4. Settlement

n Italy's western coast, on the instep of the Italian boot, 230 kilometers south of Naples, is the tiny, hilltop village of Fiumefreddo Bruzio. Many villages throughout Europe were built atop hills for protection in the Middle Ages. It is easier to defend against your enemy if you stand above him. Another reason for locating high, particularly in semi-tropical areas, is to avoid malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Finally, there is the view.

     Fiumefreddo caps a bluff dominating the Tyrrhenian shores below. Only a few hundred people live in Fiumefreddo today, many of them cultivators of the fields surrounding the village, others commuting daily to jobs in San Lucido or Paola just up the coast.

     Above even the rooftops of the village stands a ruin, the remains of a Norman castle. To defend their sea routes a thousand years ago, the Normans built many castles on the Italian coast similar to the one above Fiumefreddo. Yet few tourists traveling the coastal highway today detour to examine the ruins of this particular Norman castle, although it is clearly visible from the road below, and signs in the village offer directions to it.

     Frankly, there is little to see: merely shattered battlements, some subterranean vaults, the overgrown remnants of rooms once occupied by the feudal lords of the land, on whose walls some latter-day artist has painted pornographic graffiti. There are ruins throughout Italy and Europe, most of them more ancient, each of them with their own stories of heroism and decay. For all its beauty, Italy is a mammoth garbage dump: the ruins of Roman civilization from antiquity coupled with Coca-Cola bottles cast aside last week.

     The Normans vacated their Italian fortresses, including the one at Fiumefreddo, around the end of the twelfth century. In 1201, the castle fell into the possession of Simone Mammistra, who founded the monastery of Floriacensi nearby. The family Agliata obtained possession in 1284, Giovanni Agliata being one of the occupants. In 1415, Pietro Paolo from Viterbo owned the castle. With the Spaniards ruling the Kingdom of Naples in the fifteenth century, Emperor Carlo V of Spain gave Fiumefreddo to Ferdinand Alarcon, the Marchese d'Vallo Mendozo. Eventually, the Marchese's daughter, Isabella, presented the castle to Pietro Gonzalez of Mendoza, viceroy of Calabria. For the nobility, castles were the condominiums of the Middle Ages, and so they passed from hand to hand until their walls began to crumble and they stood only as specters of the past, as does the castle at Fiumefreddo today.

     It was the Marchese d'Vallo, mentioned above, who occupied the castle in 1476, and it is possible to imagine him standing atop the battlements glaring down toward the beach, far below, regarding a strange boat floating offshore. The boat, of course, would be the one that brought the seven families from Albania to Italy. The Marchese ruled over the countryside surrounding Fiumefreddo and it was he,

according to the legend of Falconara, who granted to the seven families the right to settle on his land.

    Published information related to the arrival of the seven families is scanty. Most information that we uncovered during our trips to Falconara (including that found in the book we had photocopied at the municipio) dates from the ninteenth century, or later, based on the oral traditions of the village. In this regard, my mother's account was as good as those from the peasant villagers we met on various visits.

     One of those visits was in September, 1983. On our first night in Falconara, my husband Hal and I stopped by the main church, San Michele di arcangelo. In the church, helping with decorations for the festival of the madonna del  buonconciglio that weekend was Totina Musacchio, my first cousin by marriage. (Totina's late husband had been the son of my Uncle Gus.) With Totina was another woman of the village, Menina Manes.

     At that time we were trying to trace a long lost book that supposedly contained historical information about Falconara. Another cousin, Marianna Molinaro in Chicago, had first told us about the book, which apparently differed from the one we had photocopied earlier. Tulio Calabria, a former resident of Falconara then living in Port Chester, New York, said he once had read a copy, but lost track of it. When we asked around the village, no one living in Falconara seemed to own a copy, although many had heard of such a volume. They said if anyone would have a copy, it would be Signora Manes, the woman we had met at the church with Totina. She taught in the elementary school, and the legend of the seven families was part of the curriculum.

