A Visit to the Ancestral Comune

Way back in the early days of this blog, I mentioned that my great grandfather Cesare Pesaresi was born in Corinaldo, in Ancona province, in the region of Le Marche.  This past weekend, thanks to cousin M. and her family, we got to see the home of his parents, Pietro Pesaresi and Marianna Pierpaoli, as well as the centro storico of the comune, and some of the surrounding countryside.  Both the ancestral homestead and the comune itself were larger than I'd pictured in my mind.

We made the drive from Senigallia to cousin M's family's home in a little under 25 minutes.  The countryside of the Marche region is very pretty - quite agricultural, like Molise, though the hills are smaller here.  I took a short video (about 26 seconds) of the drive - here is the link.  While we did see a few olive groves, as well as several signs advertising olive oil for sale, we encountered more vineyards, farms, and orchards here.  Incidentally, I learned that the wine region here is called Colli Pesaresi - although to my knowledge my family doesn't have a winery of its own (by the way, "Pesaresi" just means "from Pesaro"; "colli," in this sense of the word, translates to "hills").  I shall have to see if I can find some wines from the Colli Pesaresi region when we are back in the US!

When we arrived, M., her husband L., her daughter A. (they have a son, too, but he is currently studying in Milano), and M.'s parents were waiting to greet us.  And inside waiting for us was cousin F. - my grandfather Alfonso's first cousin, who was born in 1926!  Her mother was my great grandfather's sister Palmira - the girl with the large bow in her hair in the photo at the top of this blog.  Hard to believe there is still someone of that generation living, but there she was, very sweet and frail.  She seemed quite happy to meet us, although we couldn't really speak directly to one another as she doesn't speak English and my Italian is next to nonexistent.  She is also extremely hard of hearing. My grandfather and she used to exchange brief letters and holiday cards - he would write in English while she would write in Italian - and she still had many of the cards and letters he'd sent over the years, which they showed me!  I let them know that I have the letters and cards she sent to him, as my grandparents gave them to me years ago (along with a lot of other family memorabilia) when they sold their house.

Me, F., and M's mother/F's daughter FS.  And one of their two dogs - it kept nipping me when we first arrived.  I realized after we left that we didn't get cousin M. in this group picture for some reason😞

A US map was brought out, and we were asked to indicate on it who lives where - so we marked ourselves in PA, and to the best of our ability added various other relatives they asked about.

Mapping out the US Pesaresi family

After looking through photos and letters, marking the map, and of course, caffè, we set off to see the ancestral homestead - the home where my great, great grandparents lived, which was just a short drive away.  

The house is now owned by a German couple.  While we were there taking pictures, the woman came out to see what we were doing there.  She wasn't overly-friendly and more or less chased us away, as she was busy painting, she said (in English) - although she invited us to come back some other time.  I apologized for disturbing her and explained I'd just wanted to see the house where my great grandfather once lived.  We scooted off pretty quickly after that.

We also stopped to visit the town cemetery.  L. asked me about the cemetery at home - I think perhaps he assumed the family was all buried in one place, which isn't the case - and I did my best to explain that cemeteries in the US are not at all like the cemeteries commonly found in Italy.  In Italy, the cimitero is usually a sort of walled enclave located outside the town proper, and owned by the local comune, not the church (I believe my own comune charges a nominal "cemetery tax").  A typical cimitero consists of family mausoleums and rows of vaults - they look almost like a little village.  In at least some cimiteri, the vaults might be leased rather than owned outright; if the lease is not renewed, the deceased (or whatever remains of them) is then removed to an ossuary elsewhere on the grounds.  

Views of the cimitero

The vaults of Palmira Pesaresi and her husband, Adolfo Mosca (the parents of cousin F.)

The vault of Pietro Pesaresi, father of Cesare and Palmira.  

From there, we were taken to see the birthplace of Santa Maria Goretti, who was born here in 1890 - just nine years before the birth of Cesare Pesaresi (she died when he was three years old).  If you're not familiar with her story, know that it's not a very pleasant one - she is the patron saint of crime victims - rape victims in particular - among other things.

