Two Posters
I was 13 years old on November 4th 1966 when the Arno crested dumping water, the heating oil naptha, and an estimated half a million tons of mud into homes, businesses, churches and museums in Florence, Italy.
Growing up, I understood from the many family stories I listened to that Italians had enough hard times in the 20th century without natural disasters paying a call. Since my parents were preparing to take their first trip to Italy with stops in L’Aquila and Florence, I closely followed the news and studied the photographs of The Great Flood of Florence.
In October of 2006, while living in Florence for a month, I was excited to share in the city’s commemoration of the flood which focused on gli angeli nel fango – the mud angels. This name tagged the thousands of volunteers who formed bucket brigades or human chains to extract mud covered books from the National Library and debris from the Uffizi Gallery and other treasure houses.
Posters marking the 40th anniversary were taped on every shop window and visible at bus stops and little bill boards throughout the city. Where I “borrowed” mine from will remain a secret, but I look at it every day in my home in Washington where it hangs in my kitchen.
Another poster inspires me these days- blogAway’s emblem, created by Sammy Dunham for the blogger conference we are organizing called ‘Hands on L’Aquila’ which takes place in September of 2012 at Sextantio in Santo Stefano di Sessanio. Visit www.blogAway.org to understand how you can join in the human chain to support L’Aquila and also have a wonderful experience at this unique 2 day conference.
Someday I hope to hang another anniversary poster- one commemorating the days gone by when angels convened in Abruzzo.
The Possibility of Community
Guest Post by Kathryn Abajian
My first visit to the burgh in 2006 was also my first trip to Italy. After a leisurely drive from Rome, through increasingly spectacular countryside, Santo Stefano di Sessanio appeared at the top of a hill at the top of a mountain, its medieval crenulated tower solid and sure. Helen and I were on a mission—she to find a way to contribute to this village in the Abruzzo region where her ancestors lived, and I to see what I could see.
We were shown to our room and given a heavy skeleton key longer than a woman’s hand. It was too awkward to carry, so the first day we hid it under an ancient pot in the foyer outside our room and wandered through town, negotiating a maze of tiny alleyways and narrow staircases, stepping around a sleeping dog, passing under open archways with vestiges of painted Medici ornamentation. Everything in town is the same color—bone white, the patina of centuries embedded in every stone, shepherds’ ancient stories seeming to emanate from walls and rock lintels.
We found our way to dinner that night by the light of dozens of candles set on shallow steps leading to the cave-like dining room and feasted on roasted lamb and feather- light gnocchi. Like all the rooms converted from medieval homes scattered throughout the burgh, ours was cave-like. Stepping back centuries, we slept on antique wood beds on mattresses filled with the wool of local sheep, and luxuriated in Phillipe Starck-designed bathroom, the room’s warmth radiating from a system set below the stone floors. We felt inside history.
We set up our first writing workshop to take place in 2009, hoping that by bringing people to the town we could contribute to its revenue and restoration. We were ready to go when we learned the shocking news in early April —a 5.8 earthquake had struck, centered a few miles away from Santo Stefano in the large and lovely university town of L’Aquila. The devastation of L’Aquila was nearly complete—leveling cathedrals, museums, university buildings and, especially, leaving 28,000 people homeless.
Though we had to cancel our workshop, Helen and I went to see the damage that June and, though most of Santo Stefano’s stone structures remained intact, significant parts had fallen. By then workers were assembling stones to rebuild the town’s iconic symbol—its stone tower. Nearly all the townspeople were living below town in blue government tents set out in a meadow, not necessarily because their homes had been damaged, simply because of the terror they still felt.
Yet, the following year, in June of 2010, we ran our first Italy, In Other Words writing workshop with eight writers from San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tennessee, Toronto, Netherlands, Milan and Australia. That summer the townspeople were back in their homes, the burgh’s four restaurants open, our hotel, Sextantio Albergo Diffuso, up and running. We walked around remarkable scaffolding the government had built around the tower—enormous pipes joined with heavy fittings constructed to support the remains and shaped to replicate the tower’s iconic shape.
It was satisfying to integrate ourselves into the town—to hold our workshops in the spacious Conference Room, formerly an old woman’s home where in her last days she stayed warm by burning newspapers, the blackened walls still in evidence. We gathered each morning to talk about memories and how to make them into art—how to conjure the truth of our pasts, what to keep, what to omit and how to form the whole. We quickly became a supportive and compassionate writing community, learning how to share and respond to each other and to highly personal and newly public text.
