18. FESTIVAL

s we drove deeper into the village of Falconara-Albanese, the street narrowed until our car could go no further. The streets, of course, were not designed to permit the passage of automobiles. At the time of their construction, they had been designed to accommodate, at best, donkeys.

     The donkeys, burdened by bundles of sticks to stoke the hearth fires of the village, still were present, though outnumbered by machines. We saw Mercedes and Fiats, even Fords, next to the centuries-old homes, which sprouted TV antennas. Kids in the tobacco shop off the main piazza played Pac-Man and Space Invaders. The people, who once rose early to labor dawn to dusk in terraced fields surrounding the village, now more often catch the 7:00 bus to jobs in Cosenza or Paola.

     Two decades previous, when Hal and I first had visited the place of my parents' birth, there had been no road into Falconara, but progress was overwhelming even backward Mediterranean villages.

     It was September, 1983. Near the end of our search for information about the legend of the seven families, we had returned to Falconara to attend the village's annual celebration: the festa del madonna del buonconciglio. This festival, held each year at the end of summer, is on the feast day of the madonna who, according to the legend, guided the seven families fleeing Albania to their new home.

     As is true throughout Italy, many of the festival's activities were church-oriented, highlighted by a parade through town after mass Sunday morning. Wealthier patrons bid for the honor of carrying the madonna's statue in the parade, claimed John Molinaro. My cousin Johnny's descriptions of the parade, concerts, bazaars, and games convinced Hal and I to time one of our research visits to coincide with festival weekend, which also served as sort of a homecoming celebration for those who have moved away.

     One game described by Johnny, however, did not sound too inviting. A variation of blindman's bluff, it featured a turkey buried in the ground, only the head showing. Each player was blindfolded and handed a club, the game's object to decapitate the turkey.

     We arrived in Falconara several days before the festival's start. Johnny's sister Menica from Rome had arranged for us to rent several rooms, the upper floor of a recently remodeled house. Constructed in the old style--mortar-covered rocks for walls, wooden window shutters, tile roof--the house looked properly ancient from without, indistinguishable from other structures in the village. But within were marble floors, bright whitewashed walls, carved wooden furniture, clean linens.

     Our apartment overlooked the piazza, where most of the festival activities would occur. Sitting on the balcony of our bedroom, we could observe the entertainment below--bands, dancers, venders, the crush of merrymakers--or look down the sloping valley of grass and farmlands toward the Mediterranean, 2,000 feet lower in altitude. Above and beyond the piazza was the monolithic rock over which the seven families once saw falcons circling. The church they built atop this rock still guards the village. This was the casteda that my mother had told me about, one of Ma’s fondest memories, almost a symbol of the home she had left. It was where Uncle John had stood and looked with sorrow at the Musacchio lands that he had just sold. Uncle John had returned several times to Falconara during his last years. I felt sad that my mother never had the opportunity to do the same, but then my father had gone blind and it was awkward for her to leave him. My father had died in 1972 at the age of seventy-seven from the complications of his diabetes, my mother of cancer in 1978, aged eighty-three. Somehow they never seemed quite that old to my husband Hal, he claimed. The Falconarese always impressed him as a particularly hardy people, ageless, perhaps because they had to be so tough to survive the environment into which they had been born.

     My mother had always talked about how beautiful the scenery was in Falconara and only after Ma's death had we begun to appreciate how true this was. Yet not everybody appreciated Falconara. On another visit, when Hal and I stayed with acquaintances in nearby Paola, the husband in the family, who was Italian, told a joke about the Falconarese. In Italy, people answer the telephone by saying, "Pronto!" This signifies that they are "ready" to talk. He claimed that the Falconarese always answered the phone, by saying, "Grazie." The point of the joke was that Falconara was such a terrible place to live that they wanted to say "thank you" to anyone kind enough to call them. Well, I admit the joke loses something during translation.

     Yet the joke hardly seemed true. Falconara at times is hard, cold, cruel, but how could a place with such a view ever be considered "terrible?" The beauty of the village is so stunning, you wonder why Pa and Ma, or Uncle John and Zia Chiara, or their other relatives and friends, would want to leave Falconara to struggle as immigrants in Chicago? Poverty, of course: a desire to get what the British call, "one leg up." Southern Italy had provided workers not only for America, but also South America, northern Europe, and northern Italy. Yet looking out across the valley, beside crumbling ruins, we now saw several gardened villas that wouldn't look out of place in Beverly Hills, California. From the other side of the valley, Falconara looks like a two-dimensional patchwork of identical grey and tan squares tacked to a green blackboard. Only when you return to the village, and examine it close up, does it reveal its third dimension. When we first had visited Falconara in 1960 it had reminded us of the village in the film Zorba the Greek, black and white. But in the intervening quarter-century, during our many years of research on this book, I now saw Falconara in many shades of color. "Grazie" did not seem an appropriate way to answer the phone.

