Italy calling
In 2003, my father and brother and I travelled to Barile, Italy, birthplace of my great-grandparents and the town they emigrated to the USA from 100 years before. The trip marked the beginning of my foray in blogging (on a private family site). It is also the prologue to what promises to be an amazing return trip this summer.
At the Barile train station
For years my family discussed our great-grandparents, Giuseppe Tolve and Grazia Botte, who had come to America. We knew little because they both died relatively young after having a bunch of children (one of whom was my grandfather), so there was no one with first-hand knowledge to ask about their roots. We came to believe that my great-grandfather himself was an orphan and that he was from a small town in southern Italy called Barile. My grandfather’s and parent’s generation was far more interested in the American dream than in mining the past — especially a past in rural, poverty-stricken southern Italy. But my siblings and cousins were curious and adamant, and as the older generation left us, my father also realized the family history that was slowly slipping away.
So we went back. And what we learned was life-changing. If you’re interested in the details, e-mail me and I will point you to the private site with a dual travelogue from my father and I. Suffice to say that many family myths were debunked, much new information was uncovered, new family we didn’t know we had were found, and a love affair with the region of Basilicata was begun. Here’s an excerpt:
Basically the rest of the day became a person-by-person, cafe-by-cafe hunt for Roberto’s cousin Anita Di Tolve. He had never met her, but he knew she lived there and that her family owned a gelateria. It was like a scavenger hunt. We’d go from place to place gathering new information. At each place word of our presence had preceded us. “Oh, Di Tolve! Yes, yes, we heard you were here.”
Finally we found her. She was in her late 70’s and wearing all black because her husband passed away last year. Once she figured out what was happening she invited all seven of us into her tiny cave-like home and started balling. It was extremely emotional. She insisted that we let her take us to her wine cave (there’s a much a longer story about why most Barilesi have caves), the local cemetery, and to cook us dinner that night. We let her do all of the above. She had to put on black stockings before we went out because if the fellow townspeople saw her without them there would be gossip. She was, after all, a recent widow.
In the cave — a good 25 degrees cooler — we sipped homemade spumante that her husband had bottled five years ago. At the cemetery we searched the above-ground tombs just like we searched the yellowing church records for evidence of Tolve, Botte, Urbano, Paternoster, and Schiro families. Anita could not get in to her father’s tomb because she and her sister were having a dispute and her sister had changed the lock. Typical Italian family bickering.
About a year ago I got an e-mail from a Michele Brucoli, part of the external communications department of the regional government of Basilicata. He had come across my infrequent postings on Barile and was interested in learning more about my perspective on his region as a descendant. We’ve stayed in touch over the past year and he’s sent me plenty of information. Basilicata is eager to promote tourism and investment and, independent of Michele, I’ve long supported this. Basilicata could easily be the next Tuscany or Amalfi Coast. The region boasts two separate coast lines (one on the Tyrrhenian Sea and one on the Ionian Sea), mountains, and dense forests. Like Sicily and Cyprus, Basilicata was a waypoint for whatever conquering empires were traversing the Mediterranean so there’s a diverse ethnic and cultural fabric that you don’t often find in Roman northern Italy. In short, I agree wholeheartedly with Michele that the region is ripe for discovery.
Recently Michele mentioned that the city government of Barile had discovered my blog, including the private diary from 2003, and that they were preparing to give me an award and a “day of celebration” this summer, if I could return. I was floored. I don’t exactly know what the award is, but I assume it has something to do with promoting the Lucani nel Mondo (or people of Basilicatan descent — also known as Lucanians — who live outside of the region). So, it looks like my family is ready to head back with me. I’m excited. Details are somewhat scarce right now, but it is obviously an experience I could not pass up. An award for being intersted in my roots! Hard to believe, really. I may even bring my five-year-old son.
As a sidenote, if you live in or near Chicago and want to get a taste of Basilicata there is actually a restaurant on the north side called Anna Maria Pasteria run by two sisters from Ripacandida, a small town near Barile in Potenza. The menu itself is fairly broadly Italian, but the place feels like the rustic kitchens of Basilicata, and if you ask Anna or Maria specifically they will cook you up real local dishes. Recently, as my father, uncle, cousin and I were leaving from dinner there, I mentioned my name to Anna. She grew up with my grandparents and extended family on the south side and seemingly knew more about them than we did. It is a small world when you are from Basilicata.
