By Nino Ricci (page 2 of 4)

Often enough the cheese and pork would have been of our own vintage; we used to hang them to cure from the rafters of our barn, with shields fashioned from Unico Vegetable Oil tins positioned above them to keep off the pigeon droppings. The pork came from the hog that we slaughtered every year in mid-winter: it would show up in our basement one day grunting and heaving, live and primal and real, and be sausage and tripe by the following night. This yearly slaughter, which had always to be during the waxing moon, or the meat would go bad, was accompanied by a party, for which the relatives were invited over and sheets of plywood were laid on sawhorses in the living room for tables, the windows fogging up with the heat of cooking and talk. All of these things, of course-the pigs in the basement, the parties, even the Unico tins in the barn-seemed perfectly normal and inevitable to me when I was small, not because they recalled customs my parents had had in Italy, which in any event I knew nothing of, but simply because, not unlike my father back in Molise, I had never realized that elsewhere things might be different.

When I started school, however, a lot of what we did suddenly began to seem not so normal. There was the home-made bread my mother used for our sandwiches, thick-crusted, spongy stuff that sheÕd fashioned baking pans for from those same all-purpose Unico tins and that did not resemble in the least the white, perfect, store-bought bread of the other kids; there was the patched, old-fashioned, hand-me-down look of our clothes. It was as if I too had set out on a ship and arrived in another country, where people did things differently, so that suddenly everything about my own little domain, the closed autonomous world IÕd been raised in until then, seemed makeshift and shabby and low. This, then, perhaps, was my true passage to Canada, out of innocence and sameness into difference, and like any child I did not like the experience of difference one bit, and sought every means to mitigate it. Thus all things Italian became anathema, and the two worlds I lived in, at home and at school, were kept cleanly separate and distinct, so that the former should not in any way compromise my standing in the latter. In this way I sailed more or less happily toward assimilation, which seemed the good and proper course for someone of my clearly questionable origins.

In the summer of 1971 I made my first visit to Italy, as part of a family trip that lasted six weeks and took us to every corner of the country. That trip transformed my relationship to my parentsÕ homeland: from an Italianness that had meant shabby clothes and spongy bread I discovered one that included instead such marvels as the Colosseum and Saint MarkÕs Square, which even the callow twelve-year-old I was then could not help but be impressed by. Indeed Italy, in its excess, seemed precisely designed for twelve-year-olds, since every sort of wonder could be found there, from skeleton-filled catacombs to vast marble monuments and endless miles of sand-brimmed sea, and I immediately fell hopelessly in love with the place, with exactly that achy, adolescent intensity I had begun to feel by then toward the opposite sex. The Italy I fell in love with, however, was not the one my parents had left behind; in fact, to most of the places we visited they were as much tourists as I was, and were laying eyes on them for the first time. Thus what we were discovering together was precisely the Italy that my parents had always been excluded from, coming as they had from the barbarous south, where feudalism hadnÕt been abolished until the 1850s and where Mussolini, who had been the first to introduce there such extravagances as hospitals and schools, was still considered a hero.

It was a bit of a shock to me then to arrive at this other Italy, that of my parentsÕ little mountain villages, and to find there an entirely different world, of abandoned houses and questionable plumbing and animal shit in the roads. What in the rest of Italy had seemed venerable and ancient here seemed merely backward, and my first reaction was a wish to flee back to the elegant apartment blocks and terraced inner courtyards of my sophisticated Roman cousins. I remember the supper we had our first evening in my grandfatherÕs house in Villa Canale, the flies everywhere and the stable stink from outside, the gobs of spit on the hearth where my grandfather had hawked toward the cooking fire and missed. We had penne with tomato sauce for supper but I could not eat a bite of them, so much did the place turn my stomach. Seeing the bathroom, a crude addition to the place from the early 60s, when indoor plumbing had apparently still been a great novelty, I was relieved to learn that one of my uncles had recently built a new home down the street with somewhat more updated facilities, including the luxury of a water heater and a bathtub.