The Girls of Piazza D'Amore

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  From the bridge, the men smoked, joked, argued and pretended indifference to what was going on below, but, depending on who was there, their gazes would dart down to the watery women’s domain, down the winding steps to a floor made of ancient stones that were round and smooth from years of wear, and that were also mossy, wet, and very slippery.

  The line of homes along the road and the periphery of the village started at the bridge. Their long balconies overlooked the Timpa, the cypresses of the cemetery in Amato, and the ravine. The village’s garbage and bedpans had been dumped into the ravine for ages; but, all one saw, looking over the edge, were the thick bushes and the trees growing at a slant over the precipice. Along the whole length of the ravine, a stone parapet, as high as a child’s shoulders, provided some protection for the children and a favourite place for men to sit and cool off on hot summer nights. It was also a great spot to wait for people to come in and out of Amato.

  The road continued into the main street, Via Roma, which went down toward the poorer part of the village in one direction, and, in the other, up a series of cobblestone steps to the upper church.

  The main piazza, at Piano Valle, sprawled just below the cobblestone steps and was the dividing line between the upper and lower parts of the village. In this area stood the school, the town hall, and many shops. Peppino’s bar was the centre of attraction for the men. They sat on the chairs outside, sipping coffee and talking politics all day long. During the heated election periods, from a balcony above the school, the Christian Democrats and their adversaries shouted their comizi, which incited applause, catcalls, and the occasional fistfights. In quieter times, during the major religious feasts, people brought chairs from home and sat around the piazza to watch the movies that Don Raffaele projected on a large open-air screen.

  Via Roma ran like a herringbone all down the spine of the village, with narrow alleys projecting off either side and then breaking up into other smaller alleys. Here and there, along this main street, were little squares, not quite piazzas, of which there was only one, but little enclaves of houses built around flat common areas and drinking fountains. The people who drank from the same fountain were identified by these rughe. They helped each other during harvests, and in times of crisis, but also fought and argued with each other – much like brothers and sisters. On summer evenings, the women congregated around one of the doorsteps, reciting the rosary, gossiping and telling stories, while the kids counted stars and chased fireflies.

  We called the ruga in which I lived Piazza Don Carlo, though the more archaic Piano Don Carlo was engraved on a stone tablet on the corner wall of Don Cesare’s home. There were five families living in this square, opening up onto the main road and an alley. Our next door neighbours were Rosaria Abiusi and her family on one side, and Don Cesare, the wealthiest man in the village, on the other. Directly across from our house lived Nicola, known as U Grancu, the Crab, and his younger sister, Tina. The rest of his family had immigrated to Canada, but he had been refused a visa because of his disabilities. Besides being very short, almost a dwarf, he had a crooked spine, one hip higher than the other, and walked with a limp, moving his arms. Tina was engaged to be married, and had chosen to remain in Mulirena. U Grancu never set foot outside his home, but he knew everyone’s business. He spent most of the money his parents sent him from Canada on books, magazines, and gramophone records. His house was a meeting place for all the unemployed young men.

  Next to U Grancu, and diagonally across from my house, lived Anna, a pazza – the crazy one. Her house had seen better days. It had been bombed during the war and had never been repaired. The old woman and her husband made do with one room that was no better than a stable. She had not always been crazy – only since the war. Her son was one of a handful of men who had never returned. It was assumed he had been taken prisoner in Germany, but his death was never confirmed. The villagers were not too surprised by Anna’s deterioration.

  As we reached Piazza Don Carlo, Father and I joined Mother, Comare Rosaria, Lucia and Tina, who were standing around the fountain. The water from the aqueduct was cut off in the middle of the day. As the days got hotter, the water supply was shut off earlier and earlier, and the fountain became a seating area.