This is the bed in which Maria was born

Afterwards, we drove into the walled centro storico for a walking tour.  Two of the more well-known sights of Corinaldo:

Del Pozzo della Polenta - the "Polenta Well."  The story goes that a man carrying a sack of corn flour was walking up the steep hill (I guess the steps hadn't been built yet).  He stopped to rest at the well, and his sack of flour fell in - and he jumped in after it.   Polenta-making chaos ensued - there are actually several variations of the story of what happened next:  some say he threw down some sausages, too; others say the townspeople jumped in after him because they didn't want him to selfishly eat all the polenta himself.  It's a little weird, to be sure; perhaps the story doesn't translate well across cultures.  But there is a yearly festival based on this story called La Contesta del Pozzo della Polenta - the Struggle for the Polenta Well.  The festival isn't about the polenta; rather, it is in honor of the well itself - the water from it ensured the victory of the Corinaldesi over the Duke of Urbino, who laid siege to the town back in the 1500s

This "house" is, obviously, just a façade.  The story behind the Casa di Scuretto is that Signore Scuretto, the town drunk, had a son who went to the US to work.  The son would send money back to his father, which was to be used to build a house to which the son would one day return after having made his fortune in America.  But the father spent the money in the local bars instead.  At some point, his son got suspicious and asked his father to send him pictures of the work in progress.  The father quickly had this façade built, stuck a house number on it, and sent the requested photos.  Eventually, the son found out what his father had done, and stopped sending money - so the house was never finished.

The town is larger than I had imagined.  I wish that we had planned to spend more time here, because there was much more we would have liked to have seen.  We did have a chance to climb up one part of the city walls - which, incidentally, aren't actually the original walls, as they "only" date back to the late 1400s!  So:  practically new, in Italian terms.  

Inside some kind of walkway within the walls, I think - it was a little unclear to us where we were at this point - we were just following L. as he led us through the highlights.  I wish I'd had a map...

One of the city gates

M. & L., atop the tower at the Porta Nova, I believe

The "New" Gate dates from 1490.

Views from atop the city walls

At the main entrance to city hall

Just a couple of tourists on a breezy day - please excuse my wind-blown hair

Side view of the end of a row of small houses that I thought were cute; too bad I didn't see any "vendesi" ("for sale") signs on any of them.  The front door for this end unit is on the left (unseen) side of the building.

The last part of our somewhat whirlwind tour included visits to a couple of the town's major churches.  Our first stop was the Sanctuario di Santa Maria Goretti (formerly known as the Chiesa di Sant'Agostino):

The saint's mother.

We also stopped in at the Chiesa dell'Addolorata, where they keep the Madonna and the Dead Christ that are carried in the town's Good Friday procession:

The Good Friday procession statues

After our tour of Corinaldo, we returned to the family's home to say goodbye and thank you to the cousins before heading back down the A14 (the Autostrata Adriatica) towards home.  As we were driving, we took note of how pretty the route is.  The A14 runs from Bologna over to the coast, then more or less down the Adriatic coastline before cutting back over to Taranto at the western top of the "heel" of the "boot" of Italy - on the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea.  We decided that we might like to do an A14 road trip someday - starting in Bologna and working our way down, stopping along the way to explore whatever cute beach towns catch our fancy.  Anybody in?

When we finally arrived home, we realized - much to our embarrassment - that we'd completely forgotten to give our hosts a cake we'd bought at our local bakery as a gift for them.  This cake is called Colomba di Pasqua ("dove cake," although to me, the texture is more like a light, sweet bread - somewhat like a panettone),  and is traditionally served at Eastertime here (Paolo waited in line for quite a while at the bakery to get one).  Ugh, I felt like a jerk - I don't know how it slipped my mind.  Well, I will send them something from the US once we return, I guess.  In the meantime, we've been eating the cake/bread ourselves, as there's no sense in letting it go to waste; it's super tasty.  I will have to see if I can find a good recipe to replicate this back in the US.  Which, sadly, will be all too soon...

Next up:  Paolo had an appointment to pick up his carta di soggiorno at the questura in Campobasso.

Overnight in Senigallia

We were invited to stay overnight in the little pied-à-terre of cousin M. and her husband L. in the nearby beach resort town of Senigallia (a little less than 25 minutes from their home on the outskirts of Corinaldo, my great grandfather's hometown).  We had a great view of the beach from the balcony:

The vibe of the beachfront area is not unlike that of Avalon, NJ, for example, with its quaint little shops and trendy-ish restaurants.  The beaches along the Adriatic coast - at least the ones we've passed on our travels - seem to be narrower than most of those along the South Jersey shore.  I imagine it gets pretty lively here in the summer time.  It seems to be a family-oriented area, as we saw a few playground areas along the beach - though not in a loud, neon-lighted Wildwood or busy-boardwalk Ocean City kind of way (with apologies to those who enjoy those types of places).

