Return to Campania Bill Scheller

Corso Cusani, the main street in Solopaca

Return to Campania

Story & Photos by Bill Scheller

That brief stopover to see my Italian relatives during aWashington Postcircuit 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-

size statues of Saints Cosmas and Damian were making their way to a hilltop chapel four miles distant. The rest of us, torches in hand, were seeing them on their way.

I happened to be escorting Cosmas and Damian, on this moonless, torchlit night, because I was staying only a few miles away, in the town of Solopaca, home of my Italian maternal ancestors. Finding the way to one’s ancestral paese is unusual enough, for an American a hundred years removed from the great southern Italian diaspora. What is even less likely is to be able to enjoy the hospitality of relatives whose familial connections are entirely clear. But this was just my good fortune: I was staying at the home of the son of my grandmother’s first cousin. And I had an even closer relative along: I was traveling with my mother, who well remembered the émigrés of a century ago.

I remember one of them myself. My great-grandmother, born Rosa Di Bernardo, left Solopaca when she married Bernardo Iannucci in 1902, and never returned. But she lived to be 101 years old, and kept in touch with her family by mail. She was a fixture of my New Jersey boyhood, in her little house lit by gas lamps where my greatgrandfather had run his shoe-repair business. And she was a fixture in the minds of her relatives in Solopaca, and later with their children: nearly everyone there over a certain age knew who “Nonna Rosa” was, even if they had never seen her.

So it had been no problem to introduce ourselves, on visits to Italy -- first my uncle, then my mother and grandmother, and finally me, the one with the German-Swiss name, when I first showed up sixteen years ago. I had been to Solopaca once since, but this time was different -- not only because I had brought my mother, but because I had timed the ten-day visit to coincide with the vendemmia, the late September harvest of the wine grapes.

My cousin Nicola, a reserved man with the wry, realistic outlook of the Mezzogiorno and a regular job in an office, tends the vineyards that have been in the family for generations. His wife, Sonja, works with the grapes as well. Sonja is from Slovenia, on the other side of the Adriatic, but her warm good sense and deft hand in the kitchen qualify her as an honorary Italian (that’s not fair; I’m sure Slovenians have those virtues -- and they learn excellent English, besides). Their teenage daughter, Maria Diletta -- called Madi -- helps too. Madi, quietly demure in her limited English, is voluble enough in her fast Solopaghese, the local dialect, to qualify as a real Jersey girl if she ever decides to head our way.

Harvest time is a bustling span of two or three weeks for them, with constant running back and forth between their house on Solopaca’s main street, the nearby vineyards, and the cantina , the cooperative where the grapes are made into wines bearing the label Solopaca D.O.C. (Denominazione di Origine Controllata, the government guarantee of origin). To counter the bother of being a guest at a busy time, I had offered to help with the vendemmia. My mother, Alice (Alfonsina Marchitti, by birth) , wasn’t disposed to pick grapes, but did a fine job of exploring the narrow streets and poking into the little shops of Solopaca.

Trundling down corso Cusani with a bag of sweet, fennel-flavored sausage, she looked every bit like someone whose grandmother, Nonna Rosa, had never left the place. And, as it turned out, she had brought along a very valuable inheritance from Nonna Rosa: she could make herself perfectly understood in Solopaghese . With my CDs, dictionary and an online guide to verb conjugations, I had learned a fair bit of Italian. But when it came to dinner-table conversation, the joke was that I sounded like a professor from somewhere up north. Mom, though with less

Statues of saints Cosmas and Damian, carried in the September procession in Tocco Caudio

of a vocabulary, sounded like someone from Solopaca.

Solopaca, with a population of about 4,000, lies against a hillside between the great limestone massif of Mt. Taburno and the trickling River Calore. It’s an hour and a half drive from Naples, and only half an hour from the regional capital of Benevento, but suburbanization is a stranger to this part of the world. Where elsewhere there might be a built-up commuter corridor, in Campania the towns are as crisply defined as if they had medieval walls around them. Except on the steep, sere mountains, the countryside is all grapes and olives.