    We later saw Signora Manes, who said, "I'll bring you what I have."

    Anxiously, I said we would be happy to come get it.

    "No," responded the Signora. "I'll send my son."

     But during nearly two weeks we spent in Falconara on that visit, the son never came, or if he did, we were away. Several times, we stopped by the Manes home, which was near the entrance to the village, but failed to find the Signora in. "I'll tell her you called," said her housekeeper, who spoke only Italian, not Albanian. But we never seemed to make connections. Finally, on our next to last day in town, somewhat desperate, we arrived late one afternoon to find Signora Manes awaiting us. It was a cold day, and she served tea. No, she did not have the book we sought--if it even existed apart from our already discovered sources. But her father, Settimio Manes, had done extensive research on the village's history and had written an article. At one time he served as mayor of Falconara and had become interested in preserving the story of the village's founding.

     At first Signora Manes seemed reluctant to produce her father's manuscript. Our motives in snooping around the village were not entirely understood, or trusted. Finally, the Signora relented, disappearing into another room. When she returned, she handed us a copy of the article by Settimo Manes. Cenno Storica was the title he had given it: “Historical Allusion.” Cenno is an Italian word that means a wave of the hand, a wink of the eye almost. It was Settimo Manes's acknowledgement that the legend of the seven families--as fascinating as it was to us, and undoubtedly as well to him--was barely a footnote in the overall history of the world.

     "Could we have this?" we asked, indicating the manuscript now in our hands. No, understandably Signora Manes would not part with her only copy, but eventually she agreed to let us borrow it overnight, enough time for our son David to hand-copy the article. The next morning, on our way out of town, we returned the manuscript to Signora Manes just as she was leaving for school. Later, while in Rome, we translated Cenno  Storica into English.

     It was the best, and most precise, summary of the founding of Falconara that we had yet encountered. We drew upon it, as well as our other sources, in the following summation of how the seven families migrated from Albania to Italy.

George Nicholas Nasse in his dissertation on the Italo-Albanian Villages of Southern Italy identified four migrations; Settimio Manes spoke of seven.

     The first migration involved Albanians who aided Alfonso I when he suppressed the revolt near Crotone in 1448. The second occurred after Scanderbeg's own visit in support of Ferrante, besieged by the House of Anjou in 1461. In both instances, Albanian mercenary troops remained behind to establish villages, accepting land offered them by grateful Neapolitan monarchs.

     The third migration began soon after the death of Scanderbeg in 1468 and continued through the Turkish victory in 1480 with much of the movement in the last four years of that period. Venetian sailors helped evacuate Albanians mostly to Italy. Another group, however, settled in the Morea in the Peloponessis of Greece.

     A fourth, and separate, migration of Albanians occurred in 1534, the group from the Morea now leaving Greece in favor of Italy. Dr. Nasse identifies these as the four major migrations of Albanians to Italy. Manes accepts those four and adds three more migrations, which occurred in 1647, 1744, and 1774. But Manes offers no details other than the name of the ruler in whose reign these migrations occurred.

      It was as part of the third migration, of course, that the seven families settled Falconara. And although several sources we studied suggested 1467 as the year of settlement, this is an error, an apparent transposition of the last two digits made by one scholar, or his printer, that has been repeated by successive historians. The year certainly was 1476. Manes goes far enough to offer the precise date of the Albanian departure from Scutari, April 26, although how he determined this date, we have no idea

      "These were Greek-rite Christians," Manes writes, "forced to abandon their mother country, which had been invaded by Murad II's Moslem Turks. They were escorted by the madonna (later to be called, of good council), who appeared in the skys of Scutari the night of April 26 accompanied by two angels and preceded by a column of fire." Manes balances his account by noting that the madonna del buonconsiglio may already have been venerated in Scutari by Albanian Christians before this miraculous appearance. He suggests the seven families had been preparing to leave their country before the madonna prompted them.

