Dances with Luigi: A Grandson's Determined Quest to Comprehend Italy and the Italians

Dances

with Luigi

Prologue

I arose early in the small Italian provincial town of Rocarasso, downed a quick cappuccino and breakfast roll, then sped off into the nearby mountains to visit, for the first time, the birthplace of my mother’s father.

I was a man on a mission.

I had spent nearly the entire previous year trying to learn the Italian language and poring over contemporary and ancient Italian and Roman history. I had polled every living member of my family for their recollections, papers—anything and everything they considered relevant to who and where our family might be and be from.

Here I was in the middle of the Apennines, nearly due east of Rome and straight up—a place I only vaguely learned about in very distant history and geography classes—tracking down family mysteries. Not exactly the most logical route for an American television journalist supposedly in mid-career. I was also a third-generation Italian-American who, until just a few years before that chilly morning in Abruzzo, wasn’t much concerned about the hyphened heritage.

But, by that sunny, cold day, the search for the past had all but taken over my life and was drawing me to a personal and, ultimately, spiritual quest in search of the past. I was trying to learn whatever I could about the history of the generation that went to America, many of whose members couldn’t write and left very few records. And some of those from that same time who were literate had kept silent about key issues.

By now I had framed the questions, it was time for answers. I would visit many more villages, meet dozens more people, and spend another two years in Southern Italy before I was through.

Here I was in the middle of my life and career trying to sort things out from another generation’s past. Why was I willing to take nearly three years and go off in search of family mysteries? What was driving my sometimes quixotic adventures?

I suppose it all started in San Francisco in the early eighties. I was working as an executive producer at the NBC affiliate in town when the Italian consulate published a booklet designed to inform the offspring of Italian immigrants about modern-day Italy. The press release and booklet was being supplied to all the major news outlets throughout California.

I found myself surprised by much of the information. According to the booklet, Italy was the fifth-wealthiest nation in the world. Richer than England! A major exporter of fashion, clothing, shoes, wine, cinema, and, of course, food. Modern Italy was a fashion statement. That wasn’t the Italy my grandparents left. That wasn’t the Old Country they only occasionally mentioned. I filed the subject somewhere in the back of my mind and moved on.

Then, in San Francisco again, I went to see the 1989 baseball World Series. I wound up surviving a catastrophic earthquake. And, the Series aside, I was also at this point the news director for the NBC television affiliate in Houston. I was the only local TV representative from my station or my city in San Francisco that evening. I assigned myself the role of reporter—something I hadn’t done in years. I got on the phone and made a live report for the ten P.M. broadcast.

The day after the quake we made arrangements to feed through a regional satellite truck. I appeared on the air in Houston for the first time in my new role. The staff enjoyed giving me a detailed critique of my on-camera performance. The CEO of our parent company also saw one of the reports and sent my boss a humorous note saying, in part, "that new Italian reporter ain’t bad." My boss sent the note along to me.

There it was: all of my life, in school, in the army, in the television news business, the first descriptive term of me and that of my family was always Italian.

I didn’t so much mind, it was just that I didn’t know much about being Italian. My family was as American as you could get; I was raised in the suburbs, had been a Cub and Boy Scout, had played in Little League, was the beneficiary of excellent dental care and public schools, and was a veteran of the U.S. Army. Italian, especially at this time of my life, just wasn’t a ready or often-used adjective when I was describing myself.

During the next and very hot summer of 1990, the G-7 Economic Summit met in Houston. The heads of state for West Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, Japan, and Canada all came to explore economic interests in the high humidity of George Bush’s adopted hometown. The meetings were especially focused on Europe that year, given the recent and sweeping changes in Eastern Europe, and particularly in East Germany.

I was invited to a reception for the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti. It was to be hosted by the Houston Italian-American Cultural Society. I hadn’t known there was such an organization. The woman from the organization made a point of saying they were trying to invite all the prominent Italians from the Houston area.

But I’m American, I said.

Your parents are not Italian?

American, I said.

Your name is not Italian?

My grandparents came here from Italy, I replied.

That’s what I mean, she said, sounding somewhat exasperated. It’s the same thing.

Is it? I wondered.

Despite the fact I was still being described as such, the only information I had about my heritage were the old, nonspecific stories of my family told to me as a child.

I became determined to learn more. I signed up for an Italian-language class at the Cultural Society to see if there was, hopefully, anything familiar about the language no one had ever really spoken to me. There wasn’t. The only thing it reminded me of was how much I had dreaded Latin classes in high school.

For years I had been making a pilgrimage back to Pittsburgh for the holidays. I was always saddened at how many fewer people there were back home. Our tribe was shrinking. My knowledge of them, and theirs of me, was becoming dim.

I had come home from the army in 1969, having been stationed in Germany, for which I was very thankful. It was the height of the Vietnam conflict. I returned unharmed from what could be viewed as an extended visit to Western Europe. I had a long reunion with my maternal grandfather, Pietro DePasquale—Popa the only grandfather I ever knew and the only member of his generation in our family who had actually returned to Italy after emigrating to America.