Beyond Naples and Sorrento, Campania is not tourist Italy. There is plenty of Campanian sun, but no one has written a book about seasons spent under it. When I visit my half-homeland, I’m happy that my ancestors didn’t come from a part of Italy now overrun with outsiders. Inland Campania goes about its business, more or less oblivious to tourists. Nowhere along corso Cusani, Solopaca’s main street, are there shops stuffed with souvenirs. Instead, all on small ground-floor premises in a tight neat row of stone and stucco houses, there are the jeweler, the florist, the pharmacy, and the bookshop; the tobacconist, the clothier, the café where men in sport jackets argue good-naturedly about politics and soccer; and the dealer in motorbikes.

And the baker. On the morning when I set my alarm for two o’clock to drive into the mountains for the procession, I woke to the smell of wood smoke. It wasn’t cold enough for fireplaces, so I was puzzled -- until I remembered the baker, two doors down. He bakes his wonderful loaves in wood-fired ovens, and he was up earlier than me.

Why had I gotten up so early myself? On the day before, we had driven across Mt. Taburno, through thick woods and past grazing flocks of sheep, into the skein of small towns beyond. At lunch near Tocco Nuovo, we had learned about the procession in honor of Cosmas and Damian. I knew little about the brothers, martyred by Diocletian, and I usually go to church only on Easter. But there was something alluringly atavistic about walking in torchlight, up and down hills, past sleeping villas. Saints are saints, I know, but this was like being part of something pre-Christian, a ceremony in the nighttime honoring minor local deities.

My mother hadn’t been at all tempted to get up at such an hour. I returned later than I had expected, because once the saints had been tucked in for another year I had to retrace, again on foot, the route to my car -this time in daylight, which revealed that the procession had skirted the stark promontory where the ruined quarter of Tocco stands. I took time to explore the old town, which was abandoned after a 1983 earthquake and left

to wandering goats. When I got back to Solopaca, via the dicey mountain roads, Sonja archly handed Mom a rolling pin. Even boys in their fifties shouldn’t make their mothers worry.

Besides, it was almost time to go to work.

The harvest of grapes in the campagna, the countryside around Solopaca, begins during that time each late September when the bunches hang plump and full on the vines, and the growers determine that their sugar content -- the basis for fermentation -- is at its peak. Each day Nicola and Sonja, Madi if school was out, and a few other relatives and helpers would drive the short distance to the vineyard selected for that day’s harvest. Armed with spring-loaded clippers like I use at home to prune shrubs, I joined them to fan out among the rows of vines, working row by row. It might be a day for cutting only Malvasia, or Trebbiano, or Lambrusco. We clipped the grapes where they hung from the vines, and the big pyramidal bunches felt good as they dropped heavily into my cradling left hand.

With each clip, we tossed the grapes into plastic boxes, like milk cartons but without lattice sides, which we would leave along the rows between the trunks of the vines. Once or twice each hour, Nicola drove his small tractor that just fit within the narrow lanes between the vines, and his helper, a muscular young man named Carmine, loaded and stacked the boxes on a platform behind the tractor. At day’s end, we dumped all of the boxes into the big orange carello , a wagon that tilts hydraulically like a dump truck, and Nicola towed it behind the tractor to the cantina. Lunch in the vineyards of Solopaca, even with the boss around, is nothing like the grab and gulp workday lunches of North America. At about one, Sonja spread a tablecloth across the hood of her Fiat, and made ten-inch-long sandwiches of prosciutto and mozzarella on the chewy, crusty bread from the wood-fired ovens. There might be batter-fried pumpkin blossoms from the previous night’s dinner, and figs and white peaches from trees that grow near the entrance to the vineyard. We sat on the ground and ate our sandwiches, and drank Nicola’s homemade wine -- a full-bodied white that I decided was best served at the temperature of a September day in Campania.

We got up after a long hour, and went back to work. No one who paused for ten minutes with a salad and a bottle of water would have accomplished any more than we did.