      There was not just one boat carrying only seven families, but apparently a group of boats: a convoglio, or convoy. The muncipio  document had put the number departing Albania as 185 people, composing thirty-seven families. The group, according to Manes, included: "uomini donne, e servito," men, women, and servants. These were, after all, people of noble birth.

     Reportedly a storm struck, and the boat carrying the seven families became separated from the convoy. It was blown southward through the Ionian Sea and toward the straits of Messina separating the Italian peninsula from Sicily. When the storm abated, the seven families chose not to rejoin the other refugees bound for settlements on the eastern slopes of the Appenine, but rather continued up Italy's western coast into the Tyrrhenian Sea. They halted their journey and came ashore on land that was within the feudal province of the Prince of Bisignano, Solazzi.

    This proved to be a key reason why the seven families settled in this specific area in Calabria. Supposedly Prince Solazzi's wife was Irene Castriota, Scanderbeg's daughter. When I read this reference, I was surprised. In all my research into Scanderbeg's life, I could recall no mention of his having a daughter, only a son, John. It is true, of course, that Albanians place little value in female children, and their historians might have neglected mentioning her. Or I might have overlooked, or forgotten, any such mention.

     On one of our last research trips to Italy, we traveled to Viggiu, north of Milan, only a few kilometers from the Swiss border. We went there specifically to visit Davide Musacchio, Totina's brother-in-law. Totina had hinted that Davide was a good source for historical information. While growing up in Falconara during the thirties, Davide had made a systematic study of his village's history, accumulating many books and papers on the subject. Before he could write anything, however, Davide was conscripted into the Italian army during World War II. He left the village and spent a good portion of his army career serving in Albania, where he met his wife. After the war, Davide returned to Falconara. Alas, his mother (Vincensina Musacchio, Uncle Gus's first wife) apparently had given away, or thrown away, all of Davide's books. The villagers looked upon him with suspicion. "Why do you want to tell other people about us?" they complained. Davide never did complete the village history he had hoped to write and later, angry at the villagers, refused to return to Falconara.

     But he did confirm that Scanderbeg did have a daughter, and she was, indeed, married to the Prince of Bisignano. Bisignano is a town about thirty kilometers north of Cosenza, just west of the autostrada, running through that city. The distance between Bisignano and Falconara is about the same—at least as the crow flies—but somewhat more if you had to make the journey on foot or on horseback five hundred years ago. It would have taken perhaps a day or two's journey to go from Bisignano to Falconara in the fifteenth century.

     Davide claimed that it was neither storm nor madonna that forced, or caused, the seven families to sail through the straits of Messina and up Italy's western coast. It was the presence of Irene Castriota in Bisignano. Through her father, Scanderbeg, she was related to at least two of the families: the Muzaki and the Manesi. Sympathetic to their plight, she may have invited them to join her. Irene more than likely asked her husband, the Prince, to convince the Marchese d'Vallo (who was of lesser rank) to provide the seven families with land.

     Of still higher rank, of course, was King Ferrante, and the Princess Irene and her husband would have needed his acquiescence. Reportedly, one reason why the Albanians settled so many villages in southern Italy was that the King of Naples feared their power if they formed too cohesive a group, so he scattered them throughout his kingdom. Recognizing the reputation of these former guerilla fighters, Ferrante also may have hoped that their presence might help keep his

Italian subjects in line. At least in the case of the Falconarese, this proved to be wishful thinking. Far from being warriors itching for battle, or power, the seven families appear to have been mostly simple agricultural people who were exhausted because of their wartime experiences and were only too happy to live in peace and not meddle in the affairs of their neighbors, much less those of the king.

      Davide Musacchio could offer no documentary evidence to support his theory why the seven families took a separate route from that of the other Albanian refugees. However, it is the most logical reason we encountered as to why the seven families were the only Albanians to choose the western Appenine slopes for their village. It was the presence of Irene. Irene Castriota, not the madonna of legend, guided them to Fiumefreddo, where she had arranged for their welcome by the Marchese d'Vallo.