  An itinerant photographer walked slowly up from the alley with his heavy equipment on his shoulder. My mother suggested that the family have a photograph taken, now that we were all dressed up. It would be the last photo taken of us before Father’s departure. In anticipation of her own emigration, Mother would soon be trading in her costume for regular clothes. My brother Luigi, true to his impulsive nature, and much to Mother’s annoyance, had already changed into his summer shorts. Father was in his new brown suit, which would accompany him to the new country. My new organza dress was baby blue with crisp flounces on the bodice and hem.

  The photographer carefully aligned his camera on a wooden tripod. He placed Father and Mother side by side, Luigi on Mother’s right, with her hand gently resting on his shoulder, and me on Father’s left, his arm hugging me firmly. Rosaria’s two sons, Alfonso and Giacomo walked by and stopped to watch the photographer. After the picture had been taken, the two young women, Tina and Lucia, who had been joined by their friend Aurora, teased Father about his new suit and his impending trip.

  “They have coffee cups as big as pisciaturi,” Tina said. “They drink it by the litre because they work day and night.”

  “If you have work, food, and a bed, what else do you want?” Comare Rosaria added.

  Lucia turned to Mother, “Terè, they say that Canadian women go crazy for Italian men.”

  “That’s the last thing that Comare Teresa is worried about,” Rosaria replied, and everyone laughed.

  Professore Nucci, a friend of Father’s, who had joined the discussion, started an argument. He wasn’t really a professor; he just liked to be called Professore. Someone heard him introducing himself to an outsider as Professore Nucci, and the title had stuck. He was a bachelor at thirty and lived with his two spinster sisters, who looked after him. He received a small stipend from the village for doing minor secretarial work, but he spent most of the day walking up and down the main street in a pensive mood, his arms behind his back, a baton in one hand. Sometimes he would stop, look up into the air, and move his head as though he were reviewing a musical score. He played the clarinet and was the assistant to the village bandleader. He liked to think of himself as a maestro; sometimes people humoured him with that title. He had no relatives overseas to sponsor him and therefore no chance of emigrating.

  “I wouldn’t go to Canada if they paid me in gold,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, professò. They only pay for professors like you in Mulirena. Everywhere else you have to work,” said Alfonso, who had a bone to pick with the town hall for having refused him a position. Everyone laughed. The professor pretended not to hear them and cornered Father, who was holding me by the hand.

  “Peppé, let’s be serious. Are you really going? What do you think you’re going to find there?”

  “I’m going there to work, like everyone else.”

  “Do you know they build their houses out of wood?” he asked.

  “Professò, you don’t have a family, so you don’t know how it is. For me it’s an opportunity.”

  “Mah! Are you joking? What opportunity? You are a mastro. You have worked in stone all your life, you have built palaces in Milan out of granite and marble, and now you are going to build barns. You’re a smart man and a musician. Let these cafoni go there.”

  “If they give me work, I’ll build my house out of cement and marble,” answered Father. I was surprised at how enthusiastic he sounded with his friend. At home, the evening before, he’d said that, when he received the official papers in Milan, he’d been almost sorry he had initiated the immigration procedures. “I didn’t jump up and down like the others, as if I had won the lottery,” he had said.


  The professor made a last, grand gesture with his arms, addressing everyone now. “I’d rather eat bread and onions all my life and enjoy this sun. Where else are you going to find a day like today? Pane, amore e fantasia,” he said with a flourish of his baton, repeating the title of a popular film we had all watched with glee a few months earlier. The allusion seemed to fit what he was trying to say, though his meaning was not completely clear. He resumed his perpetual walk in the too-tight, too-short beige cotton suit he had been wearing for years.

  Some of the children were playing girotondo. Mother took my branch and told me to go ahead and join them.

  Maybe it was the song about spring and sunshine that had filled the air, but, one by one, all the kids and the adults from the ruga, as well as others who happened to be walking by, joined the circle. The circle got so large it covered the whole square. It went around and around, past Comare Rosaria’s house, past U Grancu’s, where Totu waved at us. The singing got louder and louder. I kept looking at the adults’ faces. I couldn’t believe that everyone – including my mother, my father, Comare Rosaria, Lucia, Tina, and Aurora – were playing like children and singing our song.