Grappa power!
I’m a fan of the liqueur known as grappa. This pungent drink is literally the bottom of the barrel, the end of the line for wine. Once winemakers have sucked all the juice from the stems, skins, and seeds at the bottom of the tub there’s left a goopy sludge (called the lees). Someone somewhere was the first person to think hmmm, maybe I can distill that crud and make a drink. Hence grappa.
I remember when my wife and I first tried our hand at winemaking in 1996. I wanted to make grappa also, but didn’t quite remember that personal distillation was, well, illegal until I posted openly on Usenet asking where I might obtain a still. Ah, the folly of ignorance. A few backchannel e-mails later I was fully informed that I was a dumbass for posting this request publicly. The wine itself ended up a hellish swill, not alcoholic enough to compensate for its lack of taste. I should have made grappa, you see.
Many people think grappa is jet fuel. Like tequila, there’s a vast chasm of drinkability between the bad stuff and the good stuff and, true enough, the smell of grappa can singe the nasal passage. It is an acquired taste.
It turns out I can no longer precisely counter the argument that grappa tastes like gasoline. For grappa, I have learned, can be turned into ethanol without much effort. Wired mag reports:
From October until June, backhoes pick apart a pile [of lees] and feed the mulch onto a series of conveyors, which carry it to a series of presses and kettles. The resulting solution is further fermented to make both grappa, a potable (to some, anyway) alcohol, at one end of the distillery and biofuel at the other. Caviro [an Italian distillery] produces a relatively small amount of grappa compared with its nearly 793,000 gallons of ethyl alcohol. The potent fuel is sold throughout Europe.
Naturally most Italians are aghast at the thought of using precious wine grapes to power their cars. But I bet they’d have no problem mulching a few French vineyards for it.
[Tip: for a real kick in the pants add grappa to espresso to make a Caffè corretto, literally, corrected coffee. Ah, yes, now the coffee is correct! That’ll get you going in the morning.]
Azzurri per sempre!
They should bronze this pose, Iwojima-like, and plop it out in front of the Colosseum.
Update: if they can make a fresco why not a sculpture?
Today in Italian news …
Well, it looks like my daughter will have to be the second woman of Italian-American descent to go into space. Crap! (Congratulations to Lisa Caputo Nowak.)
In other news, the battle of the European viticultural powerhouses will be staged on Sunday. Viva Italia! Screw France like they were the Gaul-toys of the Roman Empire!
Eleven months ago I received the results of my participation in The Genographic Project, the National Geographic-IBM partnership to help complete the map of genetic diversity that accounts for humankind’s migration around the world. Since then I’ve been contacted by lots of people also involved in the project who, presumably, are googling M172, the name of mutation that we share. My patrilineal genealogical line intersects the genetic data in southern Italy. But the members of my extended “family” (according to comments on this site and private e-mail) live in Iran, Hungary, India, and Croatia. Amazing to even feel a shred of familial relation to these perfect strangers.
And lastly, the Little Italy, Chicago entry on Wikipedia is but a stub. This is criminal. Or rather, the fact that I don’t have time enough to flesh it out is criminal. I owe it to my grandfather’s stomping ground to edit this, no? Must do this. Must.
Invaders of Basilicata
You kinda knew this was coming. Tourists are finally discovering Basilicata, the last untrammelled region of Italy. I’ve written a few times about why I think this part of Italy is so wonderful and it is true that a part of what makes it wonderful is that you just don’t encounter many tourists. Yet, the world needs to discover Basilicata and, apparently, it is.
A few signs that Basilicata is breaking out:
The May 2006 “Europe” issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine has a long piece on “Italy’s Secret City,” Matera, one of the provincial centers of gravity of Basilicata and one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in Europe. The online version of Travel and Leisure proclaims it more bluntly: Italy’s last, secret corner: Basilicata.
The April 2006 edition of Gourmet Magazine asks on the cover “Have You Been To Basilicata?” and delivers a full food-centric tour of the region. (The article is not online, but two of its recipes are.)
In the last few years at least two book-length travelogues have been written about Italy’s instep: Seasons in Basilicata and Under the Southern Sun.