     The day before the festival, Friday, workmen bustled through the streets erecting poles speckled with tiny light bulbs. A tent suddenly blossomed beneath our balcony. That night, looking up toward the casteda, I saw its cross had been lit, a beacon for people from surrounding communities who would throng to Festival activities.

     Even the dogs seemed agitated, their constant barking through the night keeping us awake. We became disabused of the notion that roosters waited only until dawn to assert themselves. Saturday morning we were awakened by a loudspeaker, shouts of "Pomodori!  Pomodori!" The Falconara Festival had begun.

     Pomodori is the Italian word for tomatoes, those being among the agricultural offerings featured in the bazaar. Hal stumbled onto the balcony in time to see a farmer drive past, two pigs marked with red numbers in the back of his wagon. He said it reminded him of the story told by Johnny of my grandfather, Chico, and the ritual killing of the pig each winter. Pigs still are slaughtered in Falconara and maybe their whiskers still are made into brushes for shaving, although you can now buy modern shaving goods at Signora Socco's grocery store, around the corner from the old church destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Signora Socco lived in Brooklyn for some years and was the only person we met in Falconara who spoke English.

     At a rude wood booth with palm leaves for a roof, you could buy a bottle of beer during the festival. Across the way, customers clutching 100-lira notes (about six cents at that time) leaned over a roulette table. Men passed through the crowds hawking tickets to a raffle featuring a TV set for first prize. Teenage boys in groups eyed teenage girls in groups, and vice versa. I wondered if mothers still made matches for their daughters as had been true a generation or two earlier. The smell of sausages sizzling on the grill filled the air. We entered a school for a concert scheduled for 8:00 which, in true Italian fashion, began after 9:00 and nobody seemed to mind. A string group started with Vivaldi, ended with the Beatles.

     In addition to regular villagers, many of the people crowding the piazza that night came from surrounding towns; others were former villagers back as though for a homecoming celebration. My mother once told me that when former villagers returned, they often came all dressed up flaunting their wealth. She told me when I go there, dress nice, but not fancy.

     Nevertheless, we were easily identifiable as the Americani. Although we spotted one teenager with a "Life is better in Florida" t-shirt, he obviously had never lived there. The women clad in black, the men wearing suspenders and caps, would stare at us, sometimes comment: "Kush yen to?" (Who are they?)

     A rock band claimed the piazza stage and played late into the night. We watched from below, then from our balcony. When they finished, the teenagers from other towns jumped on motor scooters to go down the mountain to their homes. We gratefully dropped into bed. The band had been so loud it frightened even the dogs to silence, so Hal quickly fell asleep. I wakened my husband later to say that some of the old men were on the church balcony playing bagpipes, authentic folk instruments made from skins of pigs. Hal claimed to be too tired to go hear them; afterwards he would admit to regretting this greatly.

     Sunday morning, we attended early mass. It was mostly us and old women, lighting so many candles I feared the church might catch fire. During the sermon, we could hear the far sounds of a band playing marching songs. Later, the same band, imported from another town, led a procession that wound through the narrow streets. Once Falconara had its own band and its own dancers at the festival, playing Arberesh songs and dances, but old traditions have begun to die, and now the village must hire musicians and dancers from outside to continue the festival activities and satisfy the crowds.

     Half the villagers marched in the procession; the others stood on balconies watching. At the head of the procession was a cross, then a picture of the madonna, then the statue carried by four men, the town priest, finally the flag of Falconara-Albanese showing a falcon above the rock.

     As the procession wound through the village, people would come out of their houses and stop the long processional line while they pinned lira on the board, crossed themselves, kissed their hands and accepted a picture of the madonna. Colorful blankets and tapestries hung from balconies and windows above. From the balconies, women threw flower petals on those walking below them. The procession lasted over an hour, covering practically every passageway in the village. We found it a moving experience.