  We ran around in a circle singing, “Giro giro tondo, com’é bello il mondo.” At the end of each refrain, “Casca la terra, tutti giu’ per terra,” we let ourselves drop to the ground, laughing. Then we got up and started again, the circle turning faster and faster.

  But then, someone pointed in the direction of old Anna’s house.

  “Watch out, a pazza, a pazza, u pisciaturu.”

  Old Anna came out of her door, carrying a big chamber pot, yelling at us to stop making noise. She hurled the contents of the pot at the crowd, and everyone scattered in different directions. “Come back! It’s only water,” I cried. I expected the singing would resume. No one came back.

  I watched Mother go inside our house. Father disappeared into the alley, motioning downward with his arms. “Don’t bother me with this anymore. It’s children’s stuff. Leave me alone.” I was angry, angry at the old woman and at her son in Germany for ruining my feast, especially angry at Father for dismissing me so callously. I closed my eyes, and began to spin round and round, until I fell, exhausted and dizzy, alone in the middle of the square.

  After that Easter, as Father prepared to leave for Canada, things seemed to be changing in Mulirena. I remembered sensing the transformations overtaking the village, though I could not explain them at the time. A curious feeling hung over the village – a vague sensation that Mulirena itself, along with the people around me, was changing into something different from what I had known. Suddenly I took notice of people and events as if seeing them for the first time and from a distance, aware that soon I would be leaving them. The changes excited me, but they also left me sad and a little apprehensive. It was like being given new toys with which to play, in exchange for old beloved ones.

  My mother often spoke of how the village had teemed with people and activity before the war, and before mass emigration. When I lived there, the village had a population of about fifteen hundred. “Four houses and four cats” – that is how we spoke about it after we left.

  Like many mountain villages in Calabria, Mulirena was built around a steep, winding road that came to a dead end. A first-time visitor could only wonder why anyone would settle there. One either became resigned to living the simple life of the village or looked for a future elsewhere.

  “Here, there is no avvenire,” I remember the villagers saying. They meant that nothing new or exciting would ever come our way.

  “We must leave for the sake of the children,” was another pronouncement, which became the mantra for the exodus, not that we children ever complained, for we were the least deprived.

  I was born as the war ended, but I felt as if I had lived through it all. My mother spoke about it continually, especially comparing the present conditions of the village with those of the war years when the Fascist government rationed bread, flour, oil, and sugar at subsistence level, and raw hunger was the order of the day. So were lice infestations and ringworm, in spite of Il Duce’s call to greatness. With all the able-bodied men away in the army, the women were left to fend for themselves, taking care of farms, animals, the old, and the young. Worried about the lack of news from husbands, sons, and brothers fighting in unknown places and for unknown reasons, they were also kept awake at night by sirens and occasional bombings. Yet, Mother claimed, they were still better off than those living in the northern cities. Many refugees from those shelled-out places sought refuge in the desolate villages and avoided starvation by sharing wild field greens, rough yellow cornbread, and gritty polenta with the villagers.

  “In the paese you never really starve,” people said. This had been their only consolation.

  A decade after the fall of Fascism, life in the village should have resumed its placid pre-war pattern. But the strong odour of DDT mixed with the stench of urine-soaked diapers in the damp, whitewashed bedrooms of stone houses must have been nauseating and stifling for the returning soldiers who saw no reward in sight for their years of combat against and for the Germans. My grandfather never stopped talking about how the Italian army had been betrayed, by whom, he never said. Mussolini’s failures and defeat must have dealt a heavy blow, not only to the regional economy, but to the psyches of his men who had been pumped up with dreams of returning to the glory days of a mythical Roman empire. They replaced the Roman salute with another well-known Italian gesture – that of slapping the right arm while bending it at the elbow – also directed towards Rome. I guess that too much had been shaken up in Mulirena for life to resume serenely.