My posts on Basilicata seem to have caught the attention of at least one of the members of Basilicata’s regional government. Recently he sent me a boxload of material relating to external promotion. Guides to wines and olive oils of the region, a CD of music to eat by (not kidding) by a classical composer from Basilicata, multimedia, maps, storybooks, cookbooks, catalogues of arts and crafts. These materials are all new. The regional government seems to be making a big tourism push. They have an advantage too in that a large percentage of foreigners with Italian heritage had ancestors from Basilicata. (The story of why — the destitution of the area in the 19th and 20th centuries — is a subject for another post.) Called the Lucani nel mondo, or Basilicatans of the world, these “expatriates” are a prime target for the new tourist marketing.
So, Basilicata is starting to shake the stereotype of bumpkin backwardness and desolation. This may mean that it will no longer serve as the backdrop of choice for religious moviemakers, but such is life. Basilicata and the south of Italy have for centuries been the Mediterranean waystation for marauding hordes and conquerors (a fact which gives it a greater diversity of cultural influences that regions to the north), so it is only fitting that they are now welcoming a different set of hordes — this time on their own terms.
Missionary ambition
During my junior year in college I fled my home institution of Vanderbilt for a semester abroad in Rome with Loyola University. It was an experience that changed my life. About a year ago I was asked to serve on the board of the Rome Center or LURC as we used to call it. This position has allowed me to get to know Father Mike Garanzini, the charistmatic relatively-new president of the university in Chicago. (This past weekend Garanzini’s turnaround of Loyola was the cover story of the Chicago Tribune Magazine.) Father Mike has big plans for LURC. One idea is really appealing to me. He’s interested in creating something called the Ricci Scholarship, a funded full-year of study abroad for exceptionally talented undergraduates. It would place them in Rome for a semester of study and then, through a partnership with Fordham University, move them to Beijing to finish the year. The goal would be a comparative assessment of business, art, mathematics, history, you-name-it and the outcome would be a senior year thesis on the same. It is a bold idea, but one that will likely work given the long history of respect in China that Jesuits enjoy in the country. Named for the missionary Matteo Ricci and undertaken in the spirit of synthesis of East and West the program may begin as early as 2007. With the western world so eager to crack the nut that is Chinese culture and business and with China determined to spread Mandarin around the world this seems very timely.
Unrelated but personally interesting is an exhibit at the Loyola Museum of Art, which I only learned of today. It presents works of Caravaggio as digital replicas per se in a darkened gallery using high-res display monitors. This is the first that I know of bringing the virtual inside the physical so literally. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m eager to know what happens to the sense of aura that standing in front of a tangible artwork produces when you’re once removed from it. I can’t imagine it is any less real than standing 30 people back gazing at the diminuitive Mona Lisa encased behind bulletproof glass.
Matera
The most interesting city in Italy, in my opinion, is not even on 5% of tourist itineraries. Matera is a gem protected by being nowhere near the sea or a navigable waterway in a region, Basilicata, which is still struggling to shed the image of bumpkin backwardness held by its northern Italian compatriots. Matera was centuries-old before Rome was founded and is known primarily for i sassi, troglodytic caves carved from the soft rock of the hillside. It is impossible to tell where the hill leaves off and man-made structures begin. Carlo Levi famously exposed the plight of the impoverished populace of Matera and Basilicata in Christ Stopped at Eboli and since then things have improved. The Italian government moved residents out of the caves a few decades ago and set about to rehabilitate and modernize them. Though most of the caves are abandoned, some Materans are now moving back in, some own them as storage, and at least one hotel exists built into the rock.
Now comes word that Matera has a new use for the rock-hewn dwellings: data-haven. A company called Datacontact is using the caves to house their servers and a call center. It makes some sense. Physically the servers could not be better protected inside the mountain. Though in a tectonically active area, the sassi have survived in their current form for over a millennia. Geographically too the placement is sensible. Labor is plentiful in Basilicata marginale, as regional natives mockingly call themselves. One hopes that this geographic marginalization (and associated prejudices that accompany it) will matter less in a the virtual world of telecommunications. After all, in a network there is no such thing as a margin.