      The seven families landed near the castle of Fiumefreddo Bruzia, where Manes relates: "The feudatory received the refugees lovingly and they camped in a locality on the periphery of Fiumefreddo which then became known as the campo, that is, the campo degli albanesi (field of the Albanians). But some time later, the people of Fiumefreddo became worried about the presence in their countryside of strange people who might attract the attention of the murderous Turkish pirates who infested their coast. They induced the Prince to scatter the Albanians, move them away from the village and to higher land, rougher ground, to the south. The poor refugees ascended into a heavily overgrown area several kilometers from Fiumefreddo, a site much less hospitable."

      The area where the seven families now stopped was halfway between the beach and the present location of Falconara. This stopping point was then, or soon after, known as colaringo, which in Italian means, "trickling down," probably because of a stream trickling down from the mountains through the valley that provided water. Manes describes this area as gifted with drinking water and rich vegetation. He says that after pitching their tents the seven families started to construct dwellings and a small temple of stone, which apparently still existed in ruins at the time he wrote in the twentieth century. (If these ruins still remain, none of the people of Falconara with whom we talked knew of their location.) The area where the Albanians stopped became known as San Pietro de torremezzo. Torremezzo translates into English as "halfway tower," an apparent reference to the temple constructed by the Albanians.

     Torremezzo today is a separate village far below Falconara, beside the sea. The governmental entity that is Falconara-Albanese contains roughly 1,500 people, but only about a third of those live in the village itself. The rest occupy the countryside or live in Torremezzo, which itself doubles or triples in population during the summer when vacationers from the North come to its beach.

     Torremezzo has become a resort community, one still growing. Row after row of modern condominiums now line the beach at Torremezzo with more being built each year. Tulio Calabria told us before his death: "When I lived in Falconara several decades ago, I had an opportunity to buy a large parcel of land at Torremezzo for an unbelievably small sum. If I had, I'd be a millionaire now." On one of our visits, when we drove Menica, our cousin from Rome, down the twisting road that connects Falconara with Torremezzo, Menica was astounded at the new construction since her visit only a few years before. Among the newly constructed buildings were several circular houses that looked as though they might have been built for movie stars. Menica kept repeating: "In-cre-di-bi-le! In-cre-di-bi-le!"

     Apparently it was in Torremezzo where the Albanians, according to the version of the legend we had first heard from the Falconarese living in Chicago, looked out toward the sea and spotted ships, which they identified as Turkish. Understandably fearful, they continued further upward into the valley above Torremezzo.

     Manes continues: "For some time they settled in a different locality, a pleasant area higher in the hills endowed with water and woodlands." Then a vechietta, an old woman, an apparition, supposedly the madonna del buonconsiglio in disguise, appeared. "Don't stop in this place," she warned, pointing to the mountain over their heads. "Sooner or later, a landslide will steal your lives!" Indeed, years later, an earthquake-induced landslide did send tons of rock rumbling down the mountain onto the area where the seven families would have built their town. Thus, according to legend, did the madonna deliver them from danger for the second time.

     The vechietta had pointed further upward into the hills. In continuing their search for a proper townsite, the seven families moved through a thickly vegetated forest populated by ferocious, wild animals, and some sheep. "Subsequently in their trip," writes Manes, "the refugees at a certain point perceived in the distance a large rocky pinnacle standing clearly above a hillside on which was a balustrade overlooking a rocky ravine." They saw several huts and a herd of sheep. The shepherd tending the sheep encouraged the refugees to stay. Manes caps his story: "And the final episode of the 'odyssey' of our own had happened."

      The tall pinnacle, of course, was the same rock on which later the seven families built their church, the rock over which falcons flew. Rose's mother had talked often about this rock, Falconara's principle landmark. The rock, with falcons circling above, was the source of the village's name, so states the legend of Falconara. Manes, however, makes no reference to falcons.

      The Albanian settlers felt they had picked an ideal, and beautiful, site for their new home. "Katundi me ishe shume i bukur," they would say. "Our country is very beautiful." My mother always talked about the beauty surrounding the village she had left.