  On their return, the restless men had found jobs rebuilding the war ruins of Cassino, Naples, and Rome. Then they gravitated toward Milan, where wages were paid more regularly than in the southern cities. The Mulirena men still complained that the cost of city living made it impossible for them to settle their families there. So, for years, the men came and went, while the women and children remained alone and rarely travelled beyond the nearby village.

  This pattern began to change when the gateways to the Americas opened up, and men bought one-way tickets out of the village. We were used to seeing the men leave for the cities of the north without much commotion, since they returned every chance they got. But when women and children packed their trunks into Don Cesare’s furgoncino, the only vehicle in the village, the departures were accompanied by tears and screams. We children followed the truck as far as we could run until it disappeared in clouds of dust beyond the Timpa.

  After Easter, my whole family travelled to Rome for father’s visa, and before that, Don Cesare drove us to Catanzaro, the provincial city, a number of times to get outfitted with new shoes and clothes for the trip to Rome. The sights, smells, and noises of the two cities were a jolting reminder of the changes that awaited me when I, too, would leave the sleepy village for a completely unknown place across the ocean.

  When I returned from Rome wearing new clothes, I felt all grown up. I spent less and less time with my school friends and more at the seamstress’s shop with the older girls, Lucia, Tina and Aurora. The trio of girls was inseparable and I was their mascot. I followed them in their evening passeggiate, became their accomplice in their hidden amorous adventures, and listened to the secrets that girls in Mulirena only revealed to each other and never, but never, to their mothers.

  The most remarkable change for me that summer was that, whatever stories I heard at the seamstress’s shop or saw happening around me, I replayed in my mind, like memorizing lines of a poem. I imagined those stories as playing out on the big screen that Don Raffaele set up outdoors on special occasions. I never saw myself as a participant, at the time, as much as a narrator, and Mulirena became the setting for my own versions of Pane, amore e fantasia with Gina Lollobrigida, or – my very favourite film – Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna, about three seamstresses of a couture ho
use in Rome who ride a Vespa and gather on the steps of the famous Piazza to eat lunch and talk of their love lives. I daydreamed about riding a Vespa with my friends and sitting on those steps in the sunset.

  Lucia and Aurora were considered two of the prettiest girls in the village, Aurora with long, almost blonde hair and grey eyes, and Lucia with curly, dark hair that framed her face like a soft cushion of puffy springs. They were both slim, but Lucia was more petite and vivacious. Lucia was very proud of her hair, parting it in the centre with a wet comb before going out, conscious that it was part of her reputation as a village belle, together with her heart-shaped mouth and spirited black eyes, and a beauty mark like an exclamation point below her lip. Tina was a brown-haired, plainer girl, but tall for a girl of the village. She was always cheerful and liked telling jokes. Everyone admired her long legs and big bust.

  We girls all lived in the same square, Lucia and I even in the same house. The L-shaped row of houses that faced the road and Piazza Don Carlo had once been one large mansion which had housed Don Cesare Cicala’s family. Over the years, it was subdivided between Don Cesare, my mother’s family and Rosaria’s family, the Abiusi.

  Aurora’s parents – Domenico, known as Micu, and Paola – were peasants who worked for Don Cesare and often spent the night at the casale on the farm. Aurora never worked on the farm, but attended school in the village. As a child, she often slept at Don Cesare’s house to keep his wife company when he was away. As she got older, she did little chores around the house, but she was never considered a maid.

  The backs of the houses formed an enclosed courtyard with an orchard, which was accessible only to Don Cesare. His home still had all the semblance of a mansion, with a protective stone wall around its entrance, a front courtyard, and large rooms with high ceilings. It was the grandest home, not only of the square, but of the village, and it gave all who lived in Piazza Don Carlo a sense of importance.