We met up with L. and daughter A. in the early evening for a very quick tour of parts of the centro storico of Senigallia before picking up M. at work:

Rocca Rovaresca, a Gothic fortress

Foro Annonario, where there is a daily market.  The inside of the building was once the fish market - inside you can still see the large stone slab tables where the fish would have been displayed.  Today there seems to be a historical exhibit of some kind inside, but we didn't visit that, just peeked through the windows

Inner courtyard, Palazzetto Baviera

After our very quick walking tour, we picked up cousin M. from her place of work and headed to dinner at a nearby restaurant, where we had Neapolitan-style pizza (note that Napoli is about 4.5 to 5 hours southwest of here by car).  We certainly had fun trying to communicate with one another.  A. speaks some English, so she helped translate a bit; mostly we had to resort to translation apps on our phones.  Interestingly, the servers in the restaurant spoke quite good English.  I wonder if many British tourists visit during the summers...?  

After dinner we walked off some of the calories on a quick tour of the beach/port area.  We saw where all the fishing boats dock (I didn't get any pictures of them as it was not particularly well-lit in that area), as well as what appeared to be a boating or yacht club, perhaps - at any rate, there were a lot of sailboats:

We also took a walk out on the pier to see the Rotondo a Mare.  I think they host events and exhibits inside; unfortunately, it wasn't open when we were there, so we could not walk all the way around it.  But it was still very cool to see lit up at night:

Rotondo a Mare

Fountain, with the Rotondo to the left in the background

View of the town in the early evening

I wish we had planned to spend more time here; it's a charming little town and I'd like to go back and see more of it - perhaps on our next trip!

Up Next:  a visit to Cesare's hometown.

Riding on a Railroad: Return to Napoli

"We are riding on a railroad / singing someone else's song..."

-James Taylor, Riding on a Railroad

We've had a quiet couple of weeks since our return from Ravenna.  Our American neighbor, who is also resident here in anticipation of citizenship recognition) had a birthday - the day before mine, actually - and threw himself a very nice party at the local bar.  It seemed like the whole comune was there at one point or another throughout the evening; we had a chance to talk with some folks we'd never met or had only seen in passing before.  I spent some time chatting with one of the old guys in town, who told me that he "hates Americans" and also "hates religion."  I said:  "Sono Americana e sono Italiana," so maybe he only half hates me?  He was actually a pretty decent guy (if somewhat curmudgeonly); we mostly communicated via translation apps on our respective phones.  He also showed me a picture of himself with (allegedly) Che Guevara's stepmother and half-sister.  Whew.

The same night we met yet another American; she arrived in town back when we were visiting Bologna, so this was the first chance we'd had to talk to her.  She's here by herself right now, but her husband will be joining her soon - he will arrive the same day we leave to return to the US.  She mentioned that her microwave was broken.  Well, one of the first really dumb things we did when we arrived was to buy ourselves a small, cheap microwave - only to get it home and realize we had absolutely nowhere to put it in our kitchen, counterspace being at a premium.  DUH.  We never even took it out of the box.  We were very happy to be able to give it to her, as she will actually get use out of it, and now we don't have to leave it behind in our apartment or otherwise deal with it when we leave.  Win-win.

Since we've been here, we've found that we get by just fine without a microwave, even though it was something we probably used every day in the US.  Here, though, we simply don't have the same access to processed and/or frozen foods.  I wonder if we'll go on not using one, once we are back in our American kitchen...?

One other thing I did was to connect with a cousin - a third cousin, actually (the granddaughter of my grandfather's first cousin - who is 96 years old!  If my grandfather were still alive, he would be 102). She and her family live in Corinaldo (or thereabouts), the town where my great grandfather was born.  She very kindly invited us to visit the family for the Sunday and Monday of Easter weekend (Easter Monday is a public holiday here, although Good Friday is not).  I'm pretty excited to be able to see Corinaldo.  Particularly the Polenta Well.

But:  we're going to squeeze in another little trip between now and then.  I'm writing this from the second of three trains we'll be riding today, making our way back to Napoli.  We spent one day there back in 2018, and we spent one day there back in February; this time we will stay for four nights.  The weather should be OK, if not perfect:  I think it may rain for a bit in the morning on two of the days; Friday should be the nicest, sunniest day.  This is perfect, because I've booked a tour of Pompeii with a former archaeologist for Friday afternoon.  Paolo has always wanted to see Pompeii, so I'm excited to be able to arrange that for him.  I hope the weather cooperates enough that I can take some good pictures of Mount Vesuvius, too.