      The seven families pitched their tents atop the balustrade and beneath the pinnacle. They began to clear the land of trees so they could construct the rough-hewn homes with walls of heavy rock still standing in Falconara today. During one of our visits to Falconara, we stood on the balcony of the church of San Michele di arcangelo talking with a villager, Francesco Nesci, custodian of the cemetery. He was recounting the legend for us again. In our search for information, we never tired of rehearing the legend, always hoping we would learn something new. As we looked out over the piazza below, and the rich agricultural valley beyond that, Francesco said simply, "The fires burned for seven years."

      Above us was the pinnacle.atop which the seven families and the descendents of those families built their first church, naming it the madonna assunta della castelluccia, the mother of the ascent to the castle of light. My mother referred to it more simply as the casteda. Reportedly the church was built in 1544. A winding stairway twists up to the small church, actually more the size of a chapel. Halfway up the stairs is a statue of the madonna, but it is badly damaged, its arms broken, the eyes missing, fearful looking in many ways as may have been the vechietta, who supposedly directed the seven families to their final home. A third church in the village, reportedly built in the sixteenth century and named after the madonna dell  buonconsiglio, was partially destroyed during an earthquake that shook Falconara in 1906. Scaffolding in the church suggested that reconstruction might be underway, but during the period of three years when we were visiting the village, we never saw any progress made.

     Church records identify 1555 as the year the first priest arrived in Falconara. A census by the Italian government ten years previous listed fifty-seven people living in the village. In 1570, the Greek-rite Albanians converted to the Latin-rite of their Italian neighbors. By then, they had settled into an ordinary agricultural life, no longer threatened by armies from the East who would kill their men, burn their village, ravish their crops, and carry their women and children off into slavery. Peace had come to at least one small group of Albanian refugees.

     The Falconarese later would sing a song about their move from Albania to Italy:

0 se que gher e poi gher

Me duin valijen

Poi to demmi i Colaringut

Gne piach nde piaccavet

Se pa sciabachedden aetit Evin turcu to me i rumbin.

The genealogist, Don Giovanni Musacchi, hoped that some day he or his children would return to Albania to reclaim the family lands. Whether or not the seven families who settled Falconara shared such a dream, they left no evidence. Albania, for them, was history. They were to remain the rest of their lives in Italy. And for more than four centuries, their descendents would seldom wander far from the new hearth fires. In his doctoral thesis, Dr. Nasse cites four previous ethnic groups besides the Albanians who settled in southern Italy.

     First were the ancient Greeks, arriving in the ninth century, B.C. They came from the Peloponnesus and settled in the lowlands, developing city-states. Greek ruins still can be seen today in cities such as Reggio Calabria. The Greeks remained five hundred years, but vanished about the time Rome began to rise in power.

     The second ethnic group were the Byzantine Greeks. From the seventh to twelfth century, the Roman Empire began to decay, its influence spent, its power split between the western emperor in Rome and the eastern emperor in Constantinople. The latter dominated southern Italy during this period, but as Rome's influence again increased, the Byzantine Greeks disappeared.

     Third were the Saracens, Arabs from North Africa. During this same period, the Arabs occupied Sicily, but only briefly touched the Italian mainland and soon left as Arab influence waned in the Mediterranean.

     The fourth and final major ethnic group were the Waldenses. This was a Protestant band numbering maybe 7,000 people, who came from the Alps beginning around the twelfth century, at a time when Calabria was underpopulated. But they were considered heretics, so in 1561 Pope Pius V had them exterminated.

     The four groups above failed to survive, according to Dr. Nasse, because their culture was incompatible with that of the Italians. They were considered foreigners who clashed with the Italian people. Yet Dr. Nasse identified dozens of Italo-Albanian villages, each of them clinging to their former culture and language with varying degrees of success. He explains why: "The Albanians represent a unique group, because even though they came as a foreign group, they did not rouse the ire of the natives and no group desired their elimination or removal. For five hundred years, they have remained on Italian soil."

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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