Popa asked me about postwar Europe. He had not been back across the Atlantic since before the start of the Second World War. He was, of course, curious about my impressions of Italy.

Popa, I said, it was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I told him the story of waking one morning in the hills above Naples and looking out over the Tyrrhenian Sea. The water was the clearest and deepest green I had ever seen. The mist rising off Capri was spectacular—beyond imagination. How could anyone leave such a place? I asked.

You saw it with a full stomach, he said, dismissing the subject.

Because of comments like that, I had always assumed my grandparents had come to the United States to escape poverty, that the lives of their families in Italy had been deprived and difficult. I never really knew for sure. Now, in the 1990s, there was no one around from the first generation to answer my growing list of questions.

My sister, Marie, had dubbed all of our family movies over to videotape. I found them difficult to watch. I could still feel the strength and solidity of my family in those old and slightly faded Kodacolor films. But a deep sadness would sometimes overwhelm me. So many people gone. And I was losing the ability to hear their voices, recall their laughter, remember the very special sense I always felt as part of that once big clan.

I wondered about those rich, dark eyes on the celluloid. They were all from the Old Country. They lived thousands of miles from where their life had started. Most had left parents and relatives behind, never to be seen again. All spoke English with obvious traces of Italy in their pronunciation. I had always assumed they were happy about their circumstance. Now I wondered, was it laughter and humor in their eyes, or merely sadness and resignation—the ironic acceptance of a people who must live in a place where they were not born?

I yearned to know who they were, these people I had called family, and what they had thought about moving to a new world where they didn’t know the language or the customs and knew there was no going back once the voyage was made.

I pestered my father for any information about his family. His father had been killed in a steel mill accident in Pittsburgh in 1922. Dad was only nine years old. He didn’t have any more information than I. He could only recall a few dim memories of a big and loving man, and of continually becoming lost and having been rescued on each occasion by his father in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was in the Village, heavily settled by Italian immigrants, where the family first moved and where my father was born—the first child in his family born in the new country.

Because of my father’s and his brothers’ wanderings, my grandmother insisted that they leave Manhattan and move to the country. They went to the Pennsylvania mill town of Clairton, where Grandma’s brother, Dad’s uncle Charlie, had achieved the remarkable status of foreman at the Carnegie Steel Company. It was a place where the children could be found simply by calling for them. In Grandma’s mind, the smoke and pollution of the mill was infinitely better than the confusion and danger on New York’s streets. Dad said his father hated the move to Pennsylvania.

Grandma died at age ninety-nine. Throughout her long life, she always lamented that she had been forced to leave her village and family, and was always saddened by the fact she had never seen her mother again. There was considerable evidence she was never completely comfortable in the new country. Her language, fashion, and outlook remained very different from that of her Americanized children—and they remained curiously indifferent to stories about the Old World.

We all knew about my mother’s father, Pietro DePasquale. He was the American Dream fulfilled, the poor boy who had left his hillside village in Italy in 1898 and gone on to seek his future and fortune in twentieth-century America. He found both. He had been a role model for his community and family.

Or did we really know about his life?

We knew he returned to Italy at least three times between 1920 and 1940, where he met with Benito Mussolini, apparently at the dictator’s invitation. Pietro had been an outspoken supporter of Il Duce. He had hired professional film crews during at least two of his visits to Italy. They filmed extensively in his native Abruzzo, a quasi-documentary on the region. I saw the film only once as a young boy. The movies were on ancient 35mm silver nitrite stock. Those not intentionally destroyed (my mother says Popa went after them with scissors the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—apparently eliminating every scene of Mussolini and anything to do with Fascism) eventually disintegrated with age.

Mussolini’s declaration of war on the United States also ended all of Pietro’s ties with the Old Country. He refused to speak about this period.

No one in my generation had been very interested in the subject of Italy during my grandfather’s lifetime. We were all little Americans—baby boomers—and very happy about it. We assumed he was, too. No one ever questioned the fact he’d left his village at the age of fourteen, his wealth on his back, yet somehow came to know a dictator. How could that have happened?

As a grandson, I had never questioned the fact. Now the journalist in me was very curious.

Through my newfound friends at the Italian Cultural Society in Houston, I learned I was eligible for an Italian passport, since my paternal grandfather, Francesco, died prior to becoming an American citizen. A European passport couldn’t hurt; the world was getting smaller, and who knew? Maybe an opportunity knocking? All I needed to do was collect the paperwork to prove my grandfather’s birth, death, and a few relevant documents in between. Sounded simple.

I was named for this man I had never known—Francesco Paolo Paolicelli. There was only one photograph of him hanging over the mantel in my grandmother’s little house in Clairton, Pennsylvania. It was a formal wedding portrait—my grandfather in a suit and tie, his new bride stiffly at his side. He had a mustache, the only clear fact I had about the man. I grew one as soon as I was able because of that photo. It was my only relationship with him, our only known similarity.

