17. CASTEDA

y father never returned to Falconara after my mother joined him in America. Uncle John made two more trips back to the old village after he retired from his job with the Surface Lines. In September, 1953, at the age of sixty-eight, John Musacchio traveled to the village of his birth and remained until the following spring. He would return again to Falconara in October, 1956. His wife, Zia Chiara, did not travel with him on either of these visits. She stayed in Chicago, looked after by their grandson, John Molinaro.

     Uncle John was hardly a wealthy man, even by the simple standards of the village. But he had marshaled his finances well, investing his earnings as a mechanic in property, such as the apartment building he lived in and owned on the corner of 76th and Dobson. And he continued to acquire property in Falconara as well.

     During his visit in 1953, Uncle John remained in Falconara for a period of nearly eight months, and during that time he secured and managed his investments in the village, adding to his very small empire. He purchased a stove for the house overlooking the valley to add to the bathtub, which by then no longer was the only bathtub in the village. In May, 1954, Uncle John returned to America with the knowledge, and satisfaction, that he had reacquired all of the property that his grandfather, Agosto Musacchio, had lost two generations before.

     Except there were no more Musacchios left in Falconara to benefit from his property. His only daughter, Marianna Molinaro, lived in Rome with her husband and four of their five children. His late brother Gus's first son, Totoni Musacchio, worked in Cosenza. Whether rightly or wrongly, John never accepted the second son of Vincensina, Davide, as a Musacchio, but he no longer lived in the village anyway, having moved north. The children of Gus's second wife all lived in the United States as did those of his brother Joe. After the gas stove was delivered to the house overlooking the valley, Uncle John did not even bother to have it connected.

     After Uncle John returned to the United States, he reflected on the irony. He had become a man of considerable property in his home village, a signore, but his eight months back in that village had taught him that he no longer wanted to remain there. He had left Falconara in 1904 at the age of nineteen and, except for scattered visits, had lived the approximately fifty other years of his life in Chicago. Apart from some old cronies who still lived in Falconara, there were few people with whom he was close. The months spent sitting around the piazza with those cronies, playing cards, swapping talk, convinced him that he had very little in common any more with the people of Falconara. How could he explain a street car to them? How could he explain the dynamism that was Chicago, the city of big shoulders? For better or for worse, Uncle John had become an American. And it was on the south side of Chicago that the people he loved the most--his wife, his brother, his sister-in-law, their three daughters--lived. His wife Chiara might have accepted a return back to Falconara, but even she had become accustomed to life in America during the past fifteen years since she arrived. Within the next few years the remainder of the Molinaros, with the exception of Menica, would also move from Rome to the United States.

     In October, 1956, Uncle John returned to Falconara for one last visit. The man they called Contromboli, impetuous, crazy, cut such a dominating and imposing figure that three decades later there would be people in the village who still remembered that visit! "He came driving up in a limousine," the villagers told us. "He had a chauffeur driving him. He acted as though he was better than everybody."

     One wonders whether what might have been perceived as a limousine in Falconara would have been considered the same on the south side of  Chicago? More than likely Uncle John asked some acquaintance from Paola or San Lucido to drive him up to the outskirts of the village. At that time, no streets penetrated Falconara and any vehicle would have been left well beneath the village anyway.

     The unattached stove also became part of the stories villagers would continue to tell about Uncle John. Reportedly he had refused to attach it to spite his granddaughter Menica and her husband Alfredo Gaetano in Rome. "If John had attached the stove, then Alfredo and Menica would have come more often," so we were told.

     When the Gaetanos came south, however, they usually preferred remaining down in San Lucido where they could be near the beach, where their children could swim in the ocean. Alfredo Gateano was a physician, a man of means, who in addition to a well-appointed apartment in Rome

then owned three other weekend homes. It seemed unlikely that an unattached stove would have kept Alfredo and Menica away from Falconara.

     The villagers also talk of one last fiery outburst by Uncle John, how when he visited the cemetery and saw the grave of Vincensina, on which is carved the names of her two sons Totoni and Davide, his anger surfaced once again. Vincensina Coraggio Musacchio had died just before Christmas, 1955, between Uncle John's last two visits. John reportedly wanted to rush to the municipio to have her second son denounced, to make it forbidden that he continue to use the name Musacchio.

     As the story was told, Totoni calmed him. "Why are you trying to embarrass us?" asked Totoni. And Uncle John's anger reportedly subsided.

     One wonders about the legends of Falconara, those that revolve around Uncle John: him arriving in a limousine, the unattached stove, his rage over his brother Gus's first wife. At least for the current generation, tales about Uncle John have become part of the fabric of that small village, along with the story of the seven families.

     It was also during this last visit to Falconara that Uncle John reconsidered his ownership of the family lands, the ones that his grandfather Agosto previously had lost. By reacquiring those lands, Uncle John had achieved his goal. But once having the lands in his possession, there was nothing to do with them. Uncle John was hardly about to abandon the south side of Chicago where he also held property. And so he sold the lands!

     The story we first heard was that a man in the village named Raffaele Guerra had served as an agent for Uncle John in the land sale. But later when we went to visit Guerra and sat around talking in his kitchen, while his wife baked some delicious sugar-coated cookies called scalidas, we learned that Guerra had purchased the lands from Uncle John, not sold them.

     Guerra also told us one final story about Uncle John: how after the sale had been completed, John asked to be taken up to the casteda, the church built atop the monolithic rock where the seven families first had sighted falcons. You cannot be taken to the casteda, or driven to its doors in a limousine, you have to walk there through the twisting passageways of the old village, and ascend long flights of steps carved out of stone, passing during your trip the stark, partly shattered statue of the madonna, the vechietta, who in the legend directed the original settlers to their new home. Once atop the monolith, standing before the entrance to the church, you can turn away from that church and regard a magnificent panoramic view. You can look down on the orange-tiled roofs of Falconara, see the villagers below bustling through the passageways and piazzas with their bundles perched atop their heads. You can look out across the agricultural fields planted with vegetables, grain, and various fruits. You can look further down the verdant valley past those fields and out to the sea where the hazy horizon is but a blend of sky and water.

     Raffaele Guerra told us how Uncle John paused at the parapet, still breathing heavily from the ascent, a man of seventy-one at the time, who looked out across this panorama and the beauty surrounding Falconara, a beauty which he had been unable to perceive as a young man, and maybe

not even until that moment, when he sighed and told Raffaele Guerra: "I wish I hadn't sold the lands."

Chapter 18 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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