5. "A Fly Will Eat You"

Katunde me ishe shume i bukur 

(Our country is very beautiful)

--Village saying

n one of our trips to Falconara, we rented a small apartment next to the village's main piazza, near the church of San Michele di archangelo. The clean but plainly furnished apartment contained a bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen, a washroom. The bedroom opened onto a balcony overlooking the valley through which, five centuries before, seven families scrambled upward from the sea. Across the street, beneath the level of that street, was an elementary school named after the father of James Naccarato, a Falconarese who moved to Chicago and later contributed money for its construction.

     One morning my husband Hal overheard two women standing above the school, chattering in the Arberesh dialect peculiar to the Italo-Albanian villages. Since he did not understand the language, their conversation drifted over him: background noise like the rattling of rain on the window, the whistling of wind through the trees.

     Suddenly, Hal later said, a phrase spoken by one of the women stood clear from the chatter, almost like words underlined on the pages of a book. The woman said, "U vette Nonna!"

     And he understood. Quickly, Hal moved to the balcony in time to see the two women part, one walking up the street. Hal said he knew where she was going. "U vette Nonna," she had said. I'm going to Grandmother's."

     Despite his lack of comprehension of the Albanian dialect, he recognized the words as similar to those in a teasing child's play, or game, I used with our three children when they were very young. Our children--Kevin, David, Laura--still remember the game and smile when reminded of it. "Musha imi," we called it, those being the opening words of the game. I would play "Musha imi" with one of our children, sitting before him or her, gently stroking our son or daughter's smiling face.

"Musha imi," I would begin. Oh my dear.

"Cu vata?" I continued. Where have you been?

"Va ta Nonna." I went to Grandmother's.

"Chu ta tha?" What did she give you?

"Buk e geez." Bread and cheese.

"Yum ga ta meeze!" A fly will eat you!

     This last was said very rapidly, at least three times, in a shrieking high-pitched voice, while tickling the child's cheeks, prompting his or her laughter and a demand that "Musha imi" be played again. And again and again. The game ended only when I got bored, because our children never seemed to.

     I played "Musha imi" with our children, because my mother, Ledda, had played it with me, as Ledda's mother, Rosaria, certainly also had played the game, and on and on echoing backward through the generations perhaps to the hearthland itself, Albania. Scanderbeg's mother possibly once told her soon-to-be-warrior son that a fly would eat him. (The Sultan probably would have liked that.)

     Who knows at what point in Italo-Albanian history someone conceived the nonsensical game? That "Musha imi" remains part of the relationship between mother and child in Falconara today was evident from the smiles we received from villagers to whom we mentioned the game.

     As we tried to obtain information on those who descended from the original settlers, what more did we know other than that they probably played "Musha imi?" What could be said of them other than: they were born, they lived, and they died? While the Muzaki in the fifteenth century were both witnesses to, and participants in, a glorious (if brutal) period in European history, their children and children's children left little trace of their presence on this globe. Further north in Italy, while the fires of trees cleared from the land still burned outside Falconara, Leonardo da Vinci in Florence painted the Adoration of the Magi, the first of the masterpieces which would cause his name to be remembered through the ages. Michelangelo and Machiavelli were children growing up in the same city. Christopher Columbus, a Genovese sailor who had become shipwrecked near Portugal, was trying to obtain finances for a westward voyage of exploration that would result, in 1492, in the discovery by Europeans of a New World.

     In southern Italy, meanwhile, the seven families, once noble, whose previous life most likely had been spent in castles, their quarters well furnished, servants to wait on them, had reverted to an agricultural existence. They cleared land, plowed it, planted it, hoping to harvest enough food to get them through one more winter. The earliest structures undoubtedly were wood, erected rapidly for convenience. Eventually, using rocks and boulders scraped from the same land they farmed, the settlers erected rude homes to protect them permanently from the damp and the cold.

     Some of those early homes, surely, still remain, although it would be difficult to pinpoint the dates of construction of the ancient structures that, huddled closely together, still form the heart of Falconara in the twentieth century. These buildings, in addition to being constructed of rock, used massive wooden beams to brace the walls and support the ceilings. Although the uneven rock face was typical of the oldest among them, eventually a greyish, mud-based stucco was applied to the outside of later dwellings. Only in recent years did brick blocks replace rocks in home construction and remodelling. Also typical of the building style are occasional rectangular openings on the faces of the buildings, apparently for ventilation.

