PAOLO TULLIO
North of Naples, South of Rome
With illustrations by Susan Morley
To Chris and Diane
Thanks to John and Isabella for their encouragement,
Paul and Kathy for keeping me mobile,
and my wife for being there
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Maps
Preface
1 Picnics in the Snow
2 Wine and the Baby Jesus
3 Casa Nostra
4 Families and Favours
5 Difficult is Best
6 Naples and the Law
7 Racial Memories
8 Bribesville
9 Clean Hands
10 Walking to Sinella’s
11 Sex and Fashion
12 The Italian Larder
13 Pyrotechnics and Drama
14 Religion
15 Then and Now
16 Damming the Molarino
Copyright
This is not a book about Italy; it is about the Comino Valley in Lazio. The valley is, none the less, inhabited by Italians who have a lot in common with those who live outside the valley. In fact, they have so much in common that it is tempting to assume that all of Italy works in much the same way as the valley does.
It is a big valley – nearly a fifth of the province of Frosinone. A man could spend much of a lifetime discovering what is worth knowing about its dozen towns. It is big enough to be a world in itself; a simple man could find all he needs within it.
There is no escaping the fact that my viewpoint is provincial, and when the focus is on Gallinaro, my home town, it becomes distinctly parochial. Still, this valley is my Italy; I know it well, and am related to a huge number of its inhabitants. Historically, this was not a rich world; predominantly agricultural, its wealth has always been wine and oil. Unlike Tuscany, the valley contains no large reservoirs of art or culture, it has no beaches, no cathedrals and no tourists. Until recently, large numbers of its inhabitants emigrated to Europe, the Americas and the Antipodes. No one ever came here, they just left.
Lurking within this undisturbed territory is, of course, the real Italy. People from all over the peninsula lay claim to living in the real Italy, but they are wrong. The real Italy lies here, in the Comino Valley, north of Naples, south of Rome, high in the mountains, surrounded by the Apennine peaks.
Preface
My father was born in 1918 in Gallinaro, one of the twelve villages in the Comino Valley. His father, Luigi, had the dubious distinction of being one of the last soldiers to be killed in the First World War – wounded on 10 November 1918 and dying three days later, six months before my father was born. My grandmother Luisa, young and pretty, refused two offers of marriage and brought up my father and his elder brother by herself. Luigi left her a large house in Gallinaro, which she converted into a petrol station, a bar and a grocery shop. The house is at the bottom of the hill on which Gallinaro stands and on what was then the main road across the valley, so the business prospered.
My father was a good student and won a scholarship at the age of seven to Frascati College, in the Alban Hills, to the south of Rome. It was a boarding school, where the students had only the summer holidays to spend at home. Here he excelled at Latin and Greek, but a year before his baccalaureate he was expelled for bringing a girl to his rooms when it was discovered, despite his protestations, that she was not in fact his cousin. This was a serious blow, since he now had to find a new school with only a year until his university entrance. After nearly ten years at Frascati, he attended his last year of high school at the Tulliano, the classical lycée in Arpino, an old city just beyond the confines of the Comino Valley.
Luisa, my father’s mother, was not from Gallinaro originally. She came from the village of Casalattico, another of the villages in the valley. Her family, the Fuscos, were farmers in the hamlet of San Nazario. Since the middle of the last century pieces of the farm had been sold off bit by bit – family history has it that this was to cover gambling debts. As it grew smaller, it was no longer able to support the two large families that then worked it. By the turn of the century two brothers, Benedetto and Francesco, had divided the house, and each brother had seven children. Luisa, my grandmother, was the youngest child of the elder brother.
Mario, the eldest child of the younger brother and Luisa’s cousin, decided that prospects on the farm were far from good and so he emigrated with two of his brothers to Scotland, but not before the three brothers had married the three Magliocco sisters. Mario had two daughters, the elder of whom, Irene, he sent to school in Italy, where she lived with her aunt Rosa in Casalattico. After returning to Scotland for two years, Irene went back to Italy to the College of Santa Giovanna, in Arpino, where she met my father, Dionisio, her second cousin.
Nuns, being what they are, ensured that contacts between their female charges and the outside world were as short and as sporadic as possible, so it was not until my mother and father were visiting their respective halves of the family house in San Nazario that their romance blossomed. But then came the war. My mother returned to Scotland, while my father studied law at the University of Florence. They corresponded as frequently as they could, but towards the end of the war messages became harder to send. Its last years found my father as a second lieutenant in the Italian army, hiding from the Germans in the mountains surrounding the Comino Valley. The house in San Nazario had been taken over by the Germans as a billet, while a house my father had inherited in Gallinaro was also requisitioned. The Comino Valley was for eighteen months part of the Gustav line holding Cassino, so the density of German troops in it was high.
