Corso Cusani, the main street in Solopaca
Return to Campania Story & Photos by Bill Scheller
That brief stopover to see my Italian relatives during a Washington Post circuit of Italy’s coast was the first of several trips to the paese of my ancestors. The best of these visits was in 2005, in the company of my mother. It meant so much to her to spend ten days in the town her maternal grandparents had left to come to America, just over a century before.
The silvery green leaves of the olive trees glistened in the torchlight. It was a little after four in the morning, well before dawn in late September, and I was walking the narrow road leading out of Tocco Caudio, in the Italian province of Campania. Walking? It was more of a
cadenced stride, with the cadence provided by the recitation of the rosary over a portable loudspeaker, and accelerated between each decade of ten Hail Marys by lilting marches, played by a brass band pacing along behind me. In back of the band, on a platform shouldered by four of Tocco’s faithful, life-
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