Incidentally, the weather at home has been a bit dreary the last few days; however, today we woke up to sunshine (of course we did, because we were about to leave town).  I took a couple of quick snaps from the car on the way to the train station in Termoli:

Our train between Foggia and Caserta is running a bit late; it's going to be a very tight connection from Caserta to Napoli; fortunately, they run trains between Caserta and Napoli every 10 minutes or so, and the cost is quite minimal - about 6 or 7 euros, I think, so no big deal if we have to rebook.  The only minor annoyance, really, is that someone else is sitting in the seat I paid for; so my Paolo is stuck in a seat behind me (it appears my seatmate may also be a Paolo).  This is the second time we've had this issue with Trenitalia.  I don't know if it's a ticketing error or if people just generally sit wherever they want to despite what the ticket says, because Italy.  I suspect the latter.  I wouldn't mind nearly so much if I hadn't paid for first class tickets.  Ah, well, I don't have the language skills to press the point, so I'm just going to sit here and look out the window at the beautiful countryside and think about finding somewhere to go for a good dinner tonight...and also see if this time, I can figure out how to get a metro pass that will cover multiple days in Napoli.

Escaping the cold by going...North!

Lately, the weather in our region has been cold and damp; it rained and/or snowed most of last week.

View out the bathroom window, yesterday morning.

So we decided to escape the winter blahs for a few days.  We started checking the weather in a few places where we thought it might be warmer and drier - but it turned out that Napoli was going to be cold and damp as well; and so was Palermo.  To our surprise, the better weather (at least right now) is to the north of us.

So on a sort-of whim, we chose to spend a few days in Bologna, in the Emilia-Romagna region (fun family fact:  my great grandmother Emma Grandi was from a town about 45 minutes west of here).  It's a very old (founded by the Etruscans) and very young (full of students of the University of Bologna, est. 1088) and very diverse city, famous for its porticoes, its Due Torri, and for having been pretty heavily bombed during WWII (and maybe for a few other things as well).  The weather this week should be mainly sunny and mostly in the mid-50s F - perfect for getting out and exploring; the centro storico is very walkable, even in bad weather, thanks to all those porticoes.

We were scheduled to take the train from Termoli to Bologna Centrale at 13:20 yesterday.  It had rained and snowed all the day before, and although the snow hadn't stuck to the streets in our comune, we decided to leave a bit early, just in case we encountered snow or ice on the roads outside the comune.  Which, in fact, we did:

The road was perfectly clear right up to this point...and it was also clear on the other side a bit farther on...because Italy, I guess.  No idea what happened here.  Fortunately, we did not get stuck when turning around...although I think we almost did!  About a 10-12 minute drive from this point and everything was completely snow-free.

Despite the road block, we still managed to make it to the train station in plenty of time...only to find that our train was running about 25 minutes late.  Pretty typical of Italy, although it's rarely happened to us personally.   I tried to take a few pictures from the train during the four-hour ride:

Pesaro station, Pesaro being the origin of the name "Pesaresi"

I'll just mention here that this seems to be a pretty good time of year to visit, what with decent weather while still being outside of the tourist season; there are good deals to be had on hotel and B&B stays. We booked ourselves four nights at 051 Suites, a very nice B&B in the centro storico; it's a few steps away from the Two Towers and a very short walk to the Piazza Maggiore, one of the main piazzas in the historic district. It's in a building that also houses other businesses and apartments; the reception and breakfast room of the B&B are on the 1st floor, while the rooms are all on the 3rd floor.  I have to say that the staff here are super kind and helpful; even before we arrived, they emailed me a rather detailed list of restaurants we might like to try that serve typical regional cuisine - the kinds of places the locals would go, not tourist traps (I made sure to book a couple before we left).  

By the time we arrived, got a taxi to the B&B, checked in, etc., we had just a little bit of time to settle in and freshen up before heading out to find the restaurant where I booked dinner, which turned out to be about a 6 or 8 minute walk.  I chose a place called Trattoria Anna Maria; the B&B recommended it, plus, the Anna Maria depicted on the website looks like someone's nonna - who wouldn't want dinner cooked by Granny?  It wasn't anything fancy, but it was delicious!  I started with passatelli in broth - a dish I remembered from my childhood that I had not eaten in many years.  It tasted very much like I remembered - delightful.  Paolo chose tortelloni with butter for his first course.  

A bowlful of childhood memories

For our second courses, Paolo tried the stinco al forno (roast pork shin on the bone) while I ordered the coniglio arrosto (roast rabbit).  I'm not sure if the server - a mildly crabby older gentleman - was trying to be funny, or just didn't want to hear my poor Italian again, because when he set the dish in front of me, he called it "Roger Rabbit."

Roger was perfectly cooked and practically fell off his bones.

No fancy sauces, no artistic plating - just good food.  It was a perfect way to start our little adventure here.

I'll have to do a second post later, to describe our day today - but you'll have to excuse me now, as it's time to get ready for what will hopefully be another delicious dinner.