in Musacchio is pronounced like the "k" in key, thus Moo-sa-key-oh, almost identical in pronunciation to that of the Albanian tribal family. The encyclopedia also identified one of the plains of Albania as being called "Musseki." This lent further credence to the fact that Musacchio, indeed, was one of the seven original families.

 

     We never would know for certain until we explored records in the old village. In the fall of 1981, we had an opportunity for just such an exploration when I traveled to Athens, Greece. Rose took a three-week leave of absence from her teaching duties to accompany me.

     I am a long distance runner. In Greece, I competed in the Athens Marathon on the original course once trod by the legendary Pheidippides. It seemed that I was chasing more than one legend that trip. After the race, we had planned to vacation several days in Corfu before going to Italy for some serious research into family history.

     At the same time, one of our three children, David, then a junior at Kalamazoo College, was doing foreign study in Florence, Italy. David had learned how to speak Italian, a language that Rose, despite her understanding of Albanian, still did not know. My limited knowledge of Italian then permitted me to signal the waiter when it came time to pay for our pasta meals: "Il conto, per favore!" We arranged to meet David in Brindisi to see what we could learn about Falconara.

     It would be David's second trip to the ancestral home of his grandparents, although he could hardly be expected to remember the first trip. (Rose had been several months pregnant with him at the time of our 1960 visit.) David met us at our hotel near the railroad station. The next morning, in a rented Fiat, we circled the Bay of Taranto, then headed south down the autostrada to Cosenza. Our first stop was the apartment of one of my wife's many cousins, Delfina Ricucci. After warm greetings, and during coffee and rolls, we continued the game of identifying the seven families. Delfina suggested four: Formosa, Tocci, Candreva, and Manes. (Her mother and father had been named Formosa and Tocci.) Delfina's husband added Staffa and Nesci, but suggested that the Musacchios originally were Italian, an early Musacchio having settled in the village after marrying a Falconarese woman. Although I was reasonably certain he was wrong, I kept my silence.

     We drove crosstown to visit Delfina's mother, Serafina Tocci, my wife's aunt. Rose knew Serafina as Zia Fina, zia being the Arberesh, as well as Italian, word for aunt. Zia Fina had been married to Michele Tocci, who had been Rose's mother's older brother. Michele and Serafina had married in 1908. Although Michele had come briefly to the United States to work before World War I, he returned to Italy and obtained a job as a conductor on the railroad. Until his death from pneumonia in 1940, Michele and Serafina lived outside Falconara, near the train station on the railway line between Paola and Cosenza that serves the village. They had six children, one of whom was Delfina, another Evaristo Tocci, with whom Zia Fina now lived. Zia Fina was near ninety, on the verge of losing her sight, but she hugged Rose with tears in her eyes, remembering her from our visit two decades before.

     The name game continued. The consensus among the Toccis was that the seven founding families were: Candreva, Formosa, Scaramela, Tocci, Musacchio, Genovese, and Nesci--but not without some disagreement. Delfina doubted Genovese. Her brother Evaristo, on the other hand, denied the claim of Manes, suggesting that family had come from San Lucido. I tried to affect an air of impartiality, jotting down all claims in a notebook, but not without bemusement.

     We dined regally that evening: soup, sausages, bread, pasta, meat, vegetables, salad, and fruit, accompanied by a good local wine and climaxed finally by Expresso coffee, a typical Italian meal. If an Albanian cuisine once existed among the descendents of the seven families, it mostly had vanished in favor of a superior culinary art: la cucina Italiana.

     The next morning, with Delfina our guide, we drove from Cosenza to Falconara, heading northward up the autostrada, then turning west on a highway that cut over and through the mountains to reach Paola on the coast. Before it did, we turned off on a side road at the village of San Fili, zig-zagging back and forth along a series of switchbacks before we finally arrived at a point above Falconara.

     As we drove through the hills, I wondered if we were following the same route once trod by Rose's Uncle Mike. Mike Musachio was actually not Rose's uncle (although she referred to him as such), but rather her father's cousin. There were numerous cugini, or cousins, among our extended family, and I often had difficulty remembering their exact relationship to us and to each other. Further complicating matters was the fact that several changed their names after arriving in America. Uncle Mike dropped one "c" from Musacchio, becoming Musachio. His brother Joe, who was referred to as "Big Joe" (because of an ample waistline), changed his name to Musashe. But that was typical in an immigrant society where if you did not change your own name, you sometimes had it changed for you by a customs officer who did not know how to spell.