We marveled at the town’s antiquity and old ways, relaxed in its candle-lit Cantinone chatting with the bartender, Marco (who once gave me impromptu Italian lessons involving dramatic role playing), and later in the week met the cast and crew of the George Clooney movie being filmed in town. Each daybreak we returned to the Cantinone to enjoy Emanuella’s expansive spread of prosciutto, pastries, fruit, and coffee. One afternoon excursion took us to a local artisanal sheep farm where we watched workers make mozzarella, twisting it into beautiful forms and hanging it nearby to cure as the people of Abruzzo had been doing for centuries.
Now we are approaching Italy, In Other Word’s third workshop in Santo Stefano di Sessanio, May 27—June 2, 2012. We anticipate another rich foray into historyand look forward to the moment we are handed that large room key—our entrée into antiquity and modernism, to the wonder of ancient Abruzzese culture, to lovingly made cuisine, to a nightly glass of garnet-colored Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, and to the expectation of forming another community of thoughtful, supportive writers.
Something Inside
I won’t be able to visit L’Aquila this year until June to visually measure the recovery efforts from the earthquake which tore the heart out of central L’Aquila and left damage in many other places. When I visit, I will head to my favorite street before the quake – Corso V. Emanuele where before April 6th 2009 university students, teens, couples and families strolled amid shops, restaurants and university buildings. The pace was slow and tourists felt welcomed.
April 6th 2011 Georgetown University’s Italian Department invited Anna Tozzi who is in charge of International Relations at the University of L’Aquila to speak about the city’s recovery efforts. She told the audience, “The recovery of the town is linked to full recovery of the university.” To understand her point, realize that the literature, language, and philosophy departments were located in devastated centro. Last April only a few departments had buildings and were functioning- biotechnology, psychology, and medicine. Temporary buildings assist in some continuance of studies, but think of the town of Princeton, New Jersey without a fully functioning university, with extant classes convening near a cow pasture.
Dr. Tozzi made a single remark that, beyond the facts and statistics she shared, has stayed with me. She said, “Part of our identity is lost… We go shopping, meet friends, but something inside does not work.”
My posts from 2010 and 2011 on L’Aquila focused on protests, scaffolding, and mostly what was lost. This year I mark the anniversary with a vintage postcard. The cartolina shows Corso Vittorio Emanuele without metal bars holding up any facades. L’Aquila has fallen before and this reminds me that it will pick itself up again. I have been told the recovery phase will take 20 years. I plan to see it through on each yearly visit.
‘The Little Virtues’ of Christmas
Giro’s shop was exactly opposite our house. Giro used to stand in the doorway like an old owl, gazing at the street with his round, indifferent eyes. He sold a bit of everything; groceries, postcards, shoes and oranges. When the stock arrived and Giro unloaded the crates, boys ran to eat the rotten oranges that he threw away. At Christmas nougat, liqueurs and sweets also arrived. But he never gave the slightest discount on his prices. ‘How mean you are, Giro,’ the women said to him, and he answered ‘People who aren’t mean get eaten by dogs’. At Christmas the men returned from Terni, Sulmona and Rome, stayed for a few days, and set off again after they had slaughtered the pigs. For a few days people ate nothing but sfrizzoli, incredible sausages that made you drink the whole time; and then the squeal of the new piglets would fill the street.
Natalia Ginzburg, 1944
from “Winter in the Abruzzi” in The Little Virtues
(Reprinted with permission from Arcade Publishing)
This December scene takes place in Pizzoli near L’Aquila where in the early 40s Natalia Ginzburg, her husband Leone and two sons lived. Leone was exiled to Abruzzo to curtail his anti-fascist activities. Whenever I read “Winter in the Abruzzi” I am moved by the hardship she describes.
This time her small record of Christmas makes me think about food that marks the holiday season. My Aunt Mary hosted family the day after Christmas and made zeppoli ‘fried dough’ stuffed with either raisins or anchovies. If I read this correctly and make some guesses, the sfrizzoli of which Ginzburg writes is awfully close to what rural Americans call cracklins. And so “after they had slaughtered the pigs” they may have rendered chopped chunks of pork fat for several hours- outdoors in a big caldron- until the pieces colored and floated becoming crispy nuggets with maybe a sliver of meat in each piece.