When Cassino finally fell, the Germans left the valley and the rebuilding began. In Italy it is traditional on New Year’s Eve to set off bangers and fireworks. My father told me that New Year’s Eve 1944 was quite a sight. All around the valley people had collected the detritus of war and saved it for the celebrations. The sky was alight with tracer bullets, machine guns fired, grenades exploded and high above Casalattico someone pounded the sky with a howitzer. For years afterwards, my great-aunt had a stack of explosives – little cakes about the size of a bar of soap with a hole in the middle, presumably for a detonator. She used them for firelighters. That year everyone in the valley was well armed. The new government was nervous of the strength of the former resistance fighters. My father and his cousin Dino were armed by the government and given a small arsenal to distribute to trusted friends and relations if the expected rebellion ever happened. In 1946 my father was elected mayor of Casalattico, the youngest ever and almost certainly the first with a degree.
In Scotland in 1947 my mother was making preparations to marry a nature-cure practitioner. Shortly before the wedding date my grandfather took her to Italy to visit their relations, since the war had disrupted communications between them for six years. Naturally, while in Casalattico, my mother met my father again and their romance started anew. On her return to Scotland the impending marriage to the Scot was called off with three weeks to go, gifts were returned and a new wedding planned. Shortly afterwards my father, disillusioned with post-war Italy, came to Scotland to marry my mother. I was born in 1949 and, although I spoke only Italian until I was five, English became my first language.
I suppose early experiences have profound effects. Like my father, I was sent to boarding school at the age of eight, a decent Catholic preparatory school in Worcestershire. Although I have happy memories, I can also remember how frequently I was told that ‘We won the war’. This was often accompanied by a dig in the head and, truth to tell, never made me feel very English. The differences in culture were never more appa
rent than on visiting days, when my father was apt to kiss me. Whereas a kiss from a mother was just about tolerated, a kiss from one’s father was definitely suspect, if not damn foreign.
An English public school followed, but although by this time memories of the war and its prejudices had become more remote, an Italian surname was no great help. Still, after so many years imbued with England and things English, a great deal rubbed off. In many ways this English influence is still with me, but there remains a feeling of not quite belonging. As I got older, a sense of being Italian grew in me, not replacing my early cultural adaptations, but rather in addition to them. Throughout my schooldays a holiday in Italy, or more specifically Gallinaro, was a yearly or sometimes twice yearly event. The house in Gallinaro that my father had inherited became a home from home. Here I met cousins and the children of my parents’ friends, with whom I made lifelong friendships. Each visit to Italy allowed me to compare the patterns of their lives with my own, to contrast growing up in Italy with growing up in England. In my early teens, life in Italy seemed infinitely more attractive than in an English boarding school.
My parents moved from Salisbury to Dublin in 1962, while I continued boarding in England. During his years in Dublin my father was increasingly pulled towards returning to Italy. I had completed my first year at Trinity College Dublin when in 1969 my parents went back to Italy, where they remained until my father’s death. It was then that perhaps I came closest to making the move to Italy myself, but an Irish wife and the lure of Ireland prevailed. Now my children can, and do, compare life in the Wicklow hills with their Italian cousins and friends.
We go to Italy every year and I hope that my children have come to love the people and places as I have. I have grown up with my friends and relations in Gallinaro, watched their careers begin and flourish, and now watch as their children grow. They have given me love and companionship over the years, as well as an understanding of how life in Italy is lived. This book is a result of the curious perspective of part belonging and part alienation with which the accidents of my personal history have left me.
1
Picnics in the Snow
My valley is a monochrome,
it knows no half-measures.
Its people are always on fire
with either love, or hate:
it takes only a drop to make them boil over.
You can’t trifle with these people –
just as you can’t make light of their wines.
My valley has men like pirates,
who leave, only to return
laden with booty,
to give it villas and gardens
like offerings to a spoiled lover.
My valley has women soft and gentle,
who never forget,
who live in interminable mourning.
It has boys who act like men
and treat their mothers like wives.
From Cavallo di miniera, by Gerardo Vacana
The valley that I also call mine, the Comino Valley, is the shape of a lozenge aligned east–west with two easy entrances, one to the west, and one to the south. It lies some eighty miles to the south-east of Rome, forming a near-equilateral triangle with Naples. Its sides are the Apennines, snow-capped for half the year, and through it flows the river Melfa, which eventually irrigates the plains of Roccasecca. Eleven towns hug the valley sides, circling the town of Gallinaro, which saddles a hill almost in the centre.
Of the twelve towns, Atina has the longest recorded history. One of the five legendary cities of Saturn, it pre-dates Rome by several centuries. It owes its historical power to its position, dominating the southern entrance to the valley which leads to the Cassino plains. As mountain valleys go, the Comino Valley is large and fertile, supporting some 25,000 inhabitants. This fertility and its defensibility have led to a long list of invaders over the years: Greeks, Samnites, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Lombards, French, Spanish, Austrians, Germans and Popes have all stayed and left their mark.
It was to this valley that my family came in the fourteenth century, to the hamlet of San Nazario in the comune of Casalattico. The land at San Nazario is good, sloping gently from the road to Casalattico down to the river Melfa. It was purchased from the Abbey of Montecassino in 1346 by Pasquale Fusco – the deed of sale still forms part of the incunabula of the abbey’s library.