     After the procession, the streets emptied. Not even cats moved in them. Everyone had returned home for the afternoon pranzo, the main meal of the day in Italy. We ate once again with the Gniscis, Francesco and Carolina, who still lived in my mother's old house. We feasted on soup, pasta, fried eggplant (melanjon), lamb, tomatoes, fruit, washed down with a homemade red wine. We were all one family.

     As is the custom in most of Italy, the TV remained on through the meal. Although nobody seemed to watch it, one of Carolina's five sons often would move to change channels. All her sons were lean, dark, handsome enough to stir any maiden's heart. One, Angelino, motioned us to the window so he could point to the hillside across the valley where he was constructing a home for his bride-to-be. They would be married the following autumn. I calculated that back home a house with such a view, if it could be found, would command at least six figures.

     We spoke with Angelino about the difficulties we had experienced in tracing the roots of our family. The fifteenth century, the time of Scanderbeg and the migration of the seven families, was well documented in histories as well as legends. Don Giovanni's genealogy had provided us a glimpse of Musacchio (then Muzaki) family history predating even Scanderbeg. The nineteenth century and beyond remained alive in the memories of Falconarese who had migrated to the south side of Chicago. Between, however, was a gap which we had been unable to bridge. Angelino worked in the municipio, and we wondered if he could help.

     Angelino shook his head sadly. "In recent years, the municipio has moved four times," he said, "and during each move, more old records were lost, or thrown away." He would talk again to the man in charge of records, but didn't sound hopeful. When we visited him several days later, Angelino announced, "Nothing is left."

     That evening, the festival featured a performance by Dario Baldan Bembo, an Italian TV star, whose act featured him sitting at a piano wearing a yachting cap and singing while colored lights flashed on clouds of smoke. He was good, an Italian Elton John. At the end of Dario's performance, fireworks lit the mountains with clusters of multiple explosions. Italians don't seem to have the patience for sending up one skyrocket at a time, as is done at our Fourth of July displays. Everything is fortissimo! That night, the dogs again lay silent.

     Monday the merchants continued doing business, hawking their wares with a certain desperateness now. That afternoon we watched the giochi popolari, popular games, beginning with a run around the twisting streets, which Hal considered entering until he saw he would be the only competitor over age seventeen. It was not that he would embarrass himself by losing; being a trained marathoner, Hal worried that he would embarrass his young competitors by defeating them. After the run, several dozen contestants retreated to a schoolyard for various activities: balancing eggs on spoons, dunking for a coin in flour, then water, running relays to the town fountain with a leaking bucket. Those not competing took positions on fences and walls to watch. "Are they going to do the turkey this year?" I heard one old-timer ask another. "I don't think so," was the response.

      The crowd roared with laughter as competitors buried their heads in flour, searching for a coin. The flour choked and temporarily blinded most, but finally the last boy emerged from the bucket gripping the coin in his mouth. The same boy was also the fastest locating the coin when they replaced the flour with water.

      The old man we overheard was correct; they did not brutalize a turkey in the game described to us by John Molinaro. Instead of a turkey's head sticking from the sand, blinded competitors struck at pinyatas overhead. More humane, certainly, but a departure from tradition. In fact, one sad aspect of our visit to Falconara was a realization that the Albanian village that had remained almost defiantly apart from its neighbors for five centuries was suffering deculturization. The Falconara festival, once unique, was now not that much different from that sponsored by churches in our home town of Michigan City. Jeans were more common than the flowered vest, the gipuna, once worn by my mother on festive occasions. Rock groups had relegated the old men with bagpipes to playing on the church steps long after everyone had gone to bed. The automobile had penetrated the narrow streets, TV antennas bristled on tile rooftops, and one wondered if a generation from now the children would still speak Arberesh. Perhaps it is for the better; perhaps it is for the worst.

     We continued to probe for more information on the missing link between the Musacchios who arrived among the seven families and the Musacchios who left to settle on the south side of Chicago. We visited Totina Musacchio. Her late husband had been Totoni Musacchio, son of my Uncle Gus by his first wife. Totoni and Totina: what a great pair of names! But Totina was the last remaining Musacchio in Falconara, and she had acquired her name only by marriage. By Albanian standards there were no remaining Musacchios. Women don't count.

     Totina was out when we called, but her upstairs neighbor let us in and sent her daughter to fetch her. Totina's apartment was bright, cheerily decorated with colorful pillows stitched with "Libya." Her husband Totoni apparently once had served in Libya with the Italian army.