The sfrizzoli must have tasted as good as a piece of sweet torrone in winter. I hope Giro got his fair share.
Used with permission from www.ambrosianapictures.it
Lake of Memory
Thanks to a high school research project assigned by a history teacher in L’Aquila, the American branch of the Antonelli’s learned more about some tragic family history.
Two balconies fenced with wrought iron balusters embellish the stone house where my grandfather, Francesco Antonelli, was born. The home lies in Mascioni, a village between L’Aquila and Teremo. For decades I imagined that this sole architectural flair provided the family, who made their living as pastore, with a spot to grow geraniums, catch a breath of fresh mountain air, or talk to a friend on the street below. I learned not too long ago that in 1944 the house had been the location of an episode involving German soldiers, local partisans, and my mother’s cousin and grandmother. The story ended tragically on one of the balconies.
Over the years, family members have traveled to Italy to meet the few relatives still living in Mascioni, which ascends from the shore of man-made Lake Campotosto. Each of us has proudly posed for a photograph before the wooden front doors to the uninhabited Antonelli family home. In October of 1967, my mother and father pioneered unpaved, rutted mountain roads to become the first of the Italian American branch of the Antonelli family to return to the village Francesco left at the age of 14.
After introductions and feasting, my mother’s uncle, Daniele Antonelli, guided my parents to the birthplace of her father and his siblings and then solemnly directed them to a stone property wall that runs alongside the home. Imbedded in the wall, lies a memorial to my mother’s first cousin, 19 year old Giovanni Antonelli. His death, in the final weeks of the German presence in Abruzzo, was still fresh to villagers and family who witnessed World War II.
The exchange of news between Francesco and his family in Mascioni was interrupted by the war, and after his death in 1942 letters dwindled. So it was not until this October day in 1967 that my parents, with the help of Toni Paolino a teenager who spoke a little English, first learned of Giovanni’s short life and wartime death.
My parents returned from their trip understanding that after Giovanni’s mother died in childbirth and his father’ s health declined, he was raised by his grandmother, Maria Silvestri, the Antonelli matriarch. Giovanni made his living working with his Antonelli uncles caring for horses and sheep. He was killed by German soldiers who suspected his involvement with local partisans. My parents shared these few haunting details with aunts, uncles and cousins who over the past 43 years have made a pilgrimage to Giovanni’s wall.
We inherited more of Giovanni’s history decades later both from strangers and posthumously from Daniele Antonelli. Wanting to know more about Giovanni’s story, yet expecting to find nothing, I typed his name into Google’s magic window and was stunned when it answered me back with Italian words and a link to a fifty-two page document titled Il Lago Della Memoria, Documenti E Testimonianze Della Guerra Nell’Aquilano. In the preface to this high school research project, an unnamed teacher at Andrea Bafile High School in L’Aquila informs readers that after his or her pupils studied WWII, he announced to them that “it was time to close the books.” They were dispatched to villages and returned with oral histories from “venti centri minori del territorio della provincia.” Mascioni was one of them.
The pages are devoid of photos and fancy fonts. It’s a product of bygone word processor days. The document bears no publication date. However, the work was produced at least 11 years ago. I know this because one of the primary sources, Daniele Antonelli, died in 2000. Detailed in Italian on pages thirty-five and thirty-six, under the heading Mascioni (Campotosto), the restored events of May 17, 1944 ending Giovanni’s life awaited translation.
I labored for a few hours with my Italian-English dictionary instead of copying and pasting the pages onto a free and instant translation website. I slowly searched for the unfamiliar words instead. Reprisal, noose, rifle butt. The evening in 1944 unfolded word by word, as I waded step by step into the still waters of memory.
Students interviewed three men for the story. Mascioni baker Aquilio Anaceti testified that Giovanni lent a hand to the partisans in ambushing a motorcycle and sidecar killing a German dispatcher on SS 80. Mr. Anaceti explains that with German soldiers in the area, Giovanni took to the woods with the few horses under his care. It was from this patch of wood along the state road that the German soldier was killed. He recalls that German retribution was swift with the execution of a captured Slav partisan, Blogoja Papovic, “who was wounded and then hung from a pylon of the overhead cable tram used for transporting wood. He was left exposed for about a week as a warning.”