Over the course of a vendemmia, Nicola will harvest 16,000 to 26,000 kilos of grapes. This was not so good a year -- too much rain, Nicola told me -- but to anyone who didn’t know better, watching the long line of tractors and carelli backed up along the side of the road waiting to deliver grapes to the cantina, each day’s haul would seem like a bumper crop.

While Nicola waited to have his load of plump Lambruscos weighed and tested for sugar content, before dumping them into a hopper where a worm gear would feed them to the big fermentation silos, I talked with Massimo DiCarlo, president of the Solopaca cantina . “We have 630 members in the cooperative, and these are our busiest two weeks,” he told me. A well-spoken man, with the air of a progressive politician in a mid-sized city, he has served twice as president since 1983. “Before the cantina was established in 1971, the growers mostly produced their own wine [many, including Nicola, still make a supply for home consumption]. Here, we make twelve varieties -- our Rosso Superiore is aged for a minimum of three years. We design our labels, we offer seminars to the growers -everything down to selecting the best Sardinian corks.”

All of this recent vertical integration, though, has a long history behind it. “Wine has been made in this region for more than 2,000 years,” boasted Mr. DiCarlo. “The poet Horace was traveling from Brindisi to Naples, and he stopped at an inn here and tasted our wine. He wrote about how good it was.” The cantina president motioned toward a window in the big, paneled room where we sat, surrounded by shelves of bottles. “Out there in that grove of trees are the ruins of an old Roman tavern. Who knows? It may well be the osteria that Horace visited.”

Horace, a connoisseur of wine and member of a race that loved clever innovation, would have marveled at the four pumps standing in front of the cantina ’s retail shop. They looked like gasoline pumps, with thick rubber hoses and numbers that clocked quantity and price. But they were wine pumps, and anyone could tote their own demijohn up to one of the nozzles and have the attendant fill ‘er up. At eighty Euro cents a liter, regular was a luscious, fullbodied steal. Premium went for one Euro forty.

I put my clippers aside one day, and drove with my mother to Benevento. Benevento is a city bewitched. Like Salem, Massachusetts, it plays up a spooky past, but without Salem’s nasty overtones of trials and executions. Benevento’s witches, which some sources trace back to worship of the goddess Diana, were a self-proclaimed lot, rather than an innocent collection of persecuted crones. They allegedly met beneath a walnut tree near the banks of the River Sabato throughout the Middle Ages. “Under the water and under the wind / Under the walnut of Benevento” was their summons to gather from near and far. Traveling more prosaically in a rented VW, my mother and I made our own pilgrimage to the biggest city (population roughly 70,000) in our part of Campania.

The witches are remembered today in the figure of the strega-- witch -- on the label of the eponymous herbal liqueur made here. The walnut tree, which we had read somewhere still survived down by the river, was naturally first on our Benevento agenda.

But we were disappointed. While we were circling Benevento’s splendidly preserved first-century Arch of Trajan, examining relief carvings depicting the emperor’s triumphs, we struck up a conversation with one of the locals, a geography teacher proud of his English. “There are no witches,” he told us, not too much to our surprise. “There is no tree. It hasn’t been there for five hundred years.”

So instead we finished paying our respects to Trajan, visited a Roman theater as old as the arch, and wandered the twisting back alleys of downtown Benevento. Here, tucked in amidst snug little townhouses, attorneys’ offices, and the damp echoing courtyards of decaying palazzi, we found a trattoria called Locanda delle Streghe -roughly, the Witches’ Inn. Yes, it was a touristy name -- but how touristy could it be, in a city where there didn’t seem to be any tourists? We even ordered the “witches’ soup.” It was good. And it had walnuts in it.

Thevendemmia, grape harvest time in the Solopaca vineyard of Nicola Franco (left)

On another day, my mother and I drove the six or seven kilometers across the valley of the Calore to Guardia Sanframondi, the town my grandfather’s family came from. Guardia -- the name comes from a 12thcentury Norman watchtower that looms above the highest part of town -- is only a bit larger than Solopaca, but it’s livelier, with more shops and cafés. There was portable commerce, too. As we walked along the main street, we heard a voice over a loudspeaker calling, “The onions have arrived.” The onions had arrived via a small truck, which crawled from one block to another, stopping for women who would walk off with bunches of the hard, paperyskinned autumn cipolli.