     In his eighties at that time and living in South Holland, a suburb of Chicago, Uncle Mike once told me that as a boy he walked to Cosenza on errands. The trip took a full day, each one-way portion lasting six hours. He walked alongside a mule and if threatened by wolves, Mike would climb atop the mule since the wolves would not attack it. The only wolves we encountered that day were driving Fiats and Alfas. Even by twisting road, the trip between Falconara and Cosenza took only a half hour. But the hills were high, and steep. Passes between them meandered. I was impressed with the stamina Uncle Mike must have possessed in making that journey by the side of a mule. He, not I, should have been the marathoner.

     On our previous trip to Falconara, in 1960, we had approached from the other direction--up from San Lucido. Thus I was unprepared for the beauty of the drive approaching from Cosenza: lush vegetation, crisp blue sky above, overviews of valleys below, and as we crested the divide, a magnificent panorama looking outward toward the sea. It reminded me of sights I had seen in visits to Hawaii, particularly on the Big Island. The only missing item was a waterfall or two. For two decades, I had carried a black-and-white memory of Falconara, thinking of it as existing in some dusty backwater of the world. But my youthful memory was flawed. Falconara now revealed itself in Technicolor, occupying a site of pictorial splendor, small wonder then that the seven families chose to settle there. Rose's mother used to tell her about the beautiful scenery in the village of her birth, but somehow we had been too immature to recognize it before.

     Cars now penetrated the old village, its alleys and passageways having been paved since our 1960 trip. If I was surprised by the scenery, I was in for another rude awakening when we visited several of the homes, which on the outside looked decayed, ramshackle, crumbling, worse than ghetto buildings back home. With their doors opened to us, however, we beheld marble stairways, well-polished furniture, pictures on the walls, flowers decorating the tables. We stopped at the house where Rose's mother lived after the birth of her first child, Tony, Rose's older brother. Living there then was Carolina Gnisci, another cousin, actually a half-cousin. Rose and Carolina shared a common grandfather, Francesco Tocci, although that's a story to be told later.

    Carolina was another dark-haired beauty. Her husband was named

Franco, actually called "Chic" (pronounced cheech), Chico being a common nickname among the Italians for Franco or Francesco. The Gniscis had five sons, two of them then married and living elsewhere. John Molinaro once had described to me how, as recently as the 1930s, the family home had only a single,

shadless light bulb for illumination. Then it was well-illuminated with modern plumbing in the bathroom. Delfina told us of her son-in-law in Milan, who wanted to purchase a tottering building across the street and remodel it as a summer villa. Cost of the project, we learned, would be 46 million lire, about $30,000 by the then prevailing exchange rate.

     The debate continued about the seven families: Musacchio, Staffa, Candreva, Iosci, we were told. But not Manes, Tocci, or Nesci. Visiting from Argentina at that time was Carolina's father. He offered a reason why Falconara had been settled so distant from the other Italo-Albanian communities. "The original families were wealthy," Carolina's father insisted. "Being of royal blood, they had more to fear from the Turks. But they had enough money to buy their own boat. They sailed as far away from the Turks as possible."

     The royalty claim: I still found it difficult to believe, despite Falconara's now having shifted in my mind from black-and-white to Technicolor. We hoped to settle the question of origins by a visit to the cemetery, or to the church, but Delfina began motioning us toward the door. We were due back in Cosenza for il pranzo, the mid-day dinner, traditionally the largest meal in Italian households. We followed Delfina reluctantly, knowing there was much more to learn, but overwhelmed by family hospitality. After that meal and a second meal later that evening, I found myself unable to focus my attention on our search.

     Little time remained for further explorations the next day, since, tied to a tight itinerary, we had to reach Rome that evening to stay with the Gaetanos, Alfredo and Menica. Nevertheless, I insisted that we detour slightly for one more look at Falconara.

 

    The next morning, we parked in one of the main squares, called Largo Scanderbeg. According to Dr. Nasse, practically every Italo-Albanian village contains a Piazza Scanderbeg, or some other landmark commemorating Albania's greatest hero. I began photographing the town, the view up to the rock once circled by the original falcon of legend, the gardens below, some of which once had been owned by Rose's Uncle John. Noticing a building marked municipio, the town-hall, Rose decided to go inside and see if she could learn anything. Several minutes later, while I continued trying to capture Falconara on film (black-and-white unfortunately), David appeared in the doorway and eagerly waved for me to join them.

      Several men working inside the municipio seemed interested in our project. Their names were Benito Stracan, Mario Amendola, and Giovanni Tocci (the last probably another cousin). Rose communicated easily with them using the language of her parents. David chipped in with the Italian he learned during his stay in Florence. I smiled and nodded a lot.