Mr. Anaceti further recounted to his student interviewer that Giovanni, wounded in the leg and unarmed, was rounded up as a partisan, beaten, tied up and driven to Mascioni in the back of a small truck. From the wrought iron balustrade of the Antonelli family home, he was forced by German soldiers to place a cable noose around his neck and die by hanging. Maria Silvestri’s pleas to save her innocent grandson were answered with blows from the shaft of a soldier’s rifle. In further retribution, the soldiers ransacked the home for hand woven linens. As a parting gesture, they exploded grenades in the first floor of the house.
As emotionally draining as it was to unlock these details, it was with more trepidation that I translated Daniele’s testimony. I had met him in happy times, eaten at his home and communicated with him in simple Italian exchanging years of family news. As Giovanni’s uncle, I suspected that his memory would lack the objectivity of the other interviewed men. I was treading into deeper water. The students who compiled the Mascioni chapter selected only Daniele to quote directly, perhaps due to the simple eloquence of his recollection.
He begins by discounting his nephew’s affiliation with the partisans, emphasizing that Giovanni was an honest and industrious person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fearing German raids that day also, Daniele hid in a different wooded area. He recalls:
Petrified, I stood motionless in the silent thicket, which seemed to amplify in an unnatural way the clamor and rumble of the vehicles which came from the town. When I reached Mascioni about an hour later, I found the body of poor Giovanni still there, like an abandoned puppet. My house had been destroyed, my mother beaten with the butt of a rifle. The grenades thrown on the floor of our house caused the ceiling to collapse above the room where our animals take refuge. The pain of that fateful day has never been completely submerged in the lake of memory.
The chapter on Mascioni closes with Mario Di Tommaso describing how the Germans in roaring trucks and motorcycles “circled the town twice looking for partisans and threatening to carry out reprisals on ten citizens and burn the town, but orders to retreat kept them from carrying out the massacre.” The village was spared.
Stories from Filetto, Onna, Castel di Sangro, Pizzoli and many other villages are given voice in this document. I have to wonder though if Daniele’s final words gave the project its title – Il Lago della Memoria. Or was the phrase lake of memory an assigned prompt students used in their interview questions? In any case, I have borrowed the metaphor to tell my story.
Gli autori, twenty -six students, are acknowledged on the final page of the project for their work in talking to witnesses and preserving their remembrances. To discover which two or three chronicled the mark war left on the Antonelli family and home and village is the subject for another post, one I hope to write someday. For now, Giovanni’s resurfaced history has moved us to see our photographs of Mascioni in another light. We send collective gratitude to Class V, Section A of Liceo Scientifico M.O. Andrea Bafile, L’Aquila.
Find Your Inner Pastore
The folks at Bioagriturismo La Porta dei Parchi in stunning Anversa degli Abruzzi offer travelers a chance to step into the centuries old tradition of transhumance. Transumanza refers to the seasonal migration of man and animal to greener pastures. In Abruzzo shepherds trekked to Puglia in winter and returned in late spring.
The program is instructional as well as experiential. Participants have opportunities to visit local museums specializing in pastoral life and culture, but when in the field pastore will sleep in tents and cots. Donkeys and horses are available for those who don’t wish to walk. Good meals are provided and consumed in a rifugio or on a farm.
The dates are June 16-19 or June 23-26 or August 25-28. The staff is flexible and can accommodate briefer involvement. Price for an individual for the full experience is 190 Euro, 340 for a couple.
Contact info@laportadeiparchi.it for more information. If you write in English, someone will respond in English.
Notes on L’Aquila, 30 March 2011
Several flocks of sheep are on the move near L’Aquila, roaming hills recently released from the grip of snow. Colorfully wrapped chocolate Easter eggs brighten the window of Fratelli Nurzia on the Piazza Duomo, and the fountain nearby quietly flows again. It didn’t this time last year. 
Centro L’Aquila continues to be a city braced in patterns of wood and metal. Engineers, plasterers and plumbers are bringing L’Aquila back to life piano, piano. The cranes are visible, the swooshing of wet plaster audible but a friend living in the region told me that the estimated time for the restoration of centro is 25 years.
The Globo Center is hyped as the new place to meet friends and stroll, though many defy this assault on the traditional passeggiata and return to centro to walk the few open streets emptying onto the Piazza Duomo. Though signs of life on Corso Vittorio Emanuele are disproportionate to the many signs of protest and I Have A Dream posters, a bar and restaurant are doing business.