Francesco’s death haunted my father. When he’d issue his own children a well-deserved punishment, he’d always question his strictness. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, he’d muse. I never had a father to teach me how to do this. Then he’d do exactly the right thing. But in Dad’s mind, if his father had been there, he wouldn’t have ever been unsure of himself.

On a visit to Pittsburgh, I asked Dad again for any memory, any recollection he might have about his father. He recalled my grandfather, told of him coming home from his job in the steel mill—a job he hated—and showing his blistered and bleeding hands to his small son. Dad repeated the story of how Francesco had been killed working on a construction gang while operating a crane—a task for which he had no training and no background. Dad had never known the details of the accident until he after he had graduated from high school and was working in New York City. A cousin detailed what had happened.

Apparently, some equipment became entangled. My grandfather tried to straighten things out, slipped and fell, and was run over. The crane, which ran on railroad tracks, severed Francesco’s legs from his body. The story had been told to our cousin by a man who knew Frank Paolicelli and who had been with him when the accident occurred.

The man said he could clearly remember cradling my grandfather in his arms as he lay puddled in blood. He recalled my grandfather saying over and over, povri figli mie’, povri figli mie’—my poor kids. His dying thoughts were about his children and his responsibility to his family, not his bad luck or his mutilated body.

My father choked up when he repeated the ungrammatical Italian phrase, almost seventy-five years after his father had spoken it.

Now, because of the ancient tragedy of Francesco’s early death, I was eligible for a European passport.

Other factors in my life coincided with inevitable change; my company was being put up for sale, and I had the option of cashing in my contract. It was time to move on to something else. I was burning out on television news.

I knew something was clearly missing in my life. I had known it for a long time. I had grown up in a big, noisy family. My parent’s best friends were brothers, sisters, and cousins. And so it was with our generation when we were children. My cousins and I were as close as siblings. We had a manner of communication that was special and apart from the outside world, our neighborhood, and school acquaintances. We were family, and that meant intimate familiarity, nonspoken allegiance, blood ties, and love.

We simply accepted the fact, none of us questioned it. We were each other’s best friends. We arranged for each other’s first dates, went to proms together, sneaked cigarettes, shared jokes, knew each other’s most secret secrets. There was always laughter.

My first job in television was at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. I had lucked out, stumbled into a job and a career because of a Pittsburgh newspaper strike—the local television news time had expanded to fill the void. They needed writers and reporters. I was fresh out of college, visiting my father, and had news reporting experience from the army. I applied for and was given the job of news writer. Assuming it was temporary, I didn’t inform my cousins of the new assignment.

The first time my credit ran on the air was after the six P.M. news one spring evening in 1971. Not ten seconds later, I received a phone call. It was my cousin Donna Jean. She said the name looked great on TV. I wasn’t the least surprised by her call.

By the early nineties, I was a vice president of news, and all of that sense of extended family was gone. Long gone. Donna Jean had been killed by a drunk driver just a few years after that first credit had appeared. Many others of the older generation had died as well. Those of us surviving in the younger generation had journeyed into our own typically American lives and had scattered throughout the country. Everything that my youth had been about didn’t exist any longer.

I had survived the army, worked my way through college, gone off into my own private world of sound bites and videotape and talent negotiations. I had a career. I had left family behind.

And there were no children in my life, either. I had been saving, probably since my first paycheck, to pay for my kids’ education if any ever showed up. While still in my twenties, I had a vision of a little girl sitting on the piano bench and playing Für Elise on my fiftieth birthday as I surrounded myself with friends, family, the aroma of an expensive cigar, and basked in a sense of self-satisfaction.

I was now past forty. There was no wife or daughter. Für Elise was out of the question. I had quit smoking and, just recently, there had been surgery—a piece of my hip had been harvested to replace a collapsed disk in my neck. I came out of the anesthesia and looked around at the stark, sickly lime-green enamel-painted hospital walls. What if it had ended here, I wondered. What if I hadn’t come to? Would my brief obituary have recorded the life I would have wanted?

Of course, I knew the answer only too well.

I wanted to get back to something spiritually important. Something of the heart. I had the money in the bank to educate my nonexistent daughter. Why not educate myself? Why not use the money to fill the void in my life and learn about the thing that had been most important to me? I knew I didn’t want to take another television job, move to another city, work in another newsroom. Not just yet.

I was reading, A Soldier of the Great War, a novel by Mark Helprin. It had been given to me by a friend during my recuperation from surgery. It was a brilliant story by a young American writer about an Italian veteran of the First World War. When I came to the following passage, the words jumped off the page and landed somewhere deep inside me:

Though he knew it was not true, he felt that in Rome someone would be waiting for him. Perhaps it was because the magic of cities is that they provide the illusion of love and family even for those with neither. Lights, the business of the streets, the very buildings close together, the interminable variety and depth, serve to draw lonely people in, and no matter what they know, they still feel in their heart of hearts that someone is waiting to embrace them in perfect love and trust.

I decided, then and there, to set up a bank account with the education money and to go to Italy. I’d return to the States and another job when the money was gone, but since I’d been frugal and my needs weren’t extravagant, I could anticipate a long