     The earliest roofs undoubtedly were thatch and wood, later to be replaced with tile, typical of those atop homes throughout the Mediterranean. Heavy boulders, placed every few meters, held the tile in place against strong winds swirling up the valley. The passageways between the houses seem almost an afterthought. They are steep, narrow, twisting, fit only for the passage of pedestrians, or animals, or now a teenager on a Vespa. At the time of our first visit, these passageways were mostly dirt, although when we returned again in the eighties, they had been paved.

     Soon after the seven families arrived, the homes were built, the hearth fires lit. And for several centuries in Falconara, nothing of much historical importance happened. Perhaps, considering the brutalities of the Albanian struggle to defend themselves against the Turks, this was not all that bad, certainly better than being skinned alive or having your bones broken with a hammer, as happened to the Muzaki of previous generations. In Italy's north, although great works of art were being constructed, the Pope in Rome, supported by Naples, was warring with Florence, supported by Milan and Venice. Every few years the great Italian city states would switch sides, but continue to war against each other, or sometimes against the French, the Spaniards, the Austrians, or the Turks. Being outside the flow of history might be considered living the good life.

     The people of Falconara eventually learned the Italian language, enough to trade with nearby villages (exchanging grain for olive oil). They referred to those neighbours, including a few who came to live with them, as Latinos, and were referred to by the Italians, in turn, as Ghegi, after one of the ethnic groups in Albania, although the wrong group. (There were two main ethnic groups in Albania: the Ghegs, mountain people from north of the Shkumbin River, and the Tosks, from south of that river, who controlled the fertile lands near the coast. Most of those who migrated to Italy were Tosks.) The Albanians living in Italy preferred calling each other the Arberesh, that also being the term used to refer to their peculiar language, a variation of their Tosk dialect, which they refused to abandon. They maintained Arberesh as their main link to the hearthland. Italian words continued to become mixed with their native Albanian, however, so that after five centuries it would prove difficult for them to communicate with those former countrymen who remained in Albania under the Turks and whose language also had progressed in different directions.

     Only by the nineteenth century did the Falconarese begin to cause a ripple in the history of the larger land in which they had settled. When Napoleon's legions invaded Italy in 1807, Falconarese fought to prevent the French from occupying their village. The French eventually went away, leaving as their only mark a street named after their departure.

     Felice Staffa, a poet who wrote in the Albanian language, was born in Falconara in 1801 and died in 1870. A lawyer, academician, and patriot, he was imprisoned in 1848 about the time Garibaldi was trying to unify Italy. He alone among Falconarese in the nineteenth century is remembered outside the village. Concerning Garibaldi, our relatives living in Chicago claim that none of the family, or others in the village, became involved in Garibaldi's struggle. So warlike back in their native land, the Albanians had almost become pacifists in Italy. Nevertheless, listed in the records of Falconara as patriots from that era are: Giuseppe Cazra; Andrea, Francesco, and Vincenso Carnivale; Antonio Natale; Gennaro Nesci; Giuseppe Pizzini; and Gennaro Rossi.

     Not included on this roster is the name of Giuseppe Musacchio, who, according to family legend, walked all the way to Rome to join the Italian army. "During the time of the Bourbons," Uncle Mike identified the time period, referring to the Spanish kings who ruled Italy into the nineteenth century. It now takes four or five hours by autostrada to drive the approximately 400 kilometers between Falconara and Rome. Legend says Giuseppe spent a month on his journey. Even considering the poorer roads twisting over and around the hills, to have taken that long, Giuseppe Musacchio must have paused often, sipping hot coffee in the cafes, standing in the piazzas regarding those around him, and listening to the birds. As a southern Italian, albeit Albanian, it would have been uncharacteristic for him not to have done so.

     I like to think of Giuseppe, this early ancestor who shared the same name as my father, standing by the shores of the bay of Naples, gazing out over the sparkling waters toward Sorrento and Capri, where the tourists now come to frolic. Did Giuseppe wonder what would become of him having abandoned the warmth of the hearth? This early Giuseppe must have been a man of adventure, one who thirsted for the opportunity to visit other lands, see other sights, meet different people than he could in his sequestered mountain village. Giuseppe may have been the first of the Musacchios, since the fifteenth century, to succumb to such a wanderlust--although he would not be the last. Giuseppe died a soldier in 1865. To Giuseppe's memory, we tilt our glasses, "Salute!"