In contrast to the ghostly university building neighbored by closed shops, Ristorante il Guastatore sends warm light and music into the street from its second floor windows. Opened in October 2010, the restaurant/pizzeria piles its wood for the forno in the street near its entrance.
A, B, C, D, E. This is the code by which displaced residents in Abruzzo are identified. It represents their housing status and consequently their fate. I met a woman who, along with other people, has been residing at Hotel San Michele for two years with no end in sight. She lost her home and studio. A documentary film maker, she is now confined to a small hotel room with her books and a laptop. In the E category due to age and loss of livelihood and home, she frets over government money funding hotels rather than rebuilding efforts.
Because the earthquake damaged structures on both sides of Gran Sasso and as far away as Castrovalva near Scanno, villages sustained damage as well. My second cousin who lives in Mascioni falls into the B category. Employed and in his late 50s, he has been told that he can return to his home in a few months. Since April of 2009 he has been living in what Italians call a box. He partitioned a small garage into a two room dwelling he shares with his wife.
Rubble and cracks are obvious signs of disaster, but the structural changes in the lives of people I met are more subtle. A simple doctor’s appointment must now be made at the hospital. Obtaining a pension check requires hours of waiting at the post office. I was puzzled to see the same elderly people in the hotel lobby all day long until I realized they were not guests, but residents. A dedicated professor I spoke with is teaching at the University of L’Aquila without pay.
I am going to end these notes on L’Aquila after the earthquake on a positive note.
One of the best meals I had on my short visit to Abruzzo was cooked by Enrico Ferrauto at La Grotta di Aligi on Viale Rendina in L’Aquila. His buddy has a restaurant in Brooklyn and Enrico dreams of opening a place in DC.
I don’t know if Enrico wanted to work in America before the terremoto, but I do know that Washington could use some baccala con lo zafferano.
Coming Home to Ignazio Silone
Mascioni is a small Abruzzo village only recently noted on maps of the area. It lies between L’Aquila and Teramo off SS 80 and is so nondescript that Italians refer to it as Campotosto, the nearby town.
It is the birthplace of my grandfather, Francesco Antonelli, the only brother of four who immigrated to the United States in 1909 at the age of 14. He died at 49 never to return to Mascioni.
Two and a half decades after Francesco left, the landscape he knew changed when engineers under Mussolini ‘s government transformed farms, quarries, and peat bogs – sources of livelihood for locals- into a reservoir whose damn would generate electricity that most villagers in Mascioni didn’t have in their homes until after 1970.
This photograph taken in 1967 by my father bears witness to the villagers’ hard life.
Mascioni was not spared when the terremoto struck the region in 2009. The roof to the Antonelli home has collapsed.
An earthquake, a fascist regime, a poor village, an escape. It was a natural step for me to reach for the novels of Abruzzo born Ignazio Silone in order to touch my family’s past. Related by blood but foreign to the historical context of my relatives’ lives, I read Silone for an unsentimental glimpse into my grandfather’s world before and after he left his mountain village.
The recent publication of Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao Pugliese has encouraged me to connect more readers to his work. The opportunity for travelers to gather for a week of directed discussion of Silone’s fiction in Santo Stefano di Sessanio near his birthplace, Pescina, under Italy, In Other Words Literary Workshops prompts this invitation.
Visit www.ItalyInOtherWords.com where you will find information on Literary Abruzzo ~ Reading Ignazio Silone and Kathryn Abajian’s creative nonfiction workshop The Heart of Memoir.
Made in Abruzzo
Oropuro- Pure Gold. This simple label identifies the bottles of Francesca Di Nisio’s artisanal olive oil. Observing her as she guides and engages visitors through her Museum of Olive Oil, I smile at the choice of hands to represent her business, CantinArte. She is all hands when teaching her guests to appreciate good olive oil and hands on with running the business she brought to life in 2006.
Francesca in a teaching moment
Abruzzo born Francesca has returned to the Chieti countryside to make a living. At 26, she decisively reversed the family trend, begun by her grandmother after WWII, to abandon the rural areas for work in nearby cities. As a child, Francesca felt connected to her grandmother Maria’s memories of living a simple life sustained by orchards, vineyards and fields. After studying wine in France and Tuscany and apprenticing at a winery in Chianti, Francesca was ready to return to her Abruzzo roots to produce and sell her own products “with passion and uncompromising quality.”
