A Tavola
Bringing Back
54 Section
Sunday Lunch by Marybeth Bonfiglio
B
ack in the old days, our family would gather after mass and we would spend hours eating together. It was worth having to sit through a boring mass as a kid because I knew afterwards we would be able to run wild and eat the best food, including all the dolce we wanted. We typically gathered at my Nonno’s house. All his siblings lived on one end of his street, and at the other end was Our Lady of Loretto, a tiny church that my grandparents built from stone when they arrived from Italy. After Sunday mass, everyone just walked down the street, stopped quickly in their homes, changed their clothes, grabbed the food they had prepared to share, and headed to my grandfather's house. My Nonno would bring out all the bottles of homemade wine and bitters. He’d put Tony Bennet on his record player and lay out the good silverware on red and white checkered tablecloths. Fast forward a couple of decades and nobody goes to mass anymore, the elders have all passed on, and people got so busy with their nuclear family plans that Sunday lunch became extinct. Gathering together to share food and loud conversation seemed to have faded with the busy schedules of the modern world.
Segmento Issue XXIII • June-August 2021