      Mario claimed he had a book on the village history and hastened home to fetch it. The two others escorted us upstairs to the second floor, where we discovered on one wall of a meeting room a bas-relief head sculpture of Scanderbeg. It was similar to that of an equestrian statue of the great Albanian hero we later would see in the Piazza Albanese, just south of the Coliseum in Rome. On another wall was a painting of the rock with falcon circling. The wall at the far end of the room showed a large map of the central Mediterranean featuring Italy and Albania. When I saw it, I wanted to again shout "Eureka!"

     Two towns were identified by name: Scutari in northern Albania and Falconara-Albanese. An arrow showed the route apparently taken by the original seven families. The arrow headed from Scutari straight south through the Adriatic into the larger Mediterranean sea. Past the heel of the boot, several small arrows darted off the main arrow into the Gulf of Taranto.

     I asked about that. "Many Albanians settled on the Eastern shore," one of the men explained.

     The main arrow turned westward, but instead of darting logically around the toe of the boot, and through the strait of Messina northward into the Tyrrhenian Sea, it circled Sicily before heading up. When I queried why the seven families went the long route around Sicily, the man shrugged and suggested, "Winds or currents might have forced a detour." Or maybe the artist just drew it that way, I thought.

     Our guide seemed vague about several details, but the map did confirm that the tale told by Rose's mother was more than mere legend. It was fact! (We learned later that the founding of Falconara by seven families was taught in the schools.) On the wall before us, I saw imprinted the date of the Albanian migration, 1476, confirming the claim of Rose's European History teacher, Dr. Chada.

     By the time we arrived downstairs after viewing the map, Mario had returned with the book, which contained chapters on the histories of several Italian villages, one of them Falconara-Albanese. We thumbed through the book to see what was said about Falconara. There, finally, appeared the proof we sought concerning the identity of the seven families! Eureka, once more. Two of the families listed in the book--Musacchio and Manes--had blood ties to Scanderbeg, the Albanian noble who led his country against the Turks. The claim of the Indiana pig-farmer that his family had descended from royal blood thus was more than wild boasting. And I was married to an Albanian princess, albeit in exile.

     The identities of the other families were: Iosci, Candreva, Staffa, Fionda, and Scura-Greco. The first three of these five names were on our checklist; the last two, not. The Fionda family, whom we had questioned back in Chicago, did not know they were of the seven. Scura-Greco was a name totally unknown, but suggests a possible Greek connection. There were then no Scura-Grecos living in Falconara--nor anyone named Iosci (or Gliosca by another spelling we found later), although the Gniscis suggested their name had derived from Iosci, a not illogical claim. So much intermarrying goes on in a small village, that it would be hard to find any Falconarese without some claim to descent from the seven families. It is like an American living in New England claiming a Mayflower lineage.

     I asked if we could take time to copy information from the book, but Mario, the one who had fetched it, said: "I'll run upstairs and photocopy this chapter for you!" And so he did. A Xerox machine in Falconara: the ultimate example of how even a fifteenth century village in southern Italy was not immune to twentieth century technology.

     We departed soon for Rome, to visit the Gaetanos. Several days later we stopped in Florence where David was studying. While there, we visited the Pitti Palace to see a portrait of Scanderbeg I had learned was displayed therein. Alas, the gallery containing the Scanderbeg portrait was temporarily closed.

     That merely whetted my appetite to learn more about the Albanian warrior king, now apparently identified as an ancestor of my children. By now I was committed, my curiosity aroused even more by our all too brief visit to the village where Rose's parents had been born. I wanted to explore further the history of fifteenth century Albania and Scanderbeg. I wanted to discover the reasons for the exodus of the seven families, and why--alone among the Albanian refugees--they had sailed all the way around the boot of Italy to find a new home. I wanted to uncover as much information on the village of Falconara as possible, beginning with the original settlement and continuing into the twentieth century climaxing in the second migration to America that included Rose's mother and father.

    I also wanted to place the Musacchios within the context of American immigration, learn how they, and their children, must have felt, living as strangers in a strange land, Rose and her brother and sisters different, and yet so similar, to the other immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants around them. My wife, who seemed now so typically American, had skipped off to kindergarten as a child knowing how to speak Albanian better than she spoke English, incredible, since she was perceived by everybody around as being simply Italian.

    But very few things are simple. As we flew home from Milan's Malapensa Airport at the end of the week, I knew there remained much, much more about Falconara that I wanted to learn.

 

--Hal Higdon

Long Beach, Indiana