Relics of Abruzzo
Francesca’s approach to olive oil production is holistic. Eager to show visitors this centuries old process, she restored a 17th century mill in the town of Bucchianico. It is in this small, brick mill where visitors see how man and donkey used wood and stone machinery to crush and press olives. The candle lit rooms of the mill testify to her respect for the Abruzzo past. Reverently displayed tools, pottery and books are placed in niches and on walls throughout the former mill. On one wall hangs a shepherd’s zampogna and below that an elaborate ex voto.
Francesca with the friscolo
Her tour engages more of the senses as she teaches visitors to identify grasses or berries- whatever natural properties influence the taste and smell of olive oil. Her lessons end at table. Coddling a small cup of oil to warm it for tasting, guests watch Francesca demonstrate how to hold the olive oil in the back of the mouth and suck in air. She delights in the efforts of her guests to practice this tasting method and identify essences of tomatoes, almonds, grasses.
Days after the tour, visitors are still in Francesca’s attentive hands. She sends guests a thank you email sharing several of her grandmother’s treasured recipes – pure gold.
You Don’t Have To Pay Now
March 29, 2010
I stood in front of a parchimetro at a small park along Viale Luigi Rendina in centro L’Aquila intent on abiding by municipal regulations in the distressed city that I was about to visit. The area, after all, is still occupied by soldiers and military vehicles. I imagined that parking violations would not be tolerated and in doing my part to respect civil authority, I reached into my coin purse for a few euro. A middle aged couple sitting on a bench 50 yards away in the seemingly intact park waved me off from inserting the coins into the plastic machine that would issue a receipt to park legally in centro. When I approached them, the woman quietly explained, “ Non devi pagare per il parcheggio ora a causa del terremoto.”
Walking on toward centro, I could see few signs of normalcy. Cooling off at the fountain in Piazza del Duomo, watching a soccer match at John Martin’s or Pizzeria Old City, taking a passeggiata on Via Roma, putting coins in a meter-you don’t have to do any of it now. 
Abruzzo, Grief and Hope
As any Italian American knows, a question one eventually asks to another person of Italian descent is “Di dove sei?” For those in my generation one responds by providing the name of the region or province from which his grandparents came. Calabria, Puglia, Abruzzo. Should more social intimacy be desired, the parties will commence to the next phase- the exchange of town or village names.
So, when on the morning of April 6th as news of an earthquake in Italy scrolled along the bottom of the news broadcast, Italian Americans held their breath. The early announcements that the quake struck seventy miles east of Rome held only one meaning to those of us with family ties to Abruzzo. L’Aquila.
By 7 a.m. family members were calling and emailing each other to find out if there was news about the safety of our relatives Armando, Liberata, Gina, and their children and grandchildren who live in the nearby mountain town of Mascioni. By noon we learned that all were scared, but alive and in their own homes. As my travels to Italy have broadened my relationships beyond cugini , I was also worried about the fate of Giovanni and Andrea who live and work in the medieval town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio which lies 30 kilometers from L’Aquila . They have committed themselves to the preservation efforts of the town’s visionary conservationist, Daniele Kihlgren, who has painstakingly restored much of the town which honors the historical living standards of 500 years of working class people.
I fell in love with L’Aquila, the capoluogo of Abruzzi, initially because of its ties to my grandfather Francesco Antonelli , who was born in the region, but when I visited the city three times in the last three years I became even more personally connected. L’Aquila attracts travelers. There is no hustling for tourist dollars. Its people work, study, play, and live normally. A visitor easily becomes absorbed into the pace and quality of the city’s life. It is a university town where my friend Kathryn, an educator and writer, and I were struck by how we blended in with other diners, shoppers, strollers, and museum visitors.
In 1928 Estella Canziani, an English artist, travel writer, and folklorist went to the Abruzzi region to study its people and customs. On page three of her book Through the Apennines and the Lands of the Abruzzi she notes “Aquila is built on a hill, and its steep streets lead down to the plain beyond. The town has suffered much from earthquakes. One of the first recorded was in A.D. 1315, the successive shocks of which were spread over a month…tradition says that ninety-nine surrounding villages helped to rebuild Aquila, ninety-nine being consequently since regarded as a lucky number…when the curious fountain Della Riviera was constructed in the main piazza, the water was distributed through ninety-nine spouts…”
Italians are familiar with the cycle of suffering and rebuilding. The tower, which has become emblematic of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, has fallen. Its stones crushed homes. Years of restoration and vision now lie in piles of stone and wood. For now these heaps seem to mock human effort. But as days pass, I know as every grieving Abruzzesi knows, that every stone will be picked up, sorted, and put back into the tower, walls, and steps of Santo Stefano.