     Totina arrived breathless, excited at our visit. Totina was a woman probably in her seventies--although nobody dared ask her about her age! Unlike the other women of the village, she refused to dress in the black of perpetual mourning for lost relatives. She wore a bright red sweater and a cream-colored skirt. "I do this to give people something to talk about," she laughed.

     We sat sipping coffee while Totina regaled us with stories about recent visits to the hospital, how she knew all the doctors by first name, how she had cortisone in her veins, not blood. "The only thing that keeps people alive in this village is television," Totina insisted.

     But we had come with a purpose: to learn anything we could about the Musacchios who lived in the village between the fifteenth and nineteenth century. On a previous trip to Italy, we had met Papas Antonio Bellusci, the village priest. He was Albanian and had switched the local church from the Roman Catholic to Greek Orthodox rite before transferring to another town, Frascinetta, where we had visited him. Later, I heard rumors that Papas Bellusci might have taken with him copies of church records that could bridge our genealogical gap.

     Mentioning Bellusci's name, however, was like igniting a bomb. Totina and her neighbor began talking animatedly, and simultaneously: Totina in Arberesh, the neighbor to Rose in Italian, even though Rose does not speak that language.

     Papas Bellusci apparently had left a reservoir of ill will. He had been interested in recording the folklore of the village, something he had mentioned to us during our visit with him. He went around asking people about their lives, about their families.

     "He wanted to tell everybody our nicknames," wailed Totina's neighbor. "He wanted to make us look foolish."

     The ultimate outrage, infamia as the Italians might say, occurred when Papas Bellusci asked the schoolchildren to write their family history, then sent questionnaires home for their parents to complete. The parents rose in anger, and Bellusci was soon gone. The people of Falconara apparently were willing to tolerate many sins of their village priests, but curiosity was not one of them.

     We quickly changed the subject and finished our coffee. Didn't Totina and her neighbor realize why Hal and I kept returning to Falconara? They had seen us off and on for a period of three years. I wondered about the reaction of the villagers to the publication of this book. Would we be infamia?

     Whether or not Totina fully understood the purpose of our visits, she obviously bore nothing but good will toward us. As we departed, Totina stood cheerily on her balcony, shouting after us: "Maybe I'll dye my hair red. That will give them something to talk about."

     Later, I would reflect on the Musacchios of Falconara. Except for Totina, there are none. Musacchios own no more property in Falconara, Uncle John having disposed of the family lands that he had reacquired during his last visit in 1956. When Totina died, the last person bearing the Musacchio name would have faded from the roles of the village. Examining the telephone directory, I had noticed nearly a dozen Musacchios listed as owning phones in Cosenza, but we knew none of them. Reportedly a large number of Musacchios live in another nearby village, but again, none related to us. There also are numerous Musacchios tracing their roots back to Albania scattered throughout Italy. Our cousin Johnny recalls once meeting a Musacchio from the north. But any relationship to my parents had been blurred by the centuries.

     Totina's brother-in-law, Davide Musacchio, lived near the Swiss border. He was the only one of the family we knew who actually had visited Albania at the time of our visit to the festival in 1983. But Davide claimed that the Muzaki no longer existed in that country. They either fled to Italy during the Scanderbeg era, or eventually lost their identity during nearly five centuries of Turkish occupation.

     On the morning after the last day of the festa del madonna del  buonconciglio, clouds rolled in over the mountains, obscuring the view across the valley where Angelino was building his house. We awoke to the banging of iron as merchants thrust frames for their booths into vans. They plucked unsold vinyl soccer balls from poles, packed pots and pans in boxes for sale at next week's festival somewhere else, folded their tents. The stage in the piazza where the bands played was still up, but empty.

     From the balcony we watched villagers board buses to head to jobs down the mountain in Cosenza or Paola. A woman dressed in black strode beneath our terrace, a load of branches perched atop her head. A shepherd and his dog passed, leading a herd of sheep. I spotted the boy who had been best at retrieving the coin from buckets of flour and water. Now carrying a bucket of dirt, he walked next to his father, a donkey plodding beside them.

     I could hear again the sounds of an agricultural village: a rooster crowing, a goat's bell clanging, dogs barking. Children appeared in uniforms headed for school. Women stood below talking in that strange language incomprehensible to all except a handful of people in this world. Older men sat at tables before the bar, sipping beer, playing card games. Within a few days we would be gone, but we would carry part of Falconara with us. A cool wind blew from the sea, as though to signal the approach of the next season.

Chapter 19 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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