At that time the land included valley fields on both sides of the Melfa (which separates the comune of Casalattico from Casalvieri), the small mountain of Monte Cicuto, now in the comune of Atina, and the forest along the top of the Silara range which separates the Comino Valley from the plains of Cassino. Until the 1930s the farm produced corn, olives and grapes; the hillside slopes of Monte Cicuto supplied the olives that were pressed in the frantoio in the cellar.
The house is a large one, built upon a convent that was part of the original sale, which in turn was built upon a pre-Roman Samnite temple. By the end of the last century it was already divided into two, a result of the Italian dislike of primogeniture and a predilection for partitioning land and buildings between all the offspring equally. My great-great-grandfather, the last man to own the house intact, had three sons; one became a priest and was later to work in the Ministry of Education in the last years of the Kingdom of Naples; the other two remained in the valley to divide the house and land between them. They both had seven children, who grew up in either half of the house. The partitioning of land and house has continued. The land was divided with every generation, not into useful parcels, but by splitting each field into strips. I have inherited fifteen of these strips, totalling about 3.5 hectares; the largest strip is about half a hectare, but long and very thin. Since no strip is of any use by itself, and the chances of getting forty or so cousins together to sort it out are nil, these pieces of land are valueless and have been abandoned. Until I made them over some years ago to an uncle, I was also the possessor of a quarter of a barn, one eighth of a bedroom and one sixteenth of a kitchen.
Thankfully my father’s uncle, Don Ferdinando, the archpriest of Gallinaro, left his house there to my father and it has since come to me. From the terrace of this house I can see Monte Cicuto and La Silara, so the ancestral holdings are still in view, if nothing else.
My mother told me that as a child, growing up in Casalattico, she had a mental picture of the Creation. At the end of six days’ labour creating the earth, God found he had nothing but rocks left over, and, throwing these away, he unwittingly created the Comino Valley. Even by Italian standards, it is high – the valley floor is more than 300 metres above sea-level and four of its towns stand at more than 600 metres. So much of Italy is mountainous, apart from the Po valley plain, which forms a triangle stretching from Turin in the west to Trieste and Rimini in the east, the rest of the peninsula is mountain, and the average width of the coastal plain is only 10 kilometres.
Topography has had its effects on the Comino Valley. Because the only two easy exits are to the west towards Rome and to the south towards Naples, the valley has always been under the influence of one or the other. Trading patterns, too, have developed along the path of least resistance westwards to Sora and Rome. Until ten years ago the road from Atina south to Cassino was a series of hairpin bends winding down from Atina, up to Belmonte, and down again to Cassino – by car a tortuous journey of about an hour. The road to Sora took about twenty-five minutes, so produce for the market was sent there instead. Contact beyond the valley has always tended to stretch westwards: Rome drew the valley’s inhabitants with its jobs, hospitals and university, even though the valley had been for centuries a part of the Kingdom of Naples. Even our local dialect is closer to Roman than to Neapolitan.
All this is changing because of a new road. The superstrada from Atina runs south to Cassino, through a tunnel and then on stilts, in a gradual descent to the plains, so now the trip takes a little under fifteen minutes. Increasingly, produce is going to Cassino, as are the young people since the opening of the university
there.
From early Roman times roads have been an important feature of the national psyche. They represent trade, progress and technological prowess. Because Italy is so mountainous, road-building requires great skill and Italian road-builders are justifiably respected for their expertise around the world. Italy spends a lot of money on roads – for the most part this is a commercial investment, allowing goods to be moved from remote areas to the market centres. It is also a part of the grander scheme of things, part of the homogenizing of all the remote pockets into a unified state. Since our valley typifies a remote region, at least topographically, we have seen at first hand the results of this strategy.
Responsibility for road-building is devolved to the four tiers of government: the national government is concerned with the building of autostrade and superstrade linking national centres; regional government builds the roads that link lesser regional centres; provincial government looks after county roads; and local government is concerned that all houses within the comune have access to the town’s facilities. By the nature of the landscape these roads are expensive and vast sums of money are set aside for their construction. This money is distributed to the various authorities, so there is ample scope for corruption at each and every level.
Since my only viewpoint is provincial, the examples I furnish are local. However, a quick scan of the national press confirms that the local experience is universal. At my southern end of the province of Frosinone there are three centres of commerce that are important to the valley – Cassino to the south, Sora and Frosinone town to the west. For as long as anyone can remember the road from Sora to Frosinone has been horrendous. Narrow, hilly and winding, almost constantly choked with light and heavy goods vehicles, it was a perfectly formed bottle-neck. A road linking the two towns was proposed before the war, plans were laid, money set aside. By the 1980s work had begun. The section nearest to Sora was completed fairly quickly and then suddenly all activity came to a standstill.
North of Naples, South of Rome Page 1