Forte e gentile is an old and well known epithet describing the Abruzzi people. They are strong and kind. That is why those of us who have met them feel both a spirit of hope and a terrible sadness for their losses.
Helen Free
April 9, 2009
A walk through Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a jewel in Abruzzo.
Pink Martini’s “Hang on Little Tomato” is an endearing song. Invoking faith and endurance, it serves well as an anthem for the Abruzzo region of Italy. When I discovered this video of Santo Stefano di Sessanio on YouTube, I realized that it spoke for the themes or vines of my life. For one, my grandfather was born in a nearby village. Like many from Abruzzo, he emigrated to the US and never saw his family again. Through the efforts of my parents, the second and third generations of the Antonelli family have hung on to the vine.
Italians Get It
Imagine news headlines in Europe these days: “Americans Dumbfounded, Some Irked By Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize” and ”US Lawmakers Oppose Health Insurance For Its Citizens. “
In 2006 I found myself a bit lost in a town entirely off the Tuscan tourist trail. While practicing useful phrases –Mi scusa, parla inglese – and keeping my eye out for a slow speaking, informative, kind stranger, I happened upon a wall plaque which identified the spot I stood in as Piazza John F. Kennedy. I was stunned. Surely, Kennedy had never stepped foot in Castelfiorentino. As an American I was touched by the gesture and counted myself among friends.
Last summer, I visited an antique shop in the Monti section of Rome. Floriano Costanza, the owner, had taped a newspaper photo of Barack Obama on the glass door of his shop Florian Antiquariato. I was surprised by this small cheer for America from a longtime Roman. When he discovered that I lived in Washington, he became even more gregarious, closed his shop, and ushered me to his nearby apartment to show me more of his personal collection of Neapolitan presepi or Nativity scenes.
In 2007, I chaperoned a student trip to Italy. One of the high school boys became very sick with strep throat. We were in the mountains of Abruzzi when I was sure that Zack had to see a doctor. I found a doctor in the hamlet of Barisciano. After he examined Zack and handed me a prescription, I took out my wallet. He threw his hands up and shook his head. It was a few minutes before I realized that there was no charge for the examination.
In Rome when I had the prescription filled, the pharmacist, clearly distressed, apologized because as a non Italian citizen, I had to pay the full price of 80 euros (about $100 at the time) for a 12 day supply of needles, an antibiotic, and a steroid. I had to reassure her that I was most grateful for that price.
A plaque, a newspaper clipping, a doctor visit are of a piece. Honor those with vision and respect for humanity.
14 October 2009
Archaeological Dig in Tuscany~ Medieval Castle of Catignano in Gambassi
2011 September teams forming NOW.
Please email Marja Mendera for information regarding this dig~mendera.m@tiscali.it or Delia valsa62@hotmail.com. Visit on facebook :Scavo Castello Di Catignano
Stone By Stone
“- Rebuilding the Medicean tower in Santo Stefano di Sessanio after the April 6th 2009 earthquake.
Locked Out
Sets of house keys have been fastened to a wire fence by residents at the corner of Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Corso Umberto I in protest to the government ban on independent rebuilding of homes. Resident frustration runs high as those with means are thwarted from shoring up their homes and repairing damage. Homes are interconnected by gas and water lines and shared walls. Independent enterprises are not an option here. A poignant civic exercise, the keys ultimately hang limp under the inevitability of rebuilding block by block.
Braced
Zinc coated couplers and clamps connect handsome, shiny black scaffolding tubes which surreally decorate the standing walls of nearly every building. Centro deceives the visitor. On the whole, homes, churches, shops didn’t crumble; they cracked and broke. Facades are recognizable, simply buttressed to stay put.
Pastry and Processions
On December 8, 2009 Bar Fratelli Nurzia, the lovely dark wood and marble retail home of Sorelle Nurzia torrone, reopened its doors. It is one of three business open on Piazza del Duomo. The Hotel Duomo which occupies the floors above the bar remains closed.
Defiantly attached to scaffolding, banners invited Catholics to process through the city on the traditional Good Friday observance. 