     During our trips to Falconara, we usually visited the cemetery west of town. We did so to learn more about the Musacchios--and also the Toccis, Tocci being the maiden name of my mother. The cemetery was atop a hill with a commanding view of the coast below. During World War II, the Germans planned at one time to mount artillery at the Falconara cemetery so they could control traffic on the coastal highway. The Germans never did occupy Falconara, eventually selecting Fiumefreddo (as the Normans had before them) for their defense position.

     Caretaker of the Falconara cemetery was Francesco Nesci, the same individual who had told us about the fires burning for seven years. The cemetery he watches over is "new" by European standards in that it dates back only to the nineteenth century. Before then, those who died in Falconara were buried beneath the church. Apparently they were dropped--how ceremoniously we don't know--into a hole beneath the main altar. Our cousin John Molinaro once had told us that he recalled peering beneath the rubble of the earthquake-damaged church of the madonna del  buonconsiglio and seeing bones below. He and his friends had to move a slab to look down into what John describes as a large basement. On another occasion, they found a skull beneath a crumbling wall above the piazza before the church. So lay my ancestors.

     When Hal and I asked for information on the people so interned, we were told no church records remain. Our inquiries led us inevitably to Papas Antonio Bellusci, a priest who served in Falconara during the seventies and convinced the people of that village to convert their church from Roman Catholic to the Greek-Rite of the early settlers. (Apparently as soon as he left, they converted back.) Several villagers thought their former parish priest might have taken some records with him, or might have copies of past documents that could prove useful to us.

     Papas Bellusci had published several books related to traditions in the Albanian villages: one on sacred songs, another featuring folk tales. Through the college where he taught part-time in Cosenza, we traced Papas Bellusci to Frascineto, another Albanian village along the autostrada north of Cosenza. We found him living with his sister, who worked at a loom, making dresses and other traditional woven Albanian items. She used as her workshop a large room that also doubles as her brother's office and library. It was there that we talked with Papas Bellusci. He asked us to sign a guest book, which we noticed contained the name of John Molinaro, who apparently had met the priest during a trip John made during the annual festival several years before. We purchased some books for ourselves and some linen towels as gifts for the Gaetanos in Rome, and Papas Bellusci generously gave us a flask of home-made wine.

     Chattering animatedly, the priest described his interest in collecting information on the folklore of Falconara and other Italo-Albanian villages. He spoke with pride of his success in Falconara preserving the Albanian cultural traditions. Those traditions were being eroded, he said, because of the Italianization of the village, which had accelerated in recent years. Occasionally Bellusci would rush from one side of the room to the other to pull a volume from the shelves of his amply stocked library of Italian and Albanian source books. We could find nothing directly related to our quest, although it was difficult for us to keep up with the priest as he darted from one subject to another, speaking both in Italian and Arberesh. When we asked if he might have any church records that could be useful to us in our search for information on the descendents of the seven families, the priest shook his head. "Nothing exists," said Papas Bellusci. We exited carrying only our purchases and the wine.

     Eventually, we learned only what we found carved in stone. In the Falconara cemetery, as is typical throughout Italy, most of the graves are above ground in concrete and marble sepulchres stacked four high. Those unable to afford sepulchres, or perhaps who died before sepulchres became the norm, lie in the ground, many of them with a wooden cross from which all identifying marks of their final resting place have eroded.

     We identified the sepulchres containing the remains of three of my four grandparents. My paternal grandparents were Antonio and Marianna Musacchio. My maternal grandfather was Francesco Tocci. Francesco's wife, Rosaria, the fourth grandparent, was buried in Rome. (We later would visit Rosaria's grave in that city.)

     The sepulchre containing Antonio Musacchio identified him as fu Agostino, literally "the late Agosto," but actually identifying Antonio's father. This lead us back one more generation to my great grandfather, Agosto.

     We knew Agosto Musacchio from another source: the memories of Falconarese living in Chicago. Many of these men and women were in their eighties and nineties when we tape-recorded interviews with them. Some of them died during the long years we were gathering information on Falconara and its origins. All are gone now. But before they died, we probed their memories for information on the people of their parents' and grandparents' generations, people whom they might have known when they were very young, or about whom they had heard tales.