While we sat on a bench watching the onion transactions, we noticed that the drab postwar building across the street was the town hall. We must have both gotten the idea at the same time: why not go in and check the birth records? Mom made herself clear enough -- even in Guardia, they understand Solopaghese-- and we waited while a clerk unshelved a dusty volume and began to run his finger along the entries, done in a beautiful cursive, of birth records more than a hundred and thirty years old.

And there they were, two babies born not long after Garibaldi had driven the Bourbons from southern Italy: my greatgrandparents, Raffaele Marchitti (1867) and Alfonsina Cenicola (1870), who would find their way to Paterson, New Jersey, and whose son would marry a woman whose roots were in Solopaca. “Cenicola, that’s my name,” said the clerk. And there was a greater coincidence: we looked at Alfonsina’s entry, and realized that this day, September 22, was her birthday.

On the day my other great-grandmother, Nonna Rosa, left Solopaca never to return, she went to say goodbye to her father in the church where he was working. Pasquale DiBernardo was an artist, and religious paintings were his stock-in-trade. One evening, we went with Nicola and Sonja to a little chapel on a side street, where, we had been told, several of his paintings survived. We had to get a priest from one of the other churches in town to open the chapel, which was seldom used; the holy water fonts seemed to have been dry for a very long time.

A fresco on the ceiling, and a painting on the marble altar, showed the same device -- a cross, with crossed arms before it. One arm was bare, the other in a brown sleeve, and both hands bore the stigmata, the wounds of the crucifixion. The bare arm was of course that of Christ, but I suspected that the arm cloaked in Franciscan brown was that of the saint Padre Pio. Padre Pio, much venerated in this part of Italy, bore the stigmata. But if the arm was his, the painting could not have been done by my great-great-grandfather, who worked before Pio’s day. Perhaps the arm represents someone else with the stigmata. Perhaps Pasquale diBernardo’s work adorns some other Solopaca church. And perhaps it was a far more distant relation of mine who painted the fresco of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John the Evangelist, in the style of Giotto, on the 14thcentury rear wall of the musty chapel.

Nobody in the family paints today. But we all cook, and one of the delights of my visits to Solopaca has been to discredit the popular modern belief that Italians in Italy don’t eat like Italians in America. The recipes that Sonja learned from Nicola’s mother are the same ones I grew up with in New Jersey. Over olive cuttings on the grill in Nicola and Sonja’s courtyard, my mother charred red peppers to skin and dress with garlic and olive oil. Beneath the rough red tiles that sheltered a corner of the courtyard, by trees bearing lemons and persimmons, we heaped our antipasto plates with slices of prosciutto and sopressata , with sheep’s milk cheese, and with little globes of fresh mozzarella. There were cavatelli , tightly

rolled fingers of pasta; spaghetti carbonara, brasciole, and grilled sweet sausage; and the silky potato croquettes that Nicola’s sister Concetta brought along with minestrone thick with the short tubes of macaroni called ditalini. With it all we drained bottles of Solopaca DOC and Nicola’s homemade wine as well -- Nicola DOC. After dinner, the grappa and Strega went around. “A friend of mine made this,” Nicola told me one night when he brought out a bottle of grappa insidiously devoid of labels. “No one wants to drink it. If you can get down a glass, I’ll give it to you. Regalo-- a gift.”

I got down a shot -- it must have been a hundred and thirty proof -- and then another. Not quickly, with bravado, but with a slow savoring of the simple heat and clarity of the stuff. Like the roasting red peppers, or the fat black bunches of grapes, like a white fig in the morning, or torchlight reflected on a saint’s painted robes, the fire in the grappa was a simple declarative, a primary color of southern Italy.

But I passed on the regalo. I was sure they wouldn’t allow anything that flammable on the plane. And I think that same bottle will be there when I return.

(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of Traveler Overseas. It is also available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon as part of a collection of travel articles by Bill Scheller, entitled In All Directions, published by Natural Traveler Books®.)

Wood Duck Photo by Janet Safris