Return to the Old Country
Pergine, Italy
I AM RIDING in the front seat of Alessandro‘s SUV, driving on a twisting, winding mountain road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. I close my eyes when a car approaches from the opposite direction. Alessandro and the other driver carefully maneuver their cars and expertly manage the narrow passage. I can’t look. I could never drive on such a road.
It will take us two hours to reach our destination, a small village population 200, in a valley at the base of the Dolomiti, the mountains bordering Italy and Austria. Palu del Fersina is the place where my great-grandparents, Emilia Casagrande and Pietro Anderle, were born and raised. Pietro died long before I was born, but I remember my great-grandmother, my bisnonna, well. She raised my mother when my grandmother had to go to work to support herself and her young daughter (my mother) after a scandalous divorce.
My great-grandmother was very much a part of my life and I loved her dearly. She often spoke wistfully of her life in Palu which she called the Old Country. She had a dried, pressed edelweiss flower in a little wooden frame that she would show me, explaining how she brought the flower with her all the way from the Old Country, a remnant of her life spent near these towering, craggy mountain peaks dominating the green valleys and tiny little towns scattered below.
We are driving through a bustling town on our way to Palu. I ask my guide Claudia, “Where are we right now?“ as I pull out a photograph of my great-grandmother to show her. “We’re in a town called Pergine,” Claudia says, “the town where people from Palu came to buy and sell things.”
The photo I have was taken by a professional photographer around 1903, when my great-grandmother would have been 14 years old. My great-grandmother is young and pretty, with shining eyes and full lips. Her hair is carefully arranged. She stares at the camera with a faint smile on her face, her hand resting on a table. She is beautifully dressed in a lace blouse and a checkered skirt, earrings in her ears, wearing a long Victorian lavalier necklace. A wide belt with an ornate buckle cinches her tiny waist.
She is obviously wearing a corset as she did her entire life, strange contraptions of stays and cords and boning, sewn to give shape to stiff shiny fabric that stood up by itself, looking more like a corrective medical device than lingerie. As a child, I remember seeing these large, odd, slightly scary undergarments drying in the sun on the clothesline in her backyard.
This is in stark contrast to another photograph I have of her taken in America 10 years later. She stands behind her 4 little stairstep children, 3 girls, 1 boy, my grandmother at 3 years old the youngest daughter, smiling, hands clasped, a gigantic bow in her hair.
My great-grandmother looks hollow-eyed, shattered, stricken. She is dressed in widow’s weeds, a long black dress. She wears a mourning brooch containing a lock of hair or a photograph or perhaps both, relics of her husband of 7 years, Pietro, my great-grandfather. It is 1913 and Pietro has died, leaving her a 24-year-old widow with 4 small children.
At the bottom of the earlier happy photo from 1903, ‘E. Paoli’, the name of the photographer, is printed in elaborate script on one side. ‘PERGINE’ is printed on the other side. Claudia looks at the photograph and exclaims, “This photo was taken here in Pergine, where we are right now!” We look at each other and laugh in amazement that I chose this exact moment to show Claudia my photograph. Coincidence? Perhaps.
Or maybe it’s the spirit of my bisnonna welcoming me to the Old Country, 122 years later.
LOVE!!!!!