     Mike Musachio, my Uncle Mike, remembered Agosto Musacchio, his grandfather. Uncle Mike was a robust eighty-nine when we interviewed him several times in 1983, just before his death. One time when we visited Uncle Mike just after his release from the hospital following an operation, we found him in the back yard, in shirtsleeves, working in the garden. It was a fearfully hot day, and Mike was dripping with sweat from his labors. "Uncle Mike," I admonished him, "What are you doing outside?" He just gave me a wicked grin.

     When Agosto died, Mike was six years old in 1901 (or was it 1902, he tried to recall). Uncle Mike referred to Agosto as “Gus.” "Gus was seventy-six years old," said Uncle Mike, "so that would mean he was born around 1815."

     The year 1815 became an important benchmark for us. Except for the legend of the founding of Falconara by the seven families 339 years earlier, the year 1815 became as far back in the history of the village that we could peer and obtain information on my ancestors.

     Uncle Mike could tell us little about Agosto Musacchio other than that he was a landowner and, by the standards of the village, one of the wealthier men. Land is an important commodity everywhere in the world, but in Falconara land--and what could be grown or raised on that land--was almost the only form of currency. Our family having been among the first settlers of the village, the Musacchios naturally could be expected to have been landowners, people of property. Those who cleared the land of trees claimed title to it. But by any normal standard, Agosto Musacchio was hardly wealthy. Even great wealth has a way of being diluted while being passed from one generation to successive ones. "He had three or four farms," remembers Uncle Mike. "And he had a home."

     Still, by Falconara standards, that did represent wealth. A landowner could hire other people to work his land, rewarding them by allowing them to keep a percentage of what they produced. This is in the great tradition of sharecropping, still prevalent today in pockets of the United States, particularly in the South. Money did not flow freely in Falconara, but fruit, vegetables, wool from sheep and their meat, could be bartered for other necessities--and a few luxuries. A man with property could manage that property and enjoy the fruits, so to speak, of others' labors. While they tilled the fields and tended the livestock from dawn to dark, he could remain in the village and play cards with other landowners in bars just off the town square. His wife, meanwhile, need not join the farmers in the fields, except during the midday meal

break, to bring them bread and soup. It is a mark of the status of the Musacchios during the nineteenth century that the women of the family often would leave the village mid-summer and journey with the children down to Torremezzo for several weeks at the seashore living in a shack they owned at this lower elevation. It was far from being a jet set existence, but by Falconara standards, it was one of relative comfort.

     Agosto Musacchio squandered all this when he lost the family lands. Some in the family claimed he lost them gambling. Uncle Mike scoffed at this theory, saying that Gus simply had a lot of friends, liked to give big parties, and he borrowed money to pay for them. "If you wanted something special," recalled Uncle Mike, "there were four or five persons who controlled the town. A bribe, a gift. The people who gave money said, 'You have to sign away the property.' So he did, and that's how he lost the land. Grandpa Gus was a good-time Charlie."

     Whether good-time Charlie or not, there apparently were four or five farms owned by the Musacchios at the time of Agosto's birth around 1815; when he died at the age of eighty-six in 1901 (or 1902), most of the lands were gone. This would become a significant factor affecting the lives of Agosto's grandchildren, including my father and especially my Uncle John.

     Agosto Musacchio, we also learned from Uncle Mike, was married to a woman named Theresa Petrucci. She died long before him, although we do not have the date. As with most of the Falconarese, Theresa had a nickname: Panunde, although nobody in the family today seems to know what the nickname meant or how she got it. The Petruccis, although not directly descended from the founding seven, were a respected Falconarese family. The town priest between 1742 to 1780 (at the time of the American revolution) had been a Petrucci. His relationship to Theresa, whose birth and death dates have been lost, is unclear.

     And that, sad to say, is all we know about my great grandparents on my father's side, the Musacchios. On my mother's side, the Toccis, we have even less, only a name. My maternal great grandfather was named Michele Tocci.

     That we know, because on the sepulcher of my maternal grandfather, Francesco Tocci, is the notation, fu Michele. Francesco Tocci's sepulchre identifies him, Francesco, as having been born on May 14, 1868. Francesco, who was better known by his nickname “Chico,” died January 10, 1942, when he was seventy-three years old. There is also a chapel within the Falconara cemetery containing a cross on the wall on which is carved, "Off (for offranto, offering) da Francesco Tocci."

     We assume it is the same Francesco Tocci, but whether or not, it is with Chico, and his wife Rosaria, that our narrative continues. They were well remembered by the Falconarese of Chicago.

Chapter 6 >

Falconara: A Family Odyssey

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