And lastly a cookbook recommendation: A Mediterranean Feast. Got this as a Christmas present and it is a wonderful introduction to the food of the whole region. Southern Italy, being a cross-roads of the Mediterranean, is a hodgepodge of cultures and influences not known in the more European northern regions of Italy. Greek, Roman, Norman, Albanian (more on that later!), Spanish, Muslim — all mixed together. So this cookbook, as a much a regional history as a culinary guide, is particularly illuminating about the myriad influences that define Basilicatan cuisine. This weekend I made Lucanian roast chicken with homemade wheat pasta. But really that was just an excuse to try Mark’s reconstituted apricot tart recipe. Apricots, of course, being a favorite fruit in Egypt and so wonderfully in keeping with my OCD-like focus on the Mediterranean basin. Tip #1: add some orange juice and even a splash of sweet liqueur to the water that will rejuvenate the dried apricots overnight. Tip #2: Don’t try to force wheat pasta through a capellini-sized extruder die. The wheat is too dense and the angel hair holes too small. Your machine will blow up. Trust me.
You may notice that this entry belongs to a new blog category, sub-category really, called Basilicata. I’ll be posting more on this region throughout the year. Though there’s been one travelogue written on the region recently, the instep of the boot is fascinating and unknown to most. Just like Ascent Stage.
I caffè dei sorrisi
Smile, you’re drinking authentic Italian capuccino. (Rionero in Vulture, Italy, 2003)
(The site was getting too text-heavy, OK? Had to break it up a bit.)
Pasta as pastime
I am able to screw up cooking a meal even when I follow the recipe precisely so it was particularly foolhardy of me to get a jump on my new year resolution to cook more by trying to put together dinner Saturday night based on a short narrative passage in a travelogue. But since I had the kids without wifely backup I decided to at least fill the time with enough potential for mess and chaos as to keep them interested.
Tip: if you have kids and a pasta machine, use it. My boys loved it. Making pasta is hard to screw up in a machine*. Just pour in flour, some eggs, optional dry ingredients and then watch it ooze out of the template you screw on. It looks somewhat excretory or vermiculate or both, which of course is nothing but fun for little kids. Pulling the strands and cutting them off with scissors also scores high marks. How often do you get to use arts and crafts supplies in the kitchen? Next up: Elmer’s Glue.
We made the pasta, called lagane, a type of wide strand noodle from the Basilicata region, out of wheat flour for inclusion in a simple sauce also from the region. Actually everything from Basilicata is simple. It is the most poverty-stricken part of the country (which is why so many of its people emigrated, thanks great-grandpa!) and so recipes are always simple, if sometimes unfamiliar. Great for a guy trying to learn to cook. The sauce was comprised of olive oil, garlic, chili peppers (always in dishes from Basilicata), tomatoes, walnuts, and basil. Turned out wonderful.
The other, riskier dish culled from the travelogue mentioned above is called ciambutella, a kind of omelette of Italian sausage (and pancetta, but we had none), peppers, zucchini, potatoes, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, herbs, and of course eggs. You eat it on cross-sections of crusty bread, like bruschetta or crostini. My guess is that I should have doubled the egg quantity as it seemed to be little more than cooked veggies with sausage. Not bad, of course, especially with the pasta dish, but still.
Lastly, a real crowd-pleaser (remember my crowd): R2D2 Treats. Half of a banana covered in melted white chocolate and chopped peanuts and flanked by two pieces of Kit Kat. This is the droid you are looking for.
Please note: my new year resolution did not include cleaning up the kitchen after cooking.
[*] Unless the machine fails to turn on. At which point I considered panic as the children were all geared up for pasta and the only way to do it was manually. Hand-cutting pasta is only slightly more fun than peeling a carrot with a fork. A Fonzie-like thwack on the side started the unit, thank god.
La Befana
Today the main Catholic church in Chicago’s Little Italy celebrated La Befana, the good witch of the epiphany. The story goes that Befana was a little old lady who took the three kings in for a meal and rest on their way to Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. They asked her to join them but being too busy with housework she declined, only later realizing that she had missed an opportunity to witness the birth of the savior. So she packed up some gifts and set out to find them and the baby, but she never did and continues wandering the earth (a bit creepy, no?) depositing gifts in children’s stockings to make up for missing Christ’s birth. Typically the gifts are treats of some kind. Even the coal is sweet.
For our family, La Befana marks the end of exactly one month of gift-giving mayhem. It starts on Dec. 6. with the Dutch tradition of putting out shoes for St. Nicholas moves through the pagan-Christian-consumerist Christmas festivities and ends with the Italian tradition of La Befana. Phew. Multiculturalism is tiring.
See also: The Legend of Old Befana by Tomie De Paolo, a great